The rake was the only thing left in the garage when I got the keys. It hung tines up on two nails over the workbench, a steel leaf rake with an ash handle gone the color of tea where hands had worked it, and a paper tag looped to the hang hole with string. The tag said, in blue ballpoint, LEAVE FOR THE HOUSE.
The house was a two-bedroom on Delmore Street with a silver maple out back that the inspector called mature, the way you call a man mature when you mean old. I had come from a four-bedroom on Crestline where we raised three children, and where, the June before, I stood by the coffee urn at my own estate sale and watched a stranger carry out my rake with a floor lamp under his other arm. Forty dollars for the lot. You do not argue at your own estate sale. You let it go through the garage door and you refill your cup.
The sellers on Delmore were the children of a man named Alvin Ruter, who had lived in the house forty-four years and died in February. His son and daughter emptied the place with a rented dumpster and they were thorough about it. The medicine cabinet still smelled faintly of Barbasol, but there was nothing in it. The basement shelves had rings where paint cans had stood for decades, and no paint cans. They swept the floors before the closing, which is more than most people do. And they left the rake with its tag, and I want to be fair to them here, because a person who tags a rake LEAVE FOR THE HOUSE is following an instruction, not writing one. Somewhere in that man's papers, or in his kitchen-table talk, he had said it plainly enough that his children obeyed it in the middle of everything else they had to do that winter.
I did not touch it in August. I had boxes to walk around and a bed frame that arrived without its hardware. In September the first gas bill came, thirty-one dollars, and I read it twice at the kitchen counter, because on Crestline the September bill was never under ninety and October could go past one sixty. Thirty-one dollars. I put it on the refrigerator under a magnet like a grandchild's drawing. A smaller place tells you what it costs to heat the rooms you were not using.
The maple let go in the third week of October, most of it in two windy nights, and the backyard went the color of scrambled eggs. My son offered to drive over with his blower. I told him I had equipment. Then I went out to the garage and took the rake down off its nails for the first time and turned it over in the light from the side window. One tine had been bent sometime long ago and splinted straight with a wrapping of soft wire, the ends tucked so they would not catch. The wire had gone dark as the handle. It was a repair made by a man who had priced new rakes and declined.
The handle had two smooth places on it, one near the top and one lower down, where the finish was gone entirely and the wood shone. They were set wider apart than my hands wanted to go. I started raking my own way, choked up close the way I always had, and inside ten minutes my shoulders were making the little complaints they make now. So I slid my lower hand down to the second smooth place, because it was there, and the work changed. The stroke got longer and slower and the leaves came with it. Alvin Ruter had been a taller man than I am a woman, and for half an hour in my new backyard his rake corrected my grip the way a good dance partner corrects a frame, without a word, just by where it put my hands.
Gene from across the chain-link came out while I was bagging. He is seventy-nine and wears a Purdue cap that has been through the wash. He admired the rake before he admired anything about me, which I took as a compliment to my judgment. That was Alvin's, he said. I said I had gathered that. Gene stood there with his fingers through the fence the way men his age stand when they have a thing to say and want to be asked. So I asked.
Alvin, he said, used to rake the boulevard strip along the whole east side of the block every fall. Not just his own frontage. All of it, seven houses down to the corner, because the storm drain at Delmore and Sixth sits low, and if the leaves go into it with the first hard rain, the water backs up the gutter and comes across Gene's garage floor and into the boxes he keeps his Christmas things in. Alvin called it keeping the drains honest. He did it on a weekday morning so nobody would see him at it and feel obliged, and for forty-some years most of the block never knew why their corner did not flood and the other corners did. Gene knew because his garage was the one that stayed dry.
I had planned to do my yard and stop. I want that stated. I was seventy-one years old with a bad left shoulder and a bed frame still leaning against a wall, and nobody had left me instructions. But the light was holding, the way it does some October afternoons when the cold has not made up its mind, and the rake was already in my hands, and the strip along the street was only grass and leaves and forty feet at a time. I did my frontage. Then I did the width of one more house, telling myself I was just squaring off the edge. Then Gene came out with a box of yard bags and did not say anything at all, which is how a man like Gene joins you, and between the two of us and one long pause for his knee we took the strip down to the corner and left the drain grate bare as a dinner plate.
It rained hard that Friday night. I lay in the new bedroom, which still did not sound like my bedroom, and listened to it come down the way you listen to weather in a house you do not know yet. In the morning the gutter along Delmore was running clear and fast, and the water went where water is supposed to go, and no part of that was visible as anyone's work. That is the kind of result Alvin Ruter apparently preferred, and I find I see the sense in it.
The rake is back on its two nails, tines up. The nails were placed for it and I have added nothing to that wall. I left the tag on. In the spring there will be the gutters on the house itself to think about, and whatever Alvin used for those went into the dumpster in March, so that problem will be mine to solve with my own money. But the leaves have an arrangement already, and it came with the house, and I intend to honor the terms.
