Big Sherman looked surprised. “Methuselah your mule. I got no say in the matter. I reckon you’s puttin’ in enough work for the both of you.”
“What if I leave and can’t take him with me?”
“That ol’ mule done give all he had, ‘n then some. I reckon he earned his rest. My daddy give me that mule when I took my half a the farm. Did I ever tell you that? He give Ben a mule as well.”
“He did? How long ago was that? How old is Methuselah?”
Big Sherman laughed. “Shoot, Jacob. I don’t even know how old I am.”
David looked down, embarrassed.
“No sir,” Big Sherman went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “I ain’t never gonna lift a hand against that ol’ boy. Me ‘n him done made this farm.”
Chapter Fifteen
1916
David put twenty dollars in his pocket and led Methuselah from the barn to the wagon. He thought the old mule would balk at the traces—it had been so long—but Methuselah was as docile as a lamb. He obediently backed up between the wagon shafts as if he had never missed a day in the harness.
David walked into the lumberyard at the Baldwin sawmill, and a bearded fellow—possibly older than Gramps—came out of a small shed to greet him. The old man said his name was Deet.
“I’m looking to add a room to a cabin, Mr. Deet,” David said.
“Just plain Deet. You’s free to look around.” When Deet spoke, his jaw slid sideways so dramatically that his grizzled beard seemed to twist and writhe.
David wandered around the yard, looking for materials. He was determined to do better than the cabin’s plank floor and walls, through which cold air seeped all winter, making it impossible to keep the inside warm. There were always drafts and cold spots, even with the fireplace blazing.
David’s parents had laid down heavy carpets in the winter months, even though no air came through the polished floors. David missed swinging his feet out of bed and into the thick pile of the rug in his bedroom. It was as indigo as nighttime and covered with ivy leaves of pale and dark green. When the weather warmed, they rolled the carpets and stored them with mothballs, the smell of which was so sharp and unpleasant that David’s mother aired the rugs for days before they were put down again. David wished he could afford a carpet for Audie’s feet to land on when she got out of bed each morning, but the best he could do was to build a solid floor.
David came upon a pile of creosote-soaked beams. They were the perfect length and he wouldn’t have to worry about them rotting. He studied the beams, considering how many it would take to build a foundation.
Deet shuffled up beside him. “Lookin’ to put down some railroad tracks?”
“I think I’ll get these for the foundation,” David said.
“Smell’d run y’all out. Son, I don’t wanna get up in your business, but has you ever built sump’n?”
“I built two Caddo huts.”
Deet cocked his head. After a minute, he said, “Well, a house ain’t no hut. Look to me like you got a whole lot a wanna ‘n not much else.”
David smiled, embarrassed.
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that, son. Ever’body gotta learn some way. You gots the right idea, just don’t need no creosote.” Deet led David to the rear of the yard where weathered lumber of various sizes and lengths had been discarded. “These here is free for the takin’, and it ain’t all trash.”
Deet knelt in the dirt with considerable difficulty, and David knelt beside him. Deet drew in the dirt. A white patina of dry, chapped skin covered his hands, and his knuckles were swollen with rheumatism. He drew a rectangle in the dirt and bisected it with several lines.
“These here’s your beams,” he said. “Eight footers. You needs to set ‘em down in the ground so that they’s level. Un’erstand?”
“Yes sir.”
“We gonna git you a bunch a one by sixes. Lots of ‘em. They be for the joists and the floor.” Deet described in detail how to build joists on the beams and lay the planks over them.
“Is there a way to fill the gaps between the floorboards? Too much cold air gets in.”
“Yes sir, they’s a way. Shiplap.”
“Where can I get shiplap?”
“Don’t you worry about that. You just go on ‘n make all this like I told you. You nail them one by sixes onto the joists like I told you—that be your subfloor. I be workin’ on the shiplap for when you come back.”
“Thank you.”
Deet winked at him. “You got you a bride you fixin’ this room for?”
David’s eyes widened. “No sir, I just?”
“Alrighty, alrighty. Ain’t none a my business no way.”
“No, I just . . .” But Deet had already walked away to gather lumber.
After hearing the condition of the old cabin, Deet counseled David to build a separate structure rather than trying to attach it. “Cain’t put new wine in ol’ wineskins,” he said philosophically. He told David to build a breezeway between the two. “Ain’t nothin’ to that.”
David left the yard with his twenty dollar note still in his pocket and a load of good lumber, which Deet had ordered his men to pull from various stacks—not the scrap heap. Deet gave David a hammer, a good saw, two short lengths of iron welded into a right angle, and a bucket of rusting nails that he said to soak in coal oil. Deet said to use the iron angle to square the corners. “Them corners gots to be square or the whole affair cain’t never be right.”
Methuselah dragged the wagon back to the farm at his aged pace, and David thought about building the bedroom, which—he had to admit—was solely for Audie’s benefit. He thought about her all the time. This embarrassed David, even though he was the only one who knew it.
The spring before the white man died, David had overheard his mother and grandfather talking about him in the kitchen. He had almost walked in on them, but when he heard he was the topic of conversation, he hid in the dining room to eavesdrop.
“Leave him alone and stop teasing him,” his mother said.
“He’s gonna have to get over that shyness,” Gramps said. “Ain’t a girl worth her salt gonna chase after him. That youngest daughter of Mr. Dunbar’s was in the drugstore today, and I can tell she’s got her eye on David, waiting for him to make a move. She’s got herself a wait because that boy just stands there like Old Dan Tucker.”
“Are you talking about Josephine?”
“Yes’m. They call her Jo Jo. She’s cute as a bug. Real pretty.”
“He’ll come around,” Mama said.
“He’s seventeen.”
“Exactly my point. He’s only seventeen. He has his whole life in front of him.”
They were silent a moment, and David stood with his back against the wall beside the doorway, barely breathing. He was afraid the floor would creak and give him away if he tried to take a step.
“Daddy?” Mama said.
“What is it, honey?”
“Try not to say ain’t.”
Jo Jo Dunbar was pretty. David thought she was beautiful. She wore her hair pulled up into a puff on top of her head, and she wore a different color ribbon on it every time he saw her. She must have had dozens of ribbons because David never saw the same one twice. Jo Jo’s neck was long, and it curved above the collar of her blouse. Her blouses—pink or white or pale blue—always had starched collars. Loose wisps of hair on the back of her neck floated above those collars, and David wanted to reach up and smooth them into place for her.
Jo Jo’s eyes were startlingly green, and one glance from them turned him to stone as suddenly as if Jo Jo were Medusa. Though he was as dumb as a stump in her presence, the feeling David had on the inside was the same warm, liquid flush he got when he drank the steaming milk and chocolate Mama cooked on the stove on very cold days. It heated his belly and spread slowly all the way to his fingers and toes. David did not know what to say to Jo Jo besides hello. After he overheard the conversation in the kitchen, he asked Gramps how to talk to girls.
“Depends on the girl,” Gramps said. They were sitting on the front porch, and Gramps was cleaning and trimming his fingernails with his pocketknife, which was as sharp as a razor. “You got any particular girl in mind?”
“I like that Jo Jo Dunbar pretty well.”
“She’s right pretty, that one.” Gramps leaned back, folded his knife, and put it in his pocket. “There’s no end to the things you can say to get a conversation going, Big Man. It ain’t hard to talk to women. In fact, they’re a sight easier to talk to than men.”
“Seems like every thought flies out of my head when I walk into the drugstore and she’s there. I can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound stupid or boring.”
“That’s just nerves. You’ll get over that with practice.”
“So what should I say?”
“How about asking her how she likes working in her daddy’s drugstore? You could ask what her favorite flavor of malted milkshake is. Then offer to buy her one.”
“That’s good. Real good.”
“You could ask her if she likes to read, and if she says yes, you can ask her what she likes to read.”
“Maybe she likes the same books I do.”
“Maybe so, but you ain’t gonna know until you ask her, now are you?”
“No sir.”
“You want to get to know her, don’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then show some interest. I’m not saying to interrogate her. Just act interested. She’ll start talking, and before you know it, you’ll be over the hump.”
David took Gramps’s advice the following Saturday when they went to town, and he asked Jo Jo if she liked working in the drugstore.
She did. She told him she met a lot of people because someone new came in almost every week. That almost stumped him until he remembered the doorman at the York Hotel in his deep red uniform with shiny brass buttons. David thought the man—Mr. Samuel—was a soldier, an important one, until Gramps told him Mr. Samuel was wearing a hotel uniform, not a military one. After that, David noticed Mr. Samuel’s threadbare cuffs and collar and the little grease spots on the heavy coat’s wide lapels.
David asked Jo Jo if she had met Mr. Samuel. She had. David told her about thinking the doorman was a general, and Jo Jo said she had thought the same thing. That got them talking about the different people who worked on the Avenue. When Gramps came around to tell David it was time to go home, he and Jo Jo were chatting like two old friends.
David and Jo Jo visited every Saturday after that, and he learned more about her each time they talked. He thought Jo Jo liked him too, from the way she smiled when he came into the drugstore. He began to indulge in daydreams about making a home with her. Even having children. David could be a daddy—he would be a daddy—with lots of children to play with and spoil. Then October came, and one Saturday David went hunting instead of going to town with Gramps.
The thought occurred to David for the first time that his family might have held a memorial service, as Tom Sawyer’s family had done when they thought he was dead. Would Jo Jo have cried for him as Becky Thatcher cried for Tom? Had she resisted other boys, clinging to hope that David would return? He settled into imagining the things people might have said about him at his funeral. He wished he could have been there and heard it, as Tom and Huck Finn and Joe Harper had done.
Finally, he roused himself from his deep reverie and looked around. Nothing looked familiar. In front of him, Methuselah’s shoulders, dipping with every step as he slowly plodded along, were lathered in spite of the cool day. They had missed the turnoff to the farm, and no telling how far beyond it they had traveled. Was he a child? Daydreaming about Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher and Jo Jo Dunbar? Imagining his own funeral? Would he ever grow up and live in the real world instead of inside his own head?
“Whoa, boy.” He reined Methuselah to a stop. The road was too narrow to turn the wagon around, bordered on either side by woods David did not recognize. His heartbeat quickened. He had not brought his rifle.
How had Methuselah missed the turn? Even without David’s prompting, the old mule should have taken them home. He’d made the trip home from Baldwin hundreds of times, and mules were creatures of habit.
David looked around, and seeing no one, hopped to the ground and walked to the mule’s head. “Hey old fella, you missed the turn.” At the sound of David’s voice the gray muzzle swung around. The mule’s big eyes were as clouded as two cracked marbles. “Lord, Methuselah. When did you go blind?”
David took the reins and led the mule to a place that was wide enough to turn the wagon around, and then he led Methuselah home.
Chapter Sixteen
David’s attempts to lay the foundational beams in a perfectly squared grid were futile and embarrassing. He worked all day moving the timbers around, hopping from one side to the other. Every time he squared all the corners, the ends were mismatched. When he shifted the ends of the beams to meet one another, the corners were off again.
When Big Sherman and his sons came in from pulling stumps that evening, Sherman said, “See Papa, I told you. He lazy as they come. Ain’t no tellin’ what he been up to all day.”
Big Sherman waved his hand, signaling his son to go into the house. “Maybe that feller at the yard can help if’n you’s havin’ trouble,” he said when Sherman was out of earshot.
David ducked his head. “I reckon I better go and see him in the morning.”
Big Sherman put his hand on David’s shoulder. “Ain’t no worry, Jacob. You’ll figure it out. I ain’t seen nothin’ yet you cain’t do. Now come on inside. Audie’s waitin’ supper.”
The next morning David sat for a long time on one of the timbers, studying the layout. Audie brought him a steaming cup of coffee, sweet and rich with sugar and cream. David said, “I guess I’m gonna have to go see Deet about these corners. Reckon that’ll take all morning.”
Audie stood beside him. She was a tiny woman, barely taller than he was sitting down. She said, “Wish they was a way to keep them corners from movin’ about so.”
David blew across the top of the scalding coffee and took a sip. He jerked his head up. “Oh, Lord!“
“Coffee too hot?”
“No ma’am. Coffee’s good. I just figured out a way to keep the corners from separating.”
“Well then, Mr. David Walker, I reckon it gonna be a real good day.”
“Thank you, Audie.”
She gave him a quick nod and returned to the house.
Before the sun reached its peak, David had not only secured the right angles with boards nailed diagonally across the beams, he had laid out a perfect grid. The solution had been so simple that David was glad he had not asked Deet, who might have lost confidence in him for not figuring it out on his own. David spent the afternoon leveling the beams by shoveling dirt out from under some and adding it under others. He used a bucket of water for a level.
When Big Sherman and the boys returned from the fields that evening, Sherman walked past David’s work without a glance. But Big Sherman and the boys stopped to have a look. Zach and Luke hopped from beam to beam, balancing with arms outstretched.
“You done it,” Big Sherman said. “Did you talk to your friend?”
“No, Audie showed me how.”
“Well, I ain’t one bit surprised. No sir, not one bit.”
The next day David framed out the floor joists using one by six boards set on their edges. He nailed the boards of the subfloor across the joists on the day after that. Everywhere he set a bucket, the water in it was level. The foundation was beautiful, and David walked around it again and again to admire it from every angle. He walked across it, enjoying the sturdiness of the smooth yellow pine and the hollow thump his boots made. The old cabin’s splintered gray wood seemed shabbier than ever next to it.
Before David returned to the lumberyard for more supplies and instruction, he built a platform in the nearest oak tree with leftover lumber. The tre
ehouse was smaller and simpler than the one David’s father had built for him when he was a boy, but Luke and Zach were elated when they saw it.
“It ain’t the Taj Mahal,” David said.
“What’s that?” asked Luke.
“I’ll tell you about it after supper,” Zach said, and David smiled.
David drove the wagon back to Baldwin with a pot of collard greens and a round of yellow cornbread on the seat beside him, gifts from Audie to Deet. Deet ordered two men to load the wagon with two by fours, as if David were a paying customer. He loaded David’s head with instructions on how to frame the walls. Deet drew in the dirt of the yard the walls splayed out flat, as they would look before they were raised. Three of them had framed openings for windows, and the fourth had an opening for the door.
“That’s a lot of windows,” David said.
“Needs ‘em to let in a breeze on hot days.”
“But in the winter—”
“Glass’ll block the wind. Got’s to have glass in the wenders. I done ordered it.”
“Deet—”
“Shiplap’s on the way too. Be sure to say thank you to your lady friend for the cornbread and greens. Reckon I be eatin’ like a king tonight.”
That evening, David told Big Sherman he needed help to raise the walls after they were framed, which put an immediate halt to stump pulling. The next morning, David had more help than he could shake a stick at. His heart sank at having lost his solitary hours, but the work progressed rapidly, even without Sherman, who refused to help.
When they exhausted their materials, David returned to the sawmill and Big Sherman went back to pulling stumps. A north wind had come up during the night, bringing with it an azure sky and bitter cold that cut so deeply David threw an old blanket over Methuselah to keep him warm.
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