The Still Hour

He lasted fourteen months in the federal medical center at Hazelton, and I went up whenever they let me, and the last time I brought the blade.

Rusted into the shape of the weeds. I had found it in the grass the summer after he left and I had kept it in a toolbox through the fever and through everything after, and I put it into his hand on the blanket and closed his fingers around it and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that did not sound like a child at a grave.

He turned it over twice. He held it up against the light from the window, the way a man holds up a length of stock to see whether it has been cut true.

"First thing anybody ever did for me in this country," he said.

"It was a stolen pie and a stolen blade."

"That's what I said." He put it down on the blanket beside him and left his hand on it and did not move the hand again for the rest of the visit. "Nobody ever gives you anything clean. You'll want to remember that when you're older and you've got a boy of your own."

I told him about the arrangements. I told him about the debts, all of them, out loud, the way Emmet had taught me, column by column, and he listened with his eyes closed and at the end he said the only thing he ever said about money that I have used in my life.

"Money's like the gas off that mine," said Silas Rudd. "It's under the ground whether you like it or not, and it comes up the pipe whether you like it or not. A man's got one choice in the whole business. Hold a match to it and burn it off for nothing, or run it through a turbine."

He died in the spring, and there was nobody to claim him but me, and the county had already gone through everything he had, so what was left of him was a plastic bag, which is what is left of most of us.

I worked.

I have read a great many books in which a man is ruined and then is good and then is rewarded, and my life did not do that. I went to work for Sandy Perlman, who had failed at three schemes and had one left, which was freight. Between us we made a business, and I moved containers for twelve years, and I learned the lane between Savannah and Lagos better than I know the road above my own house, and I liked that I could tell you where every dollar of it had been. That is the whole difference between my money and the money I was raised on, and it is larger than it sounds.

I paid Voss's office out over seven years, and when the last payment cleared I did not feel anything in particular, which was a disappointment and also, I now think, the point.

Emmet married Ruthie in the fall of the year I turned thirty-one. It was in the shop, with the door up, and the food was on the bench where I had taken the blade. He asked me to stand up with him, and I did, and when the preacher got to the question about anybody having anything to say, Della's name was in that room the way the gas is under the ground — present, coming up through the pipe, not called for. Ruthie looked straight at me and I said nothing, and afterward she said, "Good," and that is the entire conversation we have ever had about it.

When Stillhour was finally broken up, a list went round the hollow of what the family had owed and to whom, the way such lists do, and Pell's name was on it twice, and he had the last of it hauled away in a truck he had borrowed. Emmet Boggs was not on any of it. There had never been a ledger between him and that house. Ruthie asked him once why he had gone on walking a boy up that hill who did not want to be walked, and he said, "Somebody had to walk him home."

Vera married Trey Sutter in the spring before that, and the marriage came apart the way a thing comes apart when nobody has ever told either party no. I heard about it the way I heard about everything in those years: in a paper, in an office, at a desk, while people around me talked about tonnage. There was a crash on the Taconic on a wet Thursday, one car, one stone wall, no other driver, and Sutter had been drinking since noon and had done it alone, and I read the name twice and then went out and walked three blocks in the rain for no reason I could have told you.

I went up to Westchester for Sutter's funeral. Vera was not there. I stood at the back of a church in Mount Kisco among thirty people I did not know, and afterward a cousin of Sutter's asked me who I was, and I said I had known the family, which was the first true thing I had said about myself in a year.

The ridge changed in those years more than it had changed in my whole life.

They came with a rig and captured the methane at the sealed mouth and ran it down the mountain into a shed with an engine in it, and there is electricity in that hollow now that comes out of the ground under the graves, and the stack stands there with nothing on top of it. The flare went out on a Tuesday in October, at about twenty past nine in the morning, and I know exactly when, because Emmet called to tell me as though the world had ended, and I looked at my watch and did not say why.

Stillhour was sold off in parcels. The furniture went first, and then the land, and the house stood empty through one winter with the dead trees down and the gate gone entirely, and then a preservation society bought it for a sum nobody in the hollow would have believed, and began, very slowly, to take it apart and put it back together.

I went there on a Sunday evening in September, alone, because I had finally worked out what I owed the place and wanted to look at it.

The drive was gravel and grown through. The hall was dark. The room with the long table was full of scaffolding and drop cloths and the smell of plaster and dust, and the clock on the chimney shelf was down on a trestle with its face off and its works laid out on a towel like something on an operating table, and a young man in a museum's apron was writing on a clipboard.

"They go," he said, without looking up. "Every one of them. It's only old oil and old iron. Somebody wound them and then somebody stopped winding them, that's all." He wrote something down. "This one I can do. The big one in the hall, I can't. There's no parts and there's nobody who makes them."

I went out through the broken garden, and Vera was standing at the end of the terrace with her back to me, looking down the hill at the hollow.

She had a coat on against nothing. Her hair was the same and her shoulders were not; they had taken the assembly apart somewhere and had not put her back exactly as she was, and I found, standing there, that I preferred her this way, and that this was not a kind thought about her but about myself, and I had made my peace with that kind of thought a long time ago.

"Somebody told me you were in freight," she said.

"Yes."

"They said you did well at it." She was not looking at me. "I could never do anything. I was finished at eight years old. I have been going around being finished ever since."

"There was a man," I said. "Silas Rudd."

"I know who he was." She said it without turning round. "I have known since I was nineteen. The lawyer told me himself, in his office, and then wrote to me when the man died, because there was nothing left to leave and he thought somebody ought to be told."

"And you never said anything."

"What was there to say to you. He gave me away before I could remember him. You are the only person who ever came up that hill on purpose."

"They're taking the house apart," I said. "The clocks are all going to run."

"That'll be a change." And then, in the voice she had used in the hall when I was eight years old, the voice of a girl checking whether her sentence fit her: "Your hands are still dirty."

"They're stained."

"Is there a difference?"

"Yes."

She turned around then. She looked at my hands properly, for the first time, and it took her about four seconds, and I have thought about those four seconds more than I have thought about most years of my life.

I had one thing in my pocket, and I took it out and held it up, and it was little and brass and it had been in a burning room once and had sat in a toolbox behind a wall of other tools ever since, without ever being wound.

"One of the small ones," I said. "I got it fixed."

The hour said twenty past nine. I wound it. The works caught, and the second hand went round and the minute hand went after it, and she watched it do it.

Then I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the broken place, and the light that had burned over that hollow for a hundred years was out, and there was nothing above the ridge but the sky. I did not let go of her hand, and she did not take hers away, and we have been under one roof ever since.