The Towel I Kept for Orva

The Step

I did not know she was doing anything more than that until Saturday, the sixth of February, 1993.

I had a job. Mr. Vollbrecht, who lived a quarter mile up the gravel from us, paid me two dollars a week to feed his hogs at half past five on Saturday mornings, because his back was bad, and I took the job because it was the only money in our house that nobody had to make up an excuse for. I went out the front door in the dark in my boots and my father’s old coat with the sleeves turned up.

There was a car at the end of our lane with its lights off. It was a tan Buick, and I knew it, because it was parked in the school lot every day at a quarter to five. The motor was off. A small woman in a long coat with a scarf tied under her chin was coming up our walk very slowly, setting her feet down one at a time to keep the gravel from talking. She had something in both hands, wrapped in a white cloth.

She saw me at the same moment I saw her. We stopped, the two of us, with about ten feet of frozen yard between us. I remember my breath was white. I remember a dog barked somewhere on the Vollbrecht place. She stood very still and then she lifted one finger, the first finger of her right hand, and put it across her lips.

Then she bent and set the bundle down on our top step, and straightened up, and walked back down the walk the way she had come, still careful about the gravel, and got in her Buick and rolled it backward down the lane with the lights off until she was out on the road.