the letters

Agnes Sewell's room is at the front of the second floor, over the porch, and in August she writes at the window because it's the only place a breath of air comes in. She has written these letters every summer since 1954. To Tucson. To Albuquerque. To a town in California called Bakersfield, chosen from the atlas because she liked the sound of it. She wrote them and kept them in a candy box under the bed, which is a thing she would never allow a third-grader to do with a perfectly good letter.

This summer she mailed one. It's in the tray downstairs, waiting for the mailman. She doesn't know what she'll do if they write back.

Below her, the porch swing creaks. She doesn't mean to listen. But she hears Charlie Doud say the word south, and the Borges girl not answer, and Agnes, who was engaged once herself, to a boy from Pawtucket who didn't come back from Anzio, thinks: say yes. Then she thinks: say no. Then she lets the curtain fall, because it's none of her business.

Much later, long after the swing has gone quiet, someone comes up the stairs very slowly.

the stairs

Fourteen steps from the first floor to the second, and Edward Cauley takes them one at a time with his hand on the rail, at half past one in the morning, holding a small black notebook that isn't his.

He found it on the hall table when he came up from the cellar for a glass of water. He read it at the kitchen table under the one bulb, every page. Four hundred and twelve looms, by number. Which ones run hot. Which ones he, Edward, told the man about. He knows most of them by their sound. He put new crankshafts in half of them after the hurricane of '38 put the river into the weave room. On the last page, in pencil, smaller than the rest, the man had written: These are good looms. Somebody kept them well.

The door of the back room is dark. The man is out walking down by the river, the way he does. Edward could put the notebook back on the hall table and let him wonder. He could keep it. He could take it down to the cellar and put it in the cold furnace, and nobody would ever know.

He takes a pencil stub from his shirt pocket and writes something under the man's line. Then he bends, slowly, which costs him, and slides the notebook under the door.

the notebook

Oliver Goin has counted looms in four towns since March, two in Massachusetts, one in New Hampshire, and now this one. He tells the landladies he sells shuttles. It's nearly true. His company will buy a great many shuttles, in South Carolina, once these looms are running there.

His father fixed looms in Gaston County for thirty years, on looms that came down secondhand from a mill in Fall River that closed in 1926. His father taught him to cross his sevens so nobody would read them for ones.

He walks at night because of the heat, and because he can't sleep anyway. He goes down to the bridge over the falls and listens to the water going through the gates, the same water that turned the first wheel in this town, and he thinks about Fall River.

When he comes back at two, the notebook is on the floor inside his door. He doesn't remember leaving it downstairs. Then he does. He sits on the bed and turns to the last page, to his own small pencil line, and under it, in a hand that shakes a little, someone has written: Forty-one years. E.C.

He knows the hand.

the bathroom

There is one bathroom for the second floor and the attic, and Louis Nowlin, who works three to eleven, shaves at noon, when there's never a line. Today there is. The door is shut and two women are talking behind it, the Borges girl doing up her hair and Miss Sewell waiting to rinse out a pair of stockings, and Louis stands in the hall with his razor and his towel and tries not to hear.

"Would you go?" Miss Sewell is asking. "If he asked you. Somewhere you'd never seen?"

A long quiet. The water runs.

"I don't know," Irene says. "Would you?"

Miss Sewell laughs, a short odd laugh, and says she already mailed hers and doesn't know either.

Louis goes back up to the attic and shaves dry in the little mirror over his washstand. In Korea, the first winter, he shaved out of a helmet with snow water in it. He thought then that if he ever got home he'd never want anything again but to be warm. Tonight on the roof he'll find out if that's still true.