Chapter 10: The Gossip
By Monday, the village knew.
Carol Bixby had seen the van β of course Carol had seen the van; Carol, who ran the post office counter and the village's entire information economy from behind it, had driven her nephew's truck out Hollow Road on Sunday for the stated purpose of checking on Agnes and the unstated purpose of seeing for herself. She had seen the lettered van, and the strange men, and the patched roof shining new against the old tin, and by the time the Monday mail was sorted, Marlow Falls had the story entire, and was improving it in the telling the way a river improves a stone.
Agnes heard the current state of it standing at the counter with her pension check to deposit, because Carol believed in delivering the news to its subject as a professional courtesy. "Four of them, Agnes. In your house. All night." Carol's voice did the thing it did when a fact pleased and alarmed her in equal portions. "Ex-convicts, off that van. I told Marjorie, I said, that woman has slept in a house with four convicts and lived to buy stamps."
"They're workmen, Carol," Agnes said. "They fixed the roof."
"Well," said Carol, stamping a parcel with unnecessary force, "that's in it too. That's the part nobody can make fit. Half the town says you're the bravest woman in the county and the other half says you ought to have your niece called, and old Mr. Abernathy at the hardware says any man who'd patch a widow's roof in a blizzard can steal his silver any time he likes, which is Mr. Abernathy's idea of a character reference."
Agnes bought her stamps and walked home through the village in the thin Monday sun, and it was true what Carol had half-reported: a few people crossed the street. Not many. Not cruelly, even β the way you cross to avoid a puddle, without looking down. But Mrs. Dunmore, who had known Agnes fifty years, crossed with her eyes on the far gutter, and that one cost. And the Lowell boy's mother pulled the boy's sled a half-step closer as Agnes passed, and that one cost more, and Agnes walked home holding both costs carefully, like eggs, and set them on her table next to the biscuit tin and looked at the two things together for a long time.
Pastor Luke Meredith came on Wednesday with banana bread and no agenda that he admitted to. He was a large, soft-spoken man who had buried Thomas and married half the village and who understood that a farmhouse kitchen in February is a confessional with better coffee. He admired the flashing from the yard like a parishioner admiring a new steeple. He ate two slices of his own banana bread, as a courtesy, and let the talk go all the way around the farm β the woodpile, the gate, the pump β before he asked the only question anyone had asked that reached the bottom of the thing.
"Were you afraid, Agnes?"
She was ready with the answers she had been giving the post office all week β the sensible ones, the ones with the chair in them. But Luke Meredith had buried her husband and had once, years back, sat up all night in this same kitchen with a family waiting on a doctor, and she found she could not hand him the post office answer across this table.
"Only of the wrong things," she heard herself say, and then, because it was Luke, she went on and said the rest of it true. "I was afraid of four men who'd come in out of a storm with their hats in their hands. I wasn't afraid of the storm. I wasn't afraid my roof would come down on me in my sleep, and that pipe smoking me out some still night, and the wood running out in March β I've been afraid of those all winter and calling it being careful." She turned her mug in its ring on the table. "They fed the stove all night, Luke. In turns. So I wouldn't wake cold. And I lay up there with a chair at my door being afraid of the only people in three years who showed up to do something about the rest of it."
Luke was quiet a moment. "That's not a foolish kind of afraid, Agnes. That's just the kind we're issued."
"It is now," Agnes said, "it's corrected."
She walked him to the door β her door, that closed true β and he stood a moment in the yard looking at the roof, and then at the woodpile, and said, "You know they'll be telling this at the store all winter."
"Let them," Agnes said, and was startled, pleasantly, to find she meant it the way she'd meant very few things lately β all the way down. "Only tell Carol Bixby to get one part right. They weren't strangers by morning."