Free A New Life by Bernard Malamud

law. A few, during the Depression, had bought almost no supplies and kept salaries slightly higher—not by much—than some of us were paying. One man did his own secretarial work and divided the secretarial fund among his staff, but he had a very small staff. Maybe I should have tried something of the sort, but it didn’t seem honest to me. At least I gave employment to another mouth. In general, when I think of what I would change if I had my life to live over, I doubt I would change much.”
    He was still talking, the light fading in his hair, as Levin left.

What new with Levin in the September weeks before classes began?
    His world—inside he was Levin, although the New Levin, man of purpose after largely wasted years. For Mrs. Beaty, an old widow alone with her roomer in a bulky two-story white frame house, he performed chores he hadn’t conceived doing before, in exchange for something off the rent. Levin mowed lawns front and rear—the health of the grass was amazing, it sprouted overnight and every week he had to cut. On a shaky ladder that left him with nervous knees he gathered yellow pears, shying away from the bees sucking the sweet wounds of fruit. The cherry tree had yielded, thank God, at the end of June, and the walnut wasn’t due till late October. The landlady had eight trees on her hundred by seventy-five, including an orange-berried mountain ash, new to his eye.
Three weeks after he had arrived, after a night of rain Levin raked off the front lawn the first enormous leaves, fallen like wet rags from the sycamores in front of the old houses across the street; he had thought, until the old woman told him no, that they were from some Bunyanesque species of maple tree.
    A truck dumped a backbreaking load of practically orange sawdust in the alley, and Levin slowly shoveled it through a window into the cellar—working up respect for the shovelers of the world—where it gave off a Christmas-tree fragrance that all but levitated the house. Mrs. Beaty demonstrated how to light the sawdust furnace and Levin agreed to keep it hot when the weather got cold, load the hopper twice a day, and every month vacuum the dust filters in the heat blower. He learned a sickle was not a scythe when he laboriously cut down and dug up a weedy flower garden she could no longer take care of, and discovered last season’s walnuts and acorns, six varieties of worms, a soggy doll, and thickly-rusted screw driver from yesteryear. The past hides but is present. Watching a robin straining to snap a worm out of the earth Levin momentarily thought of himself as a latter-day Thoreau, but gave that up—he had come too late to nature. He whitewashed cellar walls until his beard dripped like the brush he was using; hosed the clapboard front of the house; again on a ladder, dug leaves out of rain gutters; changed washers in water taps; and though it worried him to work with electricity, even replaced wall switches where old ones were broken. Levin was surprised at all an inexperienced hand could do with only a slight loss of blood. He seriously considered taking up hunting and fishing, and planned to visit Seattle and San Francisco as soon as he had a few dollars in his pocket.
    Mrs. Beaty lived and let live, a woman of sixty-nine, gone half deaf; she wore a gray comb in her gray hair and a hearing button in her left ear but rarely turned it on except to answer the phone when she “felt” it ringing, and to talk with Levin when he ate in the kitchen—this was their major involvement.
Sometimes when he avoided her he realized she was avoiding him. She went to bed at eight each night, except on the rare nights she entertained; and early the next morning, wearing galoshes to protect her shoes from the wet grass, was already snipping flowers, or poking into the shrubbery around the house. She lived unself-consciously in the presence of her dead husband’s cabinetry, rocking chair, pipes; his tools were still hanging above his workbench