The Porch Story Hour

Winter

We stayed on the lawn through the end of October. Then the cold came down off the hills and Beatrice opened the branch’s community room on Thursdays at ten, with the folding chairs and the rug and a long table for the cookies.

Josh left the cedar benches out on the lawn, where they were. His mother’s rocker went by the radiator, and Mr. Wilkins took the best chair in the room and said it was the second-best seat in the county.

Some Thursdays there were forty children. Some Thursdays it snowed and there were nine. Truman handed out every book, to every child, every time.

One snowy morning Thelma walked in carrying something wrapped in a dish towel. She set it on Truman’s knees.

It was a stuffed rabbit. Not his. A new one, gray, with one floppy ear, that she had picked out at the Walmart in Conway with her mother and paid for with her own birthday money.

“It’s for when yours is in the wash,” Thelma said.

Truman turned it over. He held it up to his face and smelled it, the way he does with anything new.

Then he hummed. It was a note I had not heard before, higher than usual, bright and round, held for a long time.

Thelma’s mother was crying. I was crying. Josh, in the doorway with his arms crossed, turned and went to look at something in the hall that I am fairly sure was not there.

What I know now

People ask me whether I was angry. I was. I lay awake a full week and said things to the ceiling that would have made Josh’s mother put me in a corner.

But anger was never what moved my feet. What moved my feet was a little boy who loved Thursday at ten, a plate of cookies, and an old blanket on a porch.

I did not take it to a meeting. I did not write a letter. I read the next book, and then the one after that, and I let the town come and look.

That turned out to be the whole argument. Sixty-one children and a boy with a rabbit under his chin, in plain view, in front of a plate glass window, on a Thursday morning in October.

Nobody had to be told anything. They could see it for themselves.

I write this at the kitchen table with the back door open. The mums are done for the year, but Josh’s mother put bulbs in along the steps, and the tire swing is still hanging in the oak tree.

On the lawn of the branch, the two cedar benches sit where we left them on the last warm Thursday. Josh never took them back. Somebody lettered a sign in pencil and stuck it in the marigolds.

It says, Thursdays at ten.

On Friday mornings the dew sits on those boards, and the first sparrow lands on the back of the left bench and looks around like it is waiting for somebody to start.