The Wall We Finished by Hand

A hundred and twelve feet of new block across a hillside where two days before there had been a raw trench and two piles of rock.

Dewey stopped with a wheelbarrow halfway up on the tailgate. Gus stopped. The kid stopped. Nobody said anything.

I set the wheelbarrow I was holding down on its legs and did not walk over. I did not trust what my face would do if I walked over.

Eunice stood up off her porch steps.

She took her time. She came down the front walk in her blue cardigan with one hand on the rail, and then across the grass to the curb, and she stood by Lyman’s window until he had no choice but to roll it down.

I could not hear all of it at first. Then the wind came up the hill and I could.

“Mr. Kessinger,” she said. “I’m Eunice Pfaff. I don’t believe we’ve met properly. I just wanted to come down and thank you.”

He looked at her like she was speaking another language.

“You raised a good son,” she said. “He drew this wall for me on a feed store receipt, and he put together the best crew I have ever seen work. They finished it without him. Without anything, really. I wanted you to know that, since you came all this way to see it.”

She did not raise her voice. She did not say one word about Wednesday.

She just stood there with her hand on his door, seventy-three years old, and smiled at him the way she must have smiled at a fourth grader who had done something he knew was wrong.

Lyman’s face went a color I had never seen on it. He looked past her at the wall.

He looked at Dewey, who was standing with his arms at his sides and his red beard full of grit. He looked at me last.

The man from three houses down was out in his yard. Sadie’s white car was parked at Eunice’s neighbor’s, and she was standing beside it.

Two other people were on their porches across the road. Nobody was saying anything. They were just there.

Lyman turned off his truck.

He got out. He walked down the slope, on the plywood we had laid, all the way to the low end of the wall.

He put his hand flat on top of the cap and ran it along, the way a man runs his hand down a horse’s back. He crouched and sighted down the cap line with one eye.

He stood up and looked at the drain pipe coming out at the low end, the gravel showing at the top of the backfill, the buried first course.

He knew what he was looking at. He had been building on hillsides longer than I have been alive.

“Who set the base,” he said.

“She did,” Dewey said. “Her and Gus. Quint told her how on the phone.”

Lyman stood there a long time. Then he walked back up the slope to where I was standing by the truck.

He stopped about six feet away, and he took his cap off. I had never seen him take his cap off to anybody but a preacher.

“I’ll bring it back,” he said. “The machine. I’ll have it at your place in the morning.”

“We won’t need it in the morning,” I said. “We start a job for Sadie down the road on Monday. You can bring it there.”