The Porch Story Hour

It grows

The next Thursday there were seven.

Lori had told two mothers in the church parking lot, and one of them brought a neighbor. Josh had carried the cedar boards around from the garage the night before and set them up on cinder blocks along the rail, sanded smooth enough that nobody would get a splinter.

He took a half day off work to do it. He did not say so. I found out from his foreman at the co-op picnic.

The third Thursday, the homeschool families found us.

There is a group of them out past the Methodist church, six or seven households who teach their children together on weekdays. One of the mothers, a patient tired woman named Janice, drove up in a fifteen passenger van with six children and a thermos.

“We heard you read on a porch,” she said.

“I read to my son,” I said. “Anybody can listen.”

“Do you mind if they bring a notebook? We do a little writing after.”

I did not mind. By then I would have let them bring a goat.

The fourth Thursday, the grandparents came.

I think it was because the little ones started telling them. Children cannot keep a good thing to themselves. A grandmother turned up in a church dress with a folding lawn chair and a Tupperware of fried pies, and behind her came three more, and a grandfather in a seed cap who said, “I don’t need a seat, I’ll stand,” and then took one anyway.

That was Mr. Wilkins. He is eighty-one. He spent forty years driving a truck for the feed mill, and now his hands shake when he holds a coffee cup. Josh helped him up the steps that first day, and he looked at the porch swing hanging at the corner and said, “May I?”

“It’s a good seat,” I said.

“Best seat in the county,” he said, and winked, and by the fifth Thursday it was his and nobody else dared sit in it.

What Truman did

There is something I did not expect about all of this, and it is the part I still cannot say without my eyes going.

Truman started handing out the books.

I did not ask him to. I kept a stack of picture books on the porch rail, the ones I meant to read that day, and one Thursday I turned around and my son had picked up the whole pile in both arms, rabbit tucked under his chin, and was walking down the line of children.

One book per child. He set each one in a lap, gently, the way you set down something that might spill. He did not make eye contact. He did not need to.

And he hummed while he did it, one low note over and over, like the books were singing as they went by.

A boy of about seven, who had been fidgeting, went completely still when his book landed. A little girl who had come in a cast on her arm took hers in her good hand and held it to her chest.

“He picks them,” Janice told me later. “Have you noticed? He doesn’t just hand them out. The ones with trucks go to the boys who like trucks. The one with the horse went to that girl who has the pony.”

I had not noticed. I watched the next week, and she was right. My son, who has never said a word to anybody, knows every child on that porch by what they love.

We had twenty-eight kids by the fifth Thursday. I counted them, because I count everything. Cars lined the gravel drive most of the way to the cattle gap. Two mothers stood at the railing because there was nowhere left to sit.

The mums were in full yellow and orange bloom along the porch, and the tire swing Josh had hung from the oak tree in the yard turned in the wind, empty, because nobody wanted to leave the porch.