He did not go to his brother’s place that week, and he did not call him. He did not call him the week after, either. He told me he was waiting to see which one of them would pick up a phone first.
At the Legion hall, where the booster club keeps a whiteboard for the season, somebody had written in September, in green marker, “Whole hog: Milo Keller.” Glen Sutter wiped it clean the Saturday after the game.
In its place he wrote, in block capitals that took up half the board, “Supper at the Kellers’. every home game. bring tables.” I looked at it for a long time when I went in to pay the dues.
Noreen did not set a place at her Sunday table for Milo for three weeks. She did not say a word about it to anybody. She just set out the plates, and one was not there.
The Saturday after the game Glen Sutter carried Milo’s old card table back to his porch, the one the booster club had borrowed every fall for the sign-in sheet. He set it down square by the door and left the dust on it.
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It was still there on Monday, folded, with nobody’s hand on it. Milo did not call about it, and he did not ask for anything more.
At the first home game of the next season I came out on the porch at five in the morning, in my robe, and the street was dark and cold and quiet, the way it is just before the school bus comes.
Bev Olson’s kitchen light was on. Glen Sutter was already walking up the sidewalk with a table over each shoulder, and Mr. Nash’s bus was turning the corner a block away, a good six hours early.
I carried out the bullet smoker, the old one, with the soot still thick on the lid in the shape of a few hundred fingertips. Lloyd Vogt had delivered sixty-one pounds of shoulder the night before and refused to take a dime for the rub.
An old man was already waiting in a lawn chair at the end of our driveway. He wore a faded feed cap and held a paper-wrapped jar in both hands, and next to him stood a boy six feet four.
“This is my grandpa,” Rollie Weiss said. “He’s eighty-one. He wanted to come sit with you.”
The old man looked at the smoker and then at me. His hands were big and knotted like roots. “Used to do a whole hog every fall for the Legion,” he said. “Oak, always oak. You’ve got the right idea about the oak.”
“Would you like to sit up with it a while, Mr. Weiss?” I asked.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I’ve been waiting a year to be asked.”
I taped the start time to the lid, six o’clock, in pencil on the back of an envelope, the way I had the first time. Cole took the fork out of my hand and went to check the temperature.
When the light came up gray over the roofs and the smell reached the whole street, the old man was still in his chair beside the smoker, with his cap pushed back, telling a boy the secret of the oak.