The Verdict

The fifteenth and sixteenth of March were a Saturday and a Sunday, and nothing happened on them, and those two days are the part of this story that nobody has ever been able to tell me anything about, which is how I know that they were the worst of it.

Tessa Bright cleaned the house. That is what she did with those two days. She went through it room by room the way she had gone through it in November, except that in November she had been bringing things out of the dark and now she was putting them back in. She took the sheets out of the linen press and put them over the furniture in the front room, one piece at a time, and she did it with the stove in the front room still lit, and Wade Kelleher stood in the doorway and watched her do it and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would not have been the whole of it.

On the Sunday she mended his coat. She had mended it twice already that winter and there was not much left to mend, and she sat at the kitchen table in the afternoon in the light of the window with Verna in her chair by the stove with her eyes closed and the pills working on her, and did it anyway, with her tongue between her teeth like a child doing sums. Verna Kelleher slept with her chin on her chest and did not see it. I have that from Wade Kelleher, who sat at the other end of the same table pretending to read the feed-store calendar, and who told me, once, in about nine words, what it had been like to sit there, and I have never once been able to make those nine words do what they did.

On the Monday morning at twenty past eight, Verna Kelleher put her coffee down and said:

"I've spoke to the agency about the Tuesday after next and I've spoke to Brenda Hoyt, and Brenda can start Wednesday, and there's no sense in the girl staying on when there's nothing here for her to do and it costs the same to keep the stove going either way, so she'll go down Wednesday morning and Wade will run her to the Junction for the seven-ten."

Nobody answered her.

"Do you hear me," she said.

"I hear you," Tessa Bright said.

She said it in the voice she used for the tray and the pills and the state of the road, and she said it without looking up from the plate she was drying, and she went on drying it, and she put it in the cupboard, and she took the next one out of the rack. I have in my possession the exact number of plates she dried after she said it, because Wade Kelleher counted them, which is the only thing he did in the whole of those three days that he told me about with any pleasure, and it was six, and when she had done the sixth she put the towel on the rail and went upstairs and was gone for an hour.

Verna Kelleher watched her go up the stairs and then she said, to Wade, without any particular emphasis: "You'll want the truck Tuesday for the tires."

"I've got the tires."

"You said in February you'd want it for the tires."

"I've got them," Wade Kelleher said, and stood up, and went out.

Here is what I have been able to find out about the money, and it is the last piece of the ordinary arithmetic of this story, and then we are at the hill.

Tessa Bright had forty-one dollars. She had earned it in November at the motel in Plattsburgh and had never spent one dollar of it, because there was nothing in the Hollow to spend it on and because she understood from the first week in that house that a person in her position does not spend money on herself in front of a woman who is watching the sheet on the wall.

She had two bags and a duffel and a coat that did not fit her.

She was owed nothing. There is no law and no custom in the Hollow that says a cousin's daughter who comes to keep house for her keep is owed wages; she was family; she had been fed and housed and had used the hot water, and Verna Kelleher had written it all down on the sheet, and the sheet was, in the moral arithmetic of that county, complete.

Wade Kelleher had eleven thousand four hundred dollars and fifty cents due on the eleventh of April, and eight hundred and ninety in the joint account at the bank in Potsdam, which was the operating money for the farm and was not his to draw down below four hundred without Verna's counter-signature.

He spent the Monday afternoon in the barn with paper and a pencil working out what it would take to send a girl to Plattsburgh and to keep her there, and what it would take to go with her, and what it would take to leave, and it came out at a figure he did not have, and he did the sum four times, and then he went out and stood in the yard in the dark and looked at the road and at the black line of Barlow's Hill with the woodlot on the shoulder of it and the elm at the foot, and he thought the thing that a man thinks, and it frightened him, and he went in.

The Tuesday after next was the twenty-fifth of March. That is the date that was on the sheet, in Verna Kelleher's pencil, in the household column, with a question mark after it, and I have seen it, twenty-five years later, on a sheet of paper ruled with a ruler and pinned to a kitchen wall, because she never took it down, and the question mark is still there.

So it was nine days, and the county is wrong about that too. Tessa Bright had nine days in that house after she was told that she was leaving it, and Verna Kelleher made all nine of them, in the way that only a woman who has run a household on a shoestring can make nine days, into a single continuous departure: the two boxes that came up from the cellar for her things, the arrangements with the agency, the Tuesday-after-next on the sheet, the careful, courteous, unanswerable administration of a person out of a life.

They went through those nine days without one word said in anger in that house. Nobody slammed a door. Nobody cried where anybody could hear it. Tessa Bright kept the house to the last day and did it properly, and on the Sunday she went down to the Ordways' in the afternoon to say goodbye to Rachel, and came back at five in the dark, and did the supper, and after the supper she sat at the table with the other two and the three of them talked for forty minutes about a bridge.

I have gone over that last one a hundred times. It was a bridge on the Chandler Road with a six-ton posting on it, and a man in the Hollow had driven a fuel truck over it in January and had got away with it, and it had got round the county, and Verna Kelleher had opinions about the posting and Tessa Bright wanted to know what a six-ton posting meant and Wade Kelleher explained it to her, and it took twelve minutes, and it was the longest and most ordinary conversation those three people ever had in that house, and it took place three days before the hill, and every one of the three of them was, I am certain of this, happier in it than they had been in years, and none of them knew it.