Rise--How a House Built a Family

by Cara Brookins

  So we went to the job site, this time with a small battery-powered CD player from the garage. The speakers were tinny and weak, but Drew had made an upbeat CD with a mix we could mostly sing along to. Even Roman danced to the beat while he waded into puddles whispering to himself, “Don’t get muddy. Stay out of the mud.”

  Hershey came with us, even though she would be a muddy mess on the way home. She’d been lonely at the house. And though I didn’t want to admit it aloud, I worried about the old girl. Tail wagging lazily, she followed Roman, nudging him now and then like a wayward pup.

  Hope and I ran neon-pink strings from wooden frames I had pounded into the ground at each corner. We hung a line level from the taut string to get a level mark for the top of the first block row. The house was on a slight incline—or at least it had looked slight—so the foundation would be highest in the front corner under my library and lowest in the back corner under the kitchen. What had looked like a difference of only a few blocks when we had eyeballed it was actually about six feet. That would put my library floor nearly eight feet off the ground. This wasn’t what I had imagined, and I started to worry about the block-and-fill foundation plan. It wasn’t too late to build a different type of foundation, with a wooden floor that would leave the space under the house empty instead of filling it in.

  I decided not to settle for that. With everything in our lives feeling hollow, I needed our house to be connected to the earth. We all needed solid ground under our feet.

  We moved blocks until the sun faded and Roman’s teeth chattered behind mud-smeared lips. We slipped into our flip-flops for the ride home, singing the whole way because singing felt good and silence did not.

  Roman zoned out in front of a cartoon after brushing his teeth. The other kids went to do the homework they had said they didn’t have, and I leaned back on the sofa at Roman’s feet with my laptop. For the first time in a long time, I made solid progress on my novel. A surprisingly gruesome murder took place that I hadn’t planned on, and I refused to analyze what that might mean. It wouldn’t take a professional headshrinker to track the subconscious correlations.

  I knew it had been a successful writing night when I woke to three pages of “d”s on the screen. Almost always “d”s when I fell asleep, even though I wished just once it could be “z”s for a laugh. I carried Roman to my bed, having given up on sneaking him into his own bed. In a few months or a year he would go on his own, but maybe neither of us were ready yet.

  I rolled intentionally on my side, curling into a ball to search for sleep rather than meditation time. Even though I always felt more grounded and at peace after seeing Benjamin, something about the experience still frightened me, and I didn’t have room for more fear that night. He and I would make peace, but courage doesn’t come like a lottery check, it is earned hard and slow, like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill.

  Monday at the office I was glad to sit in a cushioned chair and rest my back. I was also happy to lose my mind in the analytical process of writing code. But after I picked the kids up from school, we rushed to the job site and discussed a plan to get water hooked up.

  The city had let me pull the plumbing permit with no evidence that I could tell one end of a pipe from the other. And no, one end of a pipe is not always the same as the other. The permit office seemed to have as much confidence in my ability to learn from YouTube videos as the bank, so I gave it everything I had.

  I finally discovered that I could hire a crew with a drilling contraption to bore a hole under the road to hook the water pipe into the city main. Nearly waist-deep in mud, I struggled to look professional, wiping the end of the muddy pipe in my armpit and then holding it up with my knees to smear it with purple PVC prep and glue. The pipe wasn’t much larger in diameter than a garden hose, which looked pitifully small to supply an entire house. But I’d watched videos, read articles, and even asked the guys at the home-improvement store, and the verdict was unanimous. The basketball-size pipes I had always imagined carrying rivers of water down the street and to my house did not exist. Even the city’s line down my street was only about the size of my ankle.

  I managed to glue in another twenty feet before I capped it off. That left me a nonfunctional water line about 230 feet from the front of the house, which even under my very loose definition of success these days barely qualified. It wasn’t a step backward, so there was that. A trencher was the next step, and my old tractor friend Jimmy had promised to call me back with the name of a guy who had one.

  I was still battling the electricians—on the phone, I mean, since I’d yet to see them in person. They had snuck in once when I wasn’t around to wire fuses and a shutoff into the temp box, which hung crookedly from the four-by-four I had mostly secured in the mud. The city had told them which main pole to hook my line to, but the person who owned the land around the pole blocked the dirt road with a locked gate and refused to let the electricians enter. As much as I hated conflict, I would have to deal with them eventually. I imagined the conversation starting with “I don’t care if you’re cooking crack back here or planting fields of funky stuff, I just need to hang a wire on that tall pole. I won’t see or hear anything else that goes on—I swear.”

  While Roman and I waited for the trencher one afternoon, the electricians nearly gave me a heart attack when they drove right up behind me. The two of them rolled out of the car and landed on their widespread feet, the truck door releasing a cloud of funky smoke that nearly blew me over. Naturally, they were in a fine, mellow mood and friendly as could be, each munching a family-size bag of Funyuns.

  Between crunches, the tall one said, “That man ain’t gonna let you over there. Not ever. Says you’ll cut a gas line if you dig to the pole.”

  “But you ain’t got no choice. City says that’s your pole, then that’s your pole,” the shorter, wider man said, wiping Funyun powder on his flannel shirttail over a trail that proved it wasn’t the first time.

  I raised my eyebrows and waited for them to tell me something I didn’t know, but nope, that was pretty much all they had. “So I guess we have to go over there and talk to him? Explain things? Tell him he has to?”

  “We?” shorty said. “You got a mouse in your pocket?” They both laughed too hard to notice the way I leaned on the bumper of their truck and sniffed away looming tears.

  “Mouse,” Roman said. “We got a mouse. Meow.” He eyed their snack and I realized he could be inhaling some residual smoke standing this close, so I carried him to the shop.

  The electricians sauntered over to admire the pole, which was actually standing straighter than either of them. Hershey followed, vacuuming a trail of crumbs.

  Since we were running out of things we could do on the job site without a better understanding of foundation work, I didn’t have much to keep me busy while the electricians did their thing. I wiped the dirt off a curved piece of metal Jada had dug up. Then, probably because I was in the mood to hit something, I pushed a ladder under the shop door, pulled the nail from my pocket—Caroline’s nail—and hung the curved metal over the door. It wasn’t exactly a lucky horseshoe, but close enough. Caroline’s nail was now a solid part of our build. Her life connected directly with ours.

  “Be back next week,” skinny electrician said, picking at a hangnail. “Already contacted One Call to mark lines for the dig.”

  “You ought to let him know.” Shorty nodded through the forest at where the neighbor’s house had started to look a lot like the house of the witch who cooked Hansel and Gretel.

  I nodded, though I didn’t really think I had the courage to do it.

  Roman waved while Tweedledum and Tweedledee backed a crooked line down the hill, waving back like happy two-year-olds.

  Things were starting to feel out of control. Only a month in and we were so paralyzed by the idea of setting the blocks that we did nothing more than shuffle them from one spot to the next each day. Even though I had given my perfectionist-self permission for small mistakes along the
way, I knew the foundation was not a place for mistakes of any size. I still believed plan Bs were for sissies, but I was willing to accept the label.

  On the way home I called Pete. “Any chance you can come by and get us started laying block?” I asked, voice quavering.

  He agreed to meet me at the site that evening—and I believed him.

  I believed him the next two times, too, because I had no plan C.

  Optimists tend to believe what they need to be true and damn all the scenarios that are more likely to be true. But every so often fate smiles and the good things turn out to be true after all. Saturday morning when the kids and I arrived decked out in full construction gear, ready for a full day of work but with no idea what that work might be, Pete was there waiting with a cell phone pressed to his ear and a toothy grin that almost made me forget all the times he had stood me up. He clapped the kids on the shoulder like he’d known them since they were knee-high.

  “Biggest problem here is your services. Electricity makes things a damn sight easier, and water is as necessary as a rifle in a rabid coon pit. Can’t do mortar without it.”

  I looked at my boots, feeling like the author who turned in a manuscript without any punctuation. The services had been my responsibility, and I had failed. Worse, when it came to water, the only thing holding me back was fear. Through my shame, I still had to smile over the rabid coon pit remark. This conversation was a million miles removed from my ordinary life. I smiled, imagining my editor’s voice in Pete’s body: Commas make things a damn sight easier, and end marks are as necessary as a rifle in a rabid coon pit.

  “… good thing you have that.” Pete pointed across the slop of Sinkwell Manor toward my neighbor’s house.

  I raised my eyebrows, hoping it was a joke.

  “Get those pails out the back-a my truck, kids!” he yelled, and the kids obeyed. “Fill ’em up with pond water. We got a foundation to build.”

  Hope and Drew didn’t bat an eye, just hauled up as much water from the pond as they could carry—which was more than they could have carried a month ago. Moving the concrete blocks that would be our block foundation had muscled us up a little, and we were no longer horrified by head-to-toe mud immersion. In our minds we were practically professionals.

  Pete pointed at Drew. “You’re the mixer. Water, one part mortar powder to three parts sand, and then a bit more water go in the wheelbarrow. Attack it with a hoe until you have peanut butter. Got it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Keep the water coming, Hope. Little Sis is going to do the trowel work. Mom—because she’s already used to it—does a little bit of everything. Whoever falls behind, she’ll get ya back on track.”

  It was a surprisingly smooth operation, even if it was a slow one. Drew set up next to the hill of sand Jimmy had delivered to the backyard. We kept it covered in a giant sheet of plastic to keep it pure for the mortar work, which was torture for Roman. I marked off a corner for him to play in while Drew and I experimented and eventually got the peanut-butter mortar mixing down to an art form. Hope and I took turns hauling water, with Drew stepping in when he was caught up on mixing.

  I made a path out of planks for the wheelbarrow and kept moving it to wherever Jada and Pete were slowly settling one block at a time onto the concrete footer. Jada globbed trowels of mortar in place with a narrow trowel that looked like a pie server, and I was proud of her for diving in without complaint or fear. Her cheeks had neat lines of mortar in stripes that looked like war paint. Pete followed right behind her, setting each block down in her mortar bed, and then using his own, smaller trowel to slather the end of the block with mortar before leveling it with the neon-pink string stretched corner-to-corner. The string had a line level suspended in the middle to make sure every layer of the foundation was perfectly level.

  Once we had a rhythm going it went faster, but it was still going to be a long process before the layers of eight-inch-tall blocks added up to a wall more than six feet tall. My shoulders tensed as I watched Pete slide in twelve-inch increments down the sixty-foot-long back of the house and then slog through the muddiest side by the Ink Spill, which was about thirty feet. When he rounded the corner to the front of the house, he put his hands on his hips and stared at me. His exasperated look probably had something to do with me hovering over him and willing speed vibes at him with a laser-like stare. Still, he didn’t scare me; a guy on his knees with his hands on his hips is not intimidating, even if he is wearing his baseball cap backward.

  “Got a job for ya,” he said.

  Was that a loan-officer smirk I saw on his oh-so-friendly face?

  “You put these blocks here?” He waved at the blocks we’d spent weeks lugging around and stacking neatly near the footer.

  I nodded. Slowly. I had a good idea what was coming next. So maybe a guy on his knees could intimidate me after all.

  “Too close to the footer. We’ll have to build scaffolding on the high parts. Hard to level block any higher than your waist so we’ll have to climb up to it.”

  “So…” I waved at the long line of blocks. Well over a thousand of them. “We have to move all of this?” My voice squeaked a tiny bit.

  “Hmm. ’Bout half.” He pushed onto his feet and stretched, laughing a little.

  Every other sentence came out with a little laugh. Still, I couldn’t help noticing that this one carried more mirth than his average.

  “See that root there? The one that looks like a dog? Start a line there.”

  When I turned my head sideways and squinted, the root Jada had dug out of our future kitchen did look like a puppy. I lifted a block off the top of a stack and started the new row. Drew raised his eyebrows and shook his head at me when he brought the next wheelbarrow load of mortar and shoveled it onto a warped piece of plywood that Jada and Pete used as their mortar palette. My boy was wise enough to know when mistakes were funny straightaway and when the humor had to wait patiently for pissed-off to take its leave.

  We worked until it was too dark to see. We had just started the second layer of block, which was depressing, especially when I looked at the seven-and-a-half-foot-tall marker at the front corner. This phase of the project was going to take a minute or two longer than the weekend I had allotted.

  Drew and I cleaned tools in the icy water at the edge of the pond. The neighbor, Timothy, came out and offered to let us run a hose to his pump house. “I only use the well for landscaping, so I won’t even notice if you tap in, especially this time of year.”

  We thanked him profusely and made plans to get back to work early the next morning.

  The ride home was silent. We were learning to balance a teeter-totter of emotions. On one side there was the huge feeling of accomplishment to see the house rising out of the ground; on the other side was the sense of enormous scale that left us feeling like we were fighting an impossible battle. Then, of course, there was the fact that we all felt like a bully had tossed us off the teeter-totter and stomped on us for three or four hours. Everything hurt. It was impossible to distinguish muscles from joints. We were one big ache, and somewhere at the back of our minds a dim voice reminded us it would feel even worse in the morning.

  Building an entire house in nine months had never looked more impossible.

  Later that week the bank inspector stopped by and said the same. Naturally I spouted all sorts of optimism about our skill and determination, even though we had never been skilled and our determination was failing as the days and weeks passed.

  We connected four long hoses to stretch from Timothy’s pump house to our backyard, but the water pressure was low enough to make it barely worth the trouble. We left the hose in a bucket for a trickle-fill while we continued hauling one pailful after another up by hand from the pond. After we got moving, the hose would cut our trips by almost half, and that was worth it. We had moved into February by the time the blocks were all set, some with Pete’s help and some on our own. I paid him by the hour, and by the time the Donna Fill was delivered to f
ill the entire space we had created with the blocks, I realized I could have hired a crew to set the blocks in two days for about the same price I had paid for us to labor over it for more than a month. Telling myself it was a solid, character-building experience didn’t make me feel much better.

  According to my careful schedule, we were supposed to have the entire house framed already. Instead, we stared in awe at a pyramid-size mountain of Donna Fill—which is a by-product of crushing granite. The gray powder is finer than sand but not quite as fine as talcum powder. We had twenty-seven dump truck loads of the stuff. Jimmy said it was the small dump truck, not the big one, but there was no such thing in my book. A dump truck was a dump truck, and our mountain was sized extra-large. Our block foundation was like an empty pit, and we had to fill it all the way to the top with the Donna Fill powder and pack it down tight before we poured the concrete slab floor on top of it.

  We named our powdery mountain the slush pile and tackled it one shovelful at a time. It seemed impossible that we could move that much dirt in a lifetime, but it turned out to be impressive how much a determined woman could move in sixteen hours of lift-and-toss action.

  Roman was in heaven. He settled into a corner with a bucket of rocks that Hope and Jada had painted to look like cars. They were nothing elaborate, but when they were lost in the mud we could paint replicas rather than worry about a hundred dollars’ worth of Matchbox cars fossilizing in our foundation. When we got too close with our shovels, he shooed us away. “This is my Donna Fill,” he said, drawing a line around his elaborate roads, holes, and hills. He was one of the only two-year-olds on the planet who not only had Donna Fill in their vocabulary but also had a working knowledge of its potential in sandcastle construction and tunnel stability, and its tendency to swallow painted-rock cars.

  To the rest of us, it was the gray curse of the sandman from hell. We had Donna Fill in places it should never have gone. Our cars and house were coated with it. It got in our hair and our eyes, and I even found a handful in the bottom of my purse when I searched for a mint in the grocery-store checkout line.