Chapter 11: The Letters
The drawer beside the stove had held Gordon Pruce's letters for the better part of a year, and on the third morning after the blizzard Agnes took them out and laid them on the kitchen table the way a person lays out cards she has finally decided to play.
There were five of them. She knew their order by heart. The first had been all business β acreage, frontage, a figure with a great many zeros arranged like an argument. The second had been warmer, and mentioned her late husband's name as though Pruce had known Thomas. The third had used the word inevitable twice. The fourth had enclosed a glossy folder of condominiums in another county, all glass and cedar and young people laughing on balconies. The fifth had come two days before the storm, and it was the sweetest of all. It offered more money than the others. It offered to let her stay in the house through one more summer, rent free, "in recognition of the Holloway family's long stewardship of the land." It referred to her, twice, as a treasure.
Agnes read it through with her tea going cold, then reached into her apron pocket for the other paper, the one she had carried there since the morning the four men left.
It was a store receipt from the general store in the village, soft at the folds. On the back, in four different hands, were four names. Marcus Webb. Darnell Price. Tommy Kowalski. Eli Ford. Beneath them, in careful printing: FOR THE ROOF. THANK YOU FOR THE NIGHT. The money had been pooled cash, folded into the receipt like a secret, and in the week since she had spent none of it, though the roof over the back bedroom dripped into a saucepan at every thaw.
She set the two papers side by side. Pruce's letter was printed on paper so thick it seemed to apologize for existing. The receipt was thin enough to read through.
"Well," Agnes said to the empty kitchen, and got up to fetch her writing box.
The first letter took her twenty minutes, because she had been raised to be courteous even to men she intended to defeat, and courtesy, done properly, is slow work.
*Dear Mr. Pruce,* she wrote. *Thank you for your letter of the fourth, and for the patience you have shown in writing to me so many times. I have considered your offer with the seriousness it deserves, and my answer is no. It will remain no. The land on Hollow Road is not mine to sell in the way you mean; it is mine to keep. I am sure you will find other parcels, and I wish you well in the search. Please do not trouble yourself to write again on this subject. Yours sincerely, Agnes Holloway.*
She read it over, changed nothing, and sealed it.
The second letter took the rest of the morning.
*Dear Emily,* she began, and stopped, and looked out the window at the yard where four sets of boot prints had long since been smoothed by thaw and new snow, and began again.
She wrote about the storm first: the wind, the roof of the henhouse, the water gone brown and then gone altogether. Then she wrote about the knock at the door, and about how she had stood there with her hand on the latch and had opened it anyway. She wrote about the shadow-puppet rooster the youngest one had made on the wall to make her laugh. She wrote about Eli's soup. She wrote about waking at dawn to the sound of the pump running sweet and clear, and the woodpile stacked to the eaves, and four men standing in her yard refusing, all of them, to be thanked.
*They were not what the village says they were,* she wrote. *Or rather β whatever they were, before, is not the whole of it. They were cold, Emily. They were cold and they were lost and they knocked, and if I had kept the door shut I would have been right, and been smaller for the rest of my life.*
*I am telling you because I have not told you true things often enough. I made this house a quiet place after your father died and I told myself it was dignity. Some of it was dignity. Some of it was a door I kept shut. I am sorry for the shut parts.*
She signed it with her full name, and then, below it, in smaller writing: *Come in the spring, if you can. The roof will be fixed by then. There is a story in that too.*
At noon she walked the letters down the drive and put them in the box and raised the red flag, her hands shaking only slightly β from the cold, she told herself, standing there a moment longer than the errand required, watching the road the strangers had walked up, white and ordinary in the sun.