Chapter 17: Darnell's Hands
Darnell Price had the biggest hands Agnes had ever seen β hands like catcher's mitts β and a touch with machinery so fine that the men said he could hear a bearing going bad the way a mother hears a baby in the next room.
He fixed the church van first, because it was part of the job, in the loose sense that everything broken within sight of the steeple had become part of the job. Then the store's freezer, which had died on a Tuesday with four hundred dollars of ice cream in it, and which Darnell resurrected on his knees behind the counter while June, the owner, held the flashlight and wept with relief and charged him nothing for the parts he refused to bill.
"The man at the depot in Rutland quoted me eleven hundred," June told the whole post office. "Darnell did it for a sandwich. A sandwich I had to talk him into."
What June did not say, because she was saving it for Agnes, was that Darnell had stayed until the cold was truly back in the box, sitting on a crate in the stockroom, watching the temperature gauge. "He said a freezer tells you the truth if you wait," June said. "He said people mostly do too, but it takes longer." Then he ate the sandwich like a steak, and asked after her mother's hip.
Then it was the Abernathy tractor, and that one mattered, because George Abernathy had crossed the street on the crew's first day in Marlow Falls β crossed it plainly, with his dog, to avoid walking past four men eating lunch on the church steps.
George was seventy-two, a dairy farmer with forty acres and strong opinions he mostly kept behind his teeth, and on the crew's second Thursday his tractor died in the lower field in the middle of haying weather, which in Vermont is a sentence all by itself. He stood looking at the dead machine for a long time. Then he walked up the church hill, where Darnell was eating an apple on the scaffold break, and stood at the foot of the ladder with his cap in his hands, turning it, turning it.
"They tell me you can fix anything," George said.
"They exaggerate to make me work," Darnell said, and came down the ladder.
He worked on that tractor until dark, in George's field, with George handing him tools and saying almost nothing, and when the engine caught β caught rough, then smoothed, the way an engine does when it remembers itself β George stood with his hand flat on the warm hood like a man feeling a horse's neck.
"What do I owe you?" he said.
"A ride back up the hill," Darnell said. "My knees are talking to me."
The next afternoon, George Abernathy came up the church hill carrying a pie.
He carried it the way men carry things they have no practice carrying β in both hands, out front, like an offering in a procession β and he stood at the edge of the work site, embarrassed to his bones, while the whole crew pretended very hard to be fascinated by shingles.
"Mrs. Abernathy β Ruth β made it," he said. "It's β she said to say it's maple. From our trees."
Darnell took the pie in his enormous hands as if it were a christening.
"Mr. Abernathy," he said, "I have eaten in some places I would not describe at a church, and I want you to know that nobody ever brought me a pie like a gentleman before. You tell Mrs. Abernathy that Darnell Price said this is a king's pie, and I will think about it when I'm an old man."
George nodded about nine times. He looked at the scaffold, at the half-done roof, at his own boots.
"My granddaddy used to say you can tell a town by whether it feeds the men working on its church," he said. "I may have got that backwards for a spell." He put his cap back on. "Roof looks good."
Word travels in a village the way weather travels β along the fences, over the store counter, through the post office window. By the crew's second week, people had begun leaving things on the church steps: a thermos, a bag of apples, once a whole ham. The selectboard's Hank Tiller said the crew's presence had done what three years of town meeting couldn't, which was get Marlow Falls to stop being scared of its own shadow.
Agnes, watching from her porch with her mending, dated the change precisely. It was not the roof. It was a pie, carried up a hill in both hands by a proud man who had crossed a street to avoid four strangers, and who had decided β turning his cap in his hands in a hay field β that crossing it back was the shorter road after all.