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The woman on the far left standing with her hands in front of her waist is Kirk Curnutt’s great-grandmother.She is 115 and currently the oldest person in the world. The boy in the right in the overalls is his grandfather.
 
 & 
 Manning the House
 SHORT STORY BY
KIRK CURNUTT
 T
 HIS WAS IN the time whenrefrigerators were just becomingcommonplace, so each morning afleet of Model As still set out from theDePrez Ice and Coal Plant on thecorner of South and Noble streetsdelivering blocks to homes. Thedrivers with routes inside Shelbyvillewere the envy of those who workedthe outlying county farms. Once pastthe city limits only a handful of roadswere paved, and even though Mr.Ford was making a reliable productup in Detroit, his pneumatic tires andvanadium suspensions were stillsusceptible enough to ruts that themen had to putter along at a speedthat barely outpaced a pair of stronghealthy horses. Only one thingirritated the drivers more than theconditions, and that was the children.Regardless of whether they werewalking to school or working thefields, when they saw a DePrez truck they dropped what they were doingto race up to the running boards andbeg for flavored shavings. “You’remistaking me for the ice-
cream
 man,” the drivers had been schooledto say. Most of the time theydelivered that information a lot lesspolitely than Mr. Daniel DePrez, their boss, would have appreciated. Quiteoften they improvised a bit of badnews meant to shoo the childrenback to their chores. “Ain’t no ice- cream man coming to theboondocks,” they would declare.“Best tell your folks to buy an extrablock from me and set you a cow onit. ’Cause that’s the only way you’regetting ice cream out here.” Ortis C. Huber was one of thefew drivers who didn’t taunt thechildren. It was likely the reason Mr.DePrez assigned him the poorest ofthe delivery routes, which ran all theway out to Blue Ridge Road headingtoward Gowdy. That and Ortis hadthe makings of a good companyman. He’d only worked for Mr. DePrezfor nine months, having come to theice plant after teaching nearly half ofhis thirty-seven years. He probably
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 Kirk Curnutt
 Manningthe House
 would’ve still been teaching, too, ifnot for the Snodgrass girl and all thetalk she’d started about him. Thatwas why Ortis happily consideredhimself a company man: Mr. DePrezhadn’t paid a whit of attention tothose rumors. He just plain hired Ortis,talkers be damned. Maybe driving anice truck wasn’t a path to a quick fortune, but it beat hiring out as afarmhand or working at the furniturefactories that were then Shelbyville’smajor employers. If Ortis played hiscards right, he figured he could getoff the road by graduating up tomechanic, maybe even managingthe garage at some point. And, as itturned out, that’s exactly whathappened: within a decade, Mr.DePrez would promote him tosupervisor of the fleet, and from thereOrtis would go on to become anengineer and then plant manager.Even after the ice industry wentunder and necessity transformed thecompany into a water distillery(among other things), Ortis C. Huber stayed with the DePrez family. Hewould still be receiving a paycheck from them when he died in 1982. Bythat point, he would be ninety-one,and the scurrilous things theSnodgrass girl said about him werelong forgotten, even by Ortis himself. But that was to the future. For now he was content to rattle alongBlue Ridge Road, passing the timedaydreaming about his customers.He wondered what Hester Cherrywould be like had her boy, Howard,not died in the Argonne (Ortisregretted not getting over); whether the cripple bachelor Dar Fatelywould’ve had better luck withwomen if his legs hadn’t been eatenoff by a thresher; whether poor families like the Pruitts would replacetheir horses with motor cars had theya dollop of prosperity. Only one family Ortis didn’tcare to conjecture about. He’dheard tales aplenty about the widowBrandywine, and they were tooreminiscent of what the Snodgrass girlhad said to cost him his teaching job.So as he knocked on the mudroomdoor Ortis made sure he had nothingextraordinary in his expression, lest thewoman think he was gossiping tohimself about her. Only it wasn’t thewidow who answered — it was theman. The one, rumor had it, Mrs.Brandywine refused to marry.The one, rumor made sure toadd, whom marriage was the onlything she refused him. “Jus’ checking to see if theicebox needs tending,” Ortis said in
of 00

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