“I did not ask for it,” he said, and for the first time his voice turned hard. “I want that understood. Nobody asked me. I would have told her to keep her thumbs to herself. A man’s mailbox is his own business until he says otherwise.”
He turned back to Emma, and his face went gentle again. “I read that you were a menace. Then I looked at your note, and I thought, I would sooner have a menace who writes me a note than a quiet neighbor who watches from the window.”
I saw Emma’s hands shake a little on the table. She slid the bank envelope across the oilcloth with two fingers.
“It’s $340,” she said. “It’s all of it. I don’t know how much a post costs, so I brought extra. You can have whatever you need.”
Harold looked at the envelope and did not touch it. “That’s tip money,” he said.
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“Yes, sir.”
“You work for that.”
“Yes, sir. It’s for the mailbox. I don’t want to owe anybody.”
He considered her for a long time, the way a man looks at a field before he decides whether to plant it. “What did you plan to do about the post?” he asked.
“We brought one. And a new mailbox. We’re going to set it, if that’s okay.”
“By yourselves?”
“My mom will hold it. I’ll dig.”
“Have you ever dug a post hole?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you’ll want my gloves,” Harold said, and he pushed up from the table. That was the end of the apology and the beginning of something else.
He found a pair of canvas gloves in a drawer, stiff with age, and gave them to Emma. He found a second pair for me, and a tape measure with a cracked case, and a four-foot level in the mudroom. Then he stood in the yard in the sun with his cane and watched my daughter dig.
She was not good at it at first. A post-hole digger takes a particular rhythm, plunge and close and pull and drop, and Indiana clay holds the blades like cold taffy.
“Spread your feet,” Harold said. “You’re fighting it. Let the handles do the work.”
“They are doing the work.”
“They’re doing about half. Put your back into the other half.”
She laughed. It was the first laugh I had heard from her in three days, and I had to look at the fence for a minute.
The hole took her forty minutes. Harold sat down on an overturned bucket about halfway through, because of the hip. Once it was deep enough, we bolted the new black mailbox to the top of the post right there on the grass, so he could judge the height with his own eyes, and then we stood the whole thing up in the hole together.
We poured two inches of crushed gravel in first, the way the man at the farm store had said, so the water would drain away from the wood. I held the post plumb with both hands. Harold called the level from his bucket. “Little to the left. Little more. There.”