the roof

The attic window opens onto a flat stretch of roof over the back ell, tarred and still warm at midnight, and Louis Nowlin climbs out onto it every night after his shift, with the transistor radio his sister gave him when he came home. The ball game comes in and out like somebody breathing.

From up here he can see everything. The lamps on Mill Street. The mill, a long black shape against the sky. The white thread of the falls. The porch swing under the maple, two people on it, not swinging. Miss Sewell's light, the only one on the second floor.

And at a quarter to one, the Carolina man, coming out the front door in his shirtsleeves and walking down toward the river, not like a man going somewhere but like a man counting his steps. Louis knows that walk. Men walked like that at night in Korea, the ones who couldn't sleep. You didn't ask them why.

In the morning the old man in the cellar will ask him what he saw, the way he always does, and Louis will tell him, the way he always does. The game ends. The Sox lose. He stays out until the tar goes cool, watching the sky in the west, where for a week now the heat lightning has been promising something.

the payroll office

Timothy McNichols has the smaller attic room, under the slope of the roof, where he can stand up straight only in the middle. He has a cot, a desk made from a door laid across two crates, and, under the copy of Moby-Dick he is supposed to finish for a course in September, a carbon copy of a letter.

He shouldn't have it. He typed the letter in the mill office in July, from the manager's dictation, and the carbon came out of the machine with it, and instead of putting it in the file he put it in his jacket. He isn't sure why. To have proof of something, he thinks.

The letter says the looms are sold. It says after Christmas. It names eleven fixers who may be offered places in South Carolina, and the fourth name is Charles Doud.

Twice he has gone down to the parlor to tell Irene, and twice he has watched the dancing instead. He leaves for Providence in three weeks. He could simply go.

Through the wall he hears Louis climbing out onto the roof, the way he does every night. And early in the morning, before anyone, he hears, faintly, from far below, Mrs. Lapoint going down to the cellar for something in a jar.

the trunk

The other half of the attic is for storage, and Violet Lapoint goes up there on Thursday afternoon, when the house is empty, which it almost never is, to find Lloyd's trunk. It's under the eaves, behind the Christmas boxes.

Inside, folded the way she folded it in 1949: his watchman's coat, his good shoes, and the time clock he carried on his rounds of the cotton mill, twenty years of keys turned in it at every station, every hour, all night. When the mill closed they let him keep the clock.

She knows what the college boy knows and hasn't said. She has read the Carolina man's notebook, because she reads everything that is left on her hall table. She has heard the Borges girl stop humming.

She wound the clock once, the winter after Lloyd died, and it ran, and she sat up here in her coat and listened to it until she couldn't anymore. Now she winds it again. It still runs.

Then she goes down two flights to start supper for seven, because whatever happens after Christmas, people will need a place to sleep, and she has one.

the storm

On Friday night, after a week of it, the heat breaks.

Timothy hears it first, because the attic hears everything first. One fat drop on the roof over his cot. Then ten. Then the whole sky letting go at once. He goes to the window. Out on the roof, Louis Nowlin is standing in the rain with his face turned up and his arms out, like a boy, and his radio is on the sill behind him, playing to nobody.

Below, every window in the house is going up. Timothy can't see them, but he can hear them: the front window over the porch; the back room on the second floor; the little window off the kitchen. Somebody laughs in the yard. Irene, he thinks, running to get the wash in. Mr. Cauley, who can't hear thunder on his left side, will feel it in the stone.

Timothy takes the carbon out from under Moby-Dick and holds it.

In the morning he'll take it downstairs to Mrs. Lapoint, who already knows. Or to Irene, who already knows. Or he'll put it back in the book and go to Providence, and the house will go on listening without him, the way houses do.