The Wall We Finished by Hand

Quint used to say a block wall is the most honest thing a man can build, because it shows every mistake.

We buried the whole first course, the way he said. Dirt in front of it, tamped down, so the wall would sit in the ground instead of on it.

By four o’clock the sun was getting low over the creek and the first row ran straight and level all the way across.

Dewey stood at the high end and sighted down it with one eye shut. Then he nodded once. He did not say it was good. He did not need to.

I drove to Springfield that afternoon while the sun was still up, and sat with Quint until he dozed off, and then I went home and fell asleep in my clothes. I am not proud of it. It is what happened.

Thursday was the hard day.

Thursday was the drain rock. The base had been maybe six tons of the thirty.

Everything else, about twenty-four tons, was clean gravel that had to go behind the wall as it went up, and into the hollow cores of every block.

That is how those walls drain. Behind the block you run a foot of clean rock all the way to the top, and in the bottom of it you lay the perforated pipe in its sock.

Water that comes down the hill drops through the rock, finds the pipe, and runs out the low end into the creek.

Without the drain rock, water builds up behind the wall and pushes. A wall that holds back a hill does not usually fall over from the weight of the dirt. It falls over from the weight of the water nobody let out.

So every course we set, we had to backfill. Set a course of block, check it, fill the cores, pour drain rock behind it, rake it, compact the dirt behind that, and set the next course. Up and down the slope, all day.

At the tall end, the wall needed geogrid every other course. That is a plastic mesh that lays flat on top of the block and runs four feet back into the hill, so the dirt itself holds the wall in.

We cut it on Eunice’s porch with a utility knife and carried it down in rolls.

By ten Thursday morning there were people at the fence.

I did not notice them at first. I was on my fortieth or fiftieth load and not looking up.

Then I came back up the plywood with the empty wheelbarrow and there was a man in overalls leaning on the fence post at the corner of Eunice’s lot.

He did not say anything. He just watched for a while, and then he went back to his truck, and he came back with a square-point shovel and stood in the driveway beside our kid and started filling the wheelbarrows with him.

I never did learn his name. He was somewhere past seventy and he lived three houses down.

He shoveled for an hour and a half without a word, and then he leaned the shovel against the house, tipped his cap at Eunice, and went home.

Eunice had been on the phone. I found out later. She had called just about everybody on her road and a good part of her old church circle, and she had told every one of them exactly what happened in her driveway on Wednesday morning.