A Builder's Tale - Chapter Eighteen
A Builder's Tale - Chapter Eighteen
No
Chapter Eighteen
Industry and old contacts renewed.
Chapter Eighteen
Industry and old contacts renewed.
The frame rises.
Wilson bounces down the drive, examining the gray-walled foundation rising in the distance. He is confident this Monday morning that, for the moment, and for the near future, no economic faults or fissures lay before him. His drive, while dusty, contains no lumps or bumps metaphorical or otherwise. He is hopeful as he examines this expansive gray beginning of new concrete walls, up and down, and staggered, not yet supporting a floor.
Late July, and finally, he will race the winter…fight its coming with all the industry he and his crew can muster. The thought of hurry and future cold, make him anxious and full of hustle. With this noted, he is surely fortunate in two short-term certainties. Grace is back in his life, and Tim will continue to pay, at least through the building’s framing, into and through the fall. He will have to. Otherwise, the man’s dollars will be squandered with the cold, and Wilson has explained this.
The morning coffee tastes better, and Wilson wonders if it is the new roasted beans he brews or if his taste buds are now influenced by happiness and hope, his reemerging affair with Grace, and the newfound dollars sitting in his bank account, promised to continue, weekly. Through the framing, the dollars will now be available, and Grace… she will be a fine balance and pleasure to the remaining summer.
His Mr. Potato head… His old saddle estate… The Steven’s home, will soon begin to climb, rising against the horizon sky, obscuring the view above and some of the lake below...the clear meadow vista blocked by wood, glass, and stone… If not forever, for at least a hundred years, if the homes in the old club estates of Beauville are an example of longevity…
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Through the last week of July, and into August, no clients bothered Wilson. There were no problems with anything other than those normal to new construction. Fortunately, the jet flew elsewhere as Tim planned and then began to build his new restaurant chain, while Daphne, industrious in her own way, arranged a fall trip to Europe, accepting that a Christmas deadline was unrealistic, leaving a message on his machine, “not to worry.” She had decided to spend the Christmas season in Megeve. And no, the jet would not be fast enough or large enough, and the Queen Mary was just too slow. She, Tim, and Philippe were planning to fly commercial. Daphne did not bother him, and for the entire month of August… no Tim, friends of Daphne or Philippe did, either.
While the town of Beauville shouted out the summer, and while others lounged in the heat, the dog days all around them, Wilson built. Not even the August heat and languid days could slow him. His only problems were the Wainwrights and old Conrad’s howling, and the genuine concerns that he would not make it… might not be able to close in the structure before the winter’s coming cold.
He remembered and regained the reasons that had caused him to pursue this business, in the first place. The absolute pleasure and enthusiasm he felt for the process… Not the money, not the people, and surely not the clients, but simply the sheer childlike joy and fulfillment… a kid stamping in a mud puddle, building twig boats, damming streams as water poured about his feet and legs. Building made him that kid again. And the designing only added to his satisfaction. He realized the reasons for his labor, sensing odd as it might seem, that he might grow to love this building… His and the Steven’s best of bad… because it was his own.
Wilson had called his crew. This time with no ‘boy who called wolf’ howling. They arrived as wanderers, reuniting vagabonds who went from job to job, some a year long, and others only a few weeks… large homes and extensive remodels, roof jobs, and new kitchens… All were pleased to be reuniting on a Wilson house. This, because an Abernathy project might last years, requesting and demanding quality, while providing the rewards both psychic and financial that came with fine fabrication. Some arrived in dilapidated trucks belching smoke, their beds banging, clanging, rust hanging from the fenders, others in a statement of carpenter well-being and status, the new and shiny truck. Over the next week, they all appeared at their own schedules, and with them they brought industry, camaraderie, and the confusion of any reuniting team... Indian Dick, and born-again Dean, his foreman Potts Jones, Randy, Terry, Jeremiah, Joseph and Waltner.
These men were carpenters of various abilities. Some were best at framing, and others superior at finish-work, but all were well-rounded craftsmen. Wilson did not support hierarchies or job distinction. There were no laborers on his jobs. He and his entire crew, shouldered, schlepped, and lifted, even cleaning as one team. And though he was the boss and the designer, he enjoyed the camaraderie of these men, who sometimes saw him as an enigma, an architect, but one that actually knew how to use the tools, and one that worked.
In fact, in moments of frustration at his constant attention and participation, certain of them might think and sometimes suggest that he depart, go hang at the office, as did most of his breed… the sentiment “oh just go find more jobs”. Still, they respected his carpentry skills, something rarely the case for others that they worked for. And, it was all part of the show for Wilson, this process of construction, the sounds and scents, the smell of new sawed wood, pine and fir, the dust from saws and the bang of hammers, the noise of compressors limping, roaring, wheezing, providing air to the pneumatic guns that fired nails like so many machine guns.
It began as it always did. First, they studied the foundation. Was it crooked, was it straight and square, and if out of level, how much, and where? Some men did this, and some made new sawhorses, others brought in equipment, ladders, scaffolds, and saws. Still others oiled the guns and checked the blades, replaced brushes, and checked on cords and motors, preparing themselves and the tools for progress.
Where the foundation varied (and this was certain, the question being how much) Wilson decided how and where to fix it. Sill plates were adjusted for square and level, the goal a platform to support the main floor deck, which was also the ceiling for the lower level. This foundation was not too bad. The heights varied an inch or so, and no corners were off by over two inches. Appalling mistakes for a perfectionist, but for Northern Michigan cement contractors, acceptable and closing on perfection. Nothing was so out of whack that it could not be shimmed and fixed and straightened!
To facilitate this, the men ran strings everywhere, not for height, and not for plumb or level, but to chart the proper building lines. Indian Dick and Randy assembled a transit- builders level, peering through its tiny lens, noting the up and down of the foundation’s walls, marking any variance with waterproof markers on the rough cement, while others followed-fixing. Then Wilson and Potts came behind them, laying out the bond and sill for joists and beams and the solid blocks that would transfer loads to points below to carry floors and roof from stories higher.
When the sprawling hundred jogging feet of the Steven’s foundation was adjusted, straight and level, they installed the first-floor deck, the joists, and then the structo-board (a ubiquitous plywood replacement/substitute that would swell without attention) which was sealed to keep the building’s main deck secure from the swelling bumps and dips inevitable, given Beauville’s summer shower cycles and the heavy rains, thunderstorms and gales, that would arrive with fall.
This sealing operation was not exact and the furthest thing from cautious. Rather, the men dumped out the buckets, one after another, five gallons at a time, sweeping, rolling and squeegeed with their feet... some running and sliding, playing, balanced by their squeegees before them, preservative hockey sticks, the liquid saturating everything with the pungent odor of petroleum distillates. There would be many cycles of wet and rain, sun and drying, before the floor was covered, closed-in, tight and safe, from Michigan’s fickle weather.
Working on the Steven’s lot, with the view large both up and down the lake, they watched the boats pass by… dense as insects on the weekends, fewer during the week. Some were sail, but more were powered, that new type of craft of too much in too little feet, rising like a swollen bean… top heavy above the water. There were trawlers too, slow and shapely, and an assortment of drug thug boats, Cigarettes and Sabers and others like them, racing up and down the shore, oddly, driven by the over-stuffed, the affluent, who in conservative northern Michigan would have frowned at their water rocket’s original purpose.
Wilson remembered, when he was young it had been a sailing lake, and also a lake, much quieter, where even on the busiest high season days there were only twenty or thirty boats in view across an expanse of many miles, yachts of style and shape, once upon a time almost all of them sailboats. Different from today, when only now and then a boat sailed by, when most of them were power. These new craft, a sad contrast and compromise to the present hurry of man, he thought. And worse yet, were those tiny wining things, jet skis that raced up and down and back and forth to no purpose but play and noise. Watching… Wet Buck Rogers warriors would flash across his mind… thoughts of water wings from hell. And when their high-pitched drones screamed across the lake, he pointed the nail guns at them, imagining their destruction. He preferred windsurfers, the sigh of wave and wind, the silence of no engines… Wondering do Tim and Daphne own these too? Probably… he could only imagine the costume Tim would don for riding a jet ski.
However; this was all distraction, because the house was underway. And with his reuniting team came the men’s normal sizing up of one another, and while most of these men had worked together before; there was always the back and forth normal to the beginning of any job. Like a pack of wolves or a tribe of monkeys, animals establishing dominance, they found their roles… tugging, pushing, with speech, and action, to see who could run what, the best, and who would be in charge of whom. Indian Dick and Dean, Randy and Joseph, Potts and all the rest.
It was not long before Indian Dick was telling stories about others, matter of fact implanting, while attempting to obscure his reasons, that Dean even though now born again was still quite probably, a firebug… And did Wilson remember the time Dean had almost burned down that house three years before, and Wilson should watch out… watch out for Dean.
This event was one Wilson could not forget, because it had been his house, the one he now lived in, and Dean, while still a whisky man, had burned the trash in the dark, late into the night. Wilson remembered arriving early, the lumber pile still smoldering, the plastic trash cans gone, melted, forever turned into plastic shapes and tentacles reminding of dripping Dali watches.
That first week Wilson roamed the structure, tool belt hanging on his waist, nail sacks banging against his thighs, hammers, and squares clanging as he hurried north, south, east, and west, ensuring that all was rising proper. He was building… Finally … and for that first week and the next, nothing went amiss. No hassles found him… the structure climbing daily, his paper image, his imagination becoming real. He should have been happy, actualized, and fulfilled. He was, but there was the nagging thought of Grace who had vanished, left, just as they had started. Splashing down into his life again, her ripples widening pulling and tugging at his desire, she had vanished, a Chimera, a perhaps. Not quite… But Tuesday when he had looked for her, driving by her church to tell her of his progress, to have dinner, and to sleep with her again… He had instead found her sister, summoned short term, she said, to care for Barney and Bezel. Grace had, said the sister, “You know Grace, she got a call from New York, she’s gone, skipped town. She’s in New York. Some bond guy called her about a tapestry, then last night, she’s gone back to France.”
“Did she leave any message?” he had asked. “Oh, yes, I remember you, you’re Wilson. She said to tell you she would call; I think there was something the New York guy wanted her to look at. Where did she say this time…I remember, she’s gone somewhere in the Loir valley.”
This was the nagging ‘what the fuck’ of Wilson’s days. But during the day he put Grace aside and watched, managed and hammered as the building climbed higher… from the first-floor deck… the main floor walls… the second floor awaiting decking. And then it was September. That first week of that transition month, when the weather could be summer and the next day fall. Where there was a warning in the air, even on the days when it was almost ninety, a tinge, a smell of fall, crisp and acrid in the heat. Beware it will be cold soon… Beware it said, and Wilson hustled on about the business of building, understanding that he was up that paddle-less-creek, because it would not be long before the fall gales came, cold with their humidity, to bind up fingers and make joints creak, to make the bruises harsher at the start of every day. Beware, the warning shouted, grabbing hold of his synapses, senses, and emotions... Beware, you northern Michigan builders of September. Beware!
Yet, beneath the warnings and in front of them, came to his good fortune and surprise, day after day of calm. Days with no breeze, clear skies and heat, first hot through the latter days of August and then warm and Indian into and through September. It was as if the Gods of troubled buildings had provided a reprieve after all the crap of the Steven’s home’s beginning, shouting from the heavens, we will help you now. Last summer’s indecision was all in jest.
Yes, it was unusual, and through almost fifty days the men worked six-day weeks, throwing away their last of summer and casting aside the beautiful fall, selling not only themselves but their season and their lives for sale, for Steven-Daphne dollars... For the Steven’s pampered whims, which by the end of September, had again asserted themselves through a barrage of e-mails and faxes.
PUMPKIN FESTIVAL
But it was not until the annual fall celebration of the Pumpkin festival when the seeds, so to speak, hit the fan. The land near the lake and around Beauville through some misguided or perhaps benign assortment of soil and temperature was pumpkin grower’s heaven. Some years the farmers planted few and some years many more. But springing up around the fields that bordered the roads and shown against the deep blue of Lake Michigan… every October, globular orange assortments of this bright squash appeared. Like so many silent heads, some in formation, and others in great mounds of rumpled crenulate orange, they dotted the landscape awaiting Libbys, families, and Halloween enchanted children… And the many trucks from downstate and beyond that would haul the pumpkins away to the markets and processing plants of America.
In the fall, you could see them truck after truck in line and waiting to be filled by giant conveyors. These lifting the pumpkins high and then dumping them, bushels, hectares of them into semis that then raced south, west, and east, with pumpkin bounty.
And in this season of orange, Beauville had an excuse to attract more tourists, one last-gasp before the skiing began and Christmas tumbled through, to attract the car crowds from downstate, to shop and squander dollars, with the merchants of the town.
The festival, thought up in jest over twenty years before by a team of bored and drunken real estate agents, and some local lawyers, was initially based on the Pumpkin Smash, a vodka sugar, tabasco’d, pureed, creamy pumpkin concoction. Now, known by some as the Beau-vile bomb, this had become a key attraction, and it anchored the festival to the area. This mixture of lots of vodka, and depending on the establishment, sometimes little pumpkin, and no cream what so ever, had morphed and expanded through the years into an entire week of celebration occurring in the middle of October.
The season, the time of year, perhaps the almost fifty days of relative tranquility, who knows, but concurrent with and perhaps because of it, during the same week as the Pumpkin Festival the Steven’s project descended into chaos once again. It could have been the Pumpkin Smash, or simply Janet Wainwright’s continued annoyance at the construction noise and confusion...her road, always full and damaged, her husband howling. Or it might have been the Pageant of the Dancing Pumpkins… But it was a serendipity of sorts, a synergy of events that occurred the middle week of the month of the magnificent, orange, harvest moon. Because it was Janet’s annual achievement to orchestrate, conduct and direct the Pumpkin pageant and all the little pumpkins, and sadly, it was here things ran amok.
This year, more than recent ones, Janet had thrown herself into preparation. Starting in August, she had been writing new songs, often to old standard melodies, but also to some of her own. To these she had added her lyrics along with some of Conrad’s, ones he wrote when he was not wasted, producing the ditties he often did... those off-key in all aspect inspirations, such as this one.
Oh, little maid in your pumpkin suit
You might think of me as a wizened fruit.
But had you seen me, in my heyday?
You would have surely, looked my way.
These accompanied by an inappropriate leer and hearty cackles.
He made these up to annoy his wife and rarely said them to the little Pumpkin ballerina’s except on those occasions when the scotch had the better of him. Which, since his crashing mishap off the deck, now months ago, was most of the time. This year Janet bought bottles and kept him upstairs without his crutches when the little girls came by… Not wishing to see Conrad’s leer, or self-indulgent despair while the little, and not so little women practiced their twirls, their dance, and singing. Or to listen to his rhymes, guffaws and jests at the new costumes displayed on the piano, costumes stitched by those other ladies of Beauville who helped at Pumpkin time, the ‘Seamstress’ Daughters of the Pumpkin Patch.
It was probably the disruption of construction that had caused this year’s renewed industry, Janet needing something to occupy her mind and block the thoughts, the constant disturbance of Conrad, and the noise of saws and hammers. The ever-present reality of new neighbors on their old land. It was likely digger Brown, who had set the stage.
Because like most homes on the old acreage bordering Lake Arnaud, in Longbottom estates, there was no convenient sewer. The town and treatment plant were[h1] too far away, and even if there could have been a sewer line run from town, it would have been prohibited, limited, and lobbied against, by those who sought to limit septic systems and sewage removal in order to limit growth by restricting the health permits that new buildings and development required.
Janet Wainwright was of this crowd, and Brown had over the years come up against her off and on about his digging, his destruction of the land, his development of ‘her lake’. And this year Brown had chosen the middle of October to install the pump-back systems now required by Longbottom’s development and the Steven’s new house. Forest and meadows that were once part of the old Wainwright place, sold to Longbottom by Conrad’s sister, along with her shoreline.
Such can be the mix of conflict. And, it was on a Tuesday morning when Janet was polishing off her choreography, adding notes here and there and fixing one lyric or another, when she heard Brown in the distance, digging. When she heard the chain saws roar, and when a smell of diesel drifted through her open windows from the East. A morning when Conrad had already sent her sideways, hobbling in circles around the room, three sheets to the wind by 8 AM, reciting one of his new ditties, breaking into song with a Pumpkin Tootoo on his head. This sort of Tuesday, when she had gone to investigate the noise… Her pumpkin pageant concentration, fleeting.
Things are sometimes worse than you imagine and this morning as Janet crossed the road and headed up the hill, she imagined with foreboding the destruction riding the chain saws whine. Perhaps they would only cut a few. Perhaps it would not need to be that big a clearing. But Brown’s few, Wilson’s few, the Stevens few, Longbottom’s few, were oh so way too many. When she stared at the rising stumps defining a clearing one hundred feet wide and two hundred long, she realized her complete failure, seeing her three years of fighting Longbottom’s development all for naught. The trees were crashing even as she moved towards them, Brown’s men tumbling many, while marking and selecting more, creating a clearing horrendous in dimension.
It is often best to tiptoe into conflict, or just never go there in the first place, diplomacy… the better path (her father had been a diplomat). However, at that moment, negotiation was not even a dot on Janet’s possibility spectrum. When she saw the rising smoke, the spinning chain saw chips, and the trees, ‘her trees’, tumbling...the forest, ‘her forest’ vanishing and now murdered, the logs stacked like so many coffins from some Western Front between what looked like sandy loam clustered bomb craters, holes remaining from roots ripped from the ground, inverse moguls left by so many tumbled trees… She went berserk. Striding with even longer strides, ten league boot strides, purposeful and straight towards him, Brown watched this stork like woman as she shouted.
“Brown, you bastard, and Brown, you so many more expletives that it would take a paragraph, a half a page, to list them.
“Brown you son of a bitch, you born-again Cretan...Brown you…”
Her shouts were so loud that all the men stopped and stared, big men, massive big bellied, big armed, big chawing, big drinking... men. They all stopped and watched as this ‘one of them’, this ‘one of those other folks... the summer folks’, this Wainwright-wealthy, headed straight towards Brown. And Brown watched Janet Wainwright, this pipe cleaner shaped, stingy, stringy dervish, who was closing fast. His massive forearms folded above his belly, looking down from his large black Caterpillar throne, his large head turned towards Janet’s approaching cacophonous shouting… On his face, an expression of humility, until he turned his “born again” eyes skyward toward the heavens, until humility transformed into a smirk, and with his hands clasped in mock-prayer, he started laughing.
At this moment, Wilson also entered the clearing, hiking up the other trail. He had heard the chain saws too and had come to investigate. His intention was to make certain that Brown put the field in the correct location while double checking that he was not short-changed on the pipe’s quality or over billed for quantity. Janet had been ahead of him and on the other side, so when Wilson entered the clearing, Brown sat before him, laughing even as Janet shouted her disdain. Seeing Wilson, she switched foes and launched into him as the certain cause of her troubles and the tree’s destruction.
“You damn developer!” she shouted. “Look at my trees, this clearing. How can you do this?”
“Money,” said Wilson, “I have no taste. And of course, no talent. It is only money, didn’t you know? And anyway, talk to Longbottom, shout at the Stevens, not us.” And then to echo Mongol in Blazing Saddles, he said “Brown just pawn in game of Life...Right Brown,”
“That’s me,” said Brown, “and born again too. It’s me and Jesus, Janet.”
With this statement, and the laughter now not only from Brown, but the crew as well. Janet shouted some more obscenities, then walked to the largest “ape” in the clearing and grabbed his chain saw. A tugging match began, and the man yelled for Brown. And clearly, there was no way that this stork of a woman, tall as she was, could wrest the chain saw from the kielbasa fingers of this fellow, but she tried, and in tugging fell to the ground. Shouting “damn you Brown, damn you, damn, you.”
“Just give her the saw,” said Brown. “Take it, Janet.” Brown was pointing now. “We need help anyway. Cut that one over there.”
But Janet was not about cutting trees, and she moved on to the next man, grabbing his saw, too. Then, to Brown and Wilson’s amazement, she turned and walked away, back down the hill, with the chain saws leaving a trail of smoke behind her.
“What shall we do boss,” said the largest fellow?
“Just let her go, get the others from the truck. I’ll retrieve them later.”
Then, turning to Wilson, Brown said, “Pissed, isn’t she?”
“Seems to be,” said Wilson.
Then both men laughed again. There was nothing else to do.
This was not true for Janet, as she walked down the hill admonishing herself for acting rashly, watching the saw’s chains first stop then spin, jerking to their motor’s sputter. She tried to turn one off, but could not find the switch. The other, she threw to the ground, hoping it would cease its whine. Recalcitrant, like so many small engines, it did as it wished, continuing to belch and sputter as Janet lugged it, spinning next to her right thigh. By the time she reached the road and the Steven’s drive, her pants were stained with oil, and enough had become enough! Wilson’s crew observed her progress as she walked by, straight towards the water’s edge, and then tossed the chain saw into the lake, steaming, then finally silenced by sinking.
Most of the men took only a passing interest, except for Indian Dick, who stared a little longer, then commented to Randy. “Holy shit! Brown ain’t going to like this.” and Randy replying “Not likely! You know, Dick, did I ever tell you about how my grandfather sliced up his leg with one of those things? Well, he was, cutting out there, you know, back by the old Kapurnski place when that bull, you remember, that old giant bull, the one with that big sack, well she ran out in front of him and with one thing and another... the chain saw,”… Dick turning away, saying “You told me… Before!” then repeating “Brown sure ain’t going to like this.”
And as you might imagine, Dick was correct in his assumption.