15. Roland #2
"Sure it wasn't." She went back to her crate, still smiling, already somewhere else in her own head.
I put the phone in my pocket and pulled it right back out, because loaded wasn't the same as gone, and gone wasn't the same as here on this ridge where I could see it.
I'd be calling that man again before the day was done, and again after that, until that housing was sitting in this yard where I could put my hands on it myself.
Three days the yard stood dead.
I watched the road. Every hour I didn't have that housing in my hands felt longer than the one before it.
The truck came up on the third morning, engine grinding on the last switchback. By the time it stopped by the shed, half the yard had gathered around the tailgate like it was a delivery of something better than iron.
The man who put us on wheeled the crate out on a hand truck and checked something off his clipboard. Somebody must have worked a miracle, he said, to turn up a housing like that.
"Must've been Ilse," Deb said. "She's been here since the old man ran the place. Knows every piece of iron on this lake better than anybody alive."
Nobody argued with that. Nobody went and found her to ask, either. She was off at the sorting bench with her back to the whole thing, and the credit landed on her and stayed there.
Ruthie stood next to me, working a loose thread on her sleeve, half listening.
"You didn't have a hand in it, did you, Ron?" Deb asked, more out of habit than curiosity.
"Wasn't me. I'd have had no idea where to start."
Deb laughed and said that made two of them, and somebody else asked whose truck was pulling the first load through.
Ruthie never looked over. She'd already gone back to her thread.
By the time the crate came open, nobody in the shed had touched the new housing except to lift it out and set it down next to the press. It sat there like it might tell somebody what to do next.
I stood there a minute same as everyone else. Then I got down on the floor because nobody else was moving, and somebody had to be.
My grandfather's toolbox was already out in the truck. I went out and got it.
The old bolts wouldn't back out clean. Two of them had rusted into the housing and I had to work them loose a quarter turn at a time, oil dripping down my wrist, knuckles scraping metal every time my hand slipped.
The new housing didn't want to seat square, not the first time or the second.
I set it, checked it, pulled it back off and tried again.
Ruthie held a light over my shoulder through all of it, and passed me whatever I put my hand out for without me asking twice. My knuckles were bleeding by the second hour. I kept going.
It took most of the afternoon. When I finally turned it over and the pump ran clean, nobody cheered. A couple of people just started moving fruit again, like the machine had never stopped.
I was wiping the wrenches down and fitting them back in their slots, Ruthie still holding the light for me, when I noticed the man who put us on standing in the doorway. He'd been there a while, watching, the way he watched most things, already turning to go back to the loads at the fence.
"Where'd you learn that?" he asked over his shoulder, not slowing down and not waiting long for it.
"My grandfather's cellar. I was eleven."
He was halfway back to the loads at the fence before I'd finished saying it.
Ruthie packed up not long after that. The others drifted out to the yard, back to loading crates onto the trailer before the light went. The shed emptied out fast once the pump was running again. Nobody had time left over for watching a man wipe down his tools.
I was alone on the wet floor, packing the last wrench into my grandfather's box, when I saw the jug.
Somebody had filled it straight off the press an hour before and set it on the shelf by the door, next to a stack of paper cups nobody had gotten around to using.
It didn't look like it belonged to anyone in particular.
I picked up one of the cups anyway, filled it about halfway, and stood there holding it in my bleeding hand.
Nobody handed it to me. Nobody was watching. Nobody asked me what I thought.
I took a mouthful.
I do this for a living. Forty wines a week, thirty years running, and I've built a company on being the man in the room who can tell you exactly what's in a glass before anyone else in it can. I know what I'm doing when something goes in my mouth.
I didn't know what I was doing with this.
I stood there working it over, the way I work over everything, waiting for it to come apart into pieces I could name. It wouldn't come apart. I set the cup down on the shelf, still half full.
The shed was empty by then. Nobody left in it but me.
"I couldn't take it apart. Thirty years, and I couldn't have told you how she'd done any of it," I said out loud.
Nine years married to her, and I'd never once put my mouth to anything she made. That landed on me slow, and it landed heavy, heavier than the pump had been all afternoon.
She'd been doing this the whole time. Alone. On the ten acres I'd left her.
I picked my grandfather's box up off the floor and carried it out to the truck.
The yard was half in shadow when I came out of the shed, crates stacked along the fence and the trailer nearly loaded. I saw her before I'd gone ten steps — up by the barn doors, pencil behind her ear, checking something against a board propped on her arm. She hadn't looked toward the shed once.
I wanted to cross that gravel more than I've wanted anything in nine years.
I'd spent three days on the phone and my own money keeping her season from stopping, and not one soul up here could tell her whose hands had done it.
I could have walked over right then and told her myself, watched whatever came up in her face when she heard it.
I didn't go over. I didn't wave. I didn't stand anywhere she'd have looked.
I carried the toolbox to the truck and set it on the seat, the latch still loose from the day's work. She was still bent over that board by the barn, and she had no idea I'd been within a hundred yards of her all afternoon.
I'd come up this ridge to see what she did with her days. I'd seen it now — crates and cold hands and twenty people who'd drop what they were doing at one word from her. That was all I'd wanted from today, and I had it.
I started the engine and pulled out through the gate.