by Matthew Batt
“You’re from Wisconsin,” he said. “Good soil from what I gather. Hunting too.”
I looked to Jenae, who was beaming at her father. She was so proud to have me visit and meet her family and see her land that she was blinded to the fact that no one here at home was exactly eager for her to get involved with an East Coast English major who was likely a fairy.
“And cows,” I said. It was a stretch, but I knew I had to stand my ground. I was reasonably certain I could back up my assertion.
I expected some kind of interrogation or hazing ritual featuring a car battery, chain-link fencing, and my face, but instead Lee worked his pliers a couple of times and gestured back toward his boys.
Despite our somewhat chilly first meeting, I have seen nothing but sweetness from Lee. Though he might not have been the husband his first wife wanted him to be, in the years I have come to know him, he has been a guileless, gentle, and almost recklessly generous man who cannot enter a gift shop, truck stop, or co-op without garnering Cornhusker tchotchkes, Remington commemorative knife sets, and his-and-hers Black Hills gold rings for his children, me included.
Before Diane and Lee got married and bought a new double-wide to park permanently at the farm, she was living with her kids in a house that had been built around a trailer. When her father was finished with all but the last wall, he hooked his tractor to the trailer and dragged it out. That must have been something.
“Let’s go see the house!” Lee says when we pick them up at their downtown hotel. They have just returned from a visit to the Bingham Canyon Mine, west of Salt Lake City, which is essentially a huge hole in the shape of an upside-down mountain. They are ready to be impressed again, and more than a little curious to see what so much money can buy. The hundred fifty grand we’ve paid for Stanley’s house could have bought an entire block in the town of Orleans, where they are from, or close to a hundred acres of farmland. The house Jenae grew up in has been appraised recently at thirty-two thousand. Most farmers’ trucks cost more than their homes. As far as most Nebraskans are concerned, the only reason to spend a hundred fifty thousand dollars is a twelve-row combine or a clone of Tom Osborne.
“All right,” Jenae says before she lets them in, “keep in mind that we’re going to be doing a lot of work, okay?”
“Sure, honey,” Diane says. “Remember, we live on a farm, for the love of God.”
“Well,” Jenae says, stepping aside, “this is different. At least you can eat the things that grow on a farm.”
Lee gives Jenae a squeeze. “Come on, sis,” he says. I love that he calls her sis, but I don’t really understand it. “Don’t be silly,” he says. “Nothing could be that bad. We’re just so proud of you two. Your own house!”
We are back outside in under two minutes. The smell is so bad with the day’s heat and the windows shut that they didn’t even go into the bedroom or office. “I’m sure they’re just as—nice,” Lee says, “as the—rest of the place.”
Diane is doubled over, rifling through her purse for cigarettes or anything to burn and inhale. “And I thought mine was a pit,” Diane says. “Jesus, kids. I hope you guys know what you’re doing.”
Lee takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. “That’s some smell,” he says. “Makes the feedlot seem like a flower shop.”
Not long after, Debby, Jenae’s mom, as well as her boyfriend, Ed, and her grandparents come out to help us tidy up. They were all loaded into Debby’s Chrysler, with Ed at the helm and Grandpa George riding shotgun. It’s a big, late-model American car, but with Ed standing only four foot ten, even with lifts in his cowboy boots he has to sit with pillows beneath and behind him in order to reach the pedals. Grandpa George, on the other hand, at over three hundred pounds is so big each one of his limbs is as big as Ed.
“Get me the hell out of here,” Grandma Carol Ann yells as Ed slows to a stop. She is shoehorned behind her husband, holding an orange cooler the size of a small refrigerator on her lap. A young and energetic grandma, she pops out from the rear door like a cheerleader. “That man,” she says, pointing back at Ed, “is a menace. Jenae, do you have any iced tea for your poor old grandma?”
Ed is still parking the car, driving slowly back and forth in the rough vicinity of the curb. In rural Nebraska, you can drive your entire life without ever shifting into reverse, never mind parallel parking.
“Goddamn it, Edward!” George says. “I’ve got to goddamned urinate here.”
“That’s not the half of it,” Grandma Carol Ann says. She drops into a chair on our porch and rocks herself nervously. “It’s the bungee cords.”
Jenae and I look at each other. “Bungee cords?”
“The bungee cords!” Carol Ann resumes. “Driving eighty miles an hour down the interstate, doing just fine as you please, when he sees a bungee cord and jumps on the brake and all of a sudden you’re thrown into the back of your husband’s head. Probably did that a hundred times. I’ll kill him, that’s all. I’ll kill him the next time he so much as lets off the gas for one.”
“You say that now,” Ed says, ambling around the front of the car, immensely proud of his big-city parking job. “But there’ll come a day, by God, when you need one—hit a deer, say, and want to take it home for the meat—and what are you gonna use to lash it to the hood? Grandpa’s belt, maybe, but short of that, you’ll be high and dry.”
“I heard that, Edward.” Grandpa George is preparing to extricate himself from the passenger seat. He’s such a large man it appears that the car has been built around him. “Not very goddamned funny,” he says, “never you mind the fact that I don’t wear a belt with my overalls. Come over here and give me a hand so I can pummel the ever living shit out of you.”
Debby walks right past me, kisses Jenae on the cheek, and goes inside. “I need to lie down,” she says.
They are here to help. It is going to be interesting.
“Matthew,” Ed says from below, shaking my hand Napoleonically hard, “do you have any idea what they charge for bungee cords at Bosselman’s? You’d never believe it, so you might as well go ahead and guess.”
We drive Debby and Carol Ann to the house and fix them up with ripped T-shirts they can use for face masks, and they set about the unenviable task of cleaning the bathroom. Jenae and I are going to spend our first night in the house, so her family can sleep in our apartment. Despite the massive amount of work that lies ahead of us, little of it can be done before the carpet is torn up, and as most surfaces are going to be taken down to bare wood, there isn’t that much for them to do. Nonetheless, after nearly two hours they have exhausted all our cleaning supplies and have to go to the store to re-up, leaving me alone with George and Ed.
We have specific instructions to come up with a project that doesn’t involve exotic dancers or anything else that will get Ed’s angina up or blow out Grandpa’s knee. The women aren’t sure that either of them—never mind me—has any home renovation skills left in them. Ed fancies himself a jack of all trades, based on the premise that if one can install hydraulic hay bale lifts on stake-body pickups, then one can do just about anything. He is also an aspiring masseur, aromatherapist, RV deliveryman, and soon-to-be Internet debt collector.
“Got to stay diversified,” Ed says, and he does, with respect to both work and women. He is an immensely likable man who would do anything you asked of him so long as it doesn’t come with too tight a time frame. He lives with his father, two hours away from Debby in North Platte. They met while country swing dancing, in which he is regionally famous for his ability to whip around women several times his own body weight. He is so popular that the only break he gets from dancing all night is to sneak out to his truck to change his sweat-soaked shirt. In a state where the only way you can get men on the dance floor is to tell them that there are Oklahoma Sooner fans hitting on their women, a guy like Ed is a hot commodity.
Grandpa George clearly thinks that Debby is wasting her time with a man as diminutive as Ed—barely big enough to s
erve as one of his own meals—but George used to play accordion at the dances back when his body could handle it, so they have an appreciation for similar things. And when you factor in Grandpa’s taste for the “dancers” at the Tower Nite Club up in Holdrege, they make as good a pair as tomato juice and beer—the unofficial state drink. George has been “retired” for years following a suspicious electrical fire that leveled a warehouse he was working on, so while Carol Ann checks bags at the grocery store, he spends his days fooling around online with classic-car chat rooms and softcore amateur porn, but in his heart he is still a workingman. He had, after all, built their house in Oxford, Nebraska. He also jacked it up to add a basement and later replaced the entire roof himself. It wasn’t his fault that the meteorologists failed to predict that one of the worst storms in Furnass County history would strike when his house had the top down. Water flowed from their ceiling fan for days.
Given their collective résumé, I decide to pick a project that can succeed or fail with little consequence.
Our garage has two doors. When Stanley showed me the place, he gestured from the backyard at the free-standing structure. “Garage door works good,” he said. “Don’t know if you can put an opener in it on account of the double header I’ve got in there for swapping out the transmissions me and Dad used to do on the side. The mandoor, on the other hand, is gonna need a little work.”
I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.
“Mandoor?” I said. I thought it might be a neighborhood gay bar. In Boston, I lived around the corner from a place called the Ramrod. Anything was possible.
“I know,” Stanley said. “It’s pretty bad, buried as it is behind that sorry excuse for a rose bush the tenant lady tried to plant there. Guess she didn’t want nobody using that entrance, come up and give her a scare.”
I assumed a thoughtful pose.
Stanley shook his head at my denseness.
“The door,” he said. “Right there. The other door the garage’s got. Not the garage door. The mandoor.”
And sure enough, there was indeed a door—a mandoor—on the side of the garage. The whole wall of the building was faded to the shade of driftwood and buried up to my knee in dirt, and some sort of wizened vegetation stood in front of a door that was no better for wear, the bottom panel rotted through and the other two not far behind.
Here is a project we could tackle like men, but with no real risk of disappointment, I think, because even failure will look better than what was already there. Then again, that described most of the house.
At the hardware store, what with George’s immense heft and bad knees, he was getting set to use one of the orange scooters with a shopping cart wired to the handlebars, but we lose him first to the lunch counter near the entrance, which is tended by a haggard but bikini-clad woman who taps her cigarette ashes into the hot-dog water.
That leaves Ed and me to do the shopping. Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of options in the mandoor department. It’s pretty much white or almond, left- or right-side knob. They come already attached to a frame and so, theoretically, you’re supposed to be able to simply measure it up and slip it right on in. That is my hope, anyway, as we drive back to our house with a door strapped to the roof of Debby’s Chrysler, praying to the gods of the highway that we won’t cross paths with any errant bungee cords.
“Now, goddamn it, Edward,” Grandpa George says, “how’s a man supposed to tell you what to do if you keep getting in his light?”
Grandpa sits on a folding metal chair that shrieks under his weight as he points with his cane and grunts commands at Ed and me. We have gotten the old door out just by trying to open it; it disintegrated into a pile of kindling and left a ragged but vaguely door-shaped hole in the wall.
“It don’t measure the same at the top and bottom,” Ed says. He stands on an overturned bucket like the conductor of a street corner orchestra.
“Well, I can goddamned see that, Edward,” Grandpa says. “We’re gonna have to cut a bigger hole is what we’re gonna have to do.”
“We are indeed,” Ed says. “Give me that Sawzall there, Matthew.”
I comply, but not without a quiet prayer first.
After a few minutes of eyeballing his line, Ed cuts a hole roughly double the size of the new door. Fortunately for us, Stanley has squirreled away in the garage a great supply of old, oily scrap wood, which Grandpa proceeds to throw at Ed. Eventually, we manage to get a new frame within an inch or so of fitting the prehung door.
“Got any screws sitting around here?” Grandpa asks. “Real long ones?”
By the time we finish, the door is spiked and riddled with three-inch-long screws and shims, and a halo of light shines around the new frame, but the thing opens and closes, and one by one we walk through it and pronounce it “close enough for country music” and go to find our ceremonial Pabst Blue Ribbons, even though we have finished far from first place.
This Little Knife of Mine
MICHAEL, OUR NEIGHBOR in the house next to our apartment, is working in his garage, building a desk for his granddaughter. He smokes a pipe and wears white painter’s coveralls and has a long white beard. He is patient, great with kids, always remembers Maggie’s name, and if there were ever any shortage of apostles, Michael, I am confident, would make a fine substitute.
Michael is working with a wood-turning machine, peeling away locks of bright white wood to reveal a purple vein beneath. Clearly, he is a professional. He has tools that I have never seen and could not name, never mind turn on or operate. Smoke from cherry pipe tobacco and fresh sawdust waft around like an elixir to cure things from which you didn’t know you were suffering.
The carpet installers are supposed to be at the house any minute, but I stop to chat with Michael first. To spurn someone like Michael is to beg misfortune. We need his handyman’s luck. Already we’re behind. We wanted to do a whole slew of things before the carpet came up—like sand the cottage cheese texture off the walls, then prime and paint so we could use the old carpet as a dropcloth—but we couldn’t decide on colors, and we forgot why we wanted to paint before we sanded the floors, so we didn’t.
Michael hands me a piece of blood-red wood. It’s heavy and dense as a bar of precious metal. “Purpleheart,” he says. “That’s what it’s called.”
He has cut the purpleheart down to a one-by-one-inch board and glued maple planks around it to make a rough square leg for the desk. He mounts the leg horizontally on the turning machine—called a lathe, he says—and while it rotates like an axle he uses a set of long-handled chisels and knives to peel and shape the wood into a nicely curved leg. Blond maple curls pile up on the floor like lost ringlets in a wig factory.
I ask him where he got the wood, the purpleheart.
“Macbeth’s,” he says.
I repeat the name, and he nods. If he doubts that I have any need for a specialty lumber store named after that Scottish king with blood-stained hands, he doesn’t betray it.
I actually have got wood on my mind, since the carpet guy will be at the house any minute and we’ll finally see what the floor is really made of. I had asked Stanley to show me what was beneath the carpet, but he said he couldn’t tear it up in case our deal fell through and “the Oriental” still wanted it. “She was real into the carpet,” he had said.
We had shopped and shopped for the bedroom and study carpeting, but until you install a carpet on a couple hundred square feet of floor, all you see are placemat-size remnants like you sat on in kindergarten. I’m afraid we’ll get it down and then hate it. I know this couple who stayed at the Marriott and ate every meal at my restaurant for six weeks while they had their kitchen remodeled—twice, because they didn’t like the first renovation. We don’t quite have that luxury. The more we do ourselves, the more we can afford to do. Carpet, however, is not something I am going to fabricate, and installation is free where we shopped, so for the first interior project I get to be the benign overseer.
We weren’t
sure how much carpet we’d end up buying. There appeared to be hardwood under the living and dining room carpet, but beyond that, we didn’t know. The bedroom and the study felt spongy, but that could have been due to a lot of padding or a couple of layers of carpet on top of each other. All in all, it just didn’t seem worth it. Carpet is nice. The pets would like carpet. Everybody could sleep on the floor. Carpet is for lovers, for families. And weevils, I suppose.
Me, I don’t care much for carpet because I don’t like vacuum cleaners—they scare Maggie, and she tends to be right about stuff that scares her. For example, she doesn’t like cars. What percentage of car rides result in dog-oriented destinations? Practically none. Another example: she likes mail carriers. They wear shorts and black socks and pith helmets and know where you live and see your mail and therefore know who cares about you and where your money goes. It is good to be kind to people like that. She is a smart dog.
The carpet, however, was beyond me. Even though I was resistant, I had to be a part of the process. Participation is the sine qua non of marriage. And after seeing that train hit that car the other day, and what with all the loss and illness looming around us, I wanted to be better at being married, because, after all, I was, and it’s sad when people don’t try to be better at who they are. One way to be better at being married, of course, is by contributing. That means taking a stand on things as though they were of immense importance to you. Such as: the kind, tightness, weave, warp and weft of carpet as it pertains to one’s own aesthetic sensibility and a house’s potential resale value, as well as durability and overall quality of life. Although I hate math and think the word “algorithm” sounds like a Havana fusion jazz band, I prayed for an equation to make this easier. I sought high and low for any kind of solution, but all the guides and websites and hymnals just told me to follow my heart. And I tried.
