Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Outside, the air hit her face like a warm washcloth, and the porch floorboards gave off the smell of hot varnish. But the soft, fresh breeze — unusual for this time of year — lifted the damp wisps along her hairline, and the water pitcher she was hugging chilled the insides of her arms.

Landis had gotten hold of a second chainsaw from somewhere, and he and Earl were slicing the thickest branches into fireplace-size logs. Dane and Ward were hacking off the thinner branches and dragging them to a huge pile down near the street, while Red had set up a chopping block and was splitting the logs into quarters. They all stopped work when Abby arrived. Earl and Landis killed their chainsaws and a ringing silence fell, so that her voice sounded shockingly clear: “Anybody want water?”

“I wouldn’t say no,” Earl told her, and they set down their tools and came over to her. Ward had taken his shirt off, which made him look like an amateur, and he and Dane were deeply flushed. Red, of course, had been working this hard the whole summer, but even he had rivulets of sweat running down his face, and Earl and Landis were so drenched that their blue chambray shirts were almost navy.

She distributed paper cups and then filled them while the men held them out, and they emptied them in one gulp and held them out again before she’d finished the first round. It wasn’t till halfway through the third round that anyone said more than “Thanks.” Then Red asked, “Did Dad get ahold of Mitch, do you know?”

“I think he’s on the phone with him now.”

“I still say we just go ahead and take the whole thing down,” Earl told Red.

“Well, I don’t want Mitch showing up and saying we made his job harder.”

Dane and Abby were looking at each other. Dane’s hair was damp, and he gave off a wonderful smell of clean sweat and tobacco. Abby had a sudden, worrisome thought: she didn’t own any nice underwear. Just plain white cotton underpants and white cotton bras with the tiniest pink rosebud stitched to the center V. She looked away again.

“Hello?”

It was a beefy man in a seersucker suit, parting the azalea hedge that bordered the lawn next door. Twigs crackled under his chalk-white shoes as he walked toward them. “Say, there,” he said when he reached them. He had his eyes fixed specifically on Red.

“Hi, Mr. Barkalow,” Red said.

“Wonder if you realize what time your men started work this morning.”

Landis was the one who answered. “Eight o’clock,” he said.

“Eight o’clock,” Mr. Barkalow repeated, still looking at Red.

Landis said, “That’s when me and Red and Earl here started. The rest of them showed up later.”

“Eight o’clock in the morning,” Mr. Barkalow said. “A Sunday morning. A weekend. Does that strike you as acceptable?”

“Well, it seems okay to me, sir,” Red said in a steady voice.

“Is that right. Eight o’clock on a Sunday morning seems a fine time to run a chainsaw.”

He had ginger eyebrows that bristled out aggressively, but Red didn’t seem intimidated. He said, “I figured most folks would be—”

“Morning, there!” Mr. Whitshank called.

He was striding toward them down the slope of the lawn, wearing a black suit coat that must have been put on in haste. The left lapel was turned wrong, like a dog’s ear flipped inside out. “Fine day!” he said to Mr. Barkalow. “Good to see you out enjoying it.”

“I was just asking your son, Mr. Whitshank, what he considers to be an acceptable hour to run a chainsaw.”

“Oh, why, is there a problem?”

“The problem is that today is Sunday; I don’t know if you’re aware of it,” Mr. Barkalow said.

He had transferred his bushy-browed glare to Mr. Whitshank, who was nodding emphatically as if he couldn’t agree more. “Yes, well, we certainly wouldn’t want to—” he said.

“It is perverse how you people love to make a racket while the rest of us are trying to sleep. You’re hammering on your gutters, you’re drilling out your flagstones … Only yesterday, you sawed an entire tree down! A perfectly healthy tree, might I add. And always, always it seems to happen on a weekend.”

Mr. Whitshank suddenly grew taller.

“It doesn’t seem to happen on a weekend; it does happen on a weekend,” he said. “That’s the only time we honest laboring men aren’t busy doing you folks’ work for you.”

“You ought to thank your lucky stars I don’t report you to the police,” Mr. Barkalow said. “They’re bound to have ordinances dealing with this kind of thing.”

“Ordinances! Don’t make me laugh. Just because you all like to lie abed till noon, you and that spoiled son of yours with his big fat—”

“When you think about it,” Red broke in, “it doesn’t really matter if there are ordinances or there aren’t.”

Both men looked at him.

“What matters is, we seem to be waking our neighbors. I’m sorry about that, Mr. Barkalow. We certainly never intended to discommode you.”

“ ‘Discommode’ ?” his father repeated in a marveling voice.

Red said, “I wonder if we could settle on an hour that’s mutually agreeable.”

“ ‘Mutually agreeable ’?” his father echoed.

“Oh,” Mr. Barkalow said. “Well.”

“Does, maybe, ten o’clock sound all right?” Red asked him.

“Ten o’clock!” Mr. Whitshank said.

“Ten?” Mr. Barkalow said. “Oh. Well, even ten is … but, well, I guess we could tolerate ten if we were forced to.”

Mr. Whitshank looked up at the sky as if he were begging for mercy, but Red said, “Ten o’clock. It’s a deal. We’ll make sure to abide by that in the future, Mr. Barkalow.”

“Well,” Mr. Barkalow said. He seemed uncertain. He glanced again at Mr. Whitshank, and then he said, “Well, okay, then. I guess that settles it.” And he turned and walked off toward the hedge.

“ Now see what you’ve done,” Mr. Whitshank told Red. “Ten o’clock, for God’s sake! Practically lunchtime!”

Red handed his paper cup to Abby without comment.

Landis said, “Uh, boss?”

“What is it,” Mr. Whitshank said.

“Did you get the word from Mitch?”

“He’s coming by this afternoon with his brother-in-law’s stump grinder. He says take the trunk on down.”

“So, cut it low to the ground?”

“Low as you can get it,” Mr. Whitshank said, and by then he had already turned away and was halfway up the hill again, as if he’d washed his hands of all of them. The hem of his suit coat hung unevenly, Abby noticed — sagging at the sides and hitching up at the center, as if it belonged to a much older and shabbier man.

She circulated among the others, collecting their paper cups in silence, and then she started back up the hill herself.

“Sometimes Junior thinks the neighbors might be looking down their noses at him,” Mrs. Whitshank said when she heard about the scene in the yard. “He’s a little bit sensitive that way.”

Abby didn’t say so, but she could see his side of it. During her years as a scholarship student she’d had a few dealings herself with Mr. Barkalow’s type — so entitled, so convinced that there was only one way to live. No doubt all his sons played lacrosse and all his daughters were preparing for their debutante balls. But she shook that thought away and folded the sheet of dough on the counter a second time and a third. (“Fold, fold, and fold again” were Mrs. Whitshank’s instructions when she’d taught Abby how to make her biscuits. “Fold till when you slap the dough, you hear it give a burp.”)

“Anyhow,” Abby said, “Red got them to compromise. It all worked out in the end.”