My wife, Elowen, teaches third grade at Kettle Grove Elementary, and Dani is in her class. Elowen came home that night and sat in the kitchen with her coat on and didn’t speak for ten minutes. Then she said, “Dani asked me if Santa will be able to find her at the new address. She asked if the post office knows.”
So I knew exactly what the money was for. The five of them were sleeping on three mattresses in two rooms of Tasha’s sister’s duplex. A rental on Birch Street was going for nine hundred a month, with a deposit and first and last. Then beds. Then coats. Then, if the Lord was good, a Christmas.
The fund stood at sixteen hundred and fifty dollars over the grower’s invoice when Walt pulled his truck across my entrance.
Marcus came over after the line of cars had dispersed. He is a quiet man, tall and stooped from years of climbing into truck cabs, and he had Pipp up on his hip with the boy’s head on his shoulder.
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“Rance,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re the last man in this county who should be saying that.”
“Dani was in the car,” he said. “She heard what he said about insurance.”
I couldn’t answer.
“I’m not going to ask you to fight him,” Marcus said. “I don’t want you at his shop. I don’t want the church in a feud with a man who has to live in this town. We’ve got nothing, Rance, but we’ve still got to live here after December.”
“I can’t just load the trailer and go home. Four hundred trees.”
“I know.” He shifted Pipp to his other arm. “I’m not saying go home. I’m saying he can only lock a gate he owns.”
I looked at him.
“The field,” Marcus said. “Behind the church. Where we park for the Fourth of July.”
Six acres of flat frozen grass, a mile and a quarter out Route 9 at the edge of town, with a gravel lane and a flagpole. It belonged to the church free and clear. No handshake. No landlord.
“It’s out of the way,” I said. “Everybody who buys from us buys because they see the lights from Main Street. We’d need forty trucks and sixty people and a radio spot, all by eight o’clock tomorrow.”
“I know it,” Marcus said. He had a four-year-old asleep on his hip with a fistful of orange tags, and the face of a man who has already lost the biggest thing he is going to lose and is now only measuring the smaller ones.
“All right,” I said. “Let me pray about it.”
I meant it the way people usually mean it, which is to say I meant I’d stall. But I had said the word out loud in front of a man who had just lost his house. So I locked the hut and drove out Route 9 to the church.
The sanctuary was empty and dark except for the red glow of the exit sign. I went down the center aisle and knelt at the altar rail, and my knees cracked, and I began to pray.
I did not start by asking for help. I started by telling God how Walt had looked at that child. I told Him that Clyde was a good man who had held a dollar bill up to a window every November for thirty-one years, and that the son had sold the whole inheritance of that handshake for eleven thousand dollars. I asked God, in so many words, to do something about Walt.