I walked back down to the driveway on the seventh try. The flywheel continued to spin as Helen cranked the key and pumped the accelerator, flooding the engine in the process, the singular smell of gasoline filling my nostrils, and the headlights began to dim with each gradually slowing surge.

“Might want to give it a break there. Don’t want to run down the battery.” I could see that tears were starting to form, surface tension alone holding them fast to her lower lids. One good blink and they would start to run.

“This damn car,” she sobbed. “Nothing ever FUCKING works!” She slammed her fists in rapid succession against the steering wheel, hitting the horn occasionally, tears now streaming freely down her cheeks, the tantrum of a woman long accustomed to holding such outbursts at bay, far more fury than a disabled car could possibly warrant. I took several steps back from the car and counted twenty before speaking again.

“Now, Helen, it’s gonna be ok. There ain’t much can go wrong on a car engine that can’t be fixed pretty easy. I’ve got some tools and there’s a pretty decent parts store in town, if it comes to it. Not much I can do out here in the dark though. How about we go on back up to the house and figure out what’s next? There’s a couple rooms off the back of the house you can have all to yourself for the night if you want ‘em. You can stay there and I’ll get you all fixed up in the morning. How’s that?”

She didn’t respond for a moment, several hard heartbeats passing through my collar and into my ears while she stared at her hands, now resting on the wheel. Then she opened the heavy blue door and slid out, came to stand beside me, looking at the car.

“Alright.”

The house was once a three room log cabin, originally built by my great-great grandfather in the mid eighteen hundreds for his family. As his children had children and stayed to work the farm, additions were built. There is a storage cellar in the rear, dug back into the hillside, maintaining a constant sixty-five Fahrenheit degrees regardless of the season, and two cedar-lined rooms were added above it. Eventually the two structures were connected by a porch once the road separating them was rerouted to the front of the home, but a person still has to exit one to enter the other. This is where my brothers and I had shared bunks throughout our childhood. As we grew, Frederick and William tired of the country life and lit out for the west coast. Shortly after our mother suddenly passed, my youngest brother Michael went insane with grief, being only ten at the time, and had been in institutions ever since, leaving just myself and my father to work the land. I had lived in the cellar rooms all my life until I awoke one day the lone occupant of this patch, solitary in the elements at the age of nineteen.

“There are more blankets in the closet there,” I said as I replaced a burned out bulb on the wall by the bed, “and extra pillows in that chest by the wall. My brother’s wife left some clothes behind in the other room there, they’re stale but clean. Might see if anything fits if you’d like to change.”

“I really don’t know what to say, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me, Jacob.”

“Oh, now it’s no trouble. I’ll get after that vehicle early in the morning while you sleep in, and hopefully by the time you’re up and about it’ll be out there all warmed up and ready to go for you.”

As I moved past her toward the door she caught my elbow in her hand and looked up at me. “It really means a lot that you’re helping me. Maybe you don’t see it. But it does.”

“Well, alright then. Happy to oblige. You have a good night’s rest, sleep in as long as you like. Goodnight.”

“The restroom,” she said quickly. “Is that the only one? In case I need it in the night?”

“Door to the main house is always unlocked, ma’am. Come and go as you please.”

I cleaned the kitchen and walked into the adjacent bathroom. On the back of the door still hung the leather strop my father used to beat his children. My brothers and I would sometimes joke in gallows tones about the fact that we had never seen him dress the edge of a single blade on its surface. There were whetstones aplenty in the shed. The strop’s sole purpose was the enforcement of his arbitrary and unassailable law. After our mother died what little light he had behind his grey eyes went cold. He rose and set with the sun, mute sometimes for weeks on end, save the beatings. He slowly sold off the livestock, demanded fewer acres of corn until there was nothing left in the enclosing wilderness to suggest that generations of farmers had eked out a living from the unforgiving soil. As I washed and rinsed my face in the sink I could see it hanging dormant in the mirror over my shoulder. Somehow I had not thrown it out with the rest of the old man’s things, a two pound strip of leather weighing six tons. I shut off the light, stepped into the bedroom, disrobed, and crawled into bed. Within twenty minutes she came to me, wordlessly, naked, hair down over her slim shoulders, gliding under the sheets, pressing her mouth over mine.

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Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

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Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.