“Lord, Send Someone to Fix This Roof Before Snow,” She Whispered... Not Knowing He Was Behind Her
Chapter 4
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Her voice had gone flat in the way of someone reciting a list she has recited to herself in the dark. "Nobody here buys what I can't deliver.""I've got a wagon and two days' slack," he said instead, as if thinking aloud. "My hay buyer in Loveland doesn't care which day it comes, so long as it's there by the 12th. And I'm tired of eating cold biscuit." He rubbed his jaw. "I know how to split a shake. I don't know a thing about cider."She was quiet a long moment. "That is an offer," she said."It's a question. I haven't got any offer. I haven't got the right to one."She studied him: the long, weathered face and the hat in his hands. "You have labor I need," she said. "I have fruit I cannot move. That is not a favor. That is trade."Then she went into the harness room and came out with a pencil stub and the back of an old flour sack. She smoothed it on a grain bin and wrote in a square, hard hand. When she was finished, she turned it to him:One week. Mr. Colton splits and lays the north slope, and what shakes he can on the south. Miss Prior picks and presses. Board in the barn, meals at the table on the porch, not in the house. Miss Prior keeps the cider. Mr. Colton may take one-half of whatever is pressed to sell. No other payment either way.Underneath, a line.He read it twice. It was not generous to either of them; it was the fairest thing he had ever been handed."You're giving me half the cider.""It's what the work is worth. I did the sum." She held out the pencil. "Sign it, Mr. Colton, or go on to Loveland."He signed it. His name looked large and clumsy beside hers.She folded the flour sack in four and put it in her coat pocket, and for the first time since he had driven in, her shoulders eased the width of a finger. She looked up at the north slope. She looked at it for longer than she needed to."Don't climb it till I tell you," she said."No, ma'am."She turned and went in to put out the coffee, and the door shut behind her.By Thursday, they had worked out a rhythm: the kind two stubborn people find when they have agreed on a few words and nothing else.Ezra split shakes in the barn doorway from first light until the sun stood over the orchard. The mallet rang; the thin boards piled against the wall—clean pine, sweet-smelling, each one rippled along its face.Willa picked. She worked up a ladder not ten feet high and down again, filling canvas sacks that she hauled to the press shed in a barrow with one good hand and one that she would not let him see her favor.At noon, they ate at the plank table on the porch, a body's length apart. She set out bread and a boiled potato and a square of cheese on a plate, and there was always a second plate exactly like the first. They did not talk much.