The Man from the Weeds

I was twenty-three. The quarter's money came a month late, and the note that came with it was in a hand I had never seen.

Then, in March, at eleven at night, the bell of my building rang, and I went down, and there was a man on the step in a good coat with wet hair combed back, and a face I had last seen under a rifle, wet to the chest, standing it like weather.

"You," he said, "would be Cal Pryor."

I stood there in the doorway of a building I rented with money I had not earned and I felt, all at once, the floor go out of the whole story I had built a life on.

"You've got rooms upstairs," said Silas Rudd. "Let's go up. I've been standing in the street an hour and I'd rather not do this on the sidewalk. And I'll thank you to notice that I haven't told you my name yet, and that you haven't asked, and that's the last favor I'm going to do you."

He sat on my chair in my rooms with his feet on the boards in front of the radiator, and he was still there when the building had gone quiet and the traffic on the avenue had thinned away to nothing, and somewhere in the middle of it the clock on my shelf went round an hour and I heard it.

"There was a man named Lyle Deakin," he said.

They had been in it together, years before, in a county where there was nothing to be in except the thing on offer. There had been a scheme with a widow's land and a surveyor's favor and a signature that turned out to be a forgery, and it had gone down on both of them. The man in the good coat who talked to the deputies as though he had read a book about it went down light. The man with the cuff-mark and no shirt under his canvas jacket went down heavy, and neither of them ever said the arrangement out loud.

"We were in the water in that hollow together," he said. "You saw us. He said a thing to me in that ditch that I'm not going to say to you tonight, and you're going to want it, and you're not getting it."

"I went south," he said. "A yard full of scrap, and one principle: be the one man on the crew who does not lie about tonnage."

"I did it," he said, "for eleven years, and I did it for one reason, and I want you to hear it from me and not from a paper."

Then he told me.

"You were the boy in the ditch. That's the whole of it. I owed a pie and a sawblade, and I decided a long time ago that I'd pay it back at interest, and I have. Everything you've spent, from the first quarter in Pittsburgh to the coat on your back, came out of my hands, and there's more, and it's in an arrangement with a lawyer, and the name on that arrangement is neither yours nor mine. Mine would have brought the county down on it the day I signed it, and yours was a boy's name on a school register."

"That isn't possible," I said. "I don't know you. I have never had anything from you."

"You had a pie," he said. "It was cold, and it was the best thing I had eaten in two years, and there was a blade with it and you had wrapped it in a rag."

"I want to know what Deakin said to you in that ditch."

"I know you do," said Silas Rudd.

The radiator knocked. I remember the radiator, because it was the only thing in the room that moved.

"You're not grateful," he said. "That's all right. I didn't pay for gratitude. I paid for the thing itself."

"Why?"

He looked at me a long time.

"Because I had a daughter," said Silas Rudd, "and I haven't got one, and you'll want to sit down for what comes after that."