Chapter 9: The Money
The plow came through at noon with its blade singing, throwing a white ridge across the mouth of Hollow Road, and behind it, in due course, came the sound of an engine deciding to live โ Darnell flat on his back in the snow under the van with a wrench and a vocabulary he kept strictly under his breath, until the old Ford caught, coughed, and settled into a rough, triumphant idle. The four of them stood around it in the bright cold like men at a cradle.
Agnes watched from the porch with her coat on, and did not know what to do with her hands, and so made soup again, because soup was a thing her hands knew, and packed it into jars while they loaded their duffels and Thomas's borrowed blankets, folded. Folded, she noticed. Army corners. The house was warmer than it had been in three years and she was rationing the minutes like the bacon.
It was Marcus who stayed last in the kitchen, unhurried, and Marcus who did it.
He set an envelope on her table โ a plain white envelope, soft with travel, fat as a deck of cards โ and put his hand flat on it the way you settle a thing that might blow away in a wind. "That's the crew's trip money," he said. "We pool it at the start of every job. Gas, food, rooms if the weather turns." A pause. "The weather turned."
"Marcus Webb, that is yourโ"
"It's for the roof," he said. "Not the patch. The real fix. Tin, flashing, the valley done right, a man up there with a harness who charges what he's worth." He said it without ceremony, looking at the envelope and not at her, as if ceremony would make it harder to leave on the table. "We talked it over at the stove last night. All four. It wasn't even a discussion, Miss Agnes. It was a sum. You've got the list. Now you've got the start of paying for it."
Agnes said the things a woman of her raising says โ that she couldn't, that it was too much, that they'd need it for the road โ and Marcus listened to all of it the way he had listened to her door lock the night before, patiently, as a courtesy she was owed, and then said, "Ma'am, we can earn more money. There's jobs all spring. A roof in Vermont in February is not a thing that waits its turn politely." He pushed the envelope one inch toward her side of the table. "Let us leave one thing here that's ours."
Behind him, at the door, Eli had written their names on the back of a store receipt in pencil โ MARCUS, DARNELL, TOMMY, ELI โ and underneath, in his careful hand, a phone number, and the words NEW ROOTS BUILDERS, and under that, in smaller letters still: ASK FOR HANK. "You need anything," Eli said, "you call that number and you say the farm at the end of Hollow Road. Any one of us'll know the way back."
They went out one by one and shook her hand on the porch like departing ministers. Tommy hugged her, suddenly and hard, and apologized for hugging her, and hugged her again. Darnell, last down the steps, turned and looked up at the roof he'd patched and said, "Two winters in that, easy. Get the real fix in the spring anyway. Don't let some cousin do it cheap," and ducked his head, and was gone into the white glare of the lane.
Agnes stood in her repaired doorway โ the door that closed true for the first time since Thomas's funeral, because Marcus had planed its swollen edge while she was making soup โ and watched the van climb the plowed road and take the bend and vanish. The house behind her ticked with heat. The woodpile stood high. In her hand was an envelope of money given her by four strangers, four ex-convicts, four men who had fed her stove all night in shifts so she would not wake cold.
She had meant to say thank you properly. She had a whole speech of it arranged, of the kind her generation kept polished for occasions. Standing there with the cold coming up off the snow and the warmth coming out of her own door at her back, she found she could not have spoken a word of it to save her life. She lifted one hand, instead, to the empty road, the way you wave at a train long after it has rounded the bend โ not for the passengers, who cannot see you, but for yourself, because the hand knows something the mouth takes longer to learn.
Then she went in and put the envelope in the biscuit tin, on top of the grocery list with the roof written on it, and closed the lid on both of them together.