Chapter 8 - The Reconstruction
The summer turned wet and green.
By the middle of July, the rains had brought the creek up to the edge of the lower bottom, but just as Nate had said, the water stayed in the willow swale, held back by the high gravel ridge Arthur had built with a slip-scraper sixty years before. While the corn on Ronald’s high ground began to curl and fire from the shallow limestone beneath the topsoil, our forty acres of valley bottom stayed dark, cool, and knee-deep in wild clover and orchard grass.
Nate worked like a man possessed by three generations of ghosts.
Every morning at five, before his shift at the implement dealership, he was out on the porch roof with a bundle of cedar shingles between his knees, his hammer driving home five-penny galvanized nails with a rhythmic tap-crack, tap-crack that woke the red-winged blackbirds in the cattails. In the evenings, after the sun dropped behind the timber and the heat broke, we hauled trailer loads of limestone from the creek bed to rebuild the pier under the back porch where the milk can had rested.
We didn't hire a contractor. We didn't buy new drywall.
We went to the old abandoned schoolhouse down by the crossroads—the one the township had abandoned in fifty-six—and bought twelve hundred board-feet of tongue-and-groove heart pine from the trustee for three hundred dollars. Nate planed every board by hand on an old Sears jointer he set up under the walnut tree, the sweet, resinous curls of wood shavings piling up around his ankles until the whole yard smelled of sixty-year-old pine and linseed oil.
Opal came out every Tuesday and Thursday.
She didn't stay in her apartment in town anymore. She had packed two cardboard suitcases with her quilts, her cast-iron skillets, and the framed portrait of Arthur taken during the mobilization for the First World War, and she had moved into the small downstairs bedroom where her brothers had slept during the hard winter of thirty-six.
She sat on the porch in an old wicker rocker we’d found in the loft of the sheep shed, a tin basin of early June peas in her lap, her thumbs popping the pods with a steady, dry snap-shuck, snap-shuck that seemed to match the sound of Nate’s saw in the parlor.
"Your father called the pastor yesterday," she told me one afternoon while we were stringing beans on the steps.
I stopped, the knife resting against my thumb. "What did he want?"
"He wanted Brother Thomas to come out here and talk to Nathan about the fifth commandment," Opal said, her mouth twitching with that dry, quiet humor that had survived seventy years of trouble. "Honor thy father and mother. He told Thomas that Nathan was harboring an un-Christian spirit and that it was causing talk among the deacons."
"What did Brother Thomas say?"
"He asked Ronald if he’d paid the note on the north eighty yet," she replied, tossing a handful of empty pods into the basket at her feet. "Thomas’s father was on the school board that had to buy Arthur’s timber in thirty-six so the children wouldn't freeze. People in this township have long memories, Emily. They don't talk about things at the grocery store, but they remember who paid their bills and who let their cousins carry the water."
By August, the kitchen was finished.
We didn't put down new linoleum. Nate spent four days with a scraper and a heat gun, pulling up three layers of gray Sears plastic until he reached the original yellow heart-pine floorboards Arthur had laid with square-cut iron nails. We scrubbed them with boiling water and lye until the grain stood up like velvet, then sealed them with three coats of tung oil that gave the whole room the warm, deep glow of a violin casing.
The pantry casing was left untouched.
Nate had sanded away the grease and the flaking lead paint around the door, but when he reached the column of knife marks, he laid down his paper and took out a small bottle of clear varnish. He brushed the oil into the wood with an artist’s camel-hair brush, soaking the cuts until the numbers stood out sharp and dark against the pine:
M.B. 1934
E.B. 1937
A.B. 1941
O.B. May 1942
And below them, cut into the fresh wood with the clean, sharp edge of Nate’s pocketknife:
N.A.B. June 2001
On the last Saturday of the month, a cloud of dust appeared at the end of the lane.
It wasn't Ronald’s pickup. It was an old flatbed farm truck, its stake sides rattling with age, carrying three tons of second-cutting alfalfa. Behind the wheel was Joe Gidley, his arm hanging out the window, his cap pulled down against the glare.
He pulled up by the barn, killed the engine, and climbed down with a five-gallon bucket of black fence paint in each hand.
"Nate!" he hollered toward the porch. "Heard you were getting ready to put stock in the creek bottom. Brought you some hay from the lower ditch. And my boys are coming over with the post-hole digger on Monday."
Nate came down the steps, wiping his hands on a shop rag. "Joe, I didn't order any alfalfa from you. I told you I couldn't pay for feed until the winter wheat comes off."
Joe set the paint buckets down in the grass, wiped his nose with a red handkerchief, and looked around the yard—at the repaired porch, the painted sashes, the smoke rising from the kitchen flue where Opal was baking biscuits.
"Your grandfather carried twenty bushels of seed corn down to my dad’s place in thirty-six when the bank put a padlock on our cribs, Nate," Joe said, his voice flat and hard with the stubborn decency of the valley. "My dad told me before he died, 'Joe, if a Becker ever comes back to the creek, you make sure their barn isn't empty.' You don't owe me a dime. Just help my boy pull the heads off that combine when the bearings go out."
He looked past Nate toward the porch, touching the brim of his cap to Opal, who nodded once from her rocker with the dignity of an empress on a throne.
"Afternoon, Mrs. Becker," Joe called.
May you like
"Afternoon, Joseph," she replied. "Tell your mother her peach preserves took second place at the fair because she used too much pectin. She needs to let the fruit boil in its own juice."
"I’ll tell her, ma'am," Joe grinned. "She’ll probably throw a shoe at me, but I’ll tell her."
