The Wall We Finished by Hand

With it you can dig a footing, move a pallet of block, carry half a ton of gravel down a hill in one trip, and finish in three days what would otherwise take two weeks.

We bought it used five years ago for forty-one thousand dollars. The bank wanted a co-signer because we were new, and Quint’s father signed.

We had paid it down to a little under ten thousand. We had never missed a payment, not once.

Lyman runs an excavating business of his own over toward Phillipsburg. Dozer work, ponds, septic, the big stuff.

Quint grew up on that dozer and worked for his dad until he was thirty-eight, and then he left to work for himself.

Lyman never forgave him for it. He would never have used that word.

He would have said he was disappointed, or that Quint had made a choice, but every Sunday dinner had a little needle in it somewhere about steady checks and real work.

Eunice Pfaff called us in August. She taught fourth grade in Lebanon for thirty-four years, and half the people in town under fifty had been in her class, including Dewey, who still called her Mrs. Pfaff with his cap in his hand.

Her house sits on a hill at the edge of town, and the backyard falls off steep toward a creek.

Every hard rain the slope was washing a little more, and by summer the ground had pulled back far enough that you could see raw dirt under the corner of her foundation.

Quint walked it with her twice. He came home and drew it out on the back of a feed store receipt at our kitchen table.

A segmental block wall, a hundred and twelve feet long, three feet tall at one end and nearly five at the other.

“About four hundred square feet of face,” he said. “Sixty-five a foot installed is fair. That’s twenty-six thousand dollars, and she’s going to cry when I tell her, and then she’s going to say yes, because the other choice is her house in the creek.”

She did cry a little, and she did say yes. She paid half down, thirteen thousand dollars, and we spent nearly all of it in one morning at the block yard.

Tan block, eighteen inches across the face and eight tall, seventy-four pounds apiece.

Five hundred and forty wall blocks. Eighty cap blocks. Geogrid for the tall end. A roll of four-inch perforated pipe in a sock.

Two tandem loads of rock: crushed base for the footing and clean drain gravel for behind the wall. About thirty tons in all.

We started the Monday before Quint’s stroke. He ran the skid steer all morning, digging a trench two feet wide along the string line we had set, deep enough for six inches of base and a buried first course, and Dewey followed with a shovel to clean the bottom.

The block came on a boom truck at noon. Quint ran the pallet forks the rest of the afternoon, setting every pallet down the slope along the trench where we would need it.

He was good on that machine. He could set a pallet of block on a dime.

The rock trucks came at four and dumped both loads in Eunice’s driveway at the top of the hill, because there is no way to back a loaded tandem down a slope like that.

The plan was to carry it down by the bucketful with the skid steer, a load at a time.