Chapter 13: The Visit
Walter Pruitt drove her to Castleton on Tuesday, in the Subaru he kept washed even in mud season, and spent the first mile apologizing for the state of the roads and the second mile apologizing for his cousin.
"Gordon's mother and mine were sisters," he said, eyes front, "and I want it noted, for whatever record you're keeping, that the family resemblance stops at the chin."
"Noted," said Agnes gravely, and they rode the rest of the way in the comfortable silence of two people who had been neighbors for thirty years, which is a silence with a great deal of furniture in it.
The grange hall stood at the edge of Castleton's green with its skirt of scaffolding and its roof half shingled, half open to the sky under tarps, and the sound of the work came to them before they were out of the car β hammers, a saw, a radio playing something old, and underneath it all the particular patience of men doing a thing in the right order. Agnes walked the site slowly in her good coat, the one with the horn buttons, and nobody on the crew made the mistake of treating her like a visitor to a zoo. Darnell, who was feeding boards up to the roof, called down, "Mind the offcuts, Mrs. H," as naturally as if she inspected their work every Tuesday of her life.
The joinery was the thing she kept coming back to. She knew β in her hands, the way you know a hymn β the difference between work done to be finished and work done to be true. The hall's new window frames were the second kind. She stood a long time by the stage, where Tommy was fitting trim with a care that would have shamed a jeweler, and the young man, flushing to his ears, said, "It's the room the whole town dances in. You don't rush a room like that."
Inside, along one wall, Hank had put up a corkboard, and Agnes stopped before it the way you stop before a window in a house you used to live in.
There were notes. Dozens of them, on church stationery and grocery lists and one memorable piece of birch bark: *Thank you for the ramp β Mother has been to church every Sunday since.* *The porch is the prettiest thing on our road now.* *You left the yard cleaner than you found it, and my husband says that's the whole review.* A child's drawing of four stick men holding up a house. Agnes read every one, and was grateful that Walter, with a neighbor's genius, had wandered off to inspect the scaffolding as if it were his life's study.
Marcus came down the ladder then, wiping his hands, and walked her through the job log the way another man might walk a guest through a garden. It was a green ledger, ruled and plain, every job entered in pencil: address, work done, hours, and a column at the end marked simply *Notes*. She saw Brattleboro, Windsor, the porch in Rutland with the note *Mrs. D β pays in pie, accept graciously*. And then, near the back, because it was recent, she saw her own.
*Hollow Road, Marlow Falls,* it said, in Marcus's square hand. *Fed us. Fixed what we could. Owe her a roof.*
Agnes put one finger on the page, lightly, the way you test whether a thing is real.
"Owe her a roof," she read aloud.
"That's the entry," Marcus said. "We're not fast, but we don't leave a page open." He closed the ledger gently. "Mr. Tiller says the church job in your village is out to bid. Roof's gone soft over the choir loft. We've put our number in. It's a fair number β won't be the cheapest thing they ever bought, but it'll be the truest." He said it without salesmanship, as though describing weather. "If it comes to us, I'd like to settle that page while we're in town. If it doesn't β well. A debt's a debt either way. We'll find our road back."
On the drive home, the light going gold over the mountains, Walter finally said what he had clearly been saving. "Your Thomas," he said, "helped my father raise the barn at our place in 'seventy-eight. Wouldn't take a cent. Said a barn-raising was the one debt a man was allowed to owe." He signaled for the turn onto Hollow Road, though there was no other car in the world. "I expect the trait runs in the occupancy."
Agnes looked out at her fields going past, white and patient, her roof waiting at the end of them like a sentence unfinished. "Walter," she said, "when we get home, you're staying for tea. And I am going to tell you what I intend to say at that town meeting, and you are going to tell me honestly if it sounds like a woman of sense."