Candles Burning

Forty-six

MERRYMEETING’S operation and upkeep took an enormous amount of work that Miz Verlow made every effort to keep unseen. Nothing upset guests like unreliable plumbing, while at the same time the finest pipes and fixtures in the world would be tried to their utmost by a succession of paying guests. After she lost a reliable plumber to a freak lightning strike at a church picnic, Miz Verlow cast about, trying several other local plumbers. She was dissatisfied with all until she found Grady Driver.

First, though, she fired his daddy. On his very first call to Merrymeeting, Heck Driver managed to bust a pipe and ruin a wall, not from incompetence but because the Co’Colas he drank one after another, complaining of the heat, were about half cheap rum. The ruination of guest-room wallpaper by the leaking pipe in the bathroom next door was a predictable consequence. Miz Verlow took Heck Driver to task; he cussed her out, and she not only fired him and declined to pay him, she told him she was going to bill him for the repairs.

An hour after Heck Driver stumbled out, leaving his tools where they lay, and drove uncertainly away, his rusted-out van returned with a mere boy at the wheel. I knew him from school: Grady Driver, Heck’s son, excruciatingly shy and chronically dirty. He had been sent home repeatedly with nits and been held back a couple times, so even though he was a couple years older than me, he was in the same grade.

Grady knocked at the kitchen door and asked to speak to Miz Verlow.

When she came to the door, he apologized for his father’s error, using a formula he had by heart.

“My daddy sent me to beg pardon, Miz Verlow, and not hold it agin him on account of he come out sick to start, from havin’ ate bad fried fish last night, but not wantin’ to let you down, and maybe I could clean up the mess for you and pick up his tools.”

Miz Verlow was in the doorway with her arms crossed under her bosom.

“I will excuse your lie on grounds of your understandable desire to defend your daddy. However, Mr. Driver was drunk. You are too late to clean up, as my maid has already done so, and it requires a competent plumber to repair the broken pipe. But you may retrieve his tools.”

“Hit were an accidence, Miz Verlow,” insisted Grady.

Miz Verlow had rolled her eyes. “Enunciate, young man. Accident! It-was-an-accident.”

Grady swallowed hard and repeated after her. “It-was-an-accident.”

“It was not an accident,” Miz Verlow said.

Grady looked confused. He was built like Roger, long-limbed and gangly, but poorly nourished for his frame, with a stolid expression on his face that people often took for vacuousness or backwardness of intellect.

“True accidents are surprisingly rare. Most of the events that people call ‘accidents’ are entirely predictable. Time and again, close examination of the so-called ‘accident’ reveals incompetence, fraud or drunkenness, or any combination of those faults, as the real cause. The only ‘accidental’ aspect of the mess your daddy made was the fact he did it here, because I had the random bad luck to have hired him today.”

Grady had passed from confused to stunned and back to confused again.

Miz Verlow threw up her hands. “Get your daddy’s tools!”

I’d been lurking about the kitchen to see what I could see and hear what I could hear. When Miz Verlow vacated the doorway, and Grady stood hesitant on the threshold, I hauled him inside.

“I’ll show you,” I told him.

He followed me up the backstairs and down the hall. Cleonie and I had mopped up and wiped up and even tidied the tools into Mr. Driver’s toolbox but we could not fix the pipe. Miz Verlow had turned off the water to the bathroom and so it was unusable.

To my surprise, Grady made a thorough examination of the scene. Then he took some of his daddy’s tools and went to work. Needless to say, I was fascinated, not only by Grady’s bold advance upon the problem, but also by what he did. In a quarter of an hour, he had the miscreant pipe repaired and asked me to show him where the water was turned off and on. Once the water was back on, the bathroom was operational.

Then I required Miz Verlow to cover her eyes and let me guide her to the scene, whereupon she opened her eyes on a clean, functional bathroom, and a grinning, though still regrettably unwashed, Grady Driver.

“I kin fixt that wall, Miz Verlow,” Grady said, “you got you sum plastern paste.”

Miz Verlow shook her head in disbelief.

“Young man, you amaze me. You’ll have to come back to fix the wall. I’ll have the materials on hand tomorrow.”

Grady packed up his daddy’s tools again.

Miz Verlow watched him for a moment, sighed, and went away.

I tagged after her all the way to her office. She looked at me inquiringly and I held out my hand.

“He done a good job,” I advised her.

She pursed her lips. “You know better grammar than that, Calley Dakin.”

I corrected myself, “Yes, ma’am, he did a good job.”

She opened a desk drawer, the one where she kept petty cash. I watched her fingers hesitating and then lunging and plucking out a bill. She thrust it at me.

I grabbed it and raced out, catching Grady stowing his daddy’s toolbox in the van. Just as Miz Verlow had thrust the bill at me, I thrust it at Grady.

He looked at the five-dollar bill in amazement, scratched his head, and grasped it.

“Much oblige,” he said, summoning all his dignity as a substitute adult.

“Hey,” I said, “you got nits?”

Immediately he was another kid again and disgusted with me.

“Hey,” he said, “you fly with them ears?”

“Hey, that’s original, how many times you s’pose I’ve heard it? My ears come attached to me. You get bugs in your hair from not washin’ it.”

“I ain’t got bugs!” He climbed into the van and slammed the door. “I ain’t got bugs!”

By way of underlining my superiority, I crossed my arms and watched him as he drove away. He probably did have bugs again, scratching his head like that.

I went straight inside and washed my hair.