Silver in the Hacky Sack

Chapter 16: No Rebar in It

The old man took his time in the office. When he came back out the afternoon was getting late and there was no more chance to get down off the trailer and buy anything, which was one more thing on the list. He climbed up in front with the driver. The trailer pulled out past the elevator and onto the county road, and they were a good four miles along before the driver said anything worth answering.

"Ma'am, I'll say it since there's nobody else going to." He had one hand up on the wheel and his eyes on the road. "Roy Vance's loyalty don't run your way. It runs the other way, to his brother's wife. You go up that road and knock on that door, and you're not going to win it. You'd do better to figure what you're going to do from here, and get what you need while you're still in a town that sells it. A body has to eat."

He wasn't a cruel man. He had a loose mouth, and every word of it was true, and the two of those together cost the family a good deal more than they ever cost him.

Her mother didn't answer him. She sat with her good hand flat on the boards and kept her eyes on the road, and somewhere in the next mile she said, "Roy's always been good about the firewood," and then she stopped in the middle of it and didn't pick it back up.

A man passing a house on the road sees how it's run better than the people inside it do, and this one had been passing the Vance place for years without anybody asking him to. Whether there was a reason for it or it was only how the man was made, nobody on that road could have said. What they could say was where his money went.

"He'll work himself sick to keep Vern's two young ones in school and in shoes," the driver said. "His own girls get what's left, and what's left is what the stock gets. He does it out in the open, too. That's the part I can't get my head around."

Her mother sat with it. Nell had seen her hold that door open all spring, the way you keep a coin in a pocket you don't spend — the man was still the man she'd married, and a woman with children can't stay gone, and if he was decent to her one time she'd have the girls and the bags and be back under that roof by dark. It went out of her somewhere on the county road that afternoon. She just stopped.

"Are my sisters all right?" Nell said. "Has anybody hit them?"

The driver's face changed. "No. They're up at the old man's. He's got them in the house with his own."

That was the only thing she had wanted out of him.

She'd already given up on buying. Whatever was in that storeroom, she'd find out when she got there and not before. She set the net bag down between her feet and did the figuring she'd been doing off and on since the hospital — what she had on her against what it takes to set up a room. The two didn't come close, and they weren't going to, which meant she had to come at it another way.

Her mother got her wind back somewhere along that stretch, and when she did she went after all of them at once — the man she'd married, his brother's wife, his mother, the whole house of them, and every soul that had stood in that yard and watched. Nell sat with the bag between her feet and let her. There was no use talking her down. Every mile her mother put between herself and that house made the next thing easier.

By the crossroads she had run out of names and was starting back over the ones she'd used already.

Two men were standing at the crossroads with their bags at their feet, and one of them put an arm up as soon as the trailer came into sight.

"Scrap men," the driver said. "Want a ride out to the scrap yard."

The old man knocked his pipe out against the seat and put it away. "Pick them up."

The two of them came over the side and the bags came after, and the boards went down under the weight. They knew enough to say thank you before they did anything else. One of them held out a pack of cigarettes to the driver, and the driver took it, shook one out, lit it off a match struck on his thumbnail, and passed the rest up to the old man, who put them in his shirt pocket without a word.

"Dropping you at the scrap yard?"

"If you don't mind. Sorry to be a nuisance."

A man could make a living off scrap. Everybody on that road knew it, and they knew the other half of it too: you haul nothing for a month at a time, and then one thing turns up in the pile. Nell studied the two of them the whole way in, because she had never once had the chance to see how it was done.

They went through the bags where they sat, dragging out what they wanted and shoving back what they didn't. Then one of them hauled a chunk of concrete up out of the sack and held it where the light could get at it.

"What in the world did we pick that up for? No wonder the load's like lead."

"I thought it had rebar in it."

"There's no rebar in it. There's nothing in it."

They cussed about it some, and then they set it down on the boards between them and let it be.

The trailer came up alongside the scrap yard and stopped, and the two men took hold of their bags and went off down the drive at a run without looking back.

The old man was put out. "What kind of people are those? They walk off and leave us to throw out their junk for them?"

Nell put her hand on the block.

Her left hand went hot on the concrete. She had learned about that heat in a hospital bed, and she had learned not to let it show on her face, and she took the hand back and put it in her lap.

Concrete on the outside. Something inside it that wasn't concrete.

That was the whole of what it told her. It never told her what, or how much, or what anybody would pay for it, and she had quit expecting it to.

"Sir." She kept her voice even. "I heard Aunt Faye went through our place again. I'd take that block off your hands. It'd make me a seat."

The old man looked at her a while, then down at the block, then back down the road.

"You're still their people," he said. "Split or no split. Blood's blood. And there's a limit to how far a man in my seat can get into another family's business. But you're welcome to it. I'll have them set it in the storeroom for you."

"Thank you."

The trailer came down the lane and stopped in the yard, and the old man called the driver over and the two of them took the block down off the boards. Her mother was the one who saw the storeroom.

The door was standing wide.

She got herself over the side, cast arm and all, and went across that yard without once looking down at her feet.

The storeroom had two rooms to it. The outer one stood empty, and they had been lent it to live in; the inner one held the tools and that door stayed locked. When they moved over, the house had given them bedding and a pot and a set of dishes and a lamp and a few stools, and Nell had put every piece of it where it went and made the place look like people lived in it.

What was in the outer room now, nobody could live in.

The bedding had been cut. Not torn — cut, in long strips down the middle, and the cotton pulled out of it and left lying in the water till it went gray. The pot lay on its side with a hole punched through the bottom. Every plate and every cup and every bowl was in pieces, scattered from one end of the boards to the other like somebody had gone along the shelf with a stick.

Her mother got to the doorway and went down on her knees in it.

"Lord above. They don't mean for us to live."

The old man came up and stood at her shoulder and looked in, and his face worked.

"They're split off, aren't they? They don't keep house together no more. How does a woman walk into another woman's house and do this?"

The driver set the block down and straightened up, breathing through his mouth.

"That's what you do when nobody's going to stop you. You've heard the same as I have. Roy's had his mind off home a long while, and it runs to his brother's wife, and he'd as soon his own wife wasn't in the road of it. So she's got all the room she wants."

"There's nothing to that," the old man said. "Don't go spreading it around."

Then he turned to Nell, quieter. "Talk to your mother. We'll help you get this set to rights."

"Ma." Nell stood in the doorway with the net bag in her hand. "It's gone past this. It's time my uncles came down here."

Her mother's face came up. For about as long as a breath there was something in it.

"But —"

Nell knew what the but was. Her mother had brothers, and they could fight, and any one of them would come down that road for her. And once they came down that road and went through Roy Vance's door, it wasn't a scare any longer. There'd be no calling it back after.

Nell put the bag down and walked over to where the bedding lay. She stood over it a second.

"Take a hold of it," she said. "A handful. Right there."

Her mother put her good hand into the cotton.

The water came up through her fingers yellow, and it stank, and it ran down her wrist and inside her sleeve.

"Ma. Roy didn't just smash it. He came in here and he pissed on it. Is that what you want to take the girls back to?"

Her mother looked at her hand, and at the stripe of it down the boards.

"That man," she said. Then she cried, and it came out of her the way it comes out of somebody who hasn't done it in a long while. Nell stood and let her have it. When it was over her mother wiped her hand down the front of her skirt and got up out of that doorway on her own.

"Nell. Ride out to my people's with me. We'll bring my brothers back here tonight."

"I'll run her over and she stays put," the driver said. He had his hands in his pockets and was working it out as he said it. "Leave the girl here. She can bring them in."

The old man looked at her mother a while, and then he nodded.

"That's the way," he said.

"All right," her mother said. "That's how we'll do it."

The old man and the driver carried the block in and set it just inside the storeroom door, out of the weather, and Nell watched them do it and said nothing. Then she got the net bag up on the boards and put a hand under the cast arm and got her mother up after it.

The driver climbed in and started the engine, and the old man stood back with his arms crossed and let them go.

Her mother leaned over the side and looked down at her.

"You don't go over there by yourself."

"I know it."

"You wait for your uncles."

"I know."

The trailer went out of the yard and turned at the lane and went up the road, and Nell stood where she was and watched it until the fence line took it. Then she turned around and faced the room.

The door stood open where her mother had left it.

She went in and pulled the door to behind her.