My name is Lois Teague. I’m sixty-eight years old. I’ve lived in Henry County my whole life. Our town is small enough that the bank teller knows your middle name and the man at the feed store knows what your cattle eat.
Wyatt started mowing lawns the summer he turned eleven. The summer before this one.
Dale pulled an old Toro push mower out of our pole barn. It hadn’t run in six years. He went over it blade, belt, and spark plug until it ran like something twice its age had no right to run.
Dale is seventy. He was a lineman for the rural electric cooperative for thirty-one years before he retired. There isn’t a small engine in Henry County he can’t get running again.
He taught Wyatt to check the oil before every single job. And to never, ever mow wet grass.
“Wet grass clumps,” he said. “It chokes a mower. And a boy who ruins his equipment in July has no business in August.”
The two of them spent a whole Saturday out in the pole barn with that Toro flipped up on two cinder blocks. Dale talked Wyatt through cleaning the carburetor in the same slow, patient way he used to walk new linemen through a bucket truck inspection.
By the end of that afternoon, Wyatt could name every single part he’d touched.
That’s how Dale does things. He doesn’t hand a boy a mower that runs. He hands him a mower that doesn’t run yet, and the tools to make it run. Then he stands back with his arms crossed and lets the boy get frustrated before he says one word.
That’s how Dale taught our son Curtis. That’s how Dale’s own father taught him. I quit trying years ago to talk any of the Teague men out of doing things that slow, backward way. Because it works.
Word gets around fast in a town our size.
By this second June, Wyatt had eleven steady yards. Strung out along County Road 400, and two more streets into town once you cross the bridge by the grain elevator.
The Hoskins place, with its half acre of fescue.
The Petries, who always had a glass of sweet tea waiting for him on the porch rail, whether he wanted it or not.
And old Mrs. Feagin.
Mrs. Feagin is eighty-three. She’s lived alone since her husband passed four years ago. She paid Wyatt an extra five dollars every single week just to carry her trash cans back up from the road.
Both of us know she could do that herself if she had to.
Some jobs a boy does for the money. Some jobs you let a boy do for the company. And you pay him anyway, so neither one of you has to say that part out loud.
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