The Paperboy Who Cleared Her Walk

Clement did the Courier crossword every morning of his adult life, in pen, at the kitchen table, with his reading glasses on the end of his nose. Only the crossword. He did not read the news until he finished it, and he said that was how a man kept his priorities. He had been dead nine weeks, and the paper still came every morning because nobody had called to stop it.

Somebody had looked at that paper and thought, there is a person in that house who would want the crossword on top.

I did not know yet that the somebody was eleven years old, or that he would do my walk for ten winters and never take a dime, or that I would spend those ten winters keeping a secret from him.

But the walk does not make sense without the man who walked it, so let me tell you about Clement.

My name is Winifred Tarbell, and I live at 14 Pleasant Street in Haddon, New Hampshire, up in Coos County, in a white farmhouse built in 1891 with a porch that sags a little to the left. Clement taught shop at Haddon High for thirty-one years and kept six hives of bees behind the garage. Before that, for six years, he climbed poles for the electric co-op, and he never entirely stopped being a lineman. He tested every light switch with his thumb. He could not walk under a power line without looking up at the crossarm and grunting.

He died on the second Tuesday in October, in the garage, with a drawer of hex keys open in front of him and a half-finished birdhouse on the bench. His heart. The doctor said he never knew. I have decided to believe the doctor.

We had one daughter, Marian, who lives in Nashua with her husband and three boys, and who drove up that same night and did not leave for eleven days. Marian is a good daughter. I want that understood, because I am going to tell you things about the winter that came after, and I do not want you to think she was anything but kind.

She was kind the way a person is kind who is also frightened. She stood in my kitchen on the last morning with her car keys in her hand and said, “Mom, I have a room for you. It has its own bathroom. There is a Hannaford a mile away.”

“There is a Hannaford a mile from here,” I said.

“Mom. You have the knee. You have the heart thing. You have sixty-one feet of walk and five granite steps.”

I have what the cardiologist in Lancaster calls atrial fibrillation, which means that on bad days my heart goes off at a gallop and I have to sit and wait for it to come home. The knee is a titanium one, put in eight months before Clement died.

“Give me till the first real snow,” I told her. “If I cannot manage the first real snow, I will call you, and I will go.”

She looked at me for a long time. She did not believe me, and she was right not to, because I did not believe me either.

She left that Sunday. And the next Thursday it snowed.

Let me go back to October, because I have skipped the boy.

The Courier had been delivered to Pleasant Street for nine years by a man named Gilles Pelletier, who threw from his truck window with an arm like a catapult and collected on the first of the month with his hat in his hand. That August his knees gave out. The paper cut the route down to the walkers, fourteen houses on Pleasant and Elm, and gave it to a boy off Tannery Road who was eleven and small for it.