Supper for Fifty Two Boys

The boys came down the line with their paper plates and I put pork on every one of them. A scoop of beans. A bun. A spoon of slaw. A pickle.

“Thank you, Mrs. Keller.” “Thank you, ma’am.” “This smells unreal.” “Eat all you want. There’s plenty.”

They said it again and again, fifty-two times, in cracking voices. Some of them looked right at me. Some of them looked at the plate.

A few of them, the quiet ones, did not look up at all, and I knew that one kind of look from my own years of watching boys not say what they felt.

I saw Cole in the line, near the back, behind his best friend. When he came up with his plate I gave him a double scoop and he did not say a word.

He looked at me. He swallowed. Then he walked to the end of the fence and sat on a folding chair with the rest of them and ate.

When Rollie Weiss got to the front, he stopped. He held out his plate with both hands, like it was something to carry carefully.

“Mrs. Keller,” he said, so low I could hardly hear him. “Could I ask for one more?” “You can have two more.”

“No, ma’am. It’s not for me.” His ears had turned red. “My grandpa’s at home. He’s eighty-one. He can’t get out. He’s been on soup all week and he used to smoke pork himself, back before his hands got bad.”

I put the spoon down. “Rollie, go sit down and eat your own. I’ll fix a pan for your grandpa to take home.” “I don’t want to be any trouble.”

“You’re no trouble.” I touched his arm, which is not a thing I usually do with boys that age. “Go eat, honey.”

He went. I took the biggest foil pan I had, and I packed it with pork and beans and slaw and four buns, and I wrote his grandfather’s name on the lid.

Rollie carried it onto the bus himself, right after the meal, held out in front of him with both hands as if it were hot, and set it on the seat beside him where nobody else was allowed to sit.

I had to turn and look at the smoker for a minute after that. Lavern came and stood next to me and did not say anything, which is how he says most things, and I was grateful for it.

At about a quarter past two, when the line had gone through once and half of it had come around for seconds, I noticed the folding chair at the head of the long table.

Glen had set it out that morning without thinking, the way he has set out the same chair at every team supper for eleven years. It was the one Milo sits in. It was the only chair in the yard nobody had touched.

Anybody in Burkett would have known whose it was. Lavern saw it the same moment I did, and he set the knife down on the cutting board.