the coal bin

In August Edward Cauley sleeps in the cellar. Mrs. Lapoint pretends not to know, and he pretends she doesn't, and between them they have kept the arrangement going three summers. He has a canvas cot beside the coal bin, which is empty now and smells of last winter, and the stone walls hold the cool of the ground the way a crock holds water.

He is deaf in his left ear from forty-one years in the weave room. He lies on his right side with the good ear up, and he listens to the house. A house is like a loom, he thinks. You learn its noises, and then you know when one is wrong.

Tonight: the light, quick steps on the front stairs are the Borges girl, going out to the porch swing again. The slow ones, heavy in the heel, crossing the front hall at a quarter to one, belong to the man from the Carolinas, who says he sells shuttles and has never once talked about shuttles. And the long creak overhead, so faint it might only be the heat working in the timbers, is the attic window going up.

the preserves

The jars go back to 1949. Violet Lapoint has never in her life eaten the last of anything. Tomatoes, piccalilli, bread-and-butter pickles, peaches in syrup, on plank shelves her husband put up, and beside them Lloyd's tools on the pegboard, each one outlined in pencil so she would know where it went back.

At dawn she comes down for a jar of peaches and finds Mr. Cauley asleep on his cot with his shoes on. She puts the army blanket over his feet, though it is already eighty degrees.

She has heard what they say at the bakery counter. The mill is sold. The mill is going to be sold. The mill is fine. She has heard it before. In 1949 the cotton mill across the river shut its gates, and Lloyd, who had been its night watchman for twenty years, came home with his time clock under his arm and died in October. She doesn't think the one caused the other. She thinks it most nights anyway.

The college boy in the attic works in the mill office. He would know. She hasn't asked him, because there is rent to collect on Friday, and she would rather not know until then.

the washtubs

Saturday is wash day, and Irene Borges does hers in the cellar in Mrs. Lapoint's wringer washer, and Charlie's too, because his mother's machine is broken and his mother isn't speaking to Irene, for reasons that are Portuguese and Irish at the same time.

She goes through his pockets first. It's a habit from her father, who once ran a twenty-dollar bill through the wash and never heard the end of it. A pencil stub. Two pennies. A folded paper: a railroad timetable, Providence to Spartanburg, South Carolina, with one train underlined in pencil.

She sits down on the cellar stairs with the timetable in her lap and the wringer dripping, and she doesn't hear Mr. Cauley come in from the yard until he's beside her. He looks at the paper and doesn't say anything. Later she will think of that kindly.

Mr. Goin, on the second floor, comes from the Carolinas. She thinks about knocking on his door to ask what it's like down there. Instead she folds the timetable back into the pocket exactly the way it was, and puts the shirt in the tub, and decides to wait for Charlie to tell her. It will take him four days.

the furnace

Oliver Goin is an engineer, which is a thing he hasn't told anyone in Harlow Falls, and so when he comes down to the cellar on a Tuesday evening for no reason, it's because he can't pass a piece of machinery without looking it over. The furnace is a coal-fired monster, cold for the summer, with its iron door hanging open like a mouth.

Mr. Cauley is on his cot, reading the Providence paper. They talk about the furnace, and then boilers, and then, because the old man spent forty-one years at it, looms.

"Drapers?" Oliver asks, before he can stop himself.

"Drapers. Four hundred and twelve." Cauley turns a page. "I could tell you which ones run hot. Number two-ninety-one, she'll throw a shuttle at you if you look at her wrong." He lets a while go by. "Man who wanted to know a thing like that might write it down."

Oliver goes back upstairs and does exactly that, in the notebook he keeps in his breast pocket and, once, the next evening, leaves on the hall table.