The House That Rolled Past His Gate

Earl

Earl Gentry is seventy-seven years old and lives a mile and a half down the county road from Lonnie’s gate.

He farmed the ground next to Daddy’s for fifty years. His wife Doris died three winters ago.

I found him in his shop on a Saturday morning in May, sharpening a mower blade on the grinder.

He had a radio on the bench playing the farm report. He shut it off when he saw my face.

“I heard,” he said. “Small town. Pam told her sister and her sister told the whole Methodist church. You want coffee?”

We sat on two upturned buckets in his shop door. I told him the whole thing. Earl didn’t say anything until I was done, and then he pointed with his chin across the road.

“See that two acres between my hay field and the creek? Doris always wanted to sell it to somebody who’d sit on a porch,” he said.

“It’s high ground, it’s got the road frontage, and the electric co-op line runs right along it.”

I asked him what he wanted for it. He said twenty thousand, and then he looked at me and said sixteen.

I said that wasn’t fair to him. He said, “Cheryl, I’m seventy-seven. Let me decide what’s fair.”

I took out a loan at the farmers co-op credit union for the land, on top of what little I had. We signed the papers at the title company in town in June.

Earl had them survey it so the line came out even, and he paid for half the survey, which he did not have to do.

Doing it right

I work at the health department, so I knew the first thing you need on bare land is a septic permit.

Our environmental health man came out and did the soil test himself. The ground perked fine. A septic contractor put in the tank and field lines in July for sixty-two hundred dollars.

I put in for a temporary power pole with the electric co-op.

A well driller wanted too much, but Earl’s county water line ran past the property, and the utility district set me a meter for four hundred.

Then I needed a house mover. Everybody I asked said the same name. Hollis.

Hollis is sixty years old and has been moving houses in middle Tennessee for thirty-eight years.

He’s licensed and bonded with the state, which you have to be, and he has a big yellow toter truck that he keeps cleaner than most people keep their kitchens.

He came out on a Sunday afternoon in August while Lonnie and Pam were at Pam’s mother’s.

He walked all the way around the trailer twice, got down on his back in the gravel, and looked up under it with a flashlight.

“Frame’s good,” he said when he slid back out. “Somebody kept this up. Axles and tongue are gone, which is normal, they pull them when they set it. I’ll bring my own and bolt them on. Your deck, how’s it built?”

I told him the deck was built in three sections bolted to the frame and to posts, because the man who helped me said someday I might need to take it apart.

Hollis grinned at that. “Smart man,” he said. “We’ll unbolt it and ride it with the house, strapped down.”

He wrote me a price on the back of a business card.

Teardown, disconnect, axles and tongue, the state oversize permit, a pilot car, a mile and a half of road, setting it on the new pad, leveling, tie-downs, and putting the deck back on. Fifty-four hundred dollars.

“Fourteen wide, so it needs the permit and an escort,” he said. “State gives me a window, daylight only, no weekends. I’ll get us a Tuesday morning. Low traffic. You want it in October?”

I said the first Tuesday in October. That was the week Lonnie’s rent was due.