No better a house
by Kenneth J Harvey
[ fiction - december 03 ]
For Josiah Boyde Harvey
A man from the government stood in the doorway of Ace Winslow's one-room shack. He had arrived on a silver snowmobile and wore a silver helmet and silver zip-up snowsuit that was peculiar to the area. After introducing himself, he stood silent for a few moments, awaiting conversation that was not forthcoming, then said: "We'll be building you a new house in the spring." He explained that Ace need not live in "this place" any longer, that the government had initiated programs to ensure that the people in Cutland Junction lived better lives. Ace had never seen the man before. He nodded regardless and grinned and asked the man in for a mug of tea, but the man said he was busy and had better get going. Many more stops to make before the day was out.
"On government land over there," the man had indicated, pointing his silver mitt toward the white featureless expanse of barrens so that Ace had no idea how far. The snow went on for a vast stretch of distance, leading to the far away shadow of Coombs Hill and its deep woods where Ace had worked the trap line for over fifty years. "Here's some papers explaining the program." The man stuck his mitt under his arm and yanked out his hand. Ace was surprised at how pink and smooth the hand was. He watched it as the man pulled out a thick booklet from his deep zip-up pocket. "If you have any questions," said the man, passing the booklet to Ace, "I'll be back in a few weeks." The man then looked over his shoulder and all around as though wondering what the house might be doing plunked down there in the middle of nothing but white.
Ace grinned some more and nodded. He weighed the booklet in his hand, marvelling at how thick and full of words it was. He then watched the man turn to watch the snow that had begun falling an hour ago. "It's getting worse," said the man from the government. He fitted on his helmet and fastened the strap beneath his chin.
Ace winked in sturdy agreement and clutched the booklet with his brown leathery fingers. The cover was shiny and featured a drawing of a brand new house with a big leafy green tree to either side of it. The government man turned and climbed on his snowmobile, tugged the ignition cord and gave a wave before heading off across the white barrens toward the frozen surface of Black Duck Lake.
Ace could see a few dry bush twigs where they were poked up through the snow and cracked off in the path of the snowmobile. He shut his door and went over to the pot-bellied stove. Lifting the damper off the front burner, he admired the pure redness of the fire roaring within, then stuffed the booklet into the perfect circle. He nodded and grinned, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening as he poked at the paper with the fire iron. "A fine heat," he assured himself, feeling the hot surge so full against his face that he leaned slightly away and slid the heavy damper back over to seal the hole.
In the spring, the workers came. Ace watched them survey the land about sixty feet across the barrens where they were driving stakes and measuring the spaces between one man and the other. What they were doing required great precision. A small shift to the left and back. A tiny shift to the right and forward.
The men wore spring clothes and this pleased Ace to see that another season was coming. If he were a younger man, he'd be off in the woods, cutting and hauling wood to sell around Cutland Junction, down Shearstown Line and in Bareneed. From his doorway, he watched the workers stretch long runs of tape from one point to another, then mark the driven stakes with bits of red ribbon that flapped lightly in the breeze. Fine work, Ace told himself. Work like that was hard to come by. He considered those stakes, imagining himself yanking their sharp points out of the ground and carrying them back to his shack. They were just the right size for burning.
A few days later, a bulldozer arrived in the early hours, the roar of its engine startling Ace when he was lifting the blackened tin kettle to make his tea. The dozer had been delivered on a flatbed truck that was parked on the makeshift dirt road the men had laid to get to him. In no time, the bulldozer cleared the land, the clay fresh and brownish-red in mounds and then levelled. No trees to worry about. Too bad. Ace could have sawed them up and burned them. Even now, heading toward summer, the nights were nippy. Ace had to keep a fire burning, his bones remembering the trap line, having to keep the small stove going in the numbing outdoors night, or die. The main thing was to make it through the night without freezing to death. Just keep warm and remember where the food was buried, pray that an animal hadn't dug it up and eaten it so that a part of your life was eaten away with it.
The earth beneath the snow. Ace always wondered on that when he was snowshoeing through the trapline, the fur of the caribou skins soft against his skin. The crunch and vivid brilliance of the snow as his breath steamed out of him. The warm earth beneath that snow. It gave him consolation and blessed his sleep.
In the late afternoon of that same day, the bulldozer was loaded back on the truck bed and taken away. Ace watched out his window as everyone left in their vehicles. The freshly disturbed earth was a strange sight, a deep-brown specific space surrounded by the soggy immenseness of brittle blonde, burgundy and green barrens.
It was another two days before a different crew of workers showed up to start sawing and hammering. Supplies were delivered by big trucks that often got stuck and needed to be hauled out by other vehicles that eventually got stuck too until a crane was brought on site and kept there to help the vehicles free themselves from the clamp of the earth.
A great deal of sawing and hammering started in, and, eventually, the stud frames of walls were put together on the floor of the house and then raised and nailed down. The roofless wooden frame was erected sixty feet away from Ace's shack. The perfect ribs of the house.
Ace would rise from where he was having a lie-down on his daybed and stand next to his table, his old knees aching, until he had to sit in a chair and peek out the bottom rim of the window. All the while, he would watch the blonde-wood frame, admiring the exact fit of the construction. Occasionally, one of the workmen would come over on his break and stand in Ace's doorway and chat while he wiped sweat from his forehead. The men all knew of Ace, how he had lived alone for years, how men from the community would drop off fish and caribou steaks, potatoes and carrots, because Ace was respected for surviving and twining together the legends that figured his life. The workers were thankful to have the steady work that the government was providing by hiring them to build these new houses in and around the community.
"Same old t'ing," said Ace. "Build'n houses fer us."
The workers would smile or laugh openly. "Can't complain about the work though," they'd say, respectfully.
"No," Ace would agree with an understanding intake of breath. "Can't complain 'bout dat, me son."
The men went about their business. Ace knew many of them from the area, others were from places far from the woods, off along the coast. Over time, he learned that he was even related to a few of the local ones. He knew the stories of their lives or he invented what he could not recall and told it all back to them in yarns. The sawing and hammering made him remember.
It was nice of the men to be helping out. He watched from the window while he sipped his tea. One day to the next. The workers toiled with speed and efficiency. Hammering and sawing, and calling out requirements. The way they worked made Ace feel proud. They were good men to work so hard. They knew what they were doing, willing to learn more every day because they were interested in figuring themselves stronger; old-timers in the making.
At night, Ace would leave his doorway and, guided by his dim flashlight, wander across the pitch-black barrens to the site of his new house. The smell of fresh wood and upturned clay hung in the air like a natural intrusion. He would sweep the flashlight beam over the erected two-by-four studs and see the light travel between them, faintly spread against the night sky. He strolled back and forth in the darkness, collecting the scraps of two-by-four and two-by-six left over from the day's work. He collected them in his arms and walked with the flashlight beam aimed at the ground a few feet ahead of his slow stride.
Coming into his shack from the outside, he felt as though he were entering a foreign place. The warm light from the oil lamp softened the shape of the objects in the room in a way that made him feel attached in his heart to them. He'd lay the bits of wood on his kitchen table and leave to collect more. Next to his stove, there was a deep closet outfitted with shelves. On these shelves, Ace neatly stacked the ends of wood, brushing the bits of sawdust away with a neat sweep of his fingertips.
The house was completed in four weeks, the roof shingles gummed and nailed as the crowning touch. Sitting there on the barrens, the house appeared solid and whole, but hopelessly, senselessly vacant.
A silver pickup truck with a government sign on the door arrived and parked on the new dirt road. The government man got out and stood a moment staring at the house, his hands on his hips, then he knocked on Ace's door and announced-- with a proud smile-- that Ace could move in any time he liked. He handed the old man a silver ring with two shiny gold-coloured keys on it. "This one is for the lock on the front door, and this one's for the lock on the back."
Ace took the ring of keys, nodded and invited the man in for a mug of tea, but the man was in a hurry. "Another time," the government man assured Ace, but didn't mean it, so that Ace shut the door without further thought. He studied the keys as he went and stood by the window. The government man climbed back into his truck and drove away. The keys were brand-new-shiny where he laid them on the table top. Ace wondered why they had locked the house. Why it had two doors. Easy to walk in the front, tread straight through the house, and then out the back. Nothing there to stop a man from simply passing through.
Two weeks later, the government man arrived for another visit. He was driving the same silver pickup truck with the government markings on its door. Most of the truck was clean but the bottom was caked with mud and dust.
"Did you need help moving?" the government man asked, pointing toward the new pale-green bungalow with brown shutters that sat unoccupied on the barrens. The workers had planted two small trees in the front yard, one at either side of the house. They had even built a wooden fence and painted it white.
Ace shook his head, "Oh, no, me son. Not at all."
"I can get a few people to lend a hand."
"Don't be so foolish. No need of dat."
"Will you be moving soon?"
Ace winked and grinned, "Don't know. I were jus' look'n."
"Oh? Looking? At what?"
"Dat house, da new one. Ye couldn't 'av missed it."
The government man glanced over Ace's shoulder. "Is your wife at home?" he asked.
"Wife?"
"You're not married?"
"Yer a queer fellow, ye know," said Ace, "Right hard ta talk ta."
The government man said nothing, and Ace shut the door.
The next day, a different man in a silver truck arrived to tell Ace that he had to be moved by the end of the week. "Otherwise," the man said in a husky voice, "We'll be forced to condemn your house."
"Over dere?" Ace asked, light-heartedly.
"No," said the man. "This one." The man was outfitted in caribou skins and sealskin boots despite the warming weather. He was a big man with a big face and green eyes. He stared past Ace's shoulder into the kitchen with the daybed where Ace slept, then his eyes took in Ace's face. He spent a few moments appreciating the features. "If you move on your own, we won't need to tear this place down. Although we might need to anyway. I'm not certain."
Ace shook his head. "Ye remember dis house?" he asked, tilting his head toward the roof.
"How you mean?"
"Dis house were built fer me, too."
"When?"
"I don't 'av a clue. How da bejeezuz am I supposed ta know? Where ye frum anyway? Yer frum down on da coast."
"I'm from St. Shotts."
"Christ hallmighty. Why'd ye come dis far?"
"It's my job."
Ace scoffed and began shutting his door, but the man continued, "Just like fishermen used to sail up to the Labrador for the salmon, or head out to the ice fields for seals. What's the difference? I just work for the government. Work is work. I have to come here."
This line of reasoning gave Ace pause and he invited the man in for a mug of tea. The man accepted and they engaged in a lengthy conversation about travel by boat which greatly pleased Ace. Then the man glanced at his watch and glanced out the window and said, "I best be going. Other stops to make."
Ace nodded and showed the man to the door. It was a beautiful afternoon. The two men stood in the doorway, facing the sky, silenced by and drawn into its immense blueness.
"Nice talking," the man finally said and offered Ace his hand. Ace looked at it and it was dark and scarred. He took hold of it and gave it a firm shake.
"Pleasure," he said, shaking the man's hand a few more times for good measure. "Yer a fine feller, ye are. Drop by fer a visit any time ye likes."
The next day, Ace woke to hear the wind howling. He shuffled from his daybed and opened the door, gripping it tightly against the strain of the wind. He went to his outhouse to relieve himself, then, with the wind pressing against him, he pushed on across the barrens to the new house. The back door was locked. He fished around in the pocket of his green work pants and found the ring of two keys. The first one he tried fit perfectly. He opened the door and stepped in out of the wind to face the utter calmness of the back porch. The smell of new paint and fresh emptiness gave him pause. He felt as though he did not belong and might be caught intruding.
Listening, he heard nothing, not even the howl of the wind beyond the walls. His boot steps echoed through the entire house as he stepped into the kitchen. There was a new electric stove and refrigerator and plenty of cupboards. There was a chrome kitchen set. Ace sat in one of the vinyl-covered chairs and found it small on his rump, uncomfortable and slippery. He went back to his house and began dismantling his pot-bellied stove. He carried it piece by piece to the new house, recalling how he had to lug his smaller stove around with him on the trapline, always lugging and needing the stove to eat a meal and drive the chill away.
The electric stove was attached by a thick orange wire that had to be yanked again and again to get loose. It finally snapped free from somewhere under the floorboards. Ace shoved the electric stove out into the back yard where it tipped and rattled violently onto its back. Retrieving his wooden tool box from his shack, he cut a precise hole in the wall of the new house where the stove pipe could be snugly fitted.
The house was warm. He had water that ran from the taps. A pump that brought it from a well that was capped at the side of the house. It was fine living there although somewhat fake like it wasn't really his life at all that he was wandering around in.
As it grew colder, the pump stopped working and the two toilets wouldn't flush. Ace went to his outhouse, which had been left standing as an historical marker by the demolition crew. The squat compartment smelled the same as always. There was no changing that. It smelled like a permanent part of his life that no one could ever tear down.
"Sacred ground," he muttered, sitting there, grunting.
In the late fall, Ace ran out of the scrap lumber he had collected and began wishing the demolition crew hadn't carted away all the wood from his old house. As soon as the fire began ebbing and the chill became obvious, he opened the door that led out into the living room and surveyed the furnishings. He began sawing up the two big chairs. He worked up a sweat which was fine because the living room was cold and he didn't like lingering in the sharpness of the air without moving. The cold of the living room put him in mind of the vicious outside. He carried the wood from the upholstered chairs into the kitchen and shut the door, began splitting the wood with his handaxe.
Fire raging, he decided to make a narrower bed of the boxspring that rested on the floor in his new bedroom. The bedroom, down a short hallway and next to the bathroom, was always cold,, too far from the kitchen to ever properly heat.
In November, Ace began ripping out the bedroom walls, first burning the moldings and then the closet door. When nothing but ashes remained, he tore up the cumbersome carpet and commenced hauling up the bedroom floorboards that were nice and thick.
Ace sat in the kitchen, in the chair he had salvaged from his old shack before the workers tore it apart, plank by plank. He looked at the empty chrome chairs and wondered why they were there. His old wooden table was sitting in the living room, looking out of place among all the new woodless things.
In the dim stove-light of the kitchen, Ace thought of getting up to feed the languishing fire. Glancing around the walls, he studied the cupboards. Why had they put doors on the cupboards? You couldn't see inside that way.
Ace pushed himself to his feet and pulled open the last remaining drawer where a few of his tools were stored. He found his screwdriver right beside his hammer where he had left it. The hinges were something he might someday use. He unscrewed them, then took down his handaxe from where it was hung on the knife rack the workers had put there for him. He set the cupboard doors on the table, stood them up, one at a time, and easily split them down into manageable pieces. Good and dry. The wood burned evenly, crackled the way he liked to remember the twigs burning on the trapline.
The four chrome chairs were no good for burning. The table was equally useless. He tossed them out the back door and replaced the table with the one from his shack. Ace watched out the back window, studied the two men who had come to haul away the electric stove. They set it on the back of their pickup truck and tied it down with green rope, then wandered around, surveying what was left of the house. Ace waved at them when they returned and looked his way before climbing into their truck. The two men waved back while the engine started with a rumble.
Ace cast his scrupulous gaze around the kitchen. Nothing left to burn. He commenced tearing the clapboard off the front of the house. It burned furiously as it was dried by the sun and coated in paint. Next, he commenced tearing out the front porch. The front door burned nicely. Thick solid wood, hard to saw. The casing around the door came away easily, and then the closet door, the porch's box of walls, and then the front wall disappearing to give him an open view of the yard and the fence. In the livingroom, he took the large window out, lowered it with rope and left it on the ground for anyone who needed it, then beat out the full front wall. Nice to be sheltered with a roof over his head like that but for it to be wide open before him too; the outdoors just there at the lip of the living room. The flooring under the carpet would give him enough wood to last a month or more.
Back in the kitchen, Ace tore up the linoleum to admire what was underneath. The echoing sound his boots made against the wood was more fitting than the hushed sound they made treading over linoleum.
One morning, snow fell and buried all the trash in the back yard. The snow melted the next day, revealing everything as it was. But then, the following day, it snowed again and stayed that way for the rest of winter. Everything covered. Ace went for a walk in the small front yard. He stayed within the fence and looked out around, an immense field of white in all directions. He began hammering loose the planks from the fence. Occasionally, after one of the fence planks fell, he'd stop to turn and admire the way the snow clung to the limbs of the two small evergreens. How long for them to grow tall? he'd keep asking himself. "Christ, I'll be good'n dead by den."
Once the gyprock ceilings were pounded out of the living room, hallway, bathroom and bedrooms, the criss-cross of truss beams was revealed in explicit detail. Ace dragged his wooden table from the kitchen into the living room and stood on it, his head up in the squat attic. The trick was to figure out which supports could be cut away without the roof crashing down on him. He was still considering this as the winter began to loosen its grip. The roof was a hazard he would rather avoid. He decided to set his sights down instead of up, and so lowered himself into the spaces between the floor joists and began sawing them away. Two-by-sixes. Avoid the galvanized nails. They would dull his saw, and where would he be with a dull saw?
In the spring, as the debris was uncovered, people from the community came to salvage what they could. They had been expecting this. A new house for Ace Winslow. A few of them tapped on Ace's back door to ask for his permission.
"Yays, take whatever ye desires," he'd reply, then stand in the doorway, overseeing the men and women going about their business. "Nothing ta me," he'd mutter, watching the junk be hauled away by the thankful lot who came in need of it.
A few months later, in the early summer, the government man who had engaged Ace in a welcome bit of intelligent conversation the previous fall dropped by for a visit. He brought a house-warming gift, a shiny-leafed plant of the sort Ace had never seen before.
"It's a rubber plant," the government man told Ace, baffled by the sight of what was left of the new house, the roof trusses perilously extended over blank space toward the front, the walls of the other rooms cut down. The outer wall of the kitchen, once the living room wall, had wallpaper still stuck to it that flapped in the wind, facing the elements.
"Looks fake," Ace told the man, watching the plant where the man set it on the table and commenced staring around the kitchen.
"I brought it from St. Shotts," he said, distracted. "What happened here?"
"Needed ta keep warm."
The man laughed outright. "There's electric heat here," he explained, pointing to the thermostat on the wall.
"Wha's dat?"
"It's electric heat," the man told Ace, taking a seat.
"Bullcrap," said Ace. "Ye care fer a mug of tea?" He slid the kettle onto the damper. "We can 'av a gab."
"Why not, it's nice and warm in here." The man joined his hands on the table and smiled. "Comfortable." He rubbed his rough fingers over one of the plant's shiny leaves.
"Canned milk good enough fer ye?"
The man nodded, then laughed through his nostrils and shook his head.
"Wha's so funny?"
"Nothing, nothing. I'm just laughing at me."
"Ye gonna build me anudder house?"
"You bet," said the government man, giving Ace a generous wink. "Only this time we'll know better. We'll make it even bigger."
Ace dug a deep hole in the back yard. It took him two weeks to finish it, his knees gave him trouble as the hole got further down and he had to climb into it and then paw his way up and out. He'd puff and curse as he'd exert himself, then stand and catch his breath. Leaning on his shovel or pick handle, he'd stare down into the hole.
Ace dismantled his outhouse, moved it-- piece by piece-- over the new hole and nailed it back together. He scraped the remaining bits of wallpaper off the outer walls of the kitchen and painted the one-room house with one of the tins of paint the workers left in the back porch. They had left a few brushes, too, in a bucket of water that had frozen but was now thawed.
When the painting was finished, Ace stepped back to have a look. This house was no better a house than his old one. In fact, it was worse. The kitchen was bigger, harder to heat. No benefit to him at all. He did, however, pride himself in the pair of little spruce trees. They never failed to give him a rush of both promise and pleasure. Watching those two evergreens, he took great delight in imagining himself a much smaller man.
