Eventide (Plainsong #2)(6)

His grandfather, Walter Kephart, was a white-haired man of seventy-five. For thirty years he’d been a gandy dancer on the railroad in southern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado. When he was almost seventy he got pensioned off. He was a silent old man; he would talk a good deal if he’d been drinking, but he was not a drunk and generally would take a drink at home only if he were sick. Each month when his pension check came he’d cash the check and spend an evening drinking at the Holt Tavern on the corner of Third and Main, where he would sit and visit with other old men in town and tell stories that were not exaggerated so much as they were simply enlarged a little, and then he’d remember for an hour or two what he had been able to do in the long-ago oldtime when he was still young.

The boy’s name was DJ Kephart. He took care of the old man, walking him home along the dark streets in the night when his grandfather was finished talking at the tavern, and at home he did most of the cooking and cleaning, and once a week washed their dirty clothes at the Laundromat on Ash Street.

One day in September he came home from school in the afternoon and the old man said the neighbor woman had been over, asking for him. You better go see what she wants.

When did she come?

This morning.

The boy poured out a cup of cold coffee from the pot on the stove and drank it and started toward the woman’s house. It was still hot outside, though the sun had begun to lean to the west, and the first intimations of fall were in the air—that smell of dust and dry leaves, that annual lonesomeness that comes of summer closing down. He walked past the vacant lot with its dirt path leading to a row of mulberry trees at the alley and then the two widows’ houses, both set back from the quiet street behind a dusty stand of lilac, and came to her house.

Mary Wells was a woman just past thirty with two young girls. Her husband worked in Alaska and returned home infrequently. Slim and healthy, a pretty woman with soft brown hair and blue eyes, she could have done all the yardwork herself but she liked helping the boy in this small way and always paid him something when he worked for her.

He knocked on the door of her house and waited. He thought he should not knock a second time, that it would be impolite and disrespectful. After a little while she came to the door wiping her hands on a dish towel. Behind her were the two girls.

Grandpa said you came over this morning.

Yes, she said. Will you come in?

No, I guess I better get started.

Don’t you want to come in first and have some cookies? We’ve been baking. They’re just fresh.

I drank some coffee before I left home, he said.

Maybe later then, Mary Wells said. Anyway I wondered if you had time to work in the backyard. If you don’t have something else you need to be doing right now.

I don’t have anything else right now.

Then I can use you. She smiled at him. Let me show you what I have in mind.

She came down the steps, followed by the two girls, and they went around the corner of the house to a sun-scorched garden beside the alley. She pointed out the weeds that had come up since he’d last been there and the rows of beans and cucumbers she wanted him to pick. Do you mind doing that? she said.

No, ma’am.

But don’t let yourself get too hot out here. Come sit in the shade when you need to.

It’s not too hot for me, he said.

I’ll send the girls out with some water.

They went back inside and he began to weed in the rows between the green plants, kneeling in the dirt and working steadily, sweating and brushing away the flies and mosquitoes. He was accustomed to working by himself and used to being uncomfortable. He piled the weeds at the edge of the alley and then began to pick the bushbeans and cucumbers. An hour later the girls came out of the house with three cookies on a plate and a glass of ice water.

Mama said for you to have these, said Dena, the older girl.

He wiped his hands on his pants and took the glass of water and drank half of it, then he ate one of the big cookies, eating it in two bites. They watched him closely, standing in the grass at the edge of the garden.

Mama said you looked hungry, Dena said.

We just baked these cookies this afternoon, Emma said.

We helped, you mean. We didn’t bake them ourselves.

We helped Mama bake them.

He drank the rest of the water and handed them the glass. There were muddy prints and streaks on the outside.

Don’t you want these other cookies?

You eat them.

Mama sent them for you.

You can have them. I’ve had enough.

Don’t you like them?

Yes.

Then why won’t you eat these?

He shrugged and looked away.

I’ll eat one, Emma said.

You better not. Mama sent them out for him.

He doesn’t want them.

I don’t care. They’re his.

You can have them, he said.

No, Dena said. She took the two cookies from the plate and put them down in the grass. You can eat them later. Mama said they’re yours.

The bugs’ll get them first.

Then you better eat them.

He looked at her and then went back to work, picking green beans into a white-enameled bowl.

The two girls watched him work, he was on his knees again crawling, his back to them, the soles of his shoes turned up toward them like the narrow faces of some strange being, his hair dark with sweat at the back of his neck. When he reached the end of the row the girls left the cookies in the grass and went back inside.