Chapter 26: The First Job
The Hollow Fund's first official job began on a Saturday in late May, with Walter Pruitt standing in his yard watching four men carry his porch away in pieces, and Walter looking β Agnes thought, from her lawn chair across the lane β like a man witnessing a small, necessary funeral.
The porch had been rotten through for years. Two of its boards gave underfoot like wet cake, and the railing had parted from the posts so long ago that Walter had taken to stepping over the worst of it, which at eighty-two was its own kind of hazard. The Fund's committee β Agnes, Carol, and Pastor Meredith, with Hank Tiller advising by telephone β had voted it the first job without a single dissent. Walter had argued, of course. He had argued when the letter came, he had argued when Marcus measured, and he was arguing still, as Darnell pried up the first board with a sound like a held breath letting go.
"Forty years that porch held," Walter said.
"It held you, mostly," Agnes called over. "That's the part we're keeping."
Half the village had turned out, or near enough that the distinction didn't matter. Neighbors held boards. Neighbors brought sandwiches, and a thermos of coffee strong enough to qualify as a building material, and a rhubarb pie that disappeared in sections, only faster. Young Peter Salls filmed the whole morning for the church page, and kept asking people to say what the Fund meant, and most of them said something plain about porches and one of them β old Mrs. Abernathy, who was ninety and entitled β said, "It means nobody falls through their own front steps in this village anymore, that's what it means," and Peter filmed that twice.
Agnes sat in the lawn chair in the thin shade of Walter's maple, a glass of lemonade sweating beside her in the grass, a pencil behind her ear, and the Fund's ledger open on her knees. She had ruled the columns herself: date, house, work done, materials, labor given, labor paid. She entered the job exactly as the crew had once entered hers β Marcus had shown her his own notebook, *Holloway β gate, fence, woodpile, roof patch* β and she saw no reason to improve on the system. Under labor she wrote the names as the work went up: Marcus on the joists, Darnell and Tommy on the stringers, Eli Ford up on the ladder with the level in his teeth. Under labor paid she wrote, in her firmest hand: *At cost. As agreed.* And under materials she wrote the lumber, the screws, the concrete for the new footings, and then *sandwiches (donated)*, because a ledger should tell the truth.
By ten o'clock the job had acquired the shape that all Fund jobs would keep from then on, because Agnes had insisted on the shape, with the envelope money in a biscuit tin between them. The crew worked at cost and not a penny under β a man who works free, Hank had said, is a man whose work gets treated as free, and the Fund was not in the business of charity but of neighbors. Materials came out of the tin. Labor went in the ledger. And the householder, where the householder was able, fed the crew, which was not a rule anyone had written down and was observed like scripture.
Not everyone had been easy to convince. Young Peter's uncle, Dan Salls, had stood in Walter's yard with his arms folded and asked, not unkindly, who was watching the money. Agnes had turned the ledger around on her knees so he could read it, every column, every name. Dan had read it carefully. Then he had taken off his jacket, hung it on Walter's fence, and gone to hold the far end of a stringer board for Darnell.
"That's how it spreads," Marcus said quietly, driving a screw home. "One porch at a time, and one skeptic carrying lumber."
Agnes wrote Dan Salls into the ledger under labor given, and underlined him once, which in her system was high honors.
At noon the new frame stood square and true where the rot had been, smelling of fresh-cut pine and creosote and other people's coffee. Tommy Kowalski sighted along the beam and declared it fit for a hundred years of grandfathers. Walter came down his own front steps backward, the way he had learned to do, and then β because Marcus held out an elbow and the new wood was under his feet β he came down forward, slowly, both hands on a railing that did not move.
At the bottom he stood a while on his own walk, looking back at the porch like a man checking that a rumor is true.
"Well," he said at last. "I suppose you'll all want feeding regular, now you've got a taste for it."