I set my hammer down real slow on the old masonry grill island in Ravenswood, because the stone under my hammer rang differently from the rest of it, and nobody builds a bunker where the hot dogs go. I am Gene Caldwell, fifty eight years old, and for twenty years I have been tearing out and building the outdoor kitchens of the Ohio Valley. The couple who owned the house, Jenna and Trey Mullins, stood on the patio with their coffee mugs, watching me work. I broke through the side of the base and saw the dark of a hollow inside, and a flash of metal.
Inside the sealed compartment stood a gray steel cashbox, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with kitchen twine. Beside it lay a spiral notebook, thick as a hymnal, with a rubber band around it. I lifted both out and set them on the patio table, and Jenna read the first page of the notebook aloud. It was a ledger. It listed dates, going back thirty one years, and beside each date a number, and beside each number the words “Sunday dinner, free to all veterans.” Trey sat down slowly in a lawn chair.
The house had belonged to Cecil and Edna Renfro, who had hosted a free cookout every Sunday afternoon on that very patio since 1993, for any veteran who wanted a hot plate and company. They had served, by the notebook, twenty one thousand dinners. Cecil had passed in the fall, and Edna had moved to her daughter in Charleston. The Mullinses had bought the house from a real estate agent named Dennis Rudd, who had urged them, the very day of closing, to tear out the old grill island and build a new one twice the size.
A hollow grill island broken open on a patio gave one mason the afternoon to bring a hidden gift back to the veterans of Ravenswood.
I gave my terms to the couple across the patio table. “I do not like the way Mr. Rudd pushed you. I would like you to leave the box shut until Edna Renfro can be reached. I would like to call her myself, and read her the name on the cashbox lid. And I would like to hold off on the demolition until Sunday. If I am wrong, I will tear out the whole island for free, and set a new one twice the size. But I have a feeling, Mrs. Mullins, that you are about to inherit more than a house.”
Edna Renfro came on the telephone that evening, and her voice, eighty one years old and thin as paper, shook when I read her the name on the lid. She told us what the box held. For thirty years, she and Cecil had saved four hundred and ten thousand dollars in bearer bonds, from the pension of Cecil and every garage sale and bake sale, to keep the Sunday dinners going after they were gone. They had hidden the box in the island so that no relative could spend it. “We told only one man,” she said slowly. “Our lawyer. Dennis Rudd.”
At that moment a gold sedan swung into the driveway, and Dennis Rudd climbed out in a seersucker jacket, calling cheerfully that he had come to check on the demolition. It was Sunday afternoon. The patio was filling with veterans, a dozen of them in caps and folding chairs who had come, as they always had, for the dinner. Rudd saw the cashbox on the table, the ledger beside it, and my face. His smile fell away. He lunged across the patio, snatched the cashbox, and ran for the gate with it clutched to his chest. A tall old man in a Korean War cap stepped across the opening, and beside him a young Marine with a prosthetic leg planted himself, and beyond them a line of men in folding chairs rose, one at a time, without a word.
Rudd found himself facing fourteen veterans, standing in a line at the gate, the oldest of them eighty eight. Nobody laid a hand on him. The tall old man simply held out his palm, and Rudd, with his face the color of putty, set the cashbox in it. Sheriff Dillon, who had been enjoying a plate of ribs at the back, wiped his hands and walked over. When I called Edna Renfro back and told her, she wept so hard I thought the line had gone silent. “Sunday dinner,” she whispered. “They stood up for Sunday dinner.”
The money consequences were clean. Dennis Rudd was arrested for theft by deception, and the bar investigated his handling of the estate. The four hundred and ten thousand dollars in bearer bonds were placed in a trust, with Edna as honorary chair and the Mullinses as trustees. We did not tear out the grill island. I sealed the compartment, repaired the stone, added a second grill beside it, and set a brass plaque on the front with the words of the ledger, “Sunday dinner, free to all veterans.”
In the name of her husband Cecil, who passed in the fall, Edna started the Cecil Renfro Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for Sunday dinners, home repairs and rides to the clinic for veterans, in Jackson, Mason and Wood counties. In the first year the fund served eleven hundred plates and repaired thirty homes. One was a Vietnam veteran in Ripley who had been sleeping in a recliner for two years because his bedroom roof leaked. The crew finished the roof in a single day and brought him a casserole.
Every Sunday at four, the patio in Ravenswood fills with folding chairs and men in caps, and the smell of hickory drifts over the neighborhood. Trey works the grill in an apron, and Jenna passes the potato salad. Edna comes up from Charleston once a month, in the car of her daughter, and sits at the head of the longest table with a plate on her lap. Last month she patted the stone side of the island, with her thin, spotted hand, and said, “Cecil, they found it.” I turned the ribs, and kept my eyes on the smoke.
