Read Online A Good House by Bonnie Burnard - Free Book Online

the neighbourhood dogs congregated to bark their interest and this caused the yard squirrels to run straight up the hickories to hide in the winter branches. The squirrels returned when they saw there was nothing much to be feared and the men gave them names, engaged them in conversation. The new guy’s language was rougherthan what the older men were used to but they toned him down by declining to respond in kind, by taking the trouble to choose their own words. They were in the habit of controlling talk this way and they didn’t think badly of him, they just assumed he’d been raised differently. Perhaps by wolves, the minister suggested early on.
    Most of the men brought their own shovels and hammers and saws, their own tape measures. They dug through the thin snow into the earth, broke through the shallow frost with the mildest profanity and a bit of extra push from their steel-toed boots on the blades of their shovels. They hauled the lumber from the snowed-on pile in the driveway, built a frame for the foundation, and mixed cement in one of Archie’s wheelbarrows. After it was poured, Archie fired up a propane heater under a makeshift tent, which was only an old stained tarp thrown over the lawn chairs, to help the cement set.
    They framed three walls out square on the cold ground and pounded them together and after the walls were up Trevor Hanley made a sketch of a low-pitched roof that he said they would have to build with particular attention, making sure that the join to the house proper had integrity because if there was ever going to be a leak, that was where it would want to be.
    The plumber came over to install the drain. He drilled holes through the old foundation wall and soldered extensions to the existing waterlines in the basement and when he said he had all the lines he’d need they built the subfloor, leaving him only a trap door, which he said was likely good enough. They covered the wall studs with plywood and tar paper and with siding that someone would paint white in the spring to match the rest of the house. The Anglican minister threw a half-dozen bundles of shingles onto the roof and climbed up after them.
    Archie and a couple of the men on the town payroll dug a long trench from the new bathroom drain to the sewer line out on the street and laid a five-inch pipe to make the connection. Soon after the pipe was buried the wide snake of mounded dirt that would settle and sink by summer was covered by the last of the drifting snow.
    The men moved inside, brought their tools and their noise and their blunt male talk into the kitchen. They used mallets to gouge adoor-sized hole in the kitchen wall, trimmed the opening carefully with handsaws. The kids cleaned up, shovelled sawdust and chunks of plaster into boxes to be carried out to the garage and hauled away to the dump when someone had the time. Insulation was stuffed between the studs and covered with top-grade plywood and then a cupboard arrived and a mirror and a sink and a toilet. The plumber came back, and the electrician, bringing with him a small electric space-heater. A thick grey carpet was glued to the floor so it would be warm on Sylvia’s bare feet in the middle of the night.
    The grandfathers took off in one of Trevor’s brand new’ 55 Chev pick-ups, a demonstrator, he called it, which meant it was the truck Trevor wanted to drive that year, and after cruising up and down the streets discussing just who might have a loose door lying around they pulled into Bert Wynne’s driveway and, sure enough, Bert had an oak door that he’d saved for just such a purpose up in the rafters of his shed. They offered him twenty dollars but he settled for ten, and after the door was home and hung on its frame with new, stronger hinges, Archie patched and smoothed the ragged plaster that surrounded it.
    When the work was finished a dozen men pulled chairs around the kitchen table or leaned on the counter to share a forty-ounce bottle of Canadian