What's Worth Keeping

by Kaya McLaren

  He wasted no time removing the old fuse box and replacing it with the new circuit breaker box, then calling the power company to come and do their part. He unscrewed outlets, removed them from the brackets in the wall, and then removed what remained of the old, sketchy knob-and-tube wiring that had been attached. When the house was originally built, there had been no electricity at all. The knob-and-tube electrical wiring had been added later, and so it had mostly run under the floor, which was now gone. This was an opportunity, he reminded himself. The new wiring would be so much safer. He attached one outlet to the fuse box so that he’d have a place he could plug an extension cord into, since he would need an electric drill to drill holes through nearly all of the studs in the house in order to send wiring through the walls.

  That afternoon while he waited for the electricity to be turned on, he repaired the burst pipe that had destroyed nearly the whole house. The momentum felt good. He found himself thinking less and less about the situation at work, about the uncertainty of his marriage and of his daughter’s future, about all the ugliness he had ever seen, as he focused on just this task and then the next one. It felt good to be able to actually fix something in his life where everything else seemed broken.

  Over the course of the next four days, he rebuilt just enough of the bathroom floors that he could reinstall the toilets and sinks. Then he called the water company and had the water turned back on. Upon discovering two more leaks, he fixed those as well.

  Finally, the power company turned on the power. Then he used his electric drill to install new floorboards over much of the floor—enough to make walking throughout the house safer and easier.

  At some point, he came to see working on the house as his meditation or form of prayer. It was all right there, like a to-do list for himself. First, he’d needed to fix the plumbing so that shit had somewhere to go and could be cleared away. Plumbing made it possible to shower, or purify. A person needed that for a new beginning. Next, he’d put in the floorboards like a foundation, because Amy’s diagnosis definitely had pulled the rug out from beneath them. They needed to get their feet on solid ground. Then, he needed to rewire—both the house and his nervous system. He knew Amy did as well. When all of that was done, it would be time to put the walls back up—the boundaries, though thinking of walls in that way made Paul wonder how it might be possible to open up the inside of the house more.

  As he began to drill holes through the studs in the walls on Friday morning, he remembered a psychologist who was leading one of their mandatory small-group sessions after the blast saying that when someone is traumatized, their three minds separate—the primal survival-oriented mind separates from the rational mind and begins to perceive everything as a threat to life. The limbic mind was a big piece of it too, giving emotion to that perception so that a person would take action to ensure their own survival. What he remembered most was when the man said that we weren’t rational, thinking beings that have emotions, but emotional beings that have thoughts about their emotions. Paul vowed to read up more on this. Maybe new research in the last sixteen years had yielded new insights. Something about the house made all the things inside of him, all the things between him and Amy, tangible in a way that they had not been before, and that left him hopeful. He began to believe that if he could just fix up this house, everything would be okay.

  The phone interrupted his thoughts. For the first two rings, Paul simply looked at it warily. He could not think of one possibility of a call that he would look forward to. If it was Amy, it might be to ask him for the divorce he had once wished for. If it was work, well, who knew? But he was sure it couldn’t be good.

  He set down his drill, picked up the phone, and looked at the number. It wasn’t anyone he knew, but it was from Oklahoma City. Torn between his suspicion that it was a telemarketer and concern that it was someone from work, he caved to the latter and answered, “Hello,” less like a question and more like someone preparing to be annoyed.

  “Bergstrom. It’s Lamar Green, your union rep. I’ve got some good news for you. I did a little investigating of my own and found two neighbors who had watched your arrest of Mr. Miller. One was from a window and could not hear anything, but she did give the same account that you did. The other was peering through a fence, and he did not hear you say, ‘Take that!’ I confronted Mrs. Miller about her accusation and reminded her that witness statements are done under the penalty of perjury and that she could be charged for a false statement, and then I asked her whether she would like to change her statement now before it got to that point. She took the opportunity to clear your name. She was just trying to get her husband’s charges dismissed because she loves him don’t you know and she needs his paycheck to keep their house.” He sighed. They had all heard victims lie to protect their abusers countless times. “So, bottom line, the investigative team will reexamine the evidence Monday and I expect you’ll get a call before the end of the day informing you that you’ve been cleared, and that you will be compensated for the leave you were put on.”

  Paul looked all around him, at the exposed beams in the shell of this house. It was empty enough to hold a lot of dreams. It felt like a new beginning. But now he was being sent back to the world where all day long he put out spot fires in the larger arena of hell. Everything in him recoiled at the thought. But the only correct thing to say was, “Thank you, Green,” because his union rep had cared enough about the truth to find it and clear his name.

  * * *

  The turkeys in the neighbor’s backyard gobbled when Paul stepped onto the porch and cursed, almost as if they were laughing at his predicament. A breeze caused the leaves to quake in a large elm in the corner of the yard.

  He heard the sound of raking leaves before he saw his elderly neighbor, who caught his eye and waved. She was short, and her silver hair blew in different directions. Seven months ago, he would have thought of her hair as short, but now that he compared it with Amy’s, it seemed long. He waved back, noticing the clouds building near the mountains.

  “There’s supposed to be thunderstorms today!” called the neighbor.

  “I suppose I should check the roof, then,” Paul called back.

  “Don’t mess around up there once the thunder starts. You get down,” she told Paul.

  Paul walked over to a gap in the old wire fence and extended his hand. “I’m Paul Bergstrom,” he said.

  “Rae’s nephew-in-law. I’m Cleo Ramirez.” Her strong features showed her Spanish ancestry, and her eyes were perceptive and kind. She wore jeans and a flannel shirt, perfect for working in the yard. “A bear crashed through here. They like the fruit trees in our yards this time of year. There’s no sense in fixing it until they hibernate.”

  Looking down, Paul noticed a large pile of what appeared to be poop, but he wasn’t sure. It was about the size of cow poop, but much more colorful and textured with nuts, seeds, and fruits that hadn’t been chewed well enough.

  “This one has been hanging around for a few weeks now. Lots of people get dogs to chase them out of their yards. Do you have a dog?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Well, maybe you’ll get a dog.”

  Paul smiled but didn’t reply. There was too much to explain and he really didn’t want to.

  “We’ll have to fix this if you get a dog, though, because I’ve got chickens back there. The turkeys will only be around for another month or so, but the chickens lay eggs all year. Say, I’ve been noticing some changes in that tree,” she said, pointing to the elm. “It could be that it’s sick or it could be that it’s just lived as long as these trees generally do.”

  Paul looked at the tree, considering it. He shook his head. “It looks fine to me.”

  “I played in that tree when I was a child,” said Cleo. “I love that tree. I wouldn’t say anything bad about it if I wasn’t concerned about safety.”

  Just to appease her, Paul said, “I’ll have an arborist come look at it,” but he intentionally did not
say when. There were many more urgent things to deal with.

  “Well, I better get back at it,” Paul said. “Looks like I’ll be needing to head back to Oklahoma City tomorrow or the next day. I was hoping to stay longer and make more progress, but something came up.”

  “Oh,” said Cleo. “Well, it makes me glad to see you making it beautiful again. That was once my grandmother’s house.” Then she gestured toward her own home. It was a small house that had seen at least three additions. In her front yard, she had an altar to the Virgin Mary and a statue of St. Francis. In the bird pen in the backyard, there was another statue of St. Francis. At the moment, a turkey stood on either side of it, about the same height. “My parents built a house here, next door. It was nice growing up next to my grandma. I kept hoping someone new would love that house. It’s been empty a long time now.”

  Paul nodded, feeling bad that she’d had to see it sit in disrepair. “I dreamed of fixing it up and retiring here. Life got a little busy and then the leak…”

  “I heard about your wife,” she said. “I’m glad she’s okay now.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Well, when you finally move in, let me know if you need help finding a dog to adopt or some chickens.”

  “Thanks,” he said again, and added, “Well, back to work.”

  “Get to it,” she said, waving him off.

  * * *

  Paul had begun to settle into the patterns of sounds around him. The neighbor behind him put his border collie outside each morning around seven thirty. For the rest of the day, it barked at anything that walked by the fence. Around nine o’clock, two old steam engines whistled at one another, the first usually pitched higher than the second. In the morning, the trains simply sounded ready, but twelve hours later when all was dark and they whistled again, they sounded like lonely ghosts with their long, shrill, haunting notes. Just before noon, two moms with a gaggle of small children between them walked to the library and later passed by again with a bag of new storybooks. One mom pushed a stroller, and one young girl pushed a toy stroller with a doll in it. Just as he was wondering what time it was, they walked by, and he knew.

  By two in the afternoon, the tall, white cauliflower-like columnar clouds had leveled off and darkened the sky as they spread. High winds slapped branches against the roof, the sky flashed and rumbled, and then a torrent of rain fell like a wall of water.

  Not being a fan of thunder, Paul unplugged the extension cord from the outlet and retreated to the first-story bathroom to contemplate what kind of flooring he should buy when he returned to Oklahoma City—linoleum or tile? He needed to put the flooring in before he could bring the old claw-foot bathtub back in from where it had been sitting on the back porch for the last eight months. As much as he hated anything that would slow him down, he knew he would kick himself for a long time if he didn’t install tile. Tile it would be, he decided.

  Just then, a clap of thunder exploded above the house, shaking the earth and reminding him of the blast. Big claps nearby did that, and he had survived plenty. Despite his racing heart and memories, he knew he would survive this one too. That is, until the elm, its roots shaken loose in the soft, moist earth, came crashing through the roof.

  Sudden explosive event

  Loud noise

  Debris falling from above

  “Oh my God! Oh my God!” Paul screamed, and after the crashing, he paced furiously along the edges of the floorboards where there were still open spaces in all the spots that needed custom cuts. He looked into the gaps for people under the house, his rational mind knowing he was in a house in Chama, his limbic and primal minds panicked and desperately searching for survivors, especially the children. “Goddammit!” he yelled. “Goddammit!”

  In his mind, he saw it and smelled it and heard it: debris falling from the higher floors of the nine-story building. All the anger he still held for Timothy McVeigh bubbled up to the surface. All the anger he had for this tragic world. All the anger he had for a God that had not intervened to prevent that big tragedy and a million smaller ones from happening. All the anger he had for himself for being no more than just one man buckling under the weight of the world on his shoulders. He knew that he had just been transported back to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, and he was mad as hell about that too. That was a place to which he never, ever wanted to return.

  Debris fell down as they sifted. It killed a nurse and injured other people who were trying to help, but still none of them, including Paul, could leave the muffled voices they heard under their feet—not even after they were ordered out.

  They dug through rubble, still smoking.

  Papers from the upper floors floated down, a reminder that just moments ago, people had been there working … working as if everything weren’t about to change, as if they weren’t about to die.

  The voices under their feet grew quieter as the hours passed. They saved some. And they failed to save others.

  Above where Paul searched had been the headquarters for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He had been there only three days prior to get help on a case. He had friends there. Now, they were somewhere in the pile of smoking debris.

  There was a moment pretty early on when someone had shouted, “There was a day care here!” and Paul had walked over to the vicinity, wondering whom he might be stepping on, and began to dig through to the layer with the stuffed animals and the blocks. The officer next to him found a tiny, lifeless body, one of the fifteen children who perished that day. Someone else found a child who was miraculously still alive, but for how long was anyone’s guess.… The whole time, all of them trying to make sense of something so senseless, trying to comprehend that a member of their own species had done this, wondering how that was possible, how anyone could … all of them understanding something terrible about this world they lived in and the people who walked among them, something terrible they’d had the luxury of pretending wasn’t true until that moment.

  Paul remembered looking around at those toys, looking up at what remained of that grand building, knowing there was no way justice could ever be done. There would be no justice. There would be no forgiveness. There would be no forgetting. All of those who remained would simply have to come to accept something none of them could comprehend.

  Shaking still, Paul walked out of the back door into the rain, hoping the drops on his face would remind him several times a second that he was here, in Chama, where no one locked their doors.

  “Are you okay?” It was the old man who lived behind him with the border collie.

  Paul snapped out of it enough to say, “I’m okay.”

  Then, Cleo called out from the other direction, “Dear Lord! Are you all right?” She peered over the wire fence from the backyard, since the tree had taken down power lines in the front.

  He gave her a thumbs-up with minimal eye contact.

  “Come over! I’ll make you cocoa and cookies!”

  “Thanks—another time!” he called back over the loud wind.

  Satisfied that he was all right, Cleo ran back into her house.

  Paul was relieved. He did not want to be seen by her.

  His other neighbor was on Paul’s porch now, looking at him carefully. “Were you a soldier?”

  “No. Police officer. Oklahoma City PD.”

  “Well, come on. Come to my house.”

  “But I should…” Paul looked back.

  Another clap of thunder burst nearby. The old man startled and shouted, “Come on!” grabbed his sleeve, and started to run. The only polite thing to do was follow.

  * * *

  Once inside, his neighbor introduced himself, Ramiro Martinez. When Paul complimented him on a large black-and-white photo of a train rounding a bend, mountains in the background, and conductor waving, Mr. Martinez said, “That’s me.”

  Paul studied it for another moment, finding it calming to look at the image of Mr. Martinez’s smiling face and of the nature behind it. He felt his hear
t slow and his breathing deepen.

  Mr. Martinez said, “Trains are the Grateful Dead of machinery. People come from all over to photograph our trains. I let one train groupie come aboard and sit up front with me once—right after he took this photo, in fact. I wasn’t supposed to do that, but I could tell he was a vet and I knew he was long overdue for something good to happen. He sent me this print as a thank-you.” Smiling, he continued, “Those were good days. Hey, I want to show you something.”

  They passed through a covered passageway out his back door to his wood shop. There, he nodded at two very large pieces of wood, both standing vertically. “It’s a train door. This old one is rotten, so I was asked to make a replica.”

  “Wow,” Paul said, smiling his approval. Then he noticed a half-finished guitar. “You’re a luthier too?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call myself that yet. I’m still learning. Self-taught for the most part. I read books and watch videos and try to figure it out. I’ve got one in the house I made.” He then led the way out of the shop, shutting the door behind him. “Do you play?” he asked as they entered the house again.

  “I used to. Just a little. Nothing like you. I heard you play once from my yard. I thought it was a recording at first. You’re really good!”

  He led Paul over to the corner of his living room where three guitars sat in stands—two classical and one steel string. “Here,” he said, handing Paul one. “Remember, it was my first guitar-making attempt.”

  Paul took a seat so that he wouldn’t accidentally drop it and paused, unsure of what to play. “It’s been a really long time,” he said.

  “Can you play G–E minor–D–A minor?”

  Paul strummed those chords, while Mr. Martinez picked up the other classical guitar and played an improvisational solo. The notes, it seemed, filled Paul up, filled places that had felt empty for a long time. For the first time in recent memory, he felt truly happy. So focused was he on the music, he didn’t notice the thunder move off to the west and he didn’t think about the blast. “I always wondered how people did that—how they knew what notes would work and what notes wouldn’t work,” Paul said.