The Wall We Finished by Hand

Up the slope, Eunice had come out onto her porch in a blue cardigan. She did not come down.

She just stood there with her coffee and waited, the way she must have waited on a whole classroom to figure out an answer.

I took out my phone and called the rental yard in Lebanon. Their last track loader was out on a job until Monday.

I called the one in Springfield. They had a machine for three hundred ninety-five a day, but they could not deliver it until Monday either.

The forecast for Saturday was an inch and a half of rain. You do not leave an open trench and a cut slope sitting under an inch and a half of rain.

The bank comes down into the trench, the footing turns to soup, and you start over.

And starting over meant Eunice’s corner sagging another few inches, and her money gone into block that would sit in her yard through the winter, and Quint lying in a bed in Springfield knowing all of it.

I thought about calling the sheriff. I really did. But the loan had Lyman’s name on it, and any deputy in the county would have told me it was a family matter and gone back to his car.

And I thought about going after Lyman myself, driving out to his place and standing in his yard and saying what I had to say.

But he would have come back at the hospital with it. He would have stood at the foot of Quint’s bed and told his side.

I would not do that to my husband. Not that week.

So I put the phone in my pocket and turned around. Dewey had not moved.

“How many wheelbarrows we got,” I said.

Dewey blinked. Then he understood, and something in his face settled down, like a dog that has been told which way to go.

“Two on the truck,” he said. “Mine at home makes three. Gus has one.”

“Go get them,” I said. “We’re going to carry it.”

Thirty tons is sixty thousand pounds. A good contractor wheelbarrow, the six-cubic-foot kind with the steel tray and the wide tire, will carry about three hundred and fifty pounds of gravel if you load it right and the man pushing it is strong.

That is a hundred and seventy loads, give or take. Down a slope, which sounds easier than up, until you have tried to hold three hundred and fifty pounds back from running away on wet grass with only your arms.

We worked out a path. Dewey and Gus laid down a line of old plywood sheets from the truck, end to end, down the gentlest side of the hill, so the tire would not cut a rut or slide. The kid shoveled at the top. The rest of us pushed.

I had pushed wheelbarrows before. Every landscaper’s wife has. I had not pushed one full of crushed rock down a forty-foot slope fifty times in a day.

By the tenth load my forearms were burning. By the twentieth I had stopped feeling them.

Dewey took a carpenter’s pencil out of his shirt pocket and drew a tally mark on the end of one of the block pallets every time a load went down.

Four lines and a slash. He did not say anything about it. He just kept count.