I stood very still behind the curtain. I could see him in the glow from the street lamp. Hat pulled down. Mittens. The headlamp turned to the ground so the beam made a little white pool where he was working. And I saw the canvas bag lying on my porch rail with a rolled-up paper sticking out of it, and I knew.
It was the Thibodeau boy. He was doing it before his route. He had come to my house at five in the morning, in the dark and the cold, eleven years old, and shoveled sixty-one feet of walk and five stone steps with a tool that came up to his chin, and then he was going to go and deliver thirteen more papers.
I put my hand over my mouth.
Then I did a thing that I have turned over in my mind every winter since. I did not open the door.
I wanted to. God knows I wanted to. I wanted to go out in Clement’s robe and take that child by both shoulders and tell him he did not have to, that it was too much, that he was somebody’s baby. But I had seen the boy on my porch that Friday in October with his jaw working and his eyes on my feet. And I thought about what it would do to him to be caught.
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A boy who cannot say five words without paying for them does a kindness in the dark because he cannot do it in the daylight, where somebody would have to say thank you and somebody would have to answer. If I opened the door, he would have to talk to me. And he would never come back to my walk.
So I stood in the dark kitchen with the curtain in my fist, and I let him finish.
That was the first morning I kept the secret. It was not the last.
Of course I tried to pay him. You cannot be raised the way I was raised and let a child work for nothing.
The next Friday, when he came for his four dollars and a quarter, I had an envelope ready with a twenty folded in it and his name on the front in my best Palmer penmanship. I held it out. He looked at it as though I had handed him a live coal. His face went red to the hairline, and his head shook once, hard, side to side, and he did not take it.
I did not push. I said, “All right,” and put it back in the drawer, and he wrote my name on the yellow card and left.
I tried again at Christmas, with a card, and a fifty inside it, because it seemed the sort of thing a person could not refuse at Christmas. He took the card. I watched him take it and put it in his bag, and I thought, well, that is that.
On Saturday morning I opened the storm door for the paper, and the card was standing in the dry between the glass and the wood, the envelope still sealed. Across the front, in pencil, in a hand like a row of fence posts, he had written: No thank you Mrs. Tarbell. R.T.