The Wall We Finished by Hand

That evening Quint sat on the tailgate and drank a whole thermos of Eunice’s iced tea and said it was the best job we had ever had.

I remember him saying it. I remember his hand on my knee, the dirt in every crease of it.

Tuesday morning, at our own kitchen table, he went to pick up his coffee and his left hand would not close on the cup.

He looked at the hand like it belonged to somebody else. Then he tried to say my name and it came out wrong, the end of it sliding off.

One side of his mouth would not come up when he tried to smile at me to say he was fine.

I knew. Everyone knows the signs now from the posters at the clinic. The face, the arm, the words.

I called the ambulance with my other hand already on his shoulder, and I told him not to stand up.

They took him to the hospital in Lebanon, and the doctor there gave him the clot medicine within the hour, and then they put him in a second ambulance to Springfield, where they have the stroke team. I followed in my truck with my hazards on.

I prayed the whole way down the interstate. I am not much for praying out loud, but I said the Lord’s Prayer about forty times that morning, and somewhere around Marshfield I noticed I was saying it in my mother’s voice.

By Tuesday afternoon they said the medicine had done its work, or most of it. He would keep his life and probably most of his words.

The hand and the leg would take therapy, maybe a long time. He was tired in a way I had never seen him tired.

Lyman came Tuesday evening. He stood at the foot of the bed with his cap in his hands and did not say much to Quint.

He said more to me, out in the hall by the ice machine, in daylight still coming through the big window at the end.

“What about the job,” he said.

“Dewey and I are going over in the morning,” I said. “We’ll get the base in. The block’s on site. Quint can tell us on the phone when he’s able.”

Lyman shook his head slowly. “You don’t know what you’re doing on a machine.”

“Dewey does,” I said. “Dewey’s run it plenty.”

He did not answer that. He just looked down the hall toward Quint’s room, and I thought he was going to say something kind, and instead he said he had to get on home and feed.

I did not know he had the key. I learned later that he did not need one.

That skid steer takes the same key that fits half the skid steers in the county, and Lyman has a ring of them in his truck like any equipment man.

So that was Wednesday morning. The machine gone, Lyman’s taillights going down the hill, and the three men looking at me.

I want to say I had a speech ready. I did not. I stood there with my hands in my jacket pockets, and I could feel my chin starting to go, and I turned around and looked at the gravel piles in the driveway so they would not see it.

Two piles. Each one as tall as my truck. Crushed base on the left, clean drain rock on the right, already wet with dew and starting to settle.