The House That Rolled Down the County Road

Jake says it out loud

I did not ask Jake that night. I lay awake beside him and turned it over and over. A house is not a pickup. You cannot just drive it away.

But in the morning, while I was making eggs, Jake came in from the porch with his coffee and stood in the kitchen doorway looking at the walls he had framed.

“Your dad called me at the shop yesterday,” he said.

I put the spatula down.

“He told me about the two acres,” Jake said. “He told me he watched a house go down the road in ’71.”

“What did you say?”

Jake ran his hand along the door frame. The one by the pantry. The one with the pencil marks.

“I didn’t say anything to him,” he said. “But I’m saying it to you.”

He looked at me, and his eyes were wet, and his voice was steady.

“Call a house mover, Kay.”

His voice cracked on the last word. Just the last one. I will never forget that.

I want people to understand something about my husband. Jake is not a man who walks away from his father. He hauled hay for that man every summer of his life. He pulled calves for him at two in the morning in February. Choosing this cost him more than it cost me.

But he had a wife and two kids sleeping under a roof that his own father said was not ours. And Jake decided, standing in that doorway, that his children were going to grow up in a house that belonged to them.

Arnie

There is a company out of Scottsbluff that has been moving buildings across the Panhandle for three generations. The man who came out was named Arnie, and he looked like he had been moving houses since before I was born.

He was short and wide, with a gray mustache and a seed cap so faded you could not read it. He walked around our house twice with a tape measure and a flashlight. Then he crawled under it.

He came out with cobwebs on his shoulders and grinned.

“One story. Block crawl space, no basement. Good square framing,” he said. “Whoever built this knew what they were doing. She’ll go.”

“My husband and my dad built it,” I said.

“Well, they built it right. That makes my job easy.”

Then he told me what it would cost, and my stomach dropped.

Twenty-three thousand eight hundred dollars to jack the house, put it on beams, load it on the trailer, and set it on the new foundation. That did not count the county moving permit, or what the power co-op would charge to have a crew lift the lines at the crossings, or the new foundation itself.

It did not count a new well and a new septic at Dad’s place, either. Dad said the old yard well would reach, but we would need a line trenched. The septic was its own bill.

I sat at the table that night with a legal pad and added it all up. It came to a little over thirty-eight thousand dollars.

We had nineteen thousand in savings. It had taken us nine years to save it, a little at a time, for the kids and for emergencies.

“This is an emergency,” Jake said, looking over my shoulder.

Dad covered the rest. He would not take a note. He would not even talk about it.

“Your mother would haunt me,” he said. “Now hush.”