The Book of Old Houses

by Sarah Graves

  But then came the part about me going up the ladder, check, and now I was in my most unfavorite position; i.e., anywhere more than a foot off the ground and with nothing to hold on to because my hands were full.

  “But . . . oh, all right. Are you sure you should . . . ?” She came over obediently and gripped the ladder, steadying it.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am. It’s my dad’s idea. I’m going forward with the execution, that’s all.”

  “Forgive me for thinking that’s a really unfortunate choice of words,” Ellie replied.

  But she went on holding the ladder steady while I climbed another step and then another. “Hurry up,” she said. “Because I don’t like this, Jake, I really do not . . .”

  My head rose above gutter level, which is usually about the time when up and down start feeling interchangeable to me. A crow flapped by, shot me a beady look of disdain, and cawed mockingly.

  Okay, now: Hammer. Nails and sheet metal. Confidence level way out of proportion to my actual experience . . .

  Well, heck, if I worried about that I’d never have bought the house in the first place. And anyway, how hard could it be to . . .

  “Yikes!” I shoved the hammer under my arm and grabbed the gutter with both hands. “Ellie, what are you—?”

  “Sorry. My nose itched.” She smiled up at me. “You okay?”

  “Other than so scared that I can feel my heart beating in my eyebrows? Fine,” I said irritably. “Don’t let go again.”

  The rope needed to come down over the edge of the porch roof just about . . . there. Carefully I positioned the rectangle of sheet metal atop the shingles where it would serve as a sort of edge guard; otherwise I could imagine the rope with the bathtub’s weight on it sawing right through the roof.

  I’d punched holes in the sheet metal first with a hammer and nail, too, to make it easier to pound the roofing nails through it. Next with some six-inch PVC pipe meant for a drainage-ditch—in the spring, my driveway resembles an irrigation canal—I made a channel for the line to run in, so it wouldn’t slip off the roof’s edge at an inopportune moment.

  Such as for instance any moment; I used the drain holes in the pipe to nail it over the sheet metal. Finally Ellie passed the rope’s end up to me—a feat all in itself—and I stood on tiptoe to get it through the pipe’s far end.

  This, however, turned out to mean crawling out onto the porch roof. “Jake,” Ellie warned, “maybe you’d better . . . Oh!”

  Because just then that crow dove at me, grazing my hair with his clawed feet while shouting something unpleasant in crow-ese. Something like Die, scummy invader of my sky territory!

  Or possibly just Oops, I thought your head was a nest.

  Either way, I lost my grip. My right hand went one direction, my left hand the other, and the ladder went abruptly from under my feet.

  “Ellie!” I cried as the condition of the fasteners holding the gutter to the roof’s edge grew interesting. You hardly ever think of gutters as holding much up but rainwater and leaves. . . .

  But now one held me. My feet dangled uselessly as my grip on the gutter loosened; also, the gutter was made of aluminum, I suddenly recalled as the thing began bending inexorably.

  “Ellie!” I whispered. Nails pulled out one after the other: cree-e-eak!

  “Here,” Ellie said, a dozen feet below me. The ladder clanked as she lifted it.

  My sneaker toes touched a ladder rung. But straightening a ladder while someone is already standing on it—or trying to stand on it—is a pretty good trick, too, so it was still quite a while before I reached solid ground again, heart thudding.

  “There.” Ellie tactfully ignored the fact that I had nearly killed us both. The ladder had missed her head by inches when it fell, and the hammer, when I dropped it, by not much more.

  “Now, if you want my opinion,” she went on briskly . . .

  I didn’t. And I was running out of time.

  Inside, the tub still loomed on the stairs, wedged in on one side by a big oaken banister post and on the other side by the cracked plaster.

  “What,” Ellie inquired sternly, “are you thinking?”

  “You’ll see,” I told her just as Sam came in carrying more laundry.

  “Listen,” I said to him, “I need you to crawl out on the porch roof. I’ll toss you the end of a line, and you feed it through the pipe, okay?”

  Years of messing about in sailboats had made Sam so agile, if you saw him climbing around in the rigging of one, you’d just think the local circus had lost its chimpanzee.

  Cooperatively, my son put down the laundry, went upstairs, and stuck a leg out the window. I ran outside again. There I grabbed the line from where it had fallen with the hammer and the ladder.

  “Okay,” I called, tossing it up. Sam caught it acrobatically on the first try and fed it easily through the PVC pipe.

  “Want me to tie that for you, too?” he offered, waving at the truck.

  “No, thanks. I was the one who taught you how to tie your shoes, remember?”

  He shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

  Then he returned to filling my washing machine with the world’s smallest laundry load. Once upon a time, in his opinion, if you could close the machine without standing on it, it wasn’t full. But not anymore; caution was his watchword these days even in trivial matters.

  Ellie surveyed the scene. “This looks risky.”

  “Oh, come on. What could be risky about it? It’s not as if anyone has to go back up a ladder.”

  The on-the-roof portion of the program was over. I threw a couple of half hitches confidently onto the towing bar.

  “Drat,” I said. “We can’t pull the tub up; it’s just too heavy. Maybe heavy enough to snap even that big rope.”

  Ellie’s expression said the half hitches ought to be thrown around me. I had a sudden inspiration. “We can lower it down, though,” I said. “Slowly.”

  “How? It’s still stuck in the . . .”

  Stairway. Yes. “If we unstick it enough to get it around the corner and aimed down the stairs,” I explained, “we could use the truck to ease it the rest of the way.”

  “Hmm.” Ellie was frowning. “By backing the truck toward the house? Well, maybe. But I still think—”

  The back door slammed: Sam, who didn’t like sitting around waiting for the washer.

  “No more thinking. It’s time for action,” I declared.

  Which was probably just one of the many incredibly stupid things I said that day.

  But it was a doozy.

  • • •

  Another fifteen minutes and I’d bashed out a piece of the stairway wall, loosening the tub from the dented place where it was trapped against plaster and lath. Next, Ellie helped check the line tied to my father’s truck, and made sure also that it was fastened securely through the tub’s plug hole and tied there with more half hitches.

  “I don’t know about this, Jake,” she said for the hundredth time.

  “I do,” I retorted. “All I need now is to get the banister post loose and pull it out.”

  Banisters are built to be sturdy. But luckily this one was put together originally like a big wooden puzzle. Once I removed the decorative wooden ball atop the first post and lifted off a length of railing by tapping it from below with a padded hammer, a whole section came out easily, nearly freeing the other side of the tub.

  “Do you think one of us should go out and make the line taut before you take the final post away?” Ellie asked. “Because right now it’s the only thing holding the . . .”

  Tub up.

  “Hmm. Good idea.” Even though I thought the tub’s weight would keep it from moving until I gave it a hard shove, we might as well get all the preparations over with in advance.

  Or so I told myself optimistically. “You go pull the truck forward,” I said.

  When she had the truck positioned properly so the line was nearly-but-not-quite taut, I’d lean on it. My weight plus the little
bit of slack and the broken-out section of plaster would surely give the tub enough room and reason enough to turn on the landing, aligning itself with the stairs.

  And then we could back the truck up, lowering the tub in a controlled manner. Of course, I’d still need to get someone to haul it the rest of the way outside. . . .

  But the worst would be over. Right, sure it would . . . So anyway, Ellie started the truck while I perched in the window, ready to shout.

  That was when I noticed the next problem: a lot of extra rope. A good thick line that long was expensive, so my dad hadn’t wanted to cut it. And I’d tied it a little differently than he had; i.e., at the end instead of somewhere in the middle. As a result, yards and yards of it remained when the truck reached the end of the driveway.

  Sam returned, sauntering along the sidewalk, and saw what was happening. Amiably he began directing traffic: three cars and a motorcycle cruised by, their drivers gaping at the truck, the line tied to the back of it, and me in the window.

  The truck inched forward; so far, so good. But then a sound came from the hall: a faint, crisp snap! like someone breaking a toothpick.

  A bad thought hit me. The post I’d left in place couldn’t be breaking, though. It was so sturdy, there was no reason for it to be . . .

  Snap! Pop! And then, much to my horror, CRR-A-A-ACCKK!

  “Ellie!” I yelled out the window. Because if the line didn’t get pulled taut right this minute . . . “Go!”

  Later she insisted she’d heard me shouting “No!” and in response stopped the truck, hauled the emergency brake on, then jumped out to see what was wrong.

  I ran for the hall; there were at least thirty feet of loose rope left, more than enough to—

  BANG! The banister post broke off violently and flew across the hall. Suddenly freed, the tub swiveled hard on the carpeted step and began slanting downward.

  Now it was aimed the way I wanted it, but my plan included a restraining force: the rope, which was still slack. Slowly, the tub began sliding, first one inch.

  Then two. But it would be all right, I told myself; the tub would crash all the rest of the way down, probably, but I could repair whatever. . . .

  And then I saw them: two dogs grinning up at me, one red and one black, both clearly wondering eagerly what new game this was, and how best they could manage to get in on it.

  “Git! Go! Go on now, both of you, get out of—”

  “Jake?” Ellie called through the back door.

  The tub slid six inches. The animals watched with the kind of keen, unknowing fascination that probably first gave rise to the term dumb dog.

  And that would soon give rise to the phrase dead dogs.

  Panicked, I jumped into the tub—bad move, since my weight made it even more unstable—and then out, intending to scramble downstairs, grab the dogs, and shove them out of the way.

  But before I could do any of that, the tub itself let go.

  I hurtled downstairs ahead of it as the damned thing raced at me: thud-thud-thud-thud, popping balusters out one after another.

  “Jake!” Ellie shouted. “Get—”

  Out of the way: You betcha. Six steps left; I soared over them in a Flying Wallenda leap, seized two dog collars in one mighty grab of my left hand and the newel post with my right, and swung all three of us wildly around the corner into the dining room, where the dogs kept going and I fell down.

  The tub continued thudding. With the kind of momentum it had, it was going to blast right through the front wall and out onto the lawn.

  “Oof!” said Ellie from behind a recliner in the parlor.

  I thought she was hiding, which to me made a tremendous amount of sense; just then if I could have gotten into a bomb shelter, I would have.

  But then the recliner moved. Meanwhile and without any conscious intention on my part at all, my brain began racing through a series of diagnostic routines:

  Dogs safe? Check. Move arms and legs? Check. Ellie . . . ?

  “Ellie!” She finished shoving the recliner to the foot of the stairs as the tub paused.

  For the space of a breath, I even thought the pause might be permanent.

  But then it charged again: thudthudTHUD!!!

  “Ellie . . .” I flew at her, crossing the tub’s path to seize her shoulders; the two of us hurtled past the foot of the stairs with the massive iron thing racing at us, so close now that I could smell the kapow! on its breath.

  We hit the parlor rug just as the bathtub crashed into the recliner, shoving it all the way across the front hall. The recliner slammed into the front door with a sound like an accordion being dropped off a building; then something deep inside it broke with a loud, metallic sproing!

  The footrest popped out. I held my breath, looked for the dogs. Both of them obviously thought this was the best exercise they’d ever had, and could we do it again?

  “Good . . . heavens,” murmured Ellie, checking herself for injuries and—miraculously—not finding any.

  Blinking, Sam peered in. His eyes studied me, the dogs, Ellie, the recliner, the tub, and the stairs, which looked like a meteor had crashed into them. The front door had (a) a jagged hole the size of a bathtub in it, and (b) a bathtub in it.

  “I see you got the tub downstairs,” he said mildly. “Way to go, Mom.”

  He bit into the apple he was holding, chewed, swallowed. “I hate to bother you when you’re busy, but I can’t find Bella. Do you have any more laundry detergent?”

  “There was some in the bed of my pickup,” said my father.

  I hadn’t even heard him come in, no doubt because I was busy listening to the equivalent of an atomic bomb going off in my home.

  He eyed the destruction. “I had a feeling I shouldn’t leave you alone,” he remarked. Then: “Where is Bella, anyway?”

  It struck me that I hadn’t seen her for a while, either, and that she surely would have come running if she’d heard what was going on.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She was right here a little while ago. Anyway, I thought you were—”

  He shook his head. “Changed my mind. First things first.”

  Opening his hand he revealed a small gold object: a ring.

  “I’ll find her,” he said. And it was only by means of extreme daughterly begging that I persuaded him to haul the old tub the rest of the way out the broken front door, instead.

  That took care of the immediate present. And I’d be able to keep Bella busy and my father out of her way for the rest of the day, I was sure of it. But I could see from his look of calm purpose that the reprieve was temporary.

  Sooner or later, we were in for an explosion bigger than the one I’d just made.

  And I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it.

  For sheer domestic misery, nothing quite beats bathing in a washtub. A big washtub, but still.

  And it didn’t help any that the only person I wanted pouring tepid water over me while I stood naked and shivering had already gone to work. The minute he’d heard about the party, in fact, Wade had made sure he would be nowhere nearby at any time during the whole day.

  He loved me, he’d said.

  But a man had his limits. So I poured the water over myself.

  Also, by now the house was full of people—Bella, the Dawtons, who’d returned to be kitchen staff for the event, and who knew who else coming in unannounced from the library or the school board or the PTA, with yet another tray of party refreshments.

  As a result, it was not only a washtub I bathed in; it was a washtub in the cellar, with Bella delivering kettles at regular intervals. Although not regular enough; the best, most efficient way to cool heated water quickly, I learned that afternoon to my sorrow, is to pour it into a washtub.

  At least there was a drain in the cellar floor, put there by my father right after the pipe burst and washed the old book out. I’d thought he might have trouble finding an outflow pipe downhill enough to hook the drain to, seeing as the cellar floor wa
s considerably below ground level and the drain had to be lower than that.

  Because of gravity, and so on. But as it turned out, the water main that had burst needed afterward to be dug up all the way to the street. And when the backhoe opened the trench, the sewer pipe turned out to be there, too, only about a foot deeper.

  So he’d put the drain in; now I watched soapy water swirl down it as I tried and failed to raise the kettle (a) high enough and (b) angled enough to (c) rinse the shampoo out of my hair without (d) spilling too much.

  Also I was cold, wet, covered in goosebumps and bruises, and shivering so vigorously I could barely hold on to the kettle at all. If my teeth didn’t quit chattering soon I’d be able to hire myself out as the accompanist to a flamenco dancer.

  Now I understood why in the old days, people only did this kind of thing once a week whether they needed it or not. As far as I could tell, a bath in a washtub was the surest way to catch your death short of actually injecting yourself with pneumonia germs.

  But it was still better than going upstairs. From the patter of feet above my head, it was obvious that the party preparations were accelerating and that the ladies would soon be arriving.

  I poured another kettle over my head and shivered.

  Bert Merkle grinned knowingly at Dave DiMaio.

  Standing at the end of the Eastport IGA checkout counter while Merkle’s purchases were totaled up and bagged, Dave gazed expressionlessly back. He wasn’t sure why, but now that he was actually here, his brooding fear of the other man had evaporated completely.

  Although not his anger. He’d been following Merkle around most of the day, not bothering to try hiding his interest. For his part, Merkle seemed to accept Dave’s dogged shadowing without protest.

  He’d recognized Dave instantly, of course. And to Dave’s relief there had been no fake surprise, insincere smile, or hideously false Hey, how are ya? from his old college classmate.

  Only silence, and a long, somehow disconcerting look of calm gratification. It was as if Dave’s sudden appearance early that morning outside his trailer was merely what Merkle had been expecting.