Into Woods

by Bill Roorbach

Lawrence Berner was a former electrical engineer who’d thrown it all over at age sixty, a theory ace but a fairly clumsy worker, a guy who had actually tossed away everything and left the college track for good. Larry was British and Jewish and unconventional and very charming, all qualities that impressed me. Best of all, he was divorced, the first divorced person I’d ever seen up close. He was filthy of habit—decadent, disgusting (maybe not as bad as my friends at school, but Larry was old). He lived in his marital house, wife long gone, and had trashed the place, filled the garage with electrician junk, filled the kitchen with dirty pots and jars and cans and dishes, filled the refrigerator with his important papers (fireproof, he said), filled the bedroom with the most slathery skin magazines imaginable, filled the whole house with take-out cartons, TV-dinner tins, and his own filthy underwear. His living room seemed buried in death.

  He paid me $2.50 an hour. Working beside him (tradesmen often touch—four hands to pull the cable, four arms reaching into a small space, heads together to look into a service panel ... hey, hold my legs while I lean out over this here abyss), I’d feel sometimes like I was with my dad. It was Larry’s thin hair, maybe, or the Old Spice and cigarettes, or just regular old transference. I spent every day beside this parallel-universe effigy of my father, and I was mad at Larry almost always and desperate to impress him.

  One day he said I had good hands, and that little compliment was everything—I glowed, I crowed, I told my friends, my folks. I stared at my hands late at night in bars, stared at them for hours, entranced. And my hands got callused, grotesquely callused, were always covered in cuts and scratches and dings and scabs that I hardly felt. Your knuckles never healed. And Larry mostly worked hot, meaning with the power on, because it saved time. I got shocks and blew holes in screwdrivers. I hit my head on rafters and slammed my thumb with hammers and fell off ladders and sliced my fingers (daily) and once even poked a screwdriver hard into my eye (the blade didn’t penetrate the eyeball but rolled past it and into the socket so that old Larry had to pull it out ... and we kept on working). I drove the truck sometimes, sweet-talked the customers, ate in diners, worked squinting with a Lucky Strike in my mouth, no filter. I put in panel boxes and wired 200-amp services and installed a thousand outlets and a million switches. I drilled holes for cable, sawed rafters, snaked wire through walls. I wriggled into crawl spaces, sweated in attics, dug trenches for UF cable.

  I liked it. All that body work. But, like every college-track kid in America, I’d been taught that someone else would do the rough stuff if I’d just use my mind. And the sense that there was some higher calling nagged at me, the sense that all I’d heard about college was right. So after a year and a summer of the trades, I went back to Ithaca, pleasing my parents enormously, no surprise. The surprise was in how happy I was. Suddenly I was a great student—all As, excellent attendance, papers handed in on time—fully engaged in a tough fight against the possibility of being a tradesman, the possibility of taking Woods II for life.

  But after the college track had run its course, I needed to make money. I failed tests for newspaper jobs (twenty minutes: neatly type a 500-word story around the following facts . . .), gagged at the thought of ad agencies (“We keep you clean in Muscatine,” to quote a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first gig out of Princeton), moved around the country for a long time (coast to coast, north to south), worked with cattle (rode horses, too), bartended (which left your hands clean, at least, and put you in the path of women), played music in the most local of local bands, finally landed age about twenty-eight in a friend’s loft in New York City, state of New York, where I kept up the music in better bands and great clubs, but to no great rewards, in fact, penury. Bartending jobs were sought after, thus impossible to get. Corporate writing jobs beckoned: public relations, newsletter editor, copywriter, hack. I even answered an ad for someone to write porno. At least I knew something about that. “Adult novels,” the ad in the Village Voice said. Turned out to be a mill, and the job was to type a minimum of a book a week directly into the typesetting machine! Dollar a page, one hundred sixty page books, one-sixty a week a fortune. Torrid love engines, mossy grottoes. Better than lying about pollution controls or profits for bigger companies. On the subway out to Queens I changed my mind, pulled off my tie (a tie—who did I think was going to interview me?), untucked my shirt, changed trains at the next stop, rode back to Manhattan, broke.

  I got the bright idea to put up posters around the Village and Soho and Tribeca and be a handyman. Independence! And the amazing thing is, it worked. Calls came in immediately—did I know how hard it was to find someone to do small jobs? People would hear my estimates and laugh, offer more. I did every sort of odd job for every sort of odd person, moving over the months and years to larger home repairs, bigger prices, leaving town to restore that Berkshires inn, coming back to sub myself out to contractors. I graduated finally to a specialization in kitchen remodels and new bathrooms, getting more and more deeply into the role, hiring helpers, wearing my one suit to estimates, taking tiny but unbelievably productive ads in fancy magazines (well, New York Magazine), cracking the codes for admittance to the wholesale supply houses, getting good at all of it, twelve years total, Woods II, until one day I woke up and realized I was about to take out a bank loan to buy a truck and some very expensive tools, about to start looking for a storefront, about to start paying my ragtag musician employees on the books.

  I headed straight to grad school.

  Juliet and I spent lots of our free time last summer looking for a house to buy here in Farmington (my apprentice tenure-track teaching job, a year out of Columbia, a year after our wedding—a dreamy year we’d spent in Montana—was at the University of Maine branch campus here). It would be our first house. An old farmstead, we hoped. I kept telling myself that I had an advantage, which was my haphazard twenty-year fund of construction knowledge and restoration experience. I looked up at the beams and poked at the foundations and lifted the vinyl siding and pulled away carpets. I wiggled toilets and pulled on pipes and pushed on all the walls and ceilings. I got in crawl spaces and pried open hatch doors, inspected wiring, eyeballed plumbing, made the real-estate folks happy: they love a guy who thinks he knows what he’s doing.

  And sometimes, in light of this commitment, this buying a house on a small piece of our little planet, I thought about what would happen if the legislature shut down my branch of the University of Maine, or what would happen if I didn’t get tenure, or what would happen if I just couldn’t take the bureaucracy anymore and quit. Well, not to worry. Education presidents come and go, but people always need a plumber or someone to fix the roof. Or renovate inns. I could take my clean college hands and plunge them into work, open all the old scars, stop being mincy and fastidious, once more revel in goo and slime, get into it—wrestle cable, kick at shovels, stand in the mud all day, hook my leg around ladders in the wind, lay tile, lift toilets and plunge my hand down that reeking fuzzy hole to pull the clog (poor Raggedy Andy one time, usually worse).

  Juliet and I found a house, bought it, moved in. And immediately my dad, now retired, came up to visit, tools in hand. The two of us got up early the first morning he was here and headed out to the garage, a forlorn little outbuilding about to fall down and stuffed to the rafters with the owner-before-last’s junk (mostly pieces of Volkswagens and cans of old bolts and misshapen gaskets and used spark plugs and odd shims and clips). My plan was to leave room to park a car, sure, but to build a wood shop, a work space from which to operate while Jules and I renovated the house (a neglected nineteenth-century “quarter-cape” with many additions, the newest of which is a porch built in 1953, my own year).

  So for hours my dad and I worked. We cleared out and sorted all the junk, ripped down the cardboard that made the walls, stopped to stare, to think, came up with opposite plans, argued, convinced each other, switched sides, argued again. Finally we jacked up the north side of the garage, replaced the sill, dropped a corner post in cement
, took the jack away, rebuilt the wall. Next we shored up the south side, added wiring, installed a metal roof over the leaky old asphalt shingles. We hit our heads and cut our fingers and ripped our jackets. We peed in the woodpile. We argued, mostly about technique and a little about the Education President, that first George Bush (who was about to go), but really, I guess, about who was in charge of the work in my garage. And even though Pop was helping me for free, even buying some of the materials, I fumed and fulminated, sulked, complained, reverted to a painful adolescence.

  Still, we rebuilt the barn-style sliding door and cut in a window. We ate companionably in the Farmington Diner with sawdust and plain dirt in our hair and new hammer holsters on our belts (the acerbic Yankee waitress looked me over, said, “Hi, Professor,” and I introduced her to my dad); we went to the dump; we gabbed at the lumberyard; we swung hammers, climbed ladders, cut wood; we gazed at our work a long time in the dark when we were done.

  Pop said, “You saved that building,” as if I’d done it on my own, and we went on in the house to wash up.

  Spirits

  Right away our new neighbor Lulu Lawrence came over to greet us with a pie and a booklet (this written by a local lawyer in 1969) giving the history of our new neighborhood and showing a grainy photo of each house on our new road. From the photo Juliet and I learned that our enormous new elm had not changed much in twenty-three years—good news, as it is one of the few healthy old American elms left in Maine or in the world. We also saw that our sagging new porch had been plumb and true back in that summer of moonwalks and Woodstock and, for me, a Montana idyll, complete with church-camp girlfriend, only the fear of conscription into a lingering war to darken bright days.

  Under the photo of our new house—I photocopied the page and have it here in front of me—this:

  MRS. MARY BUTTERFIELD FOLSOM’S HOMESTEAD

  (Present owners: the Thomas C. Moonrobins)

  When Isaac Butterfield, Jr.’s daughter, Mary, married W. F. Folsom in 1874, they built this place on a part of the old Butterfield farm on the south side of the road leading from West Farmington to Temple. It was about opposite her father’s place.

  Mary’s husband and infant son died within three years after her marriage. Isaac, Jr.’s house burned at about the same time, so Isaac and his wife, Phebe, moved into the Folsom home. Mary soon went to work at the “Little Blue” School, and later she married Thomas A. Stevens and moved from this home. One of Mary and Thomas Stevens’ children, Mrs. Nora Allen, who is still living in Farmington, supplied us with much of the information in this booklet regarding the Russell’s Mills neighborhood.

  In 1878, Isaac Weston Butterfield, only son of Isaac, Jr. and Phebe, married Fannie Stevens. Isaac W. and his bride then settled on the farm with his parents.

  In 1882, shortly before his death, Isaac, Jr. deeded all his property, which included this place, to his wife, Phebe. Seven years later she deeded the place to Frank A. Thompson, minor son of Phebe’s daughter, Ellen, who had married Albert Thompson in 1869. Frank deeded to Albert Thompson in 1937, and Albert sold to the Henry J. Manns in 1951. Subsequent owners were the Frank Lindsays, Jacob Wirth, the Harold Beaches, and in 1956 the present owners, the Thomas C. Moonrobins bought the place.

  Along the way, each owner had added on. The original building is tiny, a “quarter cape,” our likeable real estate man called it (with exaggerated respect), a local architectural term that a builder friend tells me really means half a cape—Cape Cod house, that is. A number of quarter capes were built in these parts by thrifty do-it-yourselfers using a widely sold, colonial-era blueprint for a whole cape. This blueprint people of limited means simply halved, like a recipe. This half-a-house contains our living room and narrow foyer-stairwell downstairs, and one bedroom with steep eaves upstairs, a bit of an attic above that, nothing more. The basement beneath is lined with fieldstone, and is wet in spring: mud floor.

  Before 1900, an unknown one of the owners named above built an addition southwards, a large el, as such additions are called in Maine, making room downstairs for what would eventually be Juliet’s studio and our bathroom, upstairs for an unfinished attic, which, after a lot of work, now daunting, may one day be our master bedroom. The next addition grew eastwards, another el, long and thin, containing our parlor with its seven doors and woodstove and our dining area downstairs, and the eccentric eaves rooms, two in a row with different level floors, that would make our guest room and my office (where I sat as I first typed this bit of parenthetical nonsense), soon enough to become a kid’s room, one hoped. From the far end of this el, one of our antecedent owners attached yet another el, this one heading southwards again, making of the whole house a bit of a wacky horseshoe. South of this blunt el, which is wholly our kitchen, our predecessor Frank A. Thompson—no earlier than 1911—built a barn. I know that date of limitation because doing repairs I found dated religious broadsheets used as the vapor barrier between the clapboard siding and the sheathing. Jesus calls you unto him as sheep unto his fold.

  At the back of the barn was fastened a two-seat outhouse poised over a grown-in stony vault. Gravity had pulled so long with the aid of weather that the structure was hanging from its own bent and naked nails, some of them the old cut-nails, some newer wire-nail additions, all letting go. So, a couple of years into our ownership, I put a crowbar at the top of the thing and boom it fell to the lawn. I was sad about its loss, turned out, and still am a little mad at myself—but at the time it seemed crazy to spend a month renovating an outhouse. I kept the board with the two holes cut out. That will be a sign one day: Lentior! Which will translate as the name of our house: Slow Down.

  I put daylilies in the pit and have used some of the beautifully heavy old outhouse boards around the house for various projects, including repairs under our substantial porch, which I didn’t want falling as the outhouse had done, and did save.

  Thomas Q. Moonrobin added the porch, Lu Lawrence told me. And Moonrobin added the cinderblock foundation that stopped the eastern end of the house from its sinking. (A ball dropped by one of our dogs rolls forty feet from the westward living room and through the parlor to the eastward dining room fast. The walk from the kitchen to the living room is not just slanted but strongly uphill. This, I love.) “Moonrobin was a charactah,” Lu said. She would hate me for spelling it like that, but that’s how she said it. “His wife died in your house,” said Lu. “He raised four kids here,” she said. “He was a lovable, yuh, generous, hardworking man, yuh- yuh- yuh.” She shook her head, looked skyward, lost herself in reverie.

  When she came back to our shared world, she told me that Moonrobin had built all the outbuildings, too, the odd little structures that had sold me on the place. She wondered what had become of him. He’d been the mailman on this route—Rural Route Four—thirty years or more. “A sweetie, he was,” Lulu told me. “When Annie died, oh he folded in, yuh! Left his job,” Lu said, “He almost did die himself.” Then the ultimate expression of empathy, breathed inward: “Yuh. Yuh. Yuh!” She paused, collected herself. “Got dark and closed off and wouldn’t talk.”

  Moonrobin sold to a California Couple (they’re still called California Couple in the neighborhood, no name remembered), who sold it quickly to Pete and Mamie Johnson, who sold it in turn to us—Bill and Juliet (the Professor and the Artist, I know people call us, and I know the tone)—with improved gardens, septic system, and other landscaping, sold it to us in 1992 after some mild negotiation for the sweet sum of $48,500.

  And the Professor and the Artist lived in this house year-round for four unimaginably speedy years before the Professor changed jobs (trading rugged landscape and beloved home for a more rugged career landscape, for cruel ambition) and the Artist went off to school in Chicago, eventually joining her husband in plain Ohio, proving their permanent and unarguable status in Maine as Flatlanders.

  The Moonrobin place became our summer house. And though we held onto the idea that we would be back someday, back full-time, we were
certifiable Summer People, which, of course, is not good (the only even slightly acceptable Flatlander is a year-round Flatlander). But oh! Our blessed, blessed summer place! It wasn’t so hard to afford: our mortgage is $369.12 a month. In winter, a good-natured, super-handy bachelor with his own summer plans housesat for us, paid the bills on the basis of shut-off notices, kept the grounds gorgeous. Our plans fit his plans, it seemed, and he kept coming back.

  We started with a couple of acres that were sectioned off in 1951 when Albert Thompson got sick of the family house (our house, that is, still called the Thompson place by many of our neighbors, the ones who don’t call it the Moonrobin place) and put up a deluxe double-wide mobile home across the street and two hundred yards down the hill and out of sight.

  A couple of years into our tenancy, Lu Lawrence (who with her late husband bought her house, the former Little Blue School, from Thompson), decided to move to senior housing in town. She came over and made a rather formal speech: as her abutter (pronounced abuttah), I had every right to first refusal on the woods between her place and mine. So Juliet and I now own four more acres, a beaver-bitten and stonewall woodlot that touches the Temple Stream: nine thousand bucks. I thought it a good deal—still do—but certain townsfolk smirked.

  The rest of the old Butterfield farm—hundreds of acres—was still a milk farm, owned by Dennis Lucky, then not yet forty, bought (as he has told me) from his former employer. The pastures were still clear; the Temple Stream still ran through the flood plain below; the heifers still gamboled; the steers still mooned, the bull still thought he reigned; the cows still chewed and stared and bellowed giving birth, still came up the hill for milking; the birds were still plentiful and various: stream, field and forest habitats converge here and with luck always will—Dennis has lately moved up Porter Hill a mile and wisely put his streamside land into conservancy.