The Dollar Farmhouse and the Upstairs

The upstairs

The upstairs of our house has three bedrooms and a little bathroom with a clawfoot tub. We closed it off in 2006 to save on heat.

After the new furnace went in, we opened it back up for Hannah’s room, but the other two bedrooms stayed shut. They had become what upstairs rooms in a farmhouse become: boxes of Christmas decorations, Dale’s old 4-H ribbons, a crib, a treadmill nobody used.

Two bedrooms and a bath. Hannah’s room in between. It would be tight. It would be loud.

It would be a roof.

The next day I called Jeff from my route. I was parked at the Casey’s in the next town over, eating a breakfast pizza out of the box on my steering wheel, which is how a rural carrier eats lunch.

“Hey, sis.” He sounded tired. He always sounded tired that winter.

“What are you doing Saturday?” I said.

“Working till noon. Why?”

“Because Dale and I are cleaning out the upstairs, and I want you and the kids moved into it by supper.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear the elevator running behind him, the hum of the leg, a truck backing up.

“Tammy, I can’t do that to you.”

“You’re not doing anything to me. I’m doing it.”

“I’ve got three kids. Cole still gets up in the night. Brody eats like a horse.”

“I’ve got a deep freeze full of pork,” I said. “Dale raises hogs, Jeff. Brody can eat.”

He laughed, but it came out wrong, like it hurt him. “Does Dale know?”

“It was half his idea,” I said. That was a stretch. But it was Dale’s hand on my knee that told me I could do it, so I figured it counted.

“Just until you’re back on your feet,” I said. “However long that takes.” Another long quiet.

“Okay,” my brother said, very quietly. “Okay. Thank you.” He did not say anything about the house. He did not say anything about Mom and Dad. I thought that was strange at the time. I would understand why on Sunday.

Saturday

Saturday came up bright and cold, the kind of March morning where the sky is so blue it hurts and the frost on the yard doesn’t melt till ten.

Dale ran two space heaters upstairs to take the chill off the closed rooms. Hannah vacuumed what looked like twenty years of dead flies off the windowsills and made a face the whole time.

“Mom, this is disgusting.”

“That’s farm living, honey.”

“This is not farm living. This is a fly graveyard.”

We hauled the Christmas boxes to the machine shed. Dale took the old crib apart with a socket wrench and carried it out piece by piece. I put clean sheets on the double bed in the east room for Jeff, and Dale hauled up Hannah’s old bunk beds from the basement for the boys.

Kenzie would get the little room under the eaves with the slanted ceiling. I had slept in that room until I was ten. So had Jeff, before he graduated to the east room.

I cleaned that whole little room top to bottom. I washed the window and the baseboards. I hung a pink curtain I found in the hall closet.

I did not open the closet in the little room. I knew what was in there. I wasn’t ready for it yet.

At noon Jeff’s pickup came up the gravel with a queen mattress tied down in the bed and garbage bags of clothes wedged in around it.

I was carrying a box up the porch steps when they pulled in. It said KITCHEN in my brother’s handwriting. Jeff got out and came around and took a duffel bag and a pillow out of the cab and stood there holding them, looking at the house like he’d never seen it before.

Brody got out with his backpack and his shoulders up around his ears. Kenzie got out with her backpack and her hair in her face. Cole got out last, very slowly, with his backpack on and a goldfish bowl held in both hands in front of him, like he was carrying the offering plate up the aisle.

“This is Pickles,” Cole told me. “He’s a fish.”

“Hi, Pickles,” I said. “Welcome to the farm.”

“Does Pickles get his own room?”

“Pickles gets the dresser in your room,” I said. “Best view in the house.”

Cole looked at me very seriously and then nodded, like we had made a deal.

Jeff came up the steps behind me with his duffel. He wouldn’t look at me. He looked at the porch floor, the one Dale rebuilt in 2017, and the new storm door, and the porch light.

“Place looks good, Tam,” he said to the floor.

“Twenty years,” I said. “It better.”