The Porch Story Hour

Sixty-one

I opened the first book at ten o’clock exactly. It was the red barn one, because Truman had put it on top of the stack himself.

He stood up before I finished the first page. He gathered every book off the blanket in both arms, and he started down the line.

One book per child. He set each one in a lap, gently, the way you set down something that might spill. He did not look at anyone. He did not have to.

The trucks went to the boys who loved trucks. The horse went to a little girl who I swear had never been introduced to him. A baby in a stroller got a board book with a bright yellow duck.

He hummed through all of it, that one low note. Out on the lawn, in front of the glass, with the traffic going by on Church Street, it carried.

I braced for it. I will be honest about that. I had spent six weeks bracing for somebody to turn around and give me a look.

Nobody did. A mother near the front hummed back, quietly, just to see. Then her little boy did. Then Thelma, off key, one note under, from her mother’s lap.

By the middle of the book it was most of the lawn, a low uneven chord out of sixty throats, and one small boy leading it with a stuffed rabbit under his chin.

A man in a feed store cap pulled over on Church Street and put his truck in park. He did not get out. He rolled the window down and sat there with his arm on the door and listened.

Then a woman with a stroller stopped on the sidewalk. Then two more. Then a delivery driver, and a boy on a bicycle.

I counted sixty-one children by the last page. That was not counting the grown people, or the dog.

Beatrice had her hand flat over her mouth. Mr. Wilkins had taken his handkerchief out again and was studying the flag very hard.

When I turned the last page, Truman came over and patted my sleeve, twice, the way I pat his back when he is sad. Nobody clapped right away.

And then everybody did, the whole lawn and the sidewalk and the man in the truck, a big ragged happy sound that went on long enough that Truman put his hands over his ears and hummed louder to cover it.

The window

I looked up once, at the plate glass behind the benches, while the applause was still going.

A green cardigan stood at the front window of the library. It had been standing there, Cora told me afterward, from the first page to the last, with a stack of unshelved books in its arms.

Nancy did not come out. I did not wave. I did not turn away either. I let her see what she was looking at, and I looked at it too.

She stood there a minute longer. Then she set the books down on the sill, and the window was just a window again.

I think about that more than I think about the clapping. She could have drawn the blind. Instead she stood at the glass and watched every page, and she saw what she had asked me to keep out of her room.

What she did with it was hers. It was not mine to know.