Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 37 of 60

Eduardo came back to the feast hall Friday at first light. Gwen had a list on the counter and a bad back that would not bend. He read the list. Flour from the mill. Two crates of onions. A barrel of well water for the pots. He set the list down and got to work. He hauled six sacks of flour from the mill cart to the pantry. He carried the onion crates through the side door. He filled the barrel four buckets at a time until his shoulders burned. Gwen watched from the stool by the stove and said nothing. When he finished, she pointed at the wash basin and the stack of iron pots crusted with last night's stew. He scrubbed until the water went gray, then changed it and scrubbed again. He did not cut corners. He did not leave a pot half-clean and hope she would miss it. He remembered what that had cost him before. Emilio came in around noon with his stool under his arm. He set it down near the wash basin and sat. "You missed a spot," Emilio said. Eduardo looked. He had missed a spot. He scrubbed it out. "Better," Emilio said. Gwen laughed once from the stove. She brought over a bowl of stew and a heel of bread and set them on the counter beside the basin. "Eat," she said. "Then finish." Eduardo ate standing up. The stew was hot and heavy with potato. He finished the pots by mid-afternoon and stacked them dry on the rack. His hands were raw. His back ached in a clean way, the way honest work aches. Gwen came over and looked at the rack. She ran a finger along the inside of the top pot. It came away clean. She nodded and reached into her apron pocket. She counted out coins into his palm. Three dollars and forty cents. Not much against two hundred. But it was his, earned by his own hands, with no lie behind it. "Come back next Friday," she said. "I'll have more." "I will," Eduardo said. Emilio picked up his stool. "He works good," the boy said to Gwen. "I saw," she said. Eduardo walked home with the coins in his front pocket where he could feel them. He did not stop at the bank. He did not stop anywhere. At the house he pulled the tin off the shelf and dropped the coins in. They rang against the bottom. He sat on the porch step and pulled out the ledger. He wrote the date. He wrote the amount. He wrote where it came from and what he had done to earn it. Then he closed the book. Twenty-nine days left. He had started the climb.