Silver in the Hacky Sack

Chapter 9: The Left Hand

The blacktop ran straight and empty, and a mile out from the lane Nell took her hands out of her coat and did the thing she should have done back at the fence.

She had put the dollar in the right hand first, at the gate, and the right hand had said nothing to her. She put it in the left and shut her fingers on it, and the left hand went hot.

It came up quick, the way the flat of an iron is hot under your hand before you have any reason to think it is, and it quit the second she opened her fingers, and the coin was cold in her palm and the morning was cold around it.

She shut her hand on it again.

Hot.

She opened her fingers and let go, and the road was only a road.

Two hands, two jobs. Old things came up in the right one — the pot had — and gold and silver came up in the left. Back at the fence she had put two readings on it: the dollar was no good, or the hand had gone out on her. There was a third reading, and it fit both hands. The dollar had been all right the whole time. She had been asking the wrong one.

She walked on with the coin in her left hand and turned it over with her thumb. A woman's head on one side, the bird with its wings out on the other, and under the tail of the bird, small letters. She had held it up to the light at the fence and read those letters and gotten nothing out of them. One year on a coin looked like every other year to her. Whether this was the year that mattered, there was no way for her to find out.

Whatever else it was, it was silver. There had been no arguing with the hand about that.

She had watched it go into that ball years ago, and had never been told why, and had never asked.

She put it back in her pocket and walked into town.

The sun came up while she was walking. The road turned into the first street of the town and then into the square. The co-op was on the far side, with seed corn and work gloves and a coil of chain in the window, and past that the church with the door shut and nobody on the steps. Nobody was with her. She noticed it the way a person notices a thing they have known for a while: a girl of fifteen, alone on the square, with a silver dollar in her pocket that had come out of the bottom of a ball.

Whatever anybody asked her, she had borrowed it. From the Hobbs place, up the other road. She had that ready and she kept it ready.

Past the filling station the street quit and ran back between two brick walls into an alley. She knew about the alley the way she knew about most things she was not supposed to know, which was by sitting in a room while Roy and Vern talked and not being counted. Things went in and out of that alley that never got written down anywhere.

So she walked it.

There were two people in it, both going the other way, both walking fast, and they looked at her and looked at the wall and were gone. Halfway down she began to think she had it wrong, that nobody bought anything in an alley anymore, that the money in that town had dried up the same as everywhere else.

Then a man came up level with her, keeping pace, hands in his pockets.

"You buying, or you selling?"

She had her hand in her pocket with the dollar shut inside it. He was a small man with a mole at the corner of his mouth, and he was not hurrying and he was not loud.

"Neither," she said, and kept walking.

"Early in the day to be neither," he said. "Nothing's open. Come back this way where there's no wind."

"No."

She kept going. He stayed with her another three or four steps and then he didn't, and she did not turn her head to see where he had gone, because the street was right there ahead of her and that was the part that mattered.

Behind her, in no hurry at all, he said, "You think on it."

Not loud. She walked out onto the sidewalk and past the corner and did not look back at the alley. A small man, a mole at the corner of his mouth. She could have picked him out of a crowd on the far side of the square if she had to.

Across the street was the post office, brick, with a flagpole on top and the door propped open and heat coming out of the doorway onto the cold.

She went in because it was warm, and because it was the one place in that town where a person could sit down and be seen and not be asked anything. A clerk was behind the window. One man was at the counter with an envelope in his hand.

An old man sat on the bench at the far end, in the corner where the two walls came together, with the whole room laid out in front of him. Reading glasses, a plain coat, a hat resting on his knee. Not in the line. Not holding a letter. Nothing in his hands at all.

Every time the door moved, he looked at the door. Every time somebody came in carrying something, he looked at the carrying.

Men did not sit in a post office all morning for the mail.

Nell sat down on the other bench and put her hands in her coat and waited a while, and watched him not do anything. Then she got up, and went past the far end of the counter, and took the dollar out of her pocket and opened her hand over it, just long enough for one man in the corner to see what was in it, and she closed her hand and walked out the door.

If he hollered, she was going to run, and not the polite kind of run. She waited on the sidewalk by the mailbox with her back half turned and her weight on the balls of her feet.

The door opened behind her and the old man came out and put himself beside her.

"Cold," he said.

"Not bad."

"Cold for the time of year."

"It'll warm up."

A woman went by pushing a stroller, and neither of them said anything until the woman was past the corner and out of hearing.

"Would you let me look at it again?" he said.

She took it out and held it flat on her palm. He had to reach for it, and she let him, and he turned it up into the light.

"Where'd you get it?"

"It was left to me."

He waited to see if she would say more. She didn't. He didn't ask it twice, and he didn't look at her like a man who thought she was lying. He took a little brass eyeglass out of his coat, one lens on a stem, and fitted it in over his eye, and turned the dollar between his fingers with the light running across it the whole time.

He read the date off it and said the date out loud, quiet, to himself, the way a man says a thing to be sure of it. Then he tipped it further and read the small letters under the bird's tail, letters Nell had seen before and had not known were letters, and after that he stopped talking for a second.

"What do you want for it?" he said.

She told him what she wanted. She had worked it out on the walk in and she said it the way she had said it to herself, without hurrying it.

He didn't laugh, which she had been ready for. He looked at the coin again, and then at her, and then he said he didn't have that much on him, and he said what he did have, and it was less. Then he stood there with his mouth shut and waited on her. An old man on a sidewalk, in the cold, holding his hat.

She did her sum while he waited. Another hour on this sidewalk was not going to move him, and she had the hand, and the hand would find her more of these. What he was offering was less than what she had asked for, and it was more than anybody else in that town was going to give her before dark, and her mother was on a cot with a fever that had not broken since the night before.

"All right," she said.

He had the money in a billfold, and the billfold had a roll of bills in it with a rubber band wrapped twice around it, and he had to work the band off with both thumbs. He counted it out into her hand.

It was more money than she had ever held at one time in her life, and she had no way of knowing whether it was enough.

She counted it again herself. He waited on her and did not hurry her.

Then he put the dollar in his inside coat pocket, under the buttons, and his hand stayed flat on it a second after it went in, and then he buttoned the pocket.

"Any more where that came from?"

"Maybe."

"I buy silver," he said. "Coins, flatware, whatever's the real thing. The plate can stay in the drawer. You remember that."

She said she would. He looked at her face the way he had looked at the dollar, and then he said it was cold and went back up the steps and in, and the door shut behind him.

She walked off with the money folded into her coat pocket and her hand on it. The hacky sack was in her other pocket, flat and empty, and she left it there, and she looked back at the post office exactly once, from the corner, and then not again.

The place on the next street had the top half of the door open and the smell of it hanging around the doorway in the cold. Nell stood in the smell for a while before she went in.

There was a counter and four stools. She asked what it cost and the woman told her, and she counted it out onto the counter and put the rest back inside her coat.

She had not had anything since the night before. The price of three of them was nothing against what was in her pocket, and she ordered two to take and one to eat there.

It came on waxed paper and the grease came through the paper before she got it lifted, and she ate it too fast and burned the roof of her mouth and did not care very much. Nothing she had ever eaten had been bought with her own money before. When she was done she had the woman put the other two in paper and she put them in her coat, and by then the light in the windows across the street had gone from white to yellow.

The walk back was long. The cold came up out of the fields on both sides and the fence posts went by one at a time, and the light went down behind her the whole way, and she was still out on the blacktop when the first house lamps came on.

She heard Frankie crying before she got to the fence.

She was through the gate before she had finished hearing it. The lamp was lit and the door was standing open and Bobbie had the basin out with the cloth wrung in her hands, and Darlene was laid out flat on the cot with her face red in the lamplight and the heat coming off her across the whole room, worse than it had been at daylight.