The Cabin We Built Next Door

I found out later what the hole was. The boat had a note on it of thirty-eight thousand dollars, signed in August, and by September he was three months behind on a truck payment and a credit card. When the cabin came due to be sold, he was a man who needed forty thousand dollars quick.

My father drew the plans on the back of a feed sack. I am not exaggerating. He spread it on his workbench and drew a floor plan in carpenter’s pencil, twelve feet by sixteen, a single room with a loft over the back third, a door on the south wall, two windows facing the clearing and one facing the woods.

“A hundred ninety-two square feet,” he said. “Under two hundred. The township clerk told me that means no building permit, as long as it’s not a dwelling and you keep it back forty feet from the property lines.”

“Six concrete piers,” he said, tapping the sack. “Forty-two inches deep, because of the frost. Two by six floor joists. Two by four walls, sixteen inches on center. Metal roof. A pitch you can shed snow off.”

“We’ll find the windows,” he said. “Stan’s got windows.”

Stan Przybylski had windows. He had six of them, double-pane, in a barn from a house he tore down in Hillman the summer before. He gave them to us on the first Saturday and would not take a dime. “Somebody should use them,” he said. “They’re good glass.”

The first weekend was the digging.

My father brought a post-hole auger on the back of his truck, and Cody ran it. Six holes, forty-two inches each, in a rectangle, laid out with string and stakes my father drove with the flat of a hatchet. The sand came up pale and dry and the oak leaves blew into the holes as fast as we cleared them.

Cody knelt in the sand and set the old wooden level across the first form. The bubble drifted and settled. He looked at it for a long time.

“Grandpa,” he said. “Is this level still true? After sixty years?”

“It’s the truest thing I own,” my father said. “That’s why it’s yours.”

The second weekend, the eleventh of October, was the raising.

I did not invite anyone. I want that on the record. I did not call a soul. What happened is that on Thursday, I stopped at the feed store in Atlanta to buy a bag of mixed sweet feed for nothing, just to be somewhere, and the woman behind the counter said, “Heard you’re building something up at Kurt’s old place.”

“Next to it,” I said.

“Heard that too.” She rang up my coffee. “Ward Gerlach’s wife is making a ham.”

By Saturday morning there were nineteen vehicles at the end of the two-track.

I counted. Nineteen pickups, three side-by-sides and a flatbed with a skid steer on it. The old-camp crowd had come, every one of them people I had sat beside at opening night suppers for thirteen years. Roscoe Stenberg and his two boys. Stan Przybylski with a trailer of tools. Ward Gerlach and his sons-in-law. A retired lineman named Burt Sorenson who had never swung a hammer for fun.