It was around this time of heady activity on the exterior of the house that my brother David brought one of his law school friends home to spend Thanksgiving with us. I believe the guy was from out of state and had no one else to spend the holiday with. He probably imagined the weekend would be a good break from the toil of law school, a time to kick back, stuff himself with turkey, and watch some football on TV. What he got instead is a subject of amusement in my family even to this day. For no sooner had the poor devil been introduced to the family that Wednesday evening than a trenching spade was thrust into his hand and he had to pitch in, along with the rest of us, and help to dig footings for the new brick siding. After all, that’s what evenings and weekends and holidays were for when a remodeling project was under way, and the work went on not just for an hour or two but for the entire weekend, including Thanksgiving Day.
“The poor bastard,” one of us will say, remembering those days. “He didn’t know what he was getting into. He thought we’d surely quit when it got dark. Imagine how shocked he must have been when Dad came out of the house with those floodlights, and we kept right on digging past ten o’clock.”
Similar scenes played themselves out across the next couple of years, as a new roof of shake shingles was put on, the aforementioned patio was added, and, finally, the house’s four-car garage was built. In many ways, this final project was my father’s masterpiece. I was old enough by then to see how he went about it, and like everyone else who witnessed the process, I was both amused and amazed. First the foundations were dug and the footings were poured, followed by the floor of the garage and the driveway. When that was done, we set about building the rafters, stacking each new rafter we built atop the others on the patio.
“What about the walls?” a curious neighbor asked. “Ain’t you gonna have walls on this gigantic thing?”
“Sure,” my father answered. “I already have some ready and waiting.”
“You already have some walls?” the man asked, his eyes bugging a little.
“Sure, at the farm,” my father said. “I’ve got all the walls I need out there.”
I remember standing there in my carpenter’s apron, trying to visualize what my father was talking about. From what I could remember about the place, the old farmstead was little more than an abandoned basement, a rusted-out swing set, and a couple of rows of dying elm trees. Where these “walls” were coming from, I could not imagine.
I found out the very next weekend, when we pulled into the gravel driveway of the old farmstead twenty miles from town, and there at the very back of the property was an old, tin-sided government granary I had all but forgotten about.
“There are those walls I was telling you about,” my father said to our dubious neighbor, who had accompanied us on the errand. “Pull that tin off and lift the roof, and those walls will come apart in sections, just like they were designed to do when the government put them up years ago.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the neighbor said, a weak smile animating his face.
This time, everything came off just the way the old man said it would. Within a couple of hours of arriving, we were hauling our first load of walls to town. As we arrived with each load, a second crew got busy putting them up. It was like one of those Amish barn raisings, the massive garage seeming to grow out of thin air over the course of a single day, the walls rising first, followed by the rafters, followed by precut sheets of plywood we nailed into place before rolling out the tar paper and hammering on the shingles. That evening, we all stood around in the shadow of the thing we had built, drinking iced tea or beer and marveling at all we had witnessed and participated in that day.
When the house on Cedar was finally completed to my parents’ satisfaction, it boasted five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a white-carpeted living room with a stone fireplace separated from the rest of the house by French doors. By then, several of my brothers were skilled carpenters; one of them, Tom, had even gone into business for himself. The work they did on that house was professional grade, and yet, no sooner was it definitively finished, during my first year away at college, than my parents sold it and moved into the three-bedroom farmhouse west of town that my father had grown up in. I remember how shocked I was when my mother called and told me about these developments.
“You’re selling the house?” I asked. “What on earth for?”
“It’s part of a land deal,” my mother said, sighing. “But the truth is, it’s too big for us now anyway, with just your dad and me and your brother Paul left.”
“Too big?” I asked. “Or too finished?”
Here my mother allowed herself a tiny laugh. “Ah, well, you know your father. He likes to have a project.”
“Really? Just him?”
Another laugh.
That was two houses and twenty-five years ago. Although my parents are in their late seventies now and have lived in their current home on Snob Hill for only eighteen months, already I have noticed them looking around the place, commenting on what my father likes to call “the possibilities.”
Hide the envelopes.
In the Land of Crashed Cars and Junkyard Dogs
When I was a boy growing up in western Kansas, my father and his older brother, Harold, owned an auto body salvage yard in the sand hills south of Dodge City. The place was called B & B Auto Parts, or, more simply, B & B. That was the name of the business when they bought it in 1966, and that’s the name it retains to this day, long after they sold it and my father returned to full-time farming and ranching. I remember, as a very small boy, asking my mother what the name stood for and why they never bothered to change it. “I don’t know,” she answered, continuing whatever chore she was doing at the time. “A, B, C—what does it matter? It’s just a junkyard.” Of course, she was right about that; my father himself would have agreed. And yet, to me, perhaps because of the age I was when I experienced it, the salvage yard was so much more than that. As Ishmael says of the whaling ships on which he grew to manhood, the salvage yard, with its forty-odd acres of mangled cars and trucks, was my Harvard and my Yale.
I was five or six years old when I started spending a lot of time at the salvage yard. I don’t know how or why this came to pass, but I have my suspicions. From my earliest days, I was a handful—a hyperactive motor mouth prone to accidents and mischief of a more or less mindless sort. From the moment I woke up until I dropped to sleep from exhaustion seventeen or eighteen hours later, I was constantly on the go, constantly “causing a racket” and “failing to listen,” constantly “into something.” Today, kids such as I was get a dose of Ritalin. But I was lucky. The only solution that offered itself in my case was to send me to work along with my father and older brothers.
Of course, I use the phrase to work in only the loosest of senses. While most of my older brothers were given jobs as apprentice welders or body men or were at least required to push a broom every once in a while, I was allowed to roam free across the entire expanse of the salvage yard so long as I didn’t maim myself or distract anyone else from his work. In this way, I came to know the different territories that made up the salvage yard, as well as the rogue’s gallery of men who ruled over them.
The nerve center of the place was the concrete-floored front office with its long counter littered with coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays, dog-eared lists of inventory. Here parts men took orders from the public and added their voices to a static-ridden frequency on