Chapter 8: The Repairs
Eli cooked like a man conducting something. There were eggs from her own hens, beaten with a fork in the blue bowl, and bacon from the freezer that Agnes had been rationing since November, and biscuits he had made β actually made, from her flour tin, with her lard β that rose like small opinions and browned at the edges. "My grandmother raised eleven on biscuits and suspicion," Eli said, setting the pan in the middle of the table. "She said a man who can't make a biscuit can't be left alone with a problem."
They ate at her table, all five, with the storm light coming grey through the windows and the new flashing ticking overhead as it warmed. And because a full table asks things of people, Agnes heard the whole of it, plainly told, the way men tell things when their mouths are busy and their eyes can rest on their plates.
Marcus did most of it. They were a work crew, the four of them, for an outfit called New Roots Builders β a nonprofit, out of Burlington way, that took on restoration work: barns, churches, old houses for people who couldn't pay market, a covered bridge come spring. New Roots hired the men nobody else would look at twice. Men home from prison. He said it straight, without decoration, and watched her take it. "We did our time," he said. "Every kind. Darnell did six years on a thing he did at twenty and has regretted every day since in full sentences. Tommy's been out fourteen months. Eli did nine. I did four, and deserved them, and I keep the paperwork where I can see it so I don't go telling myself stories."
"And the van's lettered with it, ma'am," Tommy said. "We ain't hiding in your storm. The whole county can read us coming."
They had been headed up past Marlow Falls to a job β a widow's barn roof, Agnes noted, and filed it away β when the van's alternator died in the worst of it and the cold finished the argument. They'd seen her light. That was the whole of it. A light, and then a door.
"And a man doesn't eat a widow's soup in a storm," Darnell said, into his plate, in the tone of a man reciting the multiplication table, "and leave her roof leaking over her bed. That's not a program rule. That's just β arithmetic."
After breakfast they walked her through the house like contractors, because that is what they were, and showed her every repair as if reporting to a client: the flashing, the gate, the pump packing Marcus had reseated, the stove pipe joint Eli had re-cemented that none of them had mentioned at all. "Pipe was drawing wrong," Eli said. "Could've smoked you out some still night. It's drawing right now."
Agnes told them about Thomas, then. She had not planned to. She told them about the farm at its height and the two bad years and the morning the ambulance came up Hollow Road in the sleet and took too long at the gate β the old gate, she said, and Marcus looked at the floor. She told them the woodpile math of a winter alone, which she had never said aloud to a soul, and Tommy said, "Well, ma'am, the math's changed," and jerked his chin at the window, where the pile stood a foot taller than it had at supper and squared like a fort.
It was, she realized somewhere in the middle of her second cup of coffee, the best conversation she had had in years β better than the post office, better than church coffee hour, better than the telephone calls with her niece in Ohio that had lately become weather reports traded like currency. These men asked about the farm as if it were a going concern. They asked what she planted. They argued, respectfully and at length, about whether the barn wanted a new sill or only a new footing, and she arbitrated, and was listened to, in her own kitchen, as the last authority on the place she had kept alive for fifty years.
When she got up to clear, four men got up with her, and Marcus took the plate from her hand with enormous care, as if she had handed him something breakable that mattered.
"Miss Agnes," he said, "we're going to fix that van next, and be out of your way by dark. But you should know the roof wants more than my patch before spring. I wrote it down." He had. On the back of her grocery list, in a machinist's square hand: everything the house needed, in the order it needed it, with nothing exaggerated and nothing left out to spare her feelings.
She read it twice. Then she folded it into her apron pocket, on top of her fear, which had shrunk in the night to something that folded small indeed.