The Porch Story Hour

Thelma

There was a little girl named Thelma, about four years old.

She came the second week on her mother’s lap, a small wary child with a ponytail that stuck up like a feather. She watched Truman with enormous eyes. For three weeks she did not leave that lap.

The humming frightened her. She said so, out loud, in the middle of the second book.

“He’s making a noise,” Thelma told her mother, in the clear carrying voice of a small child.

Her mother went red to the roots of her hair. “Thelma, hush.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s a good noise. It’s how he says he likes the story.”

“But why doesn’t he talk?”

“He’s still learning how,” I said. “His words are in the hum right now.”

Thelma considered that for a while. She did not say anything else. Her mother mouthed I’m so sorry at me across the porch, and I shook my head and kept reading.

The fifth Thursday, in the middle of the book, Thelma climbed down off her mother’s lap.

I saw it from the corner of my eye. I did not stop reading, because I have learned that stopping makes things worse. She got on her hands and knees and crawled across the blanket, past the cookie plate and a boy’s untied shoe, until she was right against my son’s side.

Truman stopped humming. He turned and looked at her.

They sat like that for the length of a page. Her mother had her hand over her mouth.

Then Truman did a thing I had never seen him do in five years.

He took the rabbit from his lap, the weak-tea brown one he has carried since before he could walk, the one he once fought a nurse over at the hospital in Conway, and he put it in Thelma’s lap.

She held it like it was made of glass.

And my son started to hum again, softer now, right up close to her ear. After a moment she began to hum back, off key, one note under his.

I got to the end of the page and my voice would not hold steady. I looked up over the book at Mr. Wilkins on the porch swing, and he had taken his old cotton handkerchief out of his back pocket and was studying the yard very hard, with his jaw tight and his eyes wet.

Nobody said anything. Twenty-eight children sat in the sun with the whole world quiet around them, and my boy hummed to a little girl he had decided to trust.

When it was over, Thelma handed the rabbit back, carefully, with both hands. Truman took it. She said, “Thank you, Truman,” and I had to look at the ceiling of the porch for a minute.