The Wall We Finished by Hand

He nodded. He looked at the ground. “How’s he doing,” he said. “Today.”

“He closed his hand halfway yesterday,” I said. “You could go see him. He would like that more than he’d ever say.”

Lyman nodded again. He put his cap back on. He went back to his truck and sat in it for a while, and then he pulled out and went down the road, slow, and this time he did not lift his fingers at anybody, and nobody lifted theirs.

The rain came Saturday morning, an inch and seven-tenths by Eunice’s gauge. She called me at eight to tell me.

She had walked out on the porch in her raincoat and watched the water come off the hill, through the gravel, and out the pipe at the low end, clear as tap water.

“Not one drop over the top,” she said. “Not one.”

On Monday morning the skid steer was sitting on Lyman’s trailer at the bottom of Sadie’s driveway, and Lyman was sitting in his truck with a thermos.

He helped Dewey unload it. He did not say much. He asked Dewey whether we wanted the footing dug a foot deeper on the lower side, and Dewey said yes.

That was the start. It is not finished between them. Quint has to forgive his father in his own time, and I am letting him take it.

But Lyman has been to the hospital twice since, and both times he stayed past an hour.

But that came later. What I want to tell you about is Friday afternoon.

After Lyman drove off, I took a picture of the wall from the bottom of the yard.

The whole length of it, with the oaks behind it and Eunice’s little brick house on top of the hill and the crew truck in the driveway.

Then I got in my truck and drove to Springfield with the sun still up.

Quint was in the chair again when I got there. He looked gray and worn out. The therapist had walked him to the end of the hall and back.

I sat down on the bed and handed him my phone with the picture already on it.

He looked at it for a long time. He made it bigger with his good hand and moved it along, end to end, checking the cap line, the way I knew he would. I watched his eyes go down the length of it twice.

“Level,” he said.

“Dewey laid the level on the last one,” I said. “Dead center.”

He did not ask about anything else. He did not ask about his father. He did not ask how we did it.

I think the picture told him all of that, the way a wall shows you every mistake and every good thing too, if you know how to look at it.

Then he did something I will remember the rest of my life.

I sat beside him and held his left hand, the one that would only close halfway, while the late sun came in long across the blanket.

I did not ask for the phone back. I did not want it back.

He put the phone down flat against his chest, picture side in, with his good hand over it and his bad hand trying to come up and cover it too.

And for the first time since Tuesday morning, without the nurse giving him anything, Quint held that picture against his chest and slept.