The Miller Place on the Courthouse Steps

He shook his head.

“Sold,” Dobbs said. “Forty-one thousand five hundred. Your name, sir?”

“Schafer,” Nate said. “Nathan and Emily. Both names.”

Inside, at the county clerk’s counter, I handed over the cashier’s check and then counted fifteen hundred dollars out of the bank envelope, mostly twenties, with a layer of fives and ones at the bottom that still smelled a little like the fryer. The deputy clerk counted it twice without one remark, bless her, and wrote me a receipt.

“Deed will come in the mail in six or eight weeks,” she said. “But the sheriff’s office had the keys from when they boarded the back door.” She slid a manila envelope across. “Nobody’s going to mind if you start mowing.”

It was a ring of seven old keys, two of them skeleton keys, and not one of them marked.

We drove out there with the windows down. We stood at the foot of those porch steps holding that ring between us, and Nate’s hand was shaking, and so was mine.

“Capable,” he said.

“Don’t,” I said, and then we both laughed until I had to sit down on the bottom step, which held.

We still told nobody. By then it was not a rule so much as a habit, and there was a little pride in it too, I will own that. I wanted to hand them a finished thing. I wanted to say come to dinner, and give an address.

It was a long way from finished.

The fourth key opened the front door. Inside it smelled like mice and wet plaster and somebody’s old pipe. There was a calendar from a seed company on the kitchen wall, turned to a July six years gone. The wallpaper in the front room was coming down in sheets all by itself.

The fuse box was in the cellar stairwell. Sixty amps for the whole house, and when Nate unscrewed the first fuse there was a penny behind it.

“Well, that’s one way,” he said.

Behind the plaster it was all knob and tube, cloth-covered wire run through porcelain, eighty or ninety years old and brittle as a cracker. Nate had done two years in the electrical program at the vocational school before he ever switched to diesel. He went to the county office, pulled a homeowner’s permit, and bought a two hundred amp panel with the first paycheck after the sale.

Then he rewired that house at night.

He would come off his shift at five, eat whatever I had in a cooler, and work until eleven with a headlamp on, because of course there was no power in the place but one temporary pole in the yard. Room by room. He drilled the old studs, which were true two-by-fours, oak, and hard as iron, and he pulled new cable through them and stapled it neat as a seam. I never saw him hurry one staple.

I pulled wallpaper. There were five layers in the front room, and under the last one somebody had written a column of sums on the bare plaster in pencil. I pulled until my thumbs split, and I taped them and went to the diner, and I came back.

I was still working both jobs. The house had taken every dollar we had. Wire costs money. So does a well pump, and a septic man, and a dumpster.