would own the cinderblock house on Mill Road for less than the price of
a used pickup, and Carla Lowry and her two children would learn what
the inside of the county's one motel looked like by the month.
His mother did not know that he knew. That was the arrangement
Carla Lowry believed she had made with the world: that the letter lay in
the blue cookie tin on top of the refrigerator, where the important and
terrible papers lived, and that her son believed the tin held recipes. Carla
worked the breakfast and lunch shifts in the school cafeteria and cleaned
the Methodist fellowship hall on Wednesday nights, and she had the
particular exhaustion of a woman doing arithmetic that never once came
out even, and she had decided - Jonah understood this the way he
understood engines, from the sounds through the wall - that if the house
was going, she would tell the children at the last possible moment and
spend the time until then making it not be going, by methods she had not
yet named to herself. Jonah had counted his own money on the Tuesday
night Rosa whispered the figure, sitting on the floor of Pap's old room
with the toolbox open, and the count was this: three hundred eleven
dollars in the coffee can, a hundred and ninety owed to him by ranchers
and widows for work done since June, a bicycle worth perhaps sixty
dollars to a person who had not seen its chain, and a pair of hands that the
county's richest machine yard would not have hired at any wage, because
he was seventeen and unlicensed and the insurance had opinions. Five
hundred and one dollars against four thousand seven hundred thirty-two.
He had sat a long time looking at the difference. Then he had closed the
toolbox, and gone out to the lean-to, and rebuilt a water pump for a man
who paid him in deer meat, because the alternative was to sit in the room
where his grandfather had died being a person who sat.
June was on the porch with her school reader when he came up Mill
Road at a run, because at ten years old she had the run of Fridays
everybody else seemed to have, and folded inside the reader, with the
care of a pressed flower, was the second notice from the tax office, which
June had taken out of the mailbox on Wednesday and kept because it had
the courthouse seal on it and looked important and nobody had told her
not to. She did not know what it said. She knew it was the reason her
brother had stopped sleeping past five. She watched him take the toolbox
from the lean-to without a word, and because she was ten and her
grandfather's granddaughter in ways the adults had not finished noticing,
she said only, "Is it the green truck?" and Jonah, with the box banging his
knee, said, "How do you know about the green truck?" and June said,
"Everybody knows about the green truck," which was true of nearly
everything in Cade's Hollow eventually, and went back to her reader and
her folded thundercloud, and Jonah ran the three blocks to Haskett's with
forty pounds of tools in his right hand and the whole of his family's
position in the world riding on the sound a dead engine had made through
a shop window's worth of distance, which is to say on nothing he could
have explained to a single living soul.
The toolbox had been Pap's. It was a red Kennedy box, older than
Jonah's mother, its drawers lined with a plaid flannel that had once been a
shirt, and it held what a lifetime of school buses and salvage engines had
taught a man to keep: sockets worn to a polish inside, a timing light older
than the trucks it timed, feeler gauges like a deck of steel cards, a brass
drift, a magnet on a wand, and screwdrivers whose handles had taken the
shape of one particular hand. And in the top tray, in a slot Pap had cut for
it himself out of a piece of conveyor belt, lay the wrench. It was a 7/16-
inch box wrench, Snap-on, bought off a truck in 1968 and altered in 1969
in the motor pool at Fort Hood by a twenty-two-year-old mechanic
named Ellis Lowry who had discovered, in the way of young mechanics
everywhere, that the factory had placed two bolts exactly where no
factory tool could honorably go. Detroit had begun fitting Jake brakes -
engine brakes, housings that sat over the valve covers like a second story
- and the rear bolts of the valve covers on the big two-strokes hid beneath
them, so that a job the manual allotted forty minutes took a man two
hours and a skinned arm. Ellis had heated the wrench's neck, ground it
thin as a knife spine, and bent it eleven degrees, and quenched it in the
coffee the sergeant had left standing, which Pap maintained to the end of
his life had improved the temper and which metallurgy, Jonah suspected,
had never been consulted on. The wrench went under the Jake housing
and onto the bolt like it had been born in the gap. Pap had carried it