Chapter 16: Marcus
Marcus's story did not come out all at once, and it did not come out at Agnes at all, exactly. It came out the way heat comes off a stove in winter β slowly, and mostly while people were looking at something else.
The first piece arrived on a Sunday, over roast chicken, when Agnes asked how he had learned carpentry, since most men she knew who swung a hammer for a living had learned it from their fathers, standing on a board to reach the bench.
"Didn't learn it from my father," Marcus said. "Learned it inside."
He said it the way a man mentions the town he grew up in, and went on carving. Darnell reached for the potatoes. Eli asked about the gravy boat, which had a chip shaped remarkably like the state of Ohio, and the conversation moved on, because the four of them had eaten at that table enough Sundays now to know which doors a man opened himself and which ones you waited beside.
The next piece came a week later, in the churchyard, where Agnes had brought up lemonade in a thermos and found Marcus standing alone by the scaffold, looking at the half-laid shingles with the expression of a man reading a page he had written.
"I was nineteen," he said, not turning around, "the year I ruined my life. Took part in a robbery that went wrong. Nobody was supposed to be β " He stopped. "It went wrong. A man I barely knew did a thing I still dream about, and I was close enough to stop it and didn't, and the law doesn't much care which of those you were, when you're standing there. I got a long sentence. Deserved most of it. All of it, some nights."
Agnes said nothing. The wind moved in the maples.
"Prison had a woodshop because the warden believed idle hands were the devil's recruiting office. First board I planed, I cried like a baby. Thought that was the strangest thing. Turns out a board doesn't care what you did. It just asks whether you'll be straight with it."
"And were you?" Agnes asked.
"Took me six years." He smiled a little, sideways. "I was a slow student."
His daughter's name was Renee. Agnes learned it last, and not from a story but from a letter β a real letter, on paper, that came to the crew's boarding rooms above the store, and that Marcus read three times at Agnes's kitchen table one rainy Thursday while the roof work waited on the weather, turning the envelope over between readings like a man checking a joint for square.
"She writes back now," he said, when he finally folded it away into his shirt pocket, over his heart, where carpenters keep the good pencils. "Took fourteen years of me writing first. Every birthday. Every Christmas. Some years the letters came back unopened. I kept the returned ones." He tapped his pocket. "This one says her boy β my grandson, he's six β this one says he asked why his grandpa lives in a roof."
Agnes laughed before she could stop herself, and Marcus laughed too, and for a moment the kitchen was only that: two people laughing in the rain-light.
"What did you write back?" she asked.
"Said a roof is a fine place for a grandpa. Said it's the part of the house that keeps everybody dry, and somebody has to know how." He turned his coffee cup in its saucer. "Said I'd come see him when there's a roof I'm allowed to stand under that belongs to family. She didn't say no, Mrs. Holloway. In her last letter she did not say no."
Agnes refilled his cup, though it was nearly full, because her hands needed an errand.
"You know what you are, Marcus Webb?"
"I've been told a few things."
"You're lonely in a coat I recognize." She said it plainly, the way she had once told a student his fingering was wrong β not to shame him, just to put the true note where he could find it. "I wore it thirty years at this table, setting a place out of habit for a man in the ground. Loneliness isn't particular about how it gets in. Yours came through a gate you shut yourself. Mine came through a church door with a coffin. It's the same coat."
Marcus was quiet a long while. The rain worked at the windows.
"She might let me visit at Easter," he said at last. "Renee. She said maybe Easter."
"Then you'll go," Agnes said, "and you'll bring that boy a birdhouse you made together in pieces, so he has to help you finish it. A man who can wait fourteen years for a letter can wait out one Easter." She stood and began, unnecessarily, to wipe the already clean counter. "We none of us get the years back, Marcus. We just get to decide what the next one's for."