She did not dress it up. She did not need to. She just told it straight, the way a schoolteacher tells a story about who took the chalk, and let them make up their own minds.
At noon on Thursday there was more food than four people could eat. Somebody had sent over a pan of chicken and noodles.
Somebody else had sent a pound cake. Eunice set it all out on a card table on the porch and said grace again and made us sit on the steps.
“You’re behind,” she said to me, when the men had gone back down.
“Some,” I said. “We’ll make it.”
“I know you’ll make it,” she said. “I wasn’t asking. I was telling you that I know it, so you don’t have to wonder whether anyone does.”
I went inside and stood in her bathroom for a minute with the water running. Then I washed my face and went back out.
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Thursday afternoon a woman named Sadie drove up from the bottom of the road in a little white car.
She was maybe sixty, with her hair up in a clip, and she walked down the slope in tennis shoes and stood at the end of the wall with her arms folded.
“Mrs. Pfaff says you do this,” she said. “My driveway’s washing out on the lower side. Every spring I lose another foot of it. Could you do something like this, smaller?”
“We could,” I said. I was holding a block against my hip, seventy-four pounds, and I did not set it down. “We’re tied up through tomorrow. Maybe Monday I could come look.”
“Monday’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be there.” She looked at the wall a while longer and then she looked at me.
“Mrs. Pfaff had me in fourth grade too,” she said. “She says you’re good people. That’s enough for me.”
The second one came Thursday evening, a man across the road who called Eunice’s house phone and asked her to pass it on.
He needed the dirt cut back off his barn and a little wall along it. Eunice wrote his number on a recipe card and gave it to me.
We were not even capped yet. I had two new jobs on a recipe card in my pocket, and no skid steer, and a husband in Springfield who did not know half of what had happened.
That evening at the hospital, Quint was sitting up. They had him in a chair beside the bed with a blanket on his knees, and the therapist had been in.
He could close his left hand about halfway. He showed me three times.
“How far,” he said.
“Five courses on the low end,” I said. “Eight on the tall end. We cap tomorrow.”
He stared at me. “Four men.”
“Four of us,” I said. “And a man with a shovel I never got the name of.”
He did not say anything for a long time. Then he reached over with his good hand and took my wrist and turned my hand over and looked at the palm.
The blisters had come up and broken and come up again under them.
He did not say anything about the blisters. He held my hand on his knee, on top of the blanket, and closed his eyes, and kept it there.
Friday the sky over the creek had a white haze on it by noon.
You could smell the rain coming, the way you can in the Ozarks in October, that wet iron smell that comes ahead of a front. The oak leaves were turning over on the branches.