Chapter 12: New Roots
Hank Tiller arrived on Friday in a pickup truck with a dented fender and a thermos the size of a small child, and he stood on Agnes's porch with his cap in his hand until she told him, somewhat tartly, that men who knocked and then apologized for knocking generally got neither coffee nor conversation, and he had better choose which he was after.
"Coffee, ma'am, if it's going," he said, and grinned, and she liked him at once, which annoyed her, because she had prepared to be formidable.
He was sixty and built like a fence post that had survived weather, and he drank his coffee black and did not waste time arriving at his errand. He had come, he said, to thank her. Not for the food, though the men had talked about the food for two days running. For the not minding. "You'll never know what it does to a crew," he said, "to be treated like workmen instead of a warning. Some of my boys get whole winters of being a warning."
Then, because he seemed to understand exactly what kind of woman she was, he opened the folder he had brought and answered, straight and in order, every question the village had been whispering into its telephones.
New Roots Builders was nine years old. It was a nonprofit, funded by two churches, a county grant, and the work itself, which was real work, bid low and done well. The men were chosen out of the state program at Springfield β men finishing sentences, mostly for the kinds of foolishness and bad luck and bad company that Agnes's generation called, simply, trouble. They were vetted. They were supervised. They lived in the program's house in Rutland, worked in crews of four, and were paid wages that went partly to restitution, partly to savings, partly to the plain dignity of a man holding his own money. Of the forty-one men who had come through New Roots, thirty-six were working steady two years on. Hank recited the numbers without triumph, the way a farmer reports rainfall.
"And who stands over them?" Agnes asked. "I know what work looks like when nobody's watching it."
"Marcus stands over them," Hank said, "the way I stood over him his first year, and the way the man who hired me stood over me at twenty-two. Every crew has a lead. Every lead answers to me. Every job gets walked twice, and the customer signs the sheet, or we come back until they can."
"And the other five?" Agnes asked.
"Two went back inside," Hank said. "One died β his heart, in his sleep, clean three years. Two I don't know about, and I think about them some nights." He turned his cup once on the table. "I won't lie to you to make the arithmetic prettier, Mrs. Holloway. It's not a miracle factory. It's a job, done by men who know exactly what a second chance costs, because they pay for theirs every morning."
Agnes was quiet a moment. "The village says they were convicts," she said. "Says it the way you'd say a roof was on fire."
"Some of them were," Hank said. "Some of them are, in the way the law keeps the word after the debt's paid. I've stopped correcting people on the word. I'd rather correct them on the work." He slid the folder toward her: photographs, a church in Brattleboro with its steeple straightened, a porch in Windsor, a barn raised out of a sag that had looked terminal. "That's the argument I use. Lumber doesn't care about a man's past. It cares if the cut is true."
Before he left, he stood in the yard and looked a long time at her roof β at the place over the back bedroom where the shingles had lifted like a hand waving β and at the woodpile, stacked to the eaves in the men's careful geometry, and something in his face was complicated.
"They're on the grange hall in Castleton now," he said. "Old building, good bones, town wants it back for weddings and such. You ought to come see it. Any day you like β I'd drive you myself, but I expect you'd rather make up your own mind about the invitation first." He put his cap on. "The crew asks after you. Eli wants to know if the pump's holding. I told him I'd report back scientific."
"You tell Eli Ford the pump sings," Agnes said, "and you tell him his soup has been described, by an expert, as worth a blizzard."
Hank Tiller laughed all the way down her drive, and Agnes stood at the window watching the truck until it was gone around the bend, thinking that the village had spent a week asking what those men were doing on her road, and not one soul β herself included β had thought to ask what they were doing it for.