the man who tucked me in every night when I was four and told me a family was coming. Mom, that is Mr. Del.” I stood in the hallway with the phone against my ear and felt my knees go soft. Tessa was laughing and crying at once. “I told you to lock the doors because I panicked, and I am sorry. I was a scared little girl, and that scar frightened me then. But he ran the Purple Gable House in Plum Hollow, Kansas. I wrote that note at five because the other children were still there when I left, and I thought nobody would ever come for them.”
I found the card the man had left on my hall table and dialed the number before I could lose my nerve. Delbert Roark answered on the first ring, as if he had been sitting on the phone. “Mrs. Fenwick, I should have told you the truth at the door,” he said. “I was afraid you would send me away, and my hands shook so badly I could hardly think.” I said, “Mr. Roark, there is a pot of coffee on and a chair at my kitchen table.” Twenty minutes later he was sitting there with his hat in his lap, seventy one years old and clearly ready to be scolded.
He told me the Purple Gable House had sheltered children for thirty one years, a plain farmhouse the children themselves had painted purple in 1991, because a donated bucket of paint was all anyone could afford. It closed in 2004 when the funding ran out, and the building was slated for demolition. Del spent fifteen years and most of his pension buying it back, with help from churches and a lumberyard and a retired schoolteacher. The reopening was set for April. “But the flood in 2007 took every photograph we had,” he said. “Your daughter once mailed me a snapshot of her drawing. I have looked at it on my refrigerator for years.”
A mother learns that the stranger who wanted her daughter childhood drawing was a kind house father trying to bring a children home back to life.
I turned the drawing over on the kitchen table and read the back to him aloud. When I got to the last line, his shoulders began to shake. “She was five years old,” he said, “and she was worried about the others. She wrote down the address so somebody would come.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve. “Mrs. Fenwick, I did not know that was there. I came for a picture of the house, and I did not know I would find out she was looking after us the whole time. That child had the biggest heart in the building.”
I told him I would never sell the drawing, and I watched his face brace for disappointment. Then I said, “But I will lend it to you.” He explained that the hundred thousand dollars was a gift from the schoolteacher, meant to restore the porch, and that he had panicked and offered it all. I said, “Keep every cent, and put it into the roof.” We agreed that a good copy would be painted across the front gable, and that the original would hang in the entry hall on opening day, with the writing on the back for anyone to read.
Tessa flew in from Portland in March, and I met her at the airport in Wichita with a thermos of coffee and a very long hug. We drove the last forty miles in near silence, with the windows down and the wheat just coming green. At the end of a gravel road in Plum Hollow stood a farmhouse with a purple gable and a wide new porch. Tessa put her hand over her heart. “It is exactly the same,” she whispered. “It even has the crooked weather vane.” Del was waiting at the steps with his hat in both hands.
On the old porch rail, which Del had saved and set into the new one, were rows of tiny painted handprints from the children of the house. Tessa walked along the rail slowly, touching each one. Near the end she stopped, and her fingers closed around a small faded hand of yellow paint. “This one is mine,” she said. “I remember the day. I was four and I got paint in my hair.” Del nodded. “Nineteen ninety nine, in the spring. I kept this board in my shed through two moves. I could not bear to let it go.”
On opening day there were fourteen children on the porch steps, and the whole town seemed to have come with casseroles. A little girl named Bria, about five, sat beside Tessa with a box of crayons and began drawing the purple house. Tessa watched her for a minute and then, very quietly, took out a pen and wrote a line beneath the old words on the back of her own drawing. The drawing was already hanging in the hall, and she lifted the frame carefully down and turned it so the children could see what she had added.
Underneath This is where they keep the other children, in her grown up handwriting, she had written: And this is where they are loved. Del took one look and had to leave the hallway for a moment. When he came back, Bria tugged his sleeve and asked, “Mr. Del, can I hang my picture next to hers?” He knelt down, scar and all, and said, “Sweetheart, you can hang it anywhere you like.” Tessa and I stood in the doorway and watched a small crayon house go up on the wall beside a twenty two year old one, and neither of us said a word.
I used to think that drawing was only one of my favorite memories of my daughter. I know now that it was a five year old child asking for help in the only language she had. It took twenty two years, one trembling stranger, and a whole town with paintbrushes, but somebody finally answered her. When we drove home that evening, Tessa fell asleep with her head against the window, and I kept glancing over at her, thinking that she had once saved a house with a purple crayon.