When One Fix Led to Another

 

The job dragged on and on.

The worst boards were maybe 30 pounds. No ordinary weakling (guess who) could carry one over from the stockpile without the bigger person (guess who) helping.

They’d weighed even more when they were green, separated by sticks to keep them from warping as they dried. Even so, it would’ve been easier to get them all hung in their wet state, fresh from the sawmill. Our builder out of the country for 10 months, we just couldn’t work that fast.

When the boards were still fresh, the screws had sliced neatly through. Now, though, because the wood was too dense and resistant, if we didn’t bore preliminary holes the screws as they went screaming down through would snap in half—and they were goliaths, over three inches. We’d wrestle a board into place, then one of us would haul the drill up the ladder, the other standing beneath, a foot or knee pressed hard against the board so it wouldn’t thump down into the dirt, and then came a TAT-A-TAT-A-TAT-A-TAT-A-TAT, the worst woodpecker sound ever.

Paulson wondered whether the weight of all those boards might pull the whole house down.

He was too trim happy, I thought. Trim made sense where the walls met up with the porch floors or the roof. But on the one porch, up where the beams fed in? Between each beam? Put trim up there? No!

He couldn’t give it up. Behind my back he nailed up a sample piece. I didn’t notice until he told me. He wanted me to reconsider.

Huff.

One afternoon while he was inside napping, probably honking air out through his nose, I dragged the 8-ft. ladder over to the spot and, in my flip-flops, climbed up with a pry bar, wedged the hook end into the crack behind the trim piece, and gave a mighty yank. I must’ve been using both hands, not using one to hold onto the ladder, because when the tool—not the trim—jerked free, I shot down feet first and hit the floor with a whomp.

The pain in my foot was insane, unbearable. I lay there emitting groans, loud, aimed to wake Paulson. What business did he even have, grabbing himself naps? The sheer, impossible effort all this was taking!

My leg puffed up like an elephant’s trunk and turned the same color. That evening, headed into Harrisonburg for hamburgers, we picked up a pair of crutches. Then I waited in the restaurant while Paulson shopped—for what, I don’t remember. When I tried to move to a different table where I could plug in my laptop, my crutch slid on the just-washed tiles, causing my leg to smack the floor. An employee brought me a form to sign so I’d not sue them to death.

“Okay,” we said the next day, “maybe go to a doctor.”

After an X-ray, no elephant-hide wrinkles, just my gray foot, the Emergicare physician announced, “Looks like you dodged the bullet this time.”

“It’s not broken?” I asked, hesitant about pressing him.

“No.”

Weeks later, the X-rays ordered by our doctor in West Virginia revealed a shattered calcaneus. I’d exploded my heel like a boiled egg.

Even before my fall we’d been limping along, no John Murch to boss us. Now I’d been hoisted by my own petard.