The Vaughns

The house was white and had been white for a long time, and there were three adults in it and two of them worked shifts, so the kitchen was never empty and never full.

Dee Vaughn was twenty-seven and a nurse at the hospital in the next county. She was the one who had opened the door, and after the first week she stopped treating me like a patient, which I noticed and appreciated, because I have been somebody’s case before and it is a job with hours. Marian Vaughn was twenty-five and worked three days at the library in the town and three days at the veterinary office out on the state road, and she had a laugh that came out of her all at once, like a dropped plate, and she used it on everything, including things that were not funny, which I learned was not carelessness but a method. Silas Vaughn was twenty-nine and the pastor of the church on the square and the man who ran the school at Pine Landing, six miles out, in the old two-room schoolhouse the district had closed in 1994.

On the fifth day I asked what the rent was for the cottage by the barn.

Silas said there was no rent. I said there was a rent or I was not staying. He looked at me for a while and then he said, “A hundred and fifty a month,” and I said that was fair, and he said, “It is not fair, it is high,” and I said I would pay it, and he wrote it in a book that he kept in the kitchen drawer, and that book is the reason I was never once, in my own head, a guest in that house. I have paid rent in four places in my life. That hundred and fifty dollars bought me more than a roof.

The cottage was one room and a half with a wood stove and a pump, and a bed that had belonged to somebody’s grandmother, and a table with a drawer that stuck, and I could see the barn roof and the woodpile from the window. The pump froze twice more that winter and I learned to leave a thread of water running at night, which is a fact about cold houses and not a metaphor about anything.

Marian gave me the key on the fourth evening, on a ring with a paper tag from the hardware store, and she had written the address on the tag in her own handwriting, 4111 County Road, and she said, “That is so if you lose it somebody can bring it back.” It was the first key I had ever had that opened a door I was allowed to lock from the inside. The key from Coldbrook had been to a room in another person’s house. This one had a tag on it with my address, and for a month I checked my pocket for it the way a person checks a pocket for money.

Silas put me to work on the ninth day. He did not ask me what I could do. He said the school had forty children on a good day and twelve on a bad one, that they were the children of the men who worked the dairy and the orchards and the crews that came up for the picking, that the county bus brought them and nothing else came with them, and that he needed the afternoon hours covered and there was no money in it.

I said I would take the afternoons for nothing until the school board voted, and he said no, and I said then for eighty dollars a week, and he said sixty, and I said eighty or I would find work in the town and he said sixty-five, and we settled on sixty-five, which I have always thought was a fair picture of the man. He would not take a thing for nothing and he would not pay a cent more than he could account for.

The schoolroom had a tin ceiling, a blackboard that had been painted over twice, a stove that ate wood the way a stove does, and a well pump outside that we used because the plumbing had been cut off when the district closed the building. There were eight desks that matched and eleven that did not. I taught the four- and five-year-olds their letters in the morning and the older ones their arithmetic in the afternoon, and by the end of March I had a chart on the wall with every child’s name on it and a row of small squares beside the names, which is a method I learned at Ellerslie from a woman named Miss Farraday, and which that place used for the wrong purpose and which works perfectly well for the right one.

The town took about three weeks to decide about me. In a town of nine hundred you are a subject of conversation, and the conversation gets settled in about twenty days and then never comes up again. I went to the church on the square, which had twelve pews and forty-one people in it on a good Sunday and nineteen on a bad one, and after a month Silas handed me the bulletins to give out at the door because his hands were full with the food pantry. I never took communion. On the Sundays when it was passed I stayed in my seat and looked at the wood of the pew in front of me, and nobody ever asked me about it, which I have always thought was the most Christian thing that was ever done for me in a building with a cross on it.

The rest of it was a supermarket and a lake at the end of the state road and a library with one room. Twice a week I walked down to the lake and back, which is three miles, and I did it in any weather, because a person who has been kept indoors knows the difference between a walk and a walk you are allowed to take.

In March, Silas told me what he was going to do, and he told it to me the way he told me everything, sideways and without weather in it.

We were on the porch of the cottage and he had brought over a paper bag with two plums in it, which Dee had sent. He said that a relief agency in the northwest had been asking him for two years to come out and run a distribution point, and that he had said no twice and was going to say yes. He said the country out there burned in the summer and flooded in the spring and the people who lived in it were the poorest in the country, and that the agency paid for the worker and not for the worker’s people.

I asked him what that meant.

He said, “It means the posting is for one man. The money pays one man. If a man takes a wife out there, the agency does not raise the number, and the wife has no work and no house and no people, and in a bad week the wife is another person to evacuate.” He said it as a set of facts about a budget, which is how he said everything, and then he went home.

I sat on the step with the two plums in my hand and did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic was that the man had just told me what he was, which was somebody who would take a job and leave a door closed behind it, and would be honest about the door.

The last week of that winter I stayed late on Friday to take down the chart and wash the blackboard, and when it was clean and wet and gray I stood in front of it with the chalk in my hand and wrote my name.

I wrote it in capitals, which is the way I write on a board, one letter at a time, the whole of it.

RUTH AMORY.

Then I stood back and looked at the two words on the board in my own hand, and I wiped the damp off my palms onto my skirt, and I locked the schoolhouse with my own key and walked home across the field in the dark, and I did not tell anybody for four months.