Walking through that town one evening, I took a blue Country Squire station wagon, the largest car I ever stole, from the gravel lot of the Farmers’ Exchange. About a quarter mile later I discovered Mrs. Kathleen McKay in the back of the vehicle among her gear. When you find a woman in the car you’re stealing, there is a good chance the law will view that as kidnapping, so when Mrs. McKay called out, “Now who is driving me home?” I answered, truthfully, “Just me, Ray.” And at the four-way, when she said left, I turned left.
Now it is an odd thing to meet a widow in that way, and the month that followed, five weeks really, were odd too, and I’m just getting the handle on it now. Mrs. McKay’s main interests were in painting pictures with oil paints and in fixing up the farm. Her place was 105 acres five miles out of Sanction and the house was very fine, being block and two stories with a steep metal snow roof. Her husband had farmed the little place, she said, but not very well. He had been a Mormon from a fine string of them, but he was a drinker and they’d had no children, and so the church, she said, had not been too sorry to let them go.
She told me all this while making my bed in the little outbuilding by the barn, and when she finished, she said, “Now I’m glad you’re here, Ray. And I hope tomorrow you could help me repair the culvert.”
I had thought it would be painting the barn, which was a grand building, faded but not peeling, or mowing the acres and acres of weeds, which I could see were full of rabbits. But no, it was replacing the culvert in the road to the house. It was generally collapsed along its length and rusted through in two big places. It was a hard crossing for any vehicle. Looking at it, I didn’t really know where to start. I’d hid in plenty of culverts, mostly larger than this one, which was a thirty-inch corrugated-steel tube, but I’d never replaced one. The first thing, I started her old tractor, an International, and chained up to the ruined culvert and ripped it out of the ground like I don’t know what. I mean, it was a satisfying start, and I’ll just tell you right out, I was involved.
I trenched the throughway with a shovel, good work that took two days, and then I laid her shiny new culvert in there pretty as a piece of jewelry. I set it solid and then buried the thing and packed the road again so that there wasn’t a hump, there wasn’t a bump, there wasn’t a ripple as you crossed. I spent an extra day dredging the ditch, but that was gilding the lily, and I was just showing off.
And you know what: she paid me with a pie. I’m not joking. I parked the tractor and hung up the shovel and on the way back to my room, she met me in the dooryard like some picture out of the Farmer’s Almanac, which there were plenty of lying around, and she handed me an apple pie in a glass dish. It was warm and swollen up so the seams on the Crosshatch piecrust were steaming.
Well, I don’t know, but this was a little different period for old Ray. I already had this good feather bed in the old tack room and the smell of leather and the summer evenings and now I had had six days of good work where I had been the boss and I had a glass pie dish in my hands in the open air of Idaho. What I’m saying here is that I was affected. All of this had affected me.
To tell the truth, kindness was a new thing. My father was a crude man who never hesitated to push a child to the ground. As a cop in the town of Brown River he was not amused to have a son who was a thief. And my mother had more than she could handle with five kids and preferred to travel with the Red Cross from flood to fire across the plains. And so, all these years, I’ve been a loner and happy at it I thought, until Mrs. McKay showed me her apple pie. Such a surprise, that tenderness. I had heard of such things before, but I honestly didn’t think I was the type.
I ate the pie and that affected me, two warm pieces, and then I ate a piece cool in the morning for breakfast along with Mrs. McKay’s coffee sitting over her checked tablecloth in the main house as another day came up to get the world and I was affected further. I’m not making excuses, these are facts. When I stood up to go out and commence the mowing, Mrs. McKay said it could wait a couple of days. How’d she say it? Like this: “Ray, I believe that could wait a day or two.”
And that was that. It was three days when I came out of that house again; it didn’t really make any difference to those weeds. I moved into the main house. I can barely talk about it except to say these were decent days to me. I rode a tractor through the sunny fields of Idaho, mowing, slowing from time to time to let the rabbits run ahead of the blades. And in the evenings there was washing up and hot meals and Mrs. McKay. The whole time, I mean every minute of every day of all five weeks, I never made a Ray. And this is a place with all that barnwood and a metal silo. I didn’t scratch a letter big or small, and there were plenty of good places. Do you hear me? I’d lost the desire.