Billy Ray's Farm

by Larry Brown

  I screwed up some things, I know that. You have to screw up a few things to ever learn anything about what you’re doing. That probably goes for brain surgery or shoeing a horse. It probably goes for making love or preaching, for war or meditation, for any of the things you don’t yet know how to do very well.

  I framed up the east wall and built the header for it correctly and was able to raise it by myself and secure it temporarily with some loose studs nailed to standing studs and the elms outside that wall. I took a picture of it. I’d been taking pictures of it since the first day, when there was only one board on the ground. I was kind of documenting the thing as I went along.

  The south wall went up next, but I had a special plan for it. It was going to have three small windows, maybe ten inches high and less than two feet long, and they wouldn’t be windows that would open. They would just be panes of glass sealed into the wall to admit a little light. But each one of them would have a piece of art work etched into it in acid, a piece of work done by each of my children, and they would go in descending order from east to west across the back wall, the tallest one for Billy Ray, the second one for Shane, and the last one for LeAnne. I figured, maybe incorrectly, that each would need its own header, and it took me a long time to build that wall. It was twelve feet long. I had to make sure my measurements were exact, and that old carpenter thing kept going through my head: Measure twice, cut once.

  I kept the radio going, tunes blasting out onto the quiet of the pond. I carried my lunch or went up to the store for sandwiches and pints of milk and little bags of potato chips. I could stretch out in the shade after a big lunch, after eating a dill pickle. They were good days. But when I finally got the damn thing built it was way too heavy for me to lift. So many headers had put the weight on it.

  I prized it up off the floor with a crowbar enough to slide a piece of wood under the top plate. Then I prized it up high enough to stick a brick under it. And then I prized it up enough to stick a concrete block up under it. I had her ass then.

  I went around to one of the big pines in the front and picked up the log chain and my hammer and some extra big nails and tacked that chain in a loop around the trunk. Then I made a loop in the chain with the hook and picked up the hook of my come-along and set it in it.

  How the hell did some dude, back in France five hundred years ago, pick up some two-ton stone to cap off a cathedral that was ten stories high? I was just trying to raise a little stud wall.

  Once I stretched the cable out, all I had to do was wrap it around the top plate and go back to the handle, to ratchet it back and forth. I took a picture of that, too, the chain tight as Dick’s hatband coming off the tree and the wall halfway up. I toenailed short pieces of two-by-four at the sole plate to keep it from skidding across the floor and make it rise up. I had built the corners into each of the two walls so that I could lock the first corner together with nails once I had it up. It was still hot. The crickets were always singing in the trees. The station from Tupelo always sold cars and talked about restaurants over there. They sold the hell out of mobile homes. They played the same songs everybody all over America heard. But the radio was also easy to listen to. You just stuck some batteries in it and you could even leave it out in the rain if you wanted to. It didn’t matter. I could always buy another one. The fox could listen to it while I was gone.

  It took some lifting and shoving around and some very careful maneuvering to get the south wall in place. It was so heavy I couldn’t risk it falling on me. As soon as I could I braced it upright with some loose two-by-fours. By loosening things and renailing things and hitting things with a hammer I was able to bring it into position and then by a great stroke of good luck, working by myself like that, bring it into alignment with the corner I’d built into the east wall, finally making a solid corner—two walls of studs that could stand by themselves. Maybe.

  I felt like it was a lot to get done. It looked good. I knew I’d have to raise the north wall next, since it would be hardest, because it had all three of those windows in it, but I wanted to get the hard part out of the way and then frame the last wall with the door and put it all up and have four walls standing. Then seal all the corners together with the doubled top plate. Then get ready to cut some rafters. It was warming up into October. I heard gunshots. The days were getting shorter and shorter. And the time was shorter than I knew. I didn’t know that rain was coming. And as soon as I finished this wallframing, M.A. suffered an attack of the gall bladder and had to be hospitalized, and operated on for it, and I had to stop what I was doing and go through that with her. It’s very clear how it happened, according to my daily journal:

  November 6, 1998

  Went to Tula soon as

  I could & started

  laying out the north

  wall, got one 12 inch

  header in & worked till dark, went

  home & got ready to

  take M.A. to Ajax.

  Ate, came home & played

  till M.A. started yelling

  for B.R. around two A.M. Got

  her up & dressed & took

  her to the hospital,

  they admitted her, kept

  her knocked out with

  November 7

  Demerol most of the

  day. She had a bad

  time all day long,

  cried & suffered and

  slept by turns.

  Slept when I could and went home for a

  little while & came back, slept on

  couch in 3rd Floor Lobby.

  November 8

  Operated on her at

  9:30, took out her

  gall bladder, brought

  her back about 1:30.

  Stayed with her,

  slept on the couch

  again, got very

  little sleep.

  She got pissed off because

  me and Billy Ray were

  telling jokes and

  laughing in her room.

  I started back to work on the north wall a few days after I got her home. Oh she was sick. Laid up in the hospital before they operated on her Billy Ray and I both held up blue plastic hospital bowls for her to puke this old yellow stuff in. Gall, I guess it was. I guess she had a bladder full of that old stuff.

  On the sixteenth of November, one sunny afternoon when she was feeling better, I hauled her over there and hauled her a chaise longue over there and got her up the hill so she could be close to where I was working and started framing up the north wall, the one that would have the three big windows in it. She lay there all afternoon and watched me cut and build up the other two headers just like the first one, all of them three inches too short exactly. Just from me not paying enough attention to what I was doing. There wasn’t anything to do but throw them away and get some more material and start all over again. But I didn’t have time to do all that in one afternoon. I hauled her home and waited.

  THOSE DAYS CAME, when I was free to hammer and saw as much as I wanted to. Nobody was messing with me. There was still money in the bank. I started over on the north wall and this time I remembered to include that one-and-a-half-inch stud thickness on each side of the headers when I was building them. The windows were so wide that I had to move them pretty close together to get all three of them in the front wall. But that was the way I wanted it: a wall of mostly unbroken glass across the front, where I could sit at my desk and look out the window at the pond, in snow or rain, in dawn’s first weak light or the shadows of evening. I damn near got killed getting that one up.

  It took a while to build it. I was trying to be careful, and moving all the windows so close together meant the wall needed more studs somehow, more than the south wall had. All three of the headers in the north wall were built up out of two-by-twelves. It was real heavy. But smart me just did the same thing he did on the back wall, hooked it up to the old come-along and started winching that baby up. Too bad I didn’t think to put something out front to stop it from
falling the other way. But you live and learn. Sometimes it seems to me like I live and don’t learn anything. As heavy as that thing was, I should have known that I wouldn’t be able to keep it balanced long enough to slide it over and nail it into the east wall. But I got it up, by stages, and when I went to slide it over toward the east wall, it occurred to me that I hadn’t nailed any short two-by-fours on the corner studs to keep it from falling off the floor. And about that time it leaned a little too far toward the pond, and I couldn’t catch it, and tried to, and at the last moment I saw that we were going to crash out front against the big pine tree, and the only thing I could do in a split second of self-preservation was climb up into the middle window opening and ride it into the cedar tree, thence into the pines. It all happened pretty fast and I knew after we settled that I’d hurt my leg pretty bad. It was hurting so bad I was scared to look at it. The amazing thing was that it didn’t hurt the wall. It only fell about three feet but I got slammed. That’s what Shane would say. I hobbled around and cried for a little bit because my leg was hurting so bad and then I finally got up my guts and raised my right jeans leg and there was a very deep puncture wound in my shinbone or at least the muscle that covered it. I hobbled around some more, smoked a cigarette, cussed a little. I rested some, mopping at the sweat. Before the sun went down I had started dragging the north wall back up into position. You can’t let a bunch of wood just beat you.

  THE DAY CAME when I sat on top of the four walls and nailed the top plates down, locking all the corners together. I plumbed the corners with a carpenter’s level and nailed them into place with braces. But the days had flown. The ground around my feet was littered with falling leaves. There was no time to sit inside the walls and play the guitar. Rafters had to go up soon, and then the decking, and then whatever would cover them and keep the rain out.

  My problem was that I didn’t know how to cut a rafter. It was all explained in the carpentry book, but somehow I just couldn’t get it. There was pitch, so much drop in a running foot, varying degrees of it. And how was I going to raise the ridgepole by myself and hold it in place long enough to nail the rafters on? I couldn’t be in two places on a twelve-foot span at once.

  It was a problem. I just had to figure it out. And at this point, standing on top of the plate, we’re talking not about falling three feet but eleven feet.

  I went to the building supply and bought the straightest fourteen-foot, two-by-six spruce I could find. I bought a number of eight-foot-long two-by-sixes for rafters. I had to make something to help myself. I had to make some more hands. Shane was in school, college. Billy Ray was working, rolling his combine through fields of soybeans seven days a week, from dawn till dark and beyond. One afternoon I went and rode with him, up high in the seat of the big green John Deere, the wide-turning blades of the header bringing in six rows of beans at once. Deer stood at the edges of fields and chewed and watched. Rabbits scattered everywhere.

  I knew the principles of a plumb bob. It was nothing but another form of the level. What I figured to do was build a frame of something somehow on each side of the house, something that was about three feet high, something with a slot in it that would let me rest each end of the fourteen-foot spruce in it, then get up over it, hang a plumb bob over it, and then rock it back and forth until I had it dead center over a mark I’d be putting on the top plates of the east and and west walls that was dead center lengthwise on them, and then nail it in place.

  It was hell to do and took a long time but I got it done and it worked. But with the ridgepole stuck out on the end I could mark the first rafter, making a simple plumb cut on the top, then notching it into the top plate by marking it with a pencil and cutting it. After that first one I had a pattern. I cut all the rest of them the same way. If I’d done right, they’d fit.

  Shane was home on the twenty-fifth of November, the day before Thanksgiving, and we put them all on in one day. I watched him nail the rafters onto the ridge of the little house, and his steps were sure on the joists he was standing on, actually beams I’d formed up out of tripled two-by-sixes that would be exposed in the ceiling when the house was finished, and his stroke with the hammer was steady and hard. He’s a natural carpenter, something I have to work hard at to achieve anything resembling level or square. He would hold some nails in his mouth while he was hammering, and we nailed on all the rafters that afternoon.

  In one day I put all the decking on. It was tough, working off a ladder and then climbing up and nailing it down, and making sure it all fit right, and already rain was drifting in and telling me to hurry. I hurried and I hurried, but I didn’t make it.

  Again there was other stuff to do. The things of life. I needed to get back to real work. The house needed some shingles on it. After all that work and new wood, it needed to be protected from the rain. But those decking nails were the last nails I drove into it that year. It sat there in the winter and the rain came down, leaking between the cracks in the decking, dripping down onto the new floor, where it would puddle in spots of sawdust. A chill wind held it in its grip. The old dead pine sat there, never swaying in the wind. And the fox must have had a warm place where he hid. There was no warm place in my little house for sure. Unless maybe he got up under it and slept there, in the dead grass and dry leaves the floor had covered.

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER I bought Western red cedar shingles imported from British Columbia at $219 per square, hefty when you realize that asphalt ones run about thirty. But they were what I wanted and I put them on. Each is somewhere between four and fourteen inches wide, twenty-four inches long, thick at one end, thin at the other. You have to overlap each one with its brothers below to make sure water doesn’t run in between the gaps. It took a long time, working off a scaffold, climbing up and down, throwing more shingles up, getting on and off.

  My little roof is pretty steep. You can slide your ass right off if you aren’t careful. But I figured that would just help it shed the rainwater better. I’d read all about the shingles in the carpentry book. I knew they’d look great, too. It took me weeks and weeks to get them on. It got so hot in the daytime that I went to working at night, setting up the lights with the generator, and then the bugs came in so thick you could hardly see how to nail. But that’s just summer. That’s just a part of the life we have here.

  I built the ridgecap from a fourteen-foot piece of zinc that was fourteen inches wide. I nailed it down and swept off the splinters and loose nails and climbed down.

  I was scared to do it, but I cut the big tree down, safely, breaking it into two huge pieces against a tremendous post oak at Cordis Foster’s fenceline. Then it was time to go to Montana. It was August again. And I did go, and now am back again here, and the little house sits windowless but roofed, a few pieces of siding on it now where Billy Ray and Shane helped me one of the last evenings I was here last year. I’ve still got to get those windows in, build the cornices, hang the door, build the decks and finish all the outside, then the inside. It’ll be years at this rate. But it’s okay. It’s something to keep looking forward to. One day, maybe I will eventually sit in it and either write something on a piece of paper or play a few chords on a guitar.

  I go over there all the time. I look across the pond at it when I drive up. In the summer you can barely see it. I like that. I go and sit in it if I know a rain storm is coming. It does not leak.

  We hope you enjoy this special preview of Larry Brown’s Joe, now a motion picture starring Nicholas Cage, available in print and e-book formats wherever books are sold.

  THE ROAD LAY LONG and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance. They trudged on beneath the burning sun, but anyone watching could have seen that they were almost beaten. They passed over a bridge spanning a creek that held no water as their feet sounded weak drumbeats, erratic and small in the silence that surrounded them. No
cars passed these potential hitchhikers. The few rotting houses perched on the hillsides of snarled vegetation were broken-backed and listing, discarded dwellings where dwelled only field mice and owls. It was as if no one lived in this land or ever would again, but they could see a red tractor toiling in a field far off, silently, a small dust cloud following.

  The two girls and the woman had weakened in the heat. Sweat beaded the black down on their upper lips. They each carried paper sacks containing their possessions, all except the old man, who was known as Wade, and who carried nothing but the ragged red bandanna that he mopped against his neck and head to staunch the flow of sweat that had turned his light blue shirt a darker hue. Half of his right shoe sole was off, and it flopped and folded beneath his foot so that he managed a sliding, shuffling movement with that leg, picking it up high in a queer manner before the sole flopped again.