Ghost Dad pt. 1

    I don’t know if I ever showed you how to sharpen a carpenter’s pencil, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get to demonstrate it in person, so I guess this is as good a place as any. So you’ve got the two wide flats, right? I carve those to a point first, then the two thinner sides. Some guys will stop there, but I like to bevel the four corners, mostly for looks, I guess. I used to rotate it while I carved, like one of those old wall mounted pencil sharpeners you hid in elementary school, but because the grain is funny on these pencils, plus the blade in my utility knife is always dull as hell, it would always come out crooked as a witches finger.

    Maybe one day I’ll get the chance to take you to Staunton and show you the big porch job I was on for most of the summer of 2019. I can’t remember if you and your sister were still talking to me then or not. I was gone off and on for about three months. I’m not sure why they settled there, but those houses are built on some of the steepest terrain I’ve known, and this place was basically built into the side of a mountain, about twenty five yards uphill from the road. In order to put in a full day, I’d have to conserve energy by making as few trips as possible back and forth from the truck, so I’d start the day with my attache bag lashed over one shoulder, my lunch box across the other, and carry my three gallon water cooler in my free hand. It wasn’t Richmond hot there, but it was hot enough, so I’d try to get there by eight at the latest. If it wasn’t too preoccupied, I’d have my work keys in my free hand so I could open the door to the basement when I got to it, and unload everything onto my makeshift desk of boards across some saw horses. As always, when I managed to get the raggedy old door to swing open, I’d be greeted by a blast of cold air from around a corner in the back where I figure the coal bin used to be. Ice cold, it smells of stale beer and sweat, I’ve decided it belongs to the ghost of a shy old man. I say good morning to him every day. After I’d been on the job a week or so, I got up the nerve to peak around the corner, and of course there was nothing there in the black, except pale lime punctuating corners of blackness. I imagine him drinking his sorrows there every night, and me barging in just after dreaded sunrise. I promised to leave him alone after that. 

    I chained my tool box and big compressor to the dead hot water heater down there, next to a stack of salvaged lumber, not because Staunton is crime ridden but it was unoccupied and at some point in the last ten years somebody had kicked the basement door in, I could only guess it was neighborhood kids. The job I had been hired for was to put the porch back on along the front, so that the City would stop threatening to condemn or seize it, but my first area of focus, after moving in, was the basement. See, someone, HVAC guys I guess, had knocked a considerable hole into a masonry wall running down the middle of the place, in order to accommodate duct work. It looked as though the intention was to start out small, but the way bricks of that age behave, once two or three are removed, a whole group usually decides to fall out with them. Being that this wall held up most of the center of the house, some other enterprising individuals had installed an i-beam under the joists to carry the weight. Eight inches tall, it was completely oversized for the job, and if I had to guess, weighed in around six hundred pounds. Clipped into the underside of the joists by a couple framing nails bent around the upper lip of the “I” it was supported either end by two heavy duty screw jacks, the ones that are essentially two large poles. A fine solution, really, the only problem was the one located centermost of the room had been knocked a little more than an inch out of plumb, not quite to the tipping point of dropping the beam, but nearly. In the narrative I had been composing in my head about the history of the house, the same wild kids who’d kicked the door in had found a sledgehammer and tried to knock the post out from under the I-beam, not realizing the havoc that would result if they’d been successful. It probably would have killed one of them.

     I know I’ve told you about some of the sketchy shit I’ve done during my time in this trade, but straightening that pole might have been the worst. I slid one of my cherry red bottle jacks alongside the canted pipe, I can’t remember if I had the twenty ton one or not, and snugged a 4x4 under the I-beam just enough to tap the pipejack back into plumb. The only thing I can tell you if you find yourself involved in an operation like that- go slow and deliberate. Keep your point of egress clear. Maybe wear a hardhat. 

   It’s a garbage house, really. I say this because every hole I dig for 6x6 posts is filled with trash. Slabs of brick columns from the old porch, cinderblock fragments somebody used for back fill, Bazooka Joe gum wrappers. Shell casings from a twenty-two. A hand stitched rag doll too filthy and haunted to salvage. The walls inside have been stripped of their plaster, the lath piled into corners for some reason, like great bundles of kindling. The framing reveals to have been ripped down with a circular saw as opposed to a pit-saw, thus indicating it’s not Antebellum. Nothing special, just a hillbilly shack really.  Desiccated rat carcasses in the dust of the living room, every day it seems I find a new rat mummy, although they're probably squirrels come to think of it. Even though the newel post is good, the stairs are listing treacherously toward a hole clear to the basement, the bare ceiling rafters on the second floor are only half a foot over my head. Botched siding repairs along the back have let in enough rain the the whole wall has started to sag.  I’m only there a short while before I realize I’ve never loved a place more. 

    While we’re up here I might as well show you the room in the back where the ghost children live- I say this because of the lime green door covered in small red handprints. I blame the ghost children for all kinds of shit. It’s them causing the constant barrage of walnuts all over the yard, that sound like a gunshot whenever they hit the battered metal roof and make me jump. 

    Months earlier when I started this job I fished my bright yellow chalk box, you’ve used it yourself, out from behind the bench seat of the truck, because I knew I’d be getting into some plywood, and layed it on my “desk” in the basement. Of course when the morning came and I’d humped three or more sheets of plywood up the hill, little yellow chalk box was nowhere to be seen. Like nowhere in the whole house. I used some scrap one-by as a straight edge, like you do, and got my repairs done. I hunted for it, whenever I cleaned up at the end of the day for a couple weeks, and eventually replaced it with a steel grey one, and that’s when the ghost children brought it back. I found it laying in an bin of salvaged wire coat hangers. Flecked yellow paint, sitting on top of a pile of rusted metal, plain as day. 

    Because they’ve changed the code, one of the local building inspectors comes out and we talk about how I need to cut essentially what is a mortise into the 6x6 posts for the band boards to sit on, which I’d been doing all along anyway, as well as the new hardware requirements to attach it to the house. For some reason he tells me about his time in Iraq, and how a twenty year old man in a situation like that would be changed forever. We talk about why the codes change, a deck in Northern Virginia collapses under a hundred rowdy college kids. I tell him how I was one of those kids back in Richmond a hundred years ago, and where it was a nightly occurrence to feel like the whole world was about to fall out from under you and dump you forty feet into the cobblestone alley below. 

    He’s given me specific dimensions for the post holes, which I make into a plywood template I put on the ground and spray paint the perimeter. I take a spade and cut the silhouette made by the overspray. It’s impossible to lay out post holes perfectly, but this comes pretty close. The 6x6’s at Lowe’s only come sixteen feet, apparently, and since I have no chainsaw, I creep across town with a dozen of them jutting way too far out the back of the bed to be legal and hold the whole pile down with a wheelbarrow lashed across the top, the leaf springs on the back of the suspension compressed all the way to the tires. Back at the job, I fabricate a v-shaped sled out of scrap to hold one end in place and running a hundred foot cord from the house, cut them into manageable lengths to carry up the hill.  I get an early a start as I can, but it’s still well into the eighties by the time I start hauling material up hamburger hill. I take my time with it, the whole operation takes the better part of a day to complete, but I don’t care, it’s only me out here. I’ll worry about how to deal with the bags of concrete later. 

    The house across the way is in need of attention, just not as much, and is inhabited by a little family. Mom, Dad, two little girls, one in a stroller. They never say hi and that’s okay. The Dad is a big red headed guy and I think he must work for a film crew or be a roadie- he’s got a nice expensive panel van that’s loaded for bear I see him occasionally getting sorted. He’s gone for days at a time. Once I notice him wearing a red cowboy shirt with black roses stitched across the collarbone, and to this day I regret not hollering down and asking him where he got it.  

    I bring them up because I decide that, while he’s away. I’ll try to keep an eye on things. I think I’ve told you this before, but becoming a dad is one of those things that will change you completely. I heard a woman say on a TV show or something one time, it might have been Jessica Lange- just because her children were gone, she didn’t stop being a mother. Like, if I’m going hiking with some friends, I’ll pack extra snacks, just in case someone gets hungry. Or actually, it’s like this- say you order a package and it arrives, and there’s the thing you ordered inside a bag inside the big box. Well you’ve also recently acquired a rambunctious siamese kitten, so of course you’re gonna save the box for him, but after you open it, you’re gonna throw the plastic bag in the trash right away because you don’t want him getting trapped in it.. 

    So the reason I’m telling you this, is see- at the top of the hill, just in front of the house is a flat space, just enough for me to set up my sawhorses, even my lumber pile is set off to one side and runs uphill. This is where I do my post cutting operation, like I was saying, they have to be notched, to provide a shoulder for the perimeter boards to sit on. I’ve got my big worm drive saw set up for a majority of the work, my smaller DeWalt circular saw set at a depth of an inch and a half, then my sawzall to finish up the cuts. Oh yeah and the grinder is there to clean everything up. The older I get, the more I realize a ⅜ grinder is the real MVP of a majority of my jobs.

    Anyway the older of the two little girls are having a playdate it seems, as there were a group of three ten year olds raising hell out front of the place earlier in the day, but they’ve gone inside. The thing is, with the difference in elevation, the second story of their house is about dead-level with where I am. All the windows facing the street have thick curtains covering them which, at some point, out of the corner of my eye, I notice one moving ever so slightly. At first I thought nothing of it, but after the third time, I figured they must be peeking out at me. 

    I decide not to fuck with them and keep at it. I wonder if they’re afraid of this haunted old garbage house with its broken out windows and grey lap siding split along the length.  I wonder what they think of me. It feels suddenly, swinging 6x6’s around off and onto sawhorses, like I’m on a stage, performing a small drama for some little girls across the way and the ghost children dropping walnuts on me from the walnut trees. For some reason this line of thought leads me to the idea that I too, am a ghost, haunting this job. A ghost dad, on his hill, watching over everyone and no one all at once. The problem with all this is it reminds me that my heart is broken, and will always be broken and the only thing for it is to put my head down and keep working. 

    Years ago we were living in Tennessee and it was one of those winters where I had no work so your Uncle Paul flew me out to their place on Vashon Island near Seattle for a week and he and I drank and argued and redid one of his bathrooms. Aunt Stephanie took the cousins, who were still real little then, back home to Fort Defiance to visit family. We bitched at each other non stop but we had a lot of fun. I think he paid me a thousand dollars, I can’t remember. 

    I didn’t do well working on the road back then and I missed you and your Mom terribly and he’d get irritated with me complaining about it. We ripped everything out. I tiled the floor, the surround for the tub. I tiled around the window so it wouldn’t rot. He repaired some plumbing and together we installed a new vanity and sink. I might have set the toilet. He would gripe about all my smoke breaks but it would give us time to stand around on the porch in the rain and talk about music, or being a Dad or whatever. We worked and drank around the clock to get it done or until I said fuck it and passed out on the couch, usually around midnight. Back then he had a sheepdog named Einstein who would herd rocks, digging them out of the mossy yard and rolling them into piles. Einstein loved me. I would wake up on the couch and he’d be sitting about two feet away from my face, staring at me. Apparently after I left, Einstein ran away and Paul had to search all over the island to find him. I guess he went looking for the big lost rock.

    I bring this up because one thing we argued about was the big SUV he was thinking about getting for the family. I was like Dude you’ve only got the two kids why do you need that huge ass thing, and he’d counter with the fact that I had a full size truck, I was just as bad for the environment. I told him about the PBS special I’d seen with Alan Alda about permafrost. Alan Alda talked about how something not many people were talking about with the planet warming was the thawing of the permafrost in the Northernmost climates, and all the millions of metric tons worth of carbon they could potentially release into the atmosphere. Soil, vegetation, animal bones beneath the ground, warm enough to finally rot. Affable and unworried as always, Alan Alda smiled and told us we basically had no idea just what all could happen. I don’t guess we ever do, really, but I told all this to Paul and he essentially laughed and said “So what’s your point?” He was right, I think. Back then the people who were really destroying the planet profited from us arguing with one another about how much to recycle, what kind of car we should be driving because it took the focus away from them.

    I know I’m rambling but it’s my fucking story and you’ll probably never read it anyway. 

    See, I was thinking about Paul, because of course, Alan Alda was right. A couple weeks ago, I read a series of articles about a seismic noise that occurred in 2023 so loud it was picked up by earthquake monitors across the globe for nine days. They traced it back to a fjord in Greenland where apparently a mountain, severely undermined by the glacier at it’s feet receding, and the earth thawing beneath it, collapsed into the blue lake below. This in turn created a wave over two hundred meters tall that washed against the cliff face of the surrounding mountains for nine days. I told my therapist about this and while I was caught up in the enormity and beauty it all, he asked, always the literalist, why did it last for so long? I told him the term I’d learned- “Seiche” - the energy of the wave, caused by all the thousands of tons of rock, because of the narrow nature of the fjord and almost ninety degree angle bends at either end, couldn’t easily dissipate. The wave simply had nowhere to go. 

    I don’t know if you remember our bathtub in Tennessee, the room was tiny, but entirely pink, that fifties pink that resembles what, the inside of a watermelon? I don’t even know if that works, pink like fifties bathroom pink, with narow roundover turquoise tile to ring the whole room. The tub, sink and toilet were the same shade. After lunch, whenever you woke from nap, or else couldn't settle enough to sleep, you’d have one of your big cries and I’d draw us a bath in the pink tub and sing old Coasters we’d heard on the local radio station driving around town, likely Along Came Jones. Another trick I would do would be to slosh the water back and forth, to rock you and the little orange tug boat and whatever else we had floating around in there. It’s the same concept, a seiche wave, except on a massive scale.

    Can you imagine it though? A wave bigger than the Eiffel Tower, scouring the cliff faces again and again. I wonder, when the tsunami first formed, before it dredged up a bunch of sediment, was it built out of that perfect sapphire of the fjords, and if that were the case, could it have resembled Hakusai’s great wave? Was it indigo, like his, or more cobalt? I imagine it mostly crystal clear, glittering and deadly. It had no witnesses.

    The seismologist whose video I watched about it, said the only thing they knew at first is that it wasn’t an earthquake, which makes a cacophony like a symphony warming up. Instead the sound droned more like a “throbbing heart” he said. He said it destroyed glaciers viening their way up crevasses carved in between mountains. 

    I wonder if we talked about all this now, what your Uncle Paul would say about it. I remember being out there, smoking under the porch while it rained, him, a big guy in the rain with a blue coat and the rain falling off the hood covering his bald head, Einstein, wet and filthy, rolling around at his feet in the moss. I remember redwoods towering off behind the both of them, and me telling him about the PBS special I’d seen about the subduction plates off the coast from Seattle and the tsunami that would one day come for his island and he responded with a chuckle that sounded just like his Dad’s and said, “If it happens, it happens.”

    I always loved him. No matter how much we fought about politics or music or whatever, when everyone converged on the old homestead in Bedford for Thanksgiving he would stick up for me  whenever Grandmother singled me out. I sometimes wonder if he goes with your mom’s version of how things ended. I lost that whole family when I left, and I don’t even know if Grandmother is still alive anymore. I don’t suppose it matters what any of them think of me at this point, and whether or not it’s true. 

    For eighteen years I’ve managed to keep your mom’s name out of my mouth, but I will tell you this. When I left, she insisted I be the one to tell you, alone, and that it be the truth. So I ran the bath one night, put you in it and climbed in opposite. I asked if you remembered how we’d talked before about the wounds of the mind a person can sustain in their life. You said yes and recounted how I had gone away to rehab because of my own, and that’s how I took care of it. I told you that night because of the wound in my mind I had to move out, and take care of it, again, this time by myself. I can’t remember what you said, but you didn’t cry. 

    Like I said before, this all happened eighteen years ago and everyone’s gone now, even you and your sister and since I’m the only one who cares about it, I should probably let it go. But it’s like my therapist said to me a while back, grief is love with nowhere to go. 

   By the time I get the posts set and the frame stitched together it’s high summer and the ghost children have stepped up their campaign of pelting me from above with walnuts. Falling all day, they become a tripping hazard as I mount the hill each morning. With my messenger bag with full of pills, glasses and paperwork lashed across one shoulder, lunchbox across the other, three gallon water cooler in one hand and instead of my keys to get in the basement with the other hand, I keep it free to chuck walnuts into a woodpile across the other side of the property. I’m careful with their leathery green hides, split enough to stain my hand that deep purplish brown. 

    Like I said it’s only me out here, but I’ve been doing this long enough the joists go in efficiently and before too long one day I’m walking the tops of the joists getting ready for the flooring, perched well into the canopy of the trees. The squirrels have used the tops of my posts to strip down walnuts and the resulting pile of pulp leaves waves of stain cascading down the sides, dark enough to almost be black. The underside of the canopy is as vibrant and green as anything you can imagine, but the cold is coming. The town spills down from me, fills a small valley and then climbs again up the other side, dramatically. From up here I can hear the whole thing, alive and bustling, a pneumatic impact drill at the mechanics place, the fire department trucks heading out occasionally, sirens screaming. Around eleven the uptight hipster taco place I won’t go to anymore starts cooking ground beef and gets me thinking about a chimichanga they have at this one bar downtown. 

    There’s two doors facing the street on the first floor, one’s the main entry and the other is from a bedroom. I measure the gap between the joists and the bottom of the old threshold, worn in the middle as the back of an old mule, and the decking boards will slide under it perfectly, because at this point I’m a good fucking carpenter. I carry on with the work, thinking occasionally of the door, and how one day a man will bring a cup of coffee to his beloved sitting outside and they will have coffee together on their fine porch. The man won’t be me. I will be long gone.