Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 18

  The blue plastic seed scoop clattered to the concrete, settling in the middle of an ugly brown stain.

  After I had cut Hershey free, my goal had been to clean her wounds and apply antibiotic cream. I had been focused and working hard to look forward, not back. There was no doubt that I wanted to block out the memory of finding her there on the porch, but that was no excuse to have forgotten the blood smeared in a foot-wide stripe across the porch. Even worse, I had forgotten to look around for other things. It had never once crossed my mind, even though it should have been top of the list. Adam hadn’t been as clutter-minded as I had. A screaming dog hadn’t knocked him off his purpose. He had remembered to leave a telltale message.

  I went inside and Hershey met me at the door, nudging my hand for reassurance after refusing to go onto the back porch. I rubbed her ears and patted her ribs until she lifted her head and tail. Then I grabbed a couple of plastic shopping bags and my phone. I slipped out to take a picture and dispose of the mouse.

  “Sorry, little guy,” I said when I tied the second bag closed. “I hope you find a mountain of cheese in mousie heaven.” I hosed off the stain as well as I could, but would have to come back later with peroxide and a scrub brush. Cleaning bloodstains was on every novelist’s list of skills that they researched but never expected to use.

  I tried to keep thinking that way, as though this were research for some future novel. But I kept failing and slipping back to reality. Everyone knows that in a novel you shouldn’t hurt the dog. People can be tortured, but never, ever hurt the dog.

  Real life is a shade different from the novels, though. Sure, I was horrified and incensed that he had done such a terrible thing. I loved Hershey and felt physical pain over the assault. But the one pervading thought I couldn’t shake was how much worse he could do to my kids. In the grand scheme of things, this was not the worst thing that could happen.

  I only hoped that the worst wasn’t yet to come.

  –15–

  Rise

  One Cookie at a Time

  Another round of rainstorms kept us away from the house, and I started to panic about the schedule. It was one of the rainiest seasons on record. The foundation had taken so long for us to figure out that we were months behind my original schedule. An experienced crew could have finished the block in a weekend for only a little more than I had paid Pete to help, and the saved time would have been worth ten times that. We had made progress, but I was making more bad decisions than I could afford.

  Just when it seemed impossible to grab a stroke of positive luck, an angel showed up to pull us out of our muddy mess. He wasn’t the traditional white-plumed, singing kind; in fact, this man didn’t even believe in angels. But in our weary state, we welcomed the tall, stubborn German man who had raised me. He drove sixteen hours from Wisconsin by himself, his vehicle packed full with supplies and his head with ideas. I had more faith in my father’s ability and knowledge than anyone I knew.

  “Grampa Puttkammer is here!” Roman shouted, nailing the pronunciation and enthusiasm even while he hid behind my legs.

  But nothing in life is simple. My dad was facing a major health problem.

  Not more than a year before, on one of those Sunday afternoons when my Bradford pear trees were turning from sweetly white to electric green, my strong, always-healthy father called me from Wisconsin. “It’s going to fall below freezing again tonight,” he said casually, as though May frost were as common to me as it was to the Yankees. “The windchill might hit five degrees and the cat won’t leave my lap. Did I tell you I ordered heirloom tomato seeds this year? And I guess they finally diagnosed that thing with my leg. Multiple sclerosis. It’ll be a dry summer again. We just haven’t had enough snow for the past few years…”

  My scalp went tingly and my vision tunneled. This news was completely unexpected. Not the new garden seeds, the weather, or the lazy cat, but the relabeling of what I’d believed was a pinched nerve in his right leg. Dad had been taking care of my ailing grandparents for ten years, his own health ignored. “Multiple sclerosis, and snow,” I said, not sure what the fumbling words meant. But when you talk to a Wisconsinite, every conversation has something to do with snow or the Packers, and football just didn’t seem to fit. We talked medications and management, but with no cure and few successful treatments, there wasn’t much to say. Even the words “I love you, Dad” lost bulky weight, bubbling up fragile and wispy across my tongue.

  He was still a few years from his planned retirement and one of the most brilliant and active people I’d ever known. I said these things over and over, as though his wit, energy, and proximity to free time should have wrapped him in a blanket of immunity. The sudden, undeniable truth of Dad’s mortality crushed the air from my lungs, and even when I stood in my backyard with my arms lifted to the sky, the world no longer seemed big enough for me to inhale fully.

  I was toppled by the reversal of who would be taking care of whom. Even though I was eight hundred miles away, I wanted to drop everything and run to him, slipping and sliding up his frozen sidewalk. But I had my own messy life to deal with in Arkansas, so I hadn’t seen him as much as I needed to. And my messes just seemed to grow bigger and bigger. I didn’t expect more than phone advice from him when I started building, so seeing him at my kitchen table sketching ideas on the back of my junk mail was an enormous relief. He was six foot two, lanky, and still looked strong as ever.

  “So exactly how much do you know about building a house?” Drew asked.

  “Oh, quite a bit,” Dad said. “I built the house your mom grew up in. Course my dad helped. And all of his brothers. We had some friends who helped out quite a bit. And it was a lot smaller than the house you planned here. A third of the size, maybe. And it had a basement, so all the plumbing and vents ran down there, which made them easier to get to. Oh, and the roof structure was a lot different. Has to handle a hell of a snow load. But a house is a house. Nothing to it really.”

  The kids and I exchanged nervous half smiles. It was too late to fool us with dismissive remarks about the simplicity of building a house. And we were all too aware that a work crew of a couple of teens, a 110-pound woman, and a grandpa with a chronic illness was nothing at all like having a huge family and pile of friends over for an old-fashioned barn raising. Maybe Dad knew that, too, or maybe he’s to blame for my congenital optimism.

  “We’d better get my car unloaded,” Dad said. “Put it off long enough.”

  “What did you bring?” Jada asked, hanging on his arm and bouncing on her toes.

  “I came from Wisconsin, didn’t I? I brought enough cheese that we’re gonna need a wheelbarrow to carry it in!”

  And he wasn’t kidding. If Dad had a motto it would include the words “bargain” and “bulk.” He had stopped at one of the Amish communities and bought a fifty-pound block of cheddar.

  We spent the next couple of hours cutting it into blocks to bag and freeze. Fortunately, he had also picked up a half pallet of plastic bags intended for hot-dog buns. They were food-safe and perfect except for a smear on the printed logo that put them in a discount store. We had a lifetime supply of plastic and cheese.

  We were binge-drinking slushies while we worked. “Whole flats of strawberries for a couple of dollars,” Dad bragged. “Just because they were going bad. Cleaned up and frozen they make perfect slushies. I added grapes to the mix, too, half a trash bag for a dollar. Just can’t let that go to waste. Think of all the work that went into growing those grapes and shipping them across the country. Might as well stick ’em in our head.”

  “Brain freeze!” Jada yelled. “I have brain freeze.”

  Roman ran in circles, laughing and drooling strawberry slushy. “My brain froze! I a ice cube in my head! Brain slushies!”

  Just when I thought we had processed the last of Dad’s gifts, he came in dragging two full-size coolers. “Turn the oven on,” he said. “I brought turkeys!”

  Yes, that was plural. Turkeys.

 
; We baked through the rest of the day and all night. Then we stripped the turkeys clean, filling plastic bags with meat for sandwiches on the job site. We’d eat turkey and cheese until we gobbled and sprouted feathers.

  Hope and Drew piled a final load of bags next to the pantry. I didn’t look inside, happy that whatever we had it didn’t need to be cut, shredded, blended, or stored in the now-packed refrigerator and extra freezer. The rest of Dad’s treasures would be revealed soon enough.

  Our first few days on the job site with Dad were spent planning more than building. It was no surprise that some of my original plans weren’t the best use of space or materials, and Dad was nothing if not frugal.

  Both of my parents believed in improving standard designs or inventing new ones. They dug a full-size swimming pool—with shovels—when I was six. They made plans for a build-it-yourself motorized glider and talked about building a car with a kit from a magazine. They fashioned custom tools and devices, Dad with metal and concrete, Mom with wood and fabric. They stood in the store planning how to modify and improve an item before they even made it to the checkout line. “Cut this part off, add a wheel here, put a rubber handle on this, and it will be perfect!” Dad would say, and Mom would nod, and rework the plan on the way to the car. They gardened and hunted, home-canning vegetables, fruits, and meat. They made our meals and furniture from scratch. Most important, they taught me that I could build anything I could imagine. Granted, they didn’t expect me to dream quite so big.

  “There’s a better way to get this plywood on the exterior. Safer,” Dad said. Then he drilled two small holes in the center of a four-by-eight sheet of plywood and threaded a rope through them while I gritted my teeth, convinced that he was ruining the sheet. “Now you can pull it up from inside the house, just one person guiding it from a ladder. You’ll have a lower risk of head injuries at least.”

  He was right, of course. “What about the holes from the rope? Won’t they let cold air in?”

  “Those little pinpricks? It’ll be a damn miracle if you don’t have gaps big enough to put your head through in other spots. If they bother you, glue on a piece of foam or caulk them. No biggie. Least of your problems.”

  Perspective. That’s what Dad offered. Not always the perfect opinion, but always an intelligent one. Having someone else to bounce ideas off was a relief. I wasn’t alone anymore.

  Roman toddled up after we had most of the downstairs plywood in place on a Friday night. “I a doughnut!” He was completely naked and had rolled himself in sand. Sugar-coated. The section of our sand pile that I’d roped off for him was his new favorite play place, even though I wasn’t sure if I preferred it over mud.

  Dad had brought a large collection of toy cars and trucks he’d picked up from curb trash on his daily walks. “Can’t see any reason to put all that in a landfill when there’s a lot of good use in it.”

  Dad’s multiple sclerosis was impossible to ignore. He was still strong and had eased so much of my stress, but he had also added a sackful of new worries. He had to use a cane a lot of the time because he was off balance. When he tired out he got dizzy all at once, like a wave that knocked him down wherever he was. “When it comes over me, I’m done just like that. Have to sit down awhile. There’s no arguing with it like you can with the regular kind of tiredness.”

  I arranged lawn chairs in strategic locations and forbade him to climb on ladders. He used the chairs and the ladders. One out of two isn’t bad, I suppose.

  Every other night he injected himself in the stomach with interferon. It wasn’t a cure, but there was a small chance it would slow the progression of the disease and reduce the frequency of his weakness spells. He paid a high price with side effects, but bravely continued, since it was the only possible relief for the wicked turn his own nerve cells had taken.

  He was tough, though, and he gave me the confidence to tackle impossible things like framing the three-car garage. I had put it off because the garage floor slab was four inches lower than the house, and the step down made everything more complicated. The step and some differences in the ceiling joists would make the ceiling tall enough for the garage doors while leaving the upstairs all a single level. In short, it was a complicated section to frame, and expensive because of the taller studs—each had to be hand-cut to exactly the right length—and the heavy headers above the two garage doors.

  I had ordered our ceiling joists premade and was happier now than ever with the decision. They supported a lot of weight and needed to have enough room for the HVAC ducts and plumbing to run between the two stories. They had been ready for weeks by the time we were ready for them.

  Dad supervised the joist delivery and a crane to lift them into place while I was at the office. I couldn’t stop smiling when I saw them. The structure felt a lot more homelike even though the joists looked more like a rose trellis than a ceiling or floor. And as much as I loved being up out of the mud with the majority of our work, I had started feeling more and more nervous about how far off the ground everything was happening. We weren’t even working on the second story yet and already a minor mistake could cause a serious injury. Why that had never crossed my mind back when we were building the little model house out of sticks, I’ll never know.

  To keep us safely on the ground as long as possible, I directed everyone to finish the nailers for Sheetrock and supports for towel and tissue holders. We planned gas lines and water lines even though we were nowhere near ready to install them.

  Dad must have suspected what I was up to, because he started telling the stories about when he was drafted during the Vietnam War. They were stories about basic training, protests, and race riots in the capital. He told about hearing a visiting marine in basic who announced they didn’t have enough people listed as ground infantry in the marines and were going to move some of the army guys over. “You, you, you, and you,” the marine said, pointing right down the line of draftees. The next guy in line wavered, weak with relief. Dad said he would never forget the look on the guy’s face. To be one finger point away from almost certain death and escape. It changes everything.

  The stories varied, but the theme was consistent and relevant. Dad had been told by friends to keep his gaze steady and blank and never volunteer for anything. But he was my dad, so he rarely listened to advice even if it felt sound. He was restless and bored, so he held his hand up whenever they asked for a few volunteers, even if he knew he had no idea how to complete the task. Most of the time, he ended up in a better place because he jumped in and took action. He carried better weapons, learned more skills, and was well respected.

  So when another guy showed up, pointing and assigning each draftee to their next duty base, Dad and a couple of other guys received a different assignment from everyone else in training. He was sent to Langley, Virginia, to take a position in the presidential honor guard, while most of the others went straight to Vietnam.

  Dad was telling me to get my hand in the air, take action, quit staring straight ahead to avoid the beady eyes of danger. I might avoid the potential of a few bad things that way, but I was also avoiding the good.

  I came home from work on a Wednesday, resolved and determined to get the second story under way. Dad had been spending his mornings at the job site and then coming home for a nap before heading back out with us for the late afternoon and evening. As soon as I entered the house that day, I knew something was wrong. A bowl of soup was half spilled on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, and everything was dark and quiet. Hershey cowered down, tail between her legs, and led me up the stairs.

  My legs went numb. I was thinking of Adam, wondering if he had come back and done something terrible. By the time I reached the top of the stairs I knew thoughts of Adam were half distraction to keep myself from thinking about Dad.

  I found him curled in a bed we had set up for him in our playroom. I’d never seen my dad look so small. He had pulled a quilt over his head and he was crying. “MS attack. Have to rest,” he said. “Sorr
y.”

  The world spun wildly around him, rising and falling on waves that left him nauseous and weak. His words came out slow and slurred, and half of his face slumped in a mild palsy. With the help of an eye patch, his dizziness subsided after a couple of days and he was on his feet again. The attack had taken a toll, though, and I knew that every attack meant additional, permanent nerve damage.

  The attacks would keep happening, no matter what he did, but there was no denying that stress made them worse. I worried that I had caused it. My crazy project had taken him down a notch, stolen away some of his life.

  We were all tired and we were nowhere near the end. Was it worth it? For a house? Nothing more than a damn house?

  But somewhere deep I knew that we were building more than that and we had no option to quit. The supplies were piled up and we still couldn’t afford to hire someone else to puzzle them all together.

  Sometimes, when you raise your hand and jump in, there is no going back, no way out. And sometimes, that’s exactly the sort of commitment a person needs in order to make a profound life change.

  It was time to move forward and up, so that’s exactly what we did. Dad was at least as stubborn as I was, so he was right there with me. “I’ll go out to the house with you this weekend, make a plan for the next stage,” he said while Roman and I were planning supper on a Friday night.

  I nodded, avoiding his eyes and my own guilt.

  “I want peanut butter and eggs!” Roman said.

  “Don’t you want turkey?” Dad asked, smiling crookedly.

  Roman rolled his eyes. “I can’t eat more turkey in my life.” Then he raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Can we have cookies?”

  “Maybe one cookie after supper. Spaghetti sounds good. Everyone likes spaghetti.” It was one of my dad’s favorites and he hadn’t been holding much down lately.