Part 8 — The Wind and the Porch Light
The ride back down from the hill was silent.
Walter didn’t turn on the radio. He didn’t speak. The truck creaked with each bump in the road, the suspension protesting like an old man rising from bed. In a way, it echoed his body—tired, aching, but still moving forward.
He reached town again just after sunrise. Bellewood still slept. The windows of the few occupied homes were dark, and smoke hadn’t yet begun to drift from the chimneys. The streets looked like they’d paused, waiting for something. Or maybe someone.
Walter passed the diner again. Ruth wasn’t there yet.
He kept going until he reached the place he hadn’t dared to return to in years.
The old McKinley house.
It sat at the end of Willow Lane, half-hidden behind what used to be a thriving sycamore that now stood gnarled and leafless. The paint had faded to a dull gray. A shutter hung askew like a crooked smile. But the porch light—somehow, impossibly—still worked, glowing faint yellow in the morning hush.
Walter pulled into the gravel drive. The wheels crunched, a familiar sound that seemed to stir something in the soil. He stepped out of the truck and stood still, staring at the front steps.
He could almost hear the screen door slam.
Hear Margaret’s voice calling him in.
Smell the cornbread cooling on the windowsill.
He walked slowly to the porch. Each board remembered him, groaning gently beneath his weight. He rested a hand on the doorframe. The wood was rough, but real.
Everything about this place was real.
Even the absence.
He sat down in the rocking chair by the window—the same one he used to nap in on Sunday afternoons while Samson chased bees in the yard. The chair creaked like it always had.
Walter looked out over the fields behind the house. The fence was gone. The barn had collapsed. But the land—the land remembered.
That’s where he taught his sons to shoot arrows, where Margaret strung laundry in the spring breeze, where Samson ran until his legs gave out, rolling belly-up in the bluegrass.
He sat there a long time.
Maybe an hour. Maybe two.
Eventually, a mail truck passed at the end of the lane. The driver gave a quick wave. Walter nodded.
The town didn’t need to know where he’d been. Or what he’d buried.
Some things belong only to the soul.
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the last biscuit from the tin.
He broke it in two and laid it on the porch rail.
“For the next one,” he whispered.
Then he leaned back and let the wind move through his thinning hair, as if it had waited a decade to find him again.
The porch light flickered once. Then held.