9 Letters (23 page)

“But you was doing me the
favor, weren’t you. You were giving me the chance to do
something that matters and could help people. And I didn’t act
like it. I treated you like you were the boss instead of the man in
charge. I don’t know how to explain how those are different,
but I think we both know they are.”

He nodded again.

“And then worse than that,
I chewed out Nathan. He didn’t deserve it, and if he should
have heard anything bad from anyone, it should have been from you.
I’m not the guy in charge, you are. But I’m sorry, I’m
damn sorry. I like volunteering here. I like building. I gotta decide
that I like myself, too, and then maybe I’ll be worth having
around. If you take me back, you won’t regret it.”

Morris chewed that over for
awhile, or maybe he was just leaving me hanging as a last little bit
of punishment.

“Get in the truck, Mr.
Cawley,” he said. I helped King up into the back, then climbed
in the passenger seat smiling.

We drove off. We still didn’t
say a word, and I just watched Kansas go by and thought about all
those damn fools on the coasts who don’t know that where I’m
from is beautiful.

Apologizing to Nathan was simpler
in some ways, harder in others. I figured that man had gotten the
wrong end of the stick for most of his life, and when he saw me get
out of that truck I could tell you he was afraid. People had hurt
him, that’s what I realized. A man like me, yelling angry, made
him think that I was going to hurt him too.

My mother had tried to tell me
about that, but boys don’t listen. I guess it was good she told
me, even if I didn’t think it over for a decade at least.

“I know you’d never
hit anyone who didn’t deserve it. Never hit your girlfriend
even if she did. I know that because you’re my son and if you
ever hit a girl you’re with you wouldn’t be my son
anymore. You wouldn’t be anyone’s son. Wouldn’t
barely be a man.”

That part had gotten through to
me. But then it had gotten more complicated.

“But there are devils in
this world that take the shape of boys like you or the man you’re
going to be, and they
do
hurt people just because they’re angry. And anyone who’s
been hit like that, it’s going to be with them from now till
they’re in the ground. So a boy like you, when you yell, what
they hear is that you’re going to hit them. You’ll bring
it back up in them. You’ll think you’re just expressing
yourself. Maybe you’re not yelling at them, even, maybe you’re
just yelling. But they see someone as big as you yelling, and it’ll
be like they’re there again. About to get hit.”

I’d nodded. But I wasn’t
listening, not really. Because I figured I could yell when I wanted.

“Your dad gets angry, but
he doesn’t snap. He doesn’t yell like I might think he’s
yelling at me. Because he knows that even if he isn’t going to
hurt nobody who don’t deserve it, the people who hear him don’t
know that.”

That’s what I’d done
to Nathan.

Hell, John Lawson I
had
pushed, but John Lawson probably hadn’t gotten such a bad view
of the world as a guy like Nathan. Just because it don’t mess
with one person doesn’t mean it’s alright for everybody.

I couldn’t say all of that
to Nathan though. You can’t say all of that to someone.

“Nathan,” I said. He
turned back toward me. “I’m damn sorry. You’re
doing good work, and I was being an asshole.”

“It’s alright,”
he said.

He didn’t fully mean it,
but he wasn’t lying either. He meant it could end up alright. I
was sure I wanted it to.

All that out of the way, we built
a damn house. I usually get about half a week off work at a time, so
I put in every hour I could at Heartland Habitat.

I’d done every step of it
before, with my dad, or for clients, or just as odd jobs when I was a
kid. But there’s something a hell of a lot more interesting
about climbing up onto a roof you’ve just put on a house that
you framed, on a foundation you poured.

Judy and Georgia, they were there
every step of the way, and Nathan and his friend Gary. Another
rotating cast came through, and pretty soon Morris had me helping the
‘irregulars,’ as he called them. I went from just
building to building and teaching. Which meant I learned something
about myself I didn’t know: I can be patient.

It wasn’t until we were
hanging the sheetrock when I found out it was Nathan’s house we
were building.

There were eight of us, plus
King, picnicking on the warmest day of the year. I’d brought
baked potatoes, enough for everyone. Coleslaw and chips and soda and
fruit and jerky.

“Enough is as good as a
feast,” Nathan said.

I looked up at him.

“Used to be in the Navy,
and I spent awhile stationed in the UK. Heard it over there. ‘Enough
is as good as a feast.’ It’s true.”

Morris grunted his approval.

“This house here is enough
for me and mine. I’ve been in shelters, on couches, all of that
so long. When that tornado took my last place, I spent awhile
thinking I was done. My wife and I, we’ve been having trouble
finding places to stay big enough for both of us and the kids. A lot
of shelters won’t let our family stay together, either. But
when we move back, we’re going to be a family again. I’ll
get to be with my kids again.”

I looked at the house in a new
light, after that. I knew it was going to be somebody’s. I
didn’t know I knew the guy.

Another saying I heard at
Heartland: “many hands make light work.” It’s
amazing what you can do with hand tools, and I’d never seen a
house go up so fast. The last day of it, there were twenty people on
the job. At first, I hadn’t done well with running things
because it always seemed simpler and faster to just get the job done
myself than to teach some college kid or retired mom how to do it. Or
convince some knucklehead as dumb as me that just because he could
build a hunting stand didn’t mean he knew how to roll paint on
an interior wall or put in a fiberglass shower stall.

But it turns out that teaching
people, empowering people to get things done themselves and
empowering them to take initiative, that’s how you get things
done. I went up to get the gutter installed and I came back down and
the whole living room was floored and painted.

“Turns out you can trust
people after all,” Morris said. The sun was going down on us,
because we’d all stayed a little later than usual that last day
as we finished the house.

“I know, right?” I
said. Because, like an idiot, I was thinking about all those people
I’d been teaching. But he’d meant me.

Nathan and Georgia and Judy and
Gary came up to join us, and we put our arms around one another and
just looked at the thing we’d built.

With my own hands, with all our
hands. We’d given a homeless man a home.

“Don’t get lazy or
nothing,” Morris said. “Tomorrow we’ll start
another one.”

I grinned at that, and the line
of us started to disperse, getting things packed away in what was
left of the light.

We got into Morris’s truck
and started back to the city. With the headlights on the road in
front of us, Morris actually started to talk.

“We’re going to have
a little Memorial Day get-together,” Morris said. “Celebrate
finishing the house. Nathan’s whole family will be there, and
all the volunteers. You should come. You should bring a date.”

“I’ll come,” I
said. “But I don’t really have nobody to bring.”

“Bullshit.”

I paused, weighing my words
before speaking. What to tell, what to keep to myself. “There’s
kind of a girl, right? But I’ve been taking it slow. Holding
back. My wife died.”

“When was that?”
Morris didn’t have a coddling bone in his body. Right to the
point, every time.

“It was a year this
spring.”

“You know I know you’re
an idiot, so me telling you that ain’t going to be news to
you,” Morris said. “But you’re an idiot.”

He didn’t mean it to sound
harsh, and it didn’t.

“When I was your age, there
was this girl who loved me. I’d been out of the Army a couple
years, then in and out of jail after that. Never anything major, just
petty stuff that would build up. Worst thing I ever did, in the eyes
of the law, I hit an off-duty cop because he’d smacked my beer
out of my hand because I was being drunk and stupid. That wasn’t
worth a year of my life, of course. But I was in and out, like I was
saying, until I met Connie. She was...she was something else. They
don’t make girls like Connie too often. Beautiful, smart,
funny. Could open a beer with her teeth. Best thing in bed, too. I
met her down in Oklahoma City and I swore I was never looking back.
Happiest six months of my life.”

“What happened?”

“I blew it. I skipped
parole, and they took me in on a traffic stop. She posted bail, and I
skipped on it again to go get drunk with my buddies. She was a wild
girl, but she wasn’t stupid. She left me. Now I know you didn’t
do nothing like that. But here’s how we’re the same kind
of idiot: I just figured I’d never get anything like that
again. I figured: shit, Morris, you had your chance, and you’re
done and the game’s over. You had it all, now you’ve got
nothing, and they don’t make them like Connie anyway. So no
reason to bother. Women, they’d come and go, because I didn’t
try to hold onto them. Either they’d come on too strong, and I
wouldn’t treat them with the respect they deserved, or they’d
have some walls up the same as me, and I would just assume there was
no way they’d love a guy like me so I’d stay so distant
they’d walk right away, marry someone else. Shit, how do you
think I know Judy?”

“It’s too late for
that?” I asked. For some reason, I loved the idea of him and
Judy.

“Judy’s a widow now,
but she’s not after me anymore. Too many years as friends. But
she’ll marry someone else, I’m sure of it. Because you
know what her dead husband don’t want her to do? He don’t
want her to sit around feeling sorry for herself. Your dead wife sure
as there’s a moon in the sky don’t want you feeling sorry
for your dumb self either. You have a chance at something, you go for
it.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“But don’t get so
hung up on her that you stop building houses with me. You’re
the best damn volunteer I’ve had in years when you’re not
being a surly son-of-a-bitch.”

He dropped me off, and I climbed
up into my truck. Turned the engine over, felt it alive underneath
me. I knocked Granddad Cawley’s dog tags for luck.

It was only eight. That’s a
reasonable hour, right?

Flower shops were all closed, so
I pulled over at the first field I saw. Took out my folding knife and
went to work on the wildflowers. I didn’t know their names, but
they were pretty. Tied them up with some twine from the tool box,
then drove to Rae’s.

I didn’t give myself time
to be nervous. Once you make a decision, there’s no damn point
in doubting yourself. The worst that could happen was as bad as I had
it now. You have a chance at something, you go for it.

The living room light was on. I
rang the doorbell.

I waited there for a good minute,
just long enough for me to think she wasn’t home after all, or
she knew it was me and didn’t want to answer. But the door
opened, and there she was. She’d just tried to straighten up, I
realized, and her hair was in the kind of loose bun that meant she
was trying to look presentable at the last minute.

Rae wasn’t smiling to see
me, she was just looking at me like she didn’t know what I
wanted. I pulled the flowers out from behind my back, and I realized
what a filthy mess I was, standing there in my work clothes with a
bundle of wildflowers tied up by twine.

“Want to go on a picnic?”
I asked.

She thought it over. That’s
something good about her. I could see her mulling it over, calm and
collected like always. Then a smile broke across her face like the
sun coming out from the clouds, and she took the flowers and smelled
them.

“Sure,” she said.

I smiled too, then. She started
giggling, and I started at it too.

“I’d love to go on a
picnic with you,” she said.

And there was hope in the world.

Rae came over to meet me at my
place, so I’d spent more hours on my knees scrubbing up the
grit between tiles than I had when Emily’s letter had told me
to clean.

There’s clean enough for me
to feel good, clean enough to have company, and then clean enough to
impress a girl like Rae. Three different levels of clean. I had to
scrub my way through two of them.

Emily had taught me a lot of
tricks, even without meaning to, over the years. It had never
occurred to me to clean down the walls next to doorways, but that’s
where people put their grubby mitts when they walk through doors, and
after a year alone that had built up. Cleaning is like cooking, is
like playing music. There’s little things that make all the
difference that you wouldn’t even think of.

You look at a doorway that’s
been scrubbed and you don’t even know it’s scrubbed. But
you look at a house before and after, you might not know what’s
changed, you might not even
see
that something’s changed, but there’s a difference. It’s
like the difference between starting the pasta in the water like you
shouldn’t or throwing it in once the water’s boiling.
Little things like that, they build up. Like all the little pull-offs
and hammer-ons and slides and strumming patterns you can use when you
make up a song. Sure, if you play the right chords and your guitar’s
in tune and so is your voice, you’ve played the song. But if
you put more thought into it, if you finesse all the details, then
you’ve played some magic.

Which is why I cleaned the
ever-loving hell out of that house.