Chapter 5: The Kitchen
She set them to work because work was the only introduction she trusted. Towels from the linen press, the good ones and then the less good ones. Dry socks from Thomas's drawer, which she handed out without a word about whose they were, and four grown men pulled on a dead schoolteacher's wool socks with the reverence of communicants. The kettle went on. The soup pot β the real one, not the drip-catcher β came down, and into it went the jar of August tomatoes and beans and the end of a ham, and the kitchen filled with steam until the windows wept.
They were careful in a way she had not expected and could not stop noticing. The biggest one β the one from the porch β put himself between his companions and any sudden movement, so instinctively she wondered if he knew he was doing it. They asked before they touched anything: the chairs, the water dipper, the wood box. They set their duffel by the door in plain sight, zipped and upright, and though she made no comment she understood the gesture for what it was: a thing placed where she could see it, by men who knew exactly what she was seeing when she looked at them.
What she saw, when her eye snagged on the duffel a third time and then a fourth, was this: a tool roll bound in oiled canvas, heavy with metal that caught the lamplight, and beside it, half-tucked in the side pocket, a thick envelope, the kind that does not bend. Her imagination β a faculty that loneliness had kept in better training than she liked to admit β supplied the envelope with money, and the money with a history, and the history with a bank in it, and she seasoned the soup and told it to sit down and behave, and it did not entirely obey.
"Road crew?" she asked, at the stove.
"No, ma'am," said the big one. "Not exactly."
"Church group?" said Agnes, dry as kindling, and the young one laughed before he could stop himself and then looked stricken, and the big one smiled into his tea β a real smile, the first she had seen from any of them, and it took ten years off him and put something tired in their place. "No, ma'am," he said. "We're just traveling. Work takes us where it takes us. Van had other ideas tonight."
She did not ask what work. They did not offer it. The soup went around in her good bowls, and the men ate the way men eat who have been cold in their bones: slowly, with attention, saying please and thank you to the pot as much as to her. The young one β Jesse, the others called him β told her the ham was better than his mother's, and then went red and said his mother was a fine woman and a terrible cook, and the table laughed, all five of them, briefly and surprisedly, like people who have stumbled on a warm room in a house they expected to be cold.
When she showed them the spare room β Emily's old room, the bed made up since spring for no one β they refused it with a firmness that was almost ceremony. "Floor's what we asked for, ma'am, and floor's what we'll take." They laid their bedrolls by the kitchen stove in a row, boots paired by the door like schoolboys', and the big one fed the fire before they settled, and then β she marked it from the hall, where she had paused with her lamp β fed it again an hour later, rising without a word in the dark. They were taking turns, she understood. All night, in shifts, they would keep her stove and her house warm, and sleep in the spaces between, and none of them would say a word about it.
They had asked for one night out of the storm. They were paying for it the only way they had, in advance, without being asked.
Agnes took her lamp down the hall to her own room and shut her door. She put on her nightdress. She brushed her hair the forty strokes her mother had prescribed for a clear conscience. Then she took the straight-backed chair from beside her dresser, carried it the two steps to the door, and wedged it firmly under the handle, the way she had seen done in a film forty years ago and never once in life.
She stood looking at it a long time. She was ashamed of the chair β ashamed in a way that had heat in it β and she did not move it. Hospitality was one thing. Knowing what the world could hold was another. She got into bed and lay listening to the storm spend itself against her house, and below it, faint and regular, the soft sounds of four strangers keeping her fire.