The House That Rolled Down the County Road

Telling Gordon

Jake told his father himself. He would not let me come.

“He’s my dad,” he said. “It’s mine to say.”

He walked across the yard on a Sunday afternoon in September to his father’s shop, where Gordon was greasing the swather. I watched from the kitchen window. The shop door stayed open, and I could see the two of them standing a few feet apart, not looking at each other.

They talked for maybe ten minutes. Gordon never stopped working the grease gun.

When Jake came back, he did not come inside. He got in his pickup and sat there with both hands on the wheel for almost half an hour. I finally took him a cup of coffee and climbed in the passenger side.

“What did he say?” I asked.

Jake stared out through the windshield at the shelterbelt.

“He said he wasn’t going to stop us. He said it’s our lumber, take it if we want it. He said the ground stays with him.”

“That’s all?”

“He said we’d be back by Thanksgiving.” Jake laughed, but it was not a laugh. “He said nobody moves a house over five hundred dollars a month.”

I took his hand. His knuckles were black with grease from the shop. We sat there together until the coffee went cold.

People have asked me since if Gordon could have stopped it. Maybe. He could have called somebody. He could have stood in front of the jacks. He never did. I think, even then, some part of him did not want to win that way.

Six weeks

Moving a house is not one day. It is six weeks of a hundred small jobs, and every one of them costs something.

Dad and Jake and two men from church poured the new foundation at Dad’s place, block on a footing, the same twelve hundred square feet laid out to the inch. Jake measured it four times. Dad measured it twice more after Jake went home.

The county engineer came out to look at the route. Three miles of gravel county road, one cattle guard, one culvert Arnie did not trust, and two places where the power lines crossed low.

The co-op scheduled a crew for the second Saturday in October. They would ride ahead of the house in a bucket truck and lift the lines at each crossing.

Jake shut off the water and the propane. A plumber from Hemingford came and disconnected the septic. An electrician pulled the meter. Our house went dark for the first time in eleven years.

We lived out of Dad’s spare rooms for those last two weeks. The kids thought it was an adventure. They slept on air mattresses in my old bedroom and ate cereal at my mother’s table.

Every evening after work, I drove back over to the house and packed. Dishes in newspaper. Pictures off the walls. Arnie said we could leave most of the furniture in place if it was tied down, but anything that could fall would fall.

I left the curtains up. I could not tell you why. I just could not take them down. I wanted the house to look like a home as it went.