The Foreman's Son

The bus let Monty off at the end of a gravel drive that ran so far into the trees he couldn't see the house from the road. He was twenty-four, and he'd taken this job because his boss said a week alone on an old estate doing restoration drawings would do him good. Monty figured what his boss really meant was that Monty had spent four months being quiet at the office, and quiet was starting to worry people.

His partner had died in March. Monty didn't say it out loud, the thing he carried around like a stone in a coat pocket. Work helped. Dirt helped. So when the firm got a call from some rich guy named Benny who wanted his grandmother's gardens surveyed and drawn before he hired anyone to fix them, Monty volunteered before anyone else could.

The walk up the drive took ten minutes. The house, when it finally showed itself, was one of those gray stone places with too many chimneys, sitting in a bowl of lawn and old trees. Off to the left there was a glasshouse, a real Victorian greenhouse with white paint peeling off the ribs, and that was what had sold Monty on the trip when he saw the photos. A greenhouse like that, neglected for years, was a whole document waiting to be written.

A man was waiting on the front steps, maybe sixty, silver-haired, in a canvas jacket. He shook Monty's hand like he was testing the grip.

"Monty? I'm Harold, the foreman. Benny's off in the city until Friday, so it's mostly you and me and whoever I drag in." He said it easy, no ceremony. "Your boss said you're the one who actually knows plants and not just rocks."

"That's generous of him," Monty said, and Harold laughed like that was the right answer.

Harold walked him through it. The drawing office was a converted stable room with a good table and a cot in the corner, because Benny expected people to stay on site. Meals were whatever you could make in the little kitchenette. The greenhouse was off limits for climbing, Harold said, but measuring was fine. Then he squinted at the sky and said something about rain coming Thursday, and left Monty alone with the whole quiet estate.

Monty spent the first day just walking. He mapped nothing. He looked at overgrown rose beds and a collapsed folly and a hedge so old it had become a wall, and he felt the familiar settling in his chest that came with a big blank project. For a few hours he even forgot to be sad, which was its own kind of strange.

The second morning he was in the greenhouse at eight, camera and tape measure out, when the door banged open behind him.

He'd assumed he'd have the place to himself, so the man standing there took him a second to place. Big through the shoulders, sun-weathered to the color of old leather, maybe twenty-nine, wearing work pants and no shirt under an open flannel. He had a toolbag over one shoulder and a way of standing that filled up the doorway.

"You'd be the drawing fella," the man said. "Walter. Harold's my dad."

"Right. He mentioned a son who does contract work." Monty said it and then wished he'd said something smarter.

Walter grinned like he'd heard the wish anyway. "Don't hold the family connection against me. I'm here to brace the roof vents before the storm knocks them through the glass. You're standing right where I need to be."

Monty moved, and Walter moved with him, and for a second they did an awkward little dance in the narrow aisle between two benches of dead ferns. Walter laughed at it, a short honest laugh, and Monty found himself laughing too, which surprised him. He hadn't laughed much since March.

"So what's the verdict?" Walter nodded up at the glass. "Dad says the whole thing's a lost cause. I say it just wants somebody stubborn."

"It wants about forty thousand dollars," Monty said. "But the bones are good. The bones are very good."

"Same could be said for a lot of things," Walter said, and looked at Monty a half beat longer than the sentence needed, and then got up his ladder like nothing had happened.

Monty measured glass for two hours with his neck craned and his face warm, and told himself the warmth was the sun through the panes.

That was the rhythm of the first three days. Walter came and went with his tools, fixing things Monty was documenting, and they fell into an easy back and forth. Walter talked the way some men drive, straight and fast, and asked questions that weren't really small talk. He asked what made a person choose plants for a living. Monty gave the short version, the safe version, and Walter said "that's the resume version, but all right," and let it go. Monty both liked him and kept a careful distance, the way you keep a hand near a stove you've been burned by.

Thursday the storm arrived early, right on the first fat drops of it, and Harold went down the hill in the truck to see about a blocked culvert and didn't come back before dark. The phone line to the valley was out. Monty ate supper alone in the stable room, listening to the rain hammer the slate, and decided he might as well work. The estate had a library Benny had told him to use, a long room on the second floor with the lights left on for guests, and Monty wanted one specific book, an old nursery catalog from the eighteen eighties that Harold kept somewhere in there.

He found the catalog in the third cabinet. He also found Walter, asleep in the big leather chair by the cold fireplace, boots off, a book open on his chest.

Monty stood there like an idiot with the catalog under his arm, doing the math on backing out quietly. Then Walter opened one eye.

"You're loud for a guy who measures things for a living," he said.

"Sorry. I didn't know anyone..."

"You did. You heard the floorboards." Walter sat up, rubbing his face. He wasn't even slightly embarrassed, which seemed to be his whole personality. "Couldn't sleep with the rain doing that thing on the roof. Came in here for the light. You want the chair?"

"I want the cabinet," Monty said, holding up the catalog. "This is it."

Walter leaned over to see, and something changed in his face. "Wait. Is that the Dressing's? The one with the plates?"

Monty blinked. "You know this catalog?"

"Knew it growing up. My granddad ran these gardens, and Dad's kept it in here ever since. Used to look at the orchid plates for hours as a, well, as a young guy with nothing to do out here." Walter was twenty-nine now, Monty knew from Harold's chatter, but the way he said it made him sound like the kid he'd been, and Monty felt something loosen in his chest.

They ended up side by side on the floor under the lamp, the catalog open between them, rain coming down hard enough to drown out everything else. Walter knew plants. Not the Latin, not the drawing, but the growing of them, the stubbornness of them, and he argued cheerfully with the catalog about what would actually survive on this hill. Monty found himself talking too, more than he had in months, about soils and drainage and the folly he wanted to rebuild, and at some point their shoulders were touching and neither of them moved away.

Walter turned a page and stopped. "Here. The one I'd steal."

A hand-tinted plate of a glasshouse interior, ferns and a bench and a doorway full of light.

"That's this greenhouse," Monty said. "Before."

"Yeah." Walter looked at it a while. Then he looked at Monty, close, rain loud on the roof, and said, "You always sit this near people you just met?"

Monty's mouth went dry. "No," he said, honestly.

"Good," Walter said, and turned another page, and left his shoulder where it was.

Monty went back to the stable room that night and did not sleep. He lay on the cot listening to the rain and thinking about a shoulder against his, and by morning he had constructed several theories about why nothing should happen, each one weaker than the last.

The rain quit before dawn. Harold came back up the hill at six, mud to the knees, reporting the culvert clear, and took the truck down again to the hardware store in the valley, saying he'd be gone most of the day. Which left Monty and Walter and forty acres of soaked garden and no reason at all for Monty's stomach to be doing what it was doing.

Walter found him in the drawing office around nine, holding two cups of coffee. His shoulders were stiff, Monty noticed. He moved as if his back had strong feelings about ladders.

"You were up on that vent brace all Wednesday," Monty said. "In the wind."

"I was."

"That's a bad back waiting to happen."

"It's not waiting. It arrived." Walter set the cups down and lowered himself onto the old bench with the care of a much older man, and Monty laughed before he could stop himself.

"What?" Walter said.

"Nothing. It's just, you strut around like nothing hurts you, and right now you're sitting down like the bench might bite."

Walter looked at him. Rain light came through the one window and made everything in the room gray and soft. "You offering to fix it, draftsman?"

Monty should have said no. He heard himself say, "I give good shoulder work. My partner used to..." He stopped. The word partner sat in the room, a dropped wrench.

Walter didn't grab it and make a thing of it. He just turned around on the bench, slow, and said, "Go