The Camp I Sold Behind His Back

The Letter

The letter came on Thursday, the twentieth of August, certified, and Tamra signed for it at the door because I was on a roof in Licking. I read it in the truck at the end of the driveway.

It was from the Internal Revenue Service. It said Penrod Roofing owed thirty-one thousand dollars in payroll taxes, penalties and interest from the last six quarters, and that unless the matter was resolved by the middle of September, the government would file a lien against everything I owned. Everything, it said. The trucks, the trailers, the house, and any real property in my name.

I should explain how a man gets there, because I used to read about it and think those men were crooks. I was not a crook. I was a roofer who had a wet spring in 2024 and a wetter one in 2025. The weather shut us down for weeks, and a general contractor out of Lebanon owed me forty-four thousand dollars on a job he kept saying was coming Friday. I had eight men with families. I had checks to write every other Thursday. So I did the thing you are told never to do. I took the tax money that came out of those paychecks and I used it to make payroll, and I told myself I would put it back when the contractor paid. He never paid. He went under in February. I put some back. I did not put enough back, and it grew, the way a roof leak grows inside a wall, quietly, in the dark, until the day somebody pushes on the drywall and your hand goes through.

I did not tell my wife how bad it was until the letter came. That is its own wrong, and she has not let me forget it, and she should not.

A revenue officer named Mr. Dunphy called the following Monday. He was not unkind. He said there were arrangements, and then he said the arrangements all started with a payment, and the payment he wanted by the fifteenth was thirty-one thousand dollars. I did not have it. I had nine thousand in the business account, and about four hundred dollars of my own, and a house with a mortgage. I sat in the shop office with the phone in my hand and tried to think of what I owned that was worth thirty-one thousand dollars and was not already pledged to the bank.

The answer was twenty-two acres off Persimmon Ridge Road.

The Dentist

I want you to understand what that camp was to me, and then I want you to understand that I sold it anyway, because the first thing is true and so is the second.

My grandfather built that cabin in 1958. The whole of my childhood was in it. I learned to read a track in the mud by the spring there. I killed my first deer there at fifteen, eight days after we buried my father, with my uncle Dwain standing behind me with his hand flat on my back and not saying anything at all. For twenty years I had wanted that place to be mine. In March of 2019 it was. Granddad sold it to me for fourteen thousand dollars, and Uncle Dwain wrote a check for seven of it, and I stood on that porch and I said it would stay in the family.

I meant it. I want that said. I did not sell the camp the way a man sells a camp. I sold it the way a man cuts off his own hand to get out of a trap.