The Furnace Man Came on Monday

Mr. Kovar

I called him from the parking lot, with the car heater on high. It was a Saturday. I called him at home. In Fairbury you can still do that.

“Bonnie,” he said. “How’s Dale? I heard at the cafe.”

“He’s going to mend. They did three bypasses on Thursday.”

“Well, thank the Lord for that. What can I do for you?”

“I need a furnace, Mr. Kovar.”

The line was quiet.

“I’ve still got that card in my desk,” he said. “The one I figured on at your table. I’d have to write you a new number. It won’t be thirty-four hundred anymore.”

“I didn’t suppose it would.”

Mr. Kovar is seventy-two. He taught my Sunday school class when I was in the fifth grade. He did not ask me where the money was coming from, then or ever.

“I’ve got one in the shop that’ll fit your ductwork,” he said. “I can be there Monday at seven with my grandson. You’ll have heat by supper.”

I drove home Sunday night and kept the fire myself. Monday at ten minutes to seven his truck came up the lane.

I went down to the basement with them, in a housedress and my heavy cardigan, and I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my arms crossed and watched every bit of it.

The old furnace still had his red tag wired to the gas line. He turned it over in his fingers. The date was in his own handwriting, faded to brown.

“Eleven, nine, oh seven,” he read. He shook his head. “Bonnie, I have driven past this place every winter and looked for that stove smoke and thought, well, they’re still at it.”

His grandson Jeff cut the old one loose and the two of them walked it off to one side. It sat there in the work light, rusted through at the bottom. They set the new one where it had been.

Mr. Kovar knelt down in front of it with a pipe wrench to make up the gas line. It was an old wrench, the red paint worn off the handle.

“You know where I got this?” he said, not looking up.

“No.”

“Dale’s dad’s sale. March of ’84. I was thirty and just starting out, and I didn’t have two tools to rub together.” He tightened the fitting, a quarter turn, and another. “I gave four dollars for it. It was worth thirty. That’s how that whole day went. Everything they had went for a dime on the dollar, and every one of us that bid knew it.”

I did not say anything.

“I’ve felt funny about this wrench for forty years,” he said. “Dale was there. He was a young fellow then. He stood by the corn crib with his hands in his pockets the whole day and watched his neighbors carry his mother’s things to their cars. Her sewing machine. The kitchen table. He helped a man load the table.”

He sat back on his heels.

“I’m not telling you your business. I don’t know your business. I’m just saying a man doesn’t get over a day like that. He only gets quiet about it.”

“I know he does,” I said. It came out rougher than I meant.

He nodded and went back to work, and that was all either of us said about it. He had told me what I needed told, and he had done it with his back to me, so that I could cry a little and nobody would have to notice.

They ran a white plastic vent pipe out through the side of the house. He put a new thermostat on the dining room wall, where the old one had hung dead since 2007. He wrote up the bill at my kitchen table, the same as he had the last time.

“Sixty-five hundred and twelve dollars,” he said. “That’s the furnace, the venting, the thermostat and the labor. I can carry it thirty days, if you’d sooner wait until Dale’s home to look it over.”

“No,” I said. “I have waited since 2007.”

I got out the farm checkbook. There was a little over eleven thousand dollars in that account, and every dollar of it, according to my husband, was spoken for. Seed. Taxes. It had been spoken for every January of my married life.

I wrote the check. My hand did not shake. I knew now what was standing behind it.

At twenty minutes to four that afternoon, Mr. Kovar set the thermostat to seventy and stepped back.

There was a click down below. Then a hum. Then, out of the floor register in the dining room, where nothing had come for nineteen winters but dust, there came a breath of warm air.

I walked over and stood on it.

My housedress filled up like a bell. The warm went up my legs and into my sleeves. I stood there on that register in front of a seventy-two-year-old man and a boy of twenty, and I cried like a girl.

Mr. Kovar picked up his toolbox.

“Come on, Jeff,” he said. “Let’s go see about that old one.”

They went down the basement stairs and left me to it.