The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  He and Beasly set the TV down carefully on the floor. Abbie watched them narrowly from the stairs.

  “Why, Hiram,” she said, excited, “you put a ceiling in the basement. It looks a whole lot better.”

  “Huh?” asked Taine.

  “The ceiling. I said you put in a ceiling.”

  Taine jerked his head up and what she said was true. There was a ceiling there, but he’d never put it in.

  He gulped a little and lowered his head, then jerked it quickly up and had another look. The ceiling still was there.

  “It’s not that block stuff,” said Abbie with open admiration. “You can’t see any joints at all. How did you manage it?”

  Taine gulped again and got back his voice. “Something I thought up,” he told her weakly.

  “You’ll have to come over and do it to our basement. Our basement is a sight. Beasly put the ceiling in the amusement room, but Beasly is all thumbs.”

  “Yes’m,” Beasly said contritely.

  “When I get the time,” Taine promised, ready to promise anything to get them out of there.

  “You’d have a lot more time,” Abbie told him acidly, “if you weren’t gadding around all over the country buying up that broken-down old furniture that you call antiques. Maybe you can fool the city folks when they come driving out here, but you can’t fool me.”

  “I make a lot of money out of some of it,” Taine told her calmly.

  “And lose your shirt on the rest of it,” she said.

  “I got some old china that is just the kind of stuff you are looking for,” said Taine. “Picked it up just a day or two ago. Made a good buy on it. I can let you have it cheap.”

  “I’m not interested,” she said and clamped her mouth tight shut.

  She turned around and went back up the stairs.

  “She’s on the prod today,” Beasly said to Taine. “It will be a bad day. It always is when she starts early in the morning.”

  “Don’t pay attention to her,” Taine advised.

  “I try not to, but it ain’t possible. You sure you don’t need a man? I’d work for you cheap.”

  “Sorry, Beasly. Tell you what – come over some night soon and we’ll play some checkers.”

  “I’ll do that, Hiram. You’re the only one who ever asks me over. All the others ever do is laugh at me or shout.”

  Abbie’s voice came bellowing down the stairs. “Beasly, are you coming? Don’t go standing there all day. I have rugs to beat.”

  “Yes’m,” said Beasly, starting up the stairs.

  At the truck, Abbie turned on Taine with determination: “You’ll get that set fixed right away? I’m lost without it.”

  “Immediately,” said Taine.

  He stood and watched them off, then looked around for Towser, but the dog had disappeared. More than likely he was at the woodchuck hole again, in the woods across the road. Gone off, thought Taine, without his breakfast, too.

  The teakettle was boiling furiously when Taine got back to the kitchen. He put coffee in the maker and poured in the water. Then he went downstairs.

  The ceiling was still there.

  He turned on all the lights and walked around the basement, staring up at it.

  It was a dazzling white material and it appeared to be translucent – up to a point, that is. One could see into it, but he could not see through it. And there were no signs of seams. It was fitted neatly and tightly around the water pipes and the ceiling lights.

  Taine stood on a chair and rapped his knuckles against it sharply. It gave out a bell-like sound, almost exactly as if he’d rapped a fingernail against a thinly blown goblet.

  He got down off the chair and stood there, shaking his head. The whole thing was beyond him. He had spent part of the evening repairing Banker Stevens’ lawn mower and there’d been no ceiling then.

  He rummaged in a box and found a drill. He dug out one of the smaller bits and fitted it in the drill. He plugged in the cord and climbed on the chair again and tried the bit against the ceiling. The whirling steel slid wildly back and forth. It didn’t make a scratch. He switched off the drill and looked closely at the ceiling. There was not a mark upon it. He tried again, pressing against the drill with all his strength. The bit went ping and the broken end flew across the basement and hit the wall.

  Taine stepped down off the chair. He found another bit and fitted it in the drill and went slowly up the stairs, trying to think. But he was too confused to think. That ceiling should not be up there, but there it was. And unless he went stark, staring crazy and forgetful as well, he had not put it there.

  In the living room, he folded back one corner of the worn and faded carpeting and plugged in the drill. He knelt and started drilling in the floor. The bit went smoothly through the old oak flooring, then stopped. He put on more pressure and the drill spun without getting any bite.

  And there wasn’t supposed to be anything underneath that wood! Nothing to stop a drill. Once through the flooring, it should have dropped into the space between the joists.

  Taine disengaged the drill and laid it to one side.

  He went into the kitchen and the coffee now was ready. But before he poured it, he pawed through a cabinet drawer and found a pencil flashlight. Back in the living room he shined the light into the hole that the drill had made.

  There was something shiny at the bottom of the hole.

  He went back to the kitchen and found some day-old doughnuts and poured a cup of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table, eating doughnuts and wondering what to do.

  There didn’t appear, for the moment at least, much that he could do. He could putter around all day trying to figure out what had happened to his basement and probably not be any wiser than he was right now.

  His money-making Yankee soul rebelled against such a horrid waste of time.

  There was, he told himself, that maple four-poster that he should be getting to before some unprincipled city antique dealer should run afoul of it. A piece like that, he figured, if a man had any luck at all, should sell at a right good price. He might turn a handsome profit on it if he only worked it right.

  Maybe, he thought, he could turn a trade on it. There was the table model TV set that he had traded a pair of ice skates for last winter. Those folks out Woodman way might conceivably be happy to trade the bed for a reconditioned TV set, almost like brand new. After all, they probably weren’t using the bed and, he hoped fervently, had no idea of the value of it.

  He ate the doughnuts hurriedly and gulped down an extra cup of coffee. He fixed a plate of scraps for Towser and set it outside the door. Then he went down into the basement and got the table TV set and put it in the pickup truck. As an afterthought, he added a reconditioned shotgun which would be perfectly all right if a man were careful not to use these far-reaching, powerful shells, and a few other odds and ends that might come in handy on a trade.

  II

  He got back late, for it had been a busy and quite satisfactory day. Not only did he have the four-poster loaded on the truck, but he had as well a rocking chair, a fire screen, a bundle of ancient magazines, an old-fashioned barrel churn, a walnut highboy and a Governor Winthrop on which some half-baked, slap-happy decorator had applied a coat of apple-green paint. The television set, the shotgun and five dollars had gone into the trade. And what was better yet – he’d managed it so well that the Woodman family probably was dying of laughter at this very moment about how they’d taken him.

  He felt a little ashamed of it – they’d been such friendly people. They had treated him so kindly and had him stay for dinner and had sat and talked with him and shown him about the farm and even asked him to stop by if he went through that way again.

  He’d wasted the entire day, he thought, and he rather hated that, but maybe it had been worth it to build up his reputation out that way as the sort of
character who had softening of the head and didn’t know the value of a dollar. That way, maybe some other day, he could do some more business in the neighborhood.

  He heard the television set as he opened the back door, sounding loud and clear, and he went clattering down the basement stairs in something close to panic. For now that he’d traded off the table model, Abbie’s set was the only one downstairs and Abbie’s set was broken.

  It was Abbie’s set, all right. It stood just where he and Beasly had put it down that morning and there was nothing wrong with it – nothing wrong at all. It was even televising color.

  Televising color!

  He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and leaned against the railing for support.

  The set kept right on televising color.

  Taine stalked the set and walked around behind it.

  The back of the cabinet was off, leaning against a bench that stood behind the set, and he could see the innards of it glowing cheerily.

  He squatted on the basement floor and squinted at the lighted innards and they seemed a good deal different from the way that they should be. He’d repaired the set many times before and he thought he had a good idea of what the working parts would look like. And now they all seemed different, although just how he couldn’t tell.

  A heavy step sounded on the stairs and a hearty voice came booming down to him.

  “Well, Hiram, I see you got it fixed.”

  Taine jackknifed upright and stood there slightly frozen and completely speechless.

  Henry Horton stood foursquarely and happily on the stairs, looking very pleased.

  “I told Abbie that you wouldn’t have it done, but she said for me to come over anyway – Hey, Hiram, it’s in color! How did you do it, man?”

  Taine grinned sickly. “I just got fiddling around,” he said.

  Henry came down the rest of the stairs with a stately step and stood before the set, with his hands behind his back, staring at it fixedly in his best executive manner.

  He slowly shook his head. “I never would have thought,” he said, “that it was possible.”

  “Abbie mentioned that you wanted color.”

  “Well, sure. Of course I did. But not on this old set. I never would have expected to get color on this set. How did you do it, Hiram?”

  Taine told the solemn truth. “I can’t rightly say,” he said.

  Henry found a nail keg standing in front of one of the benches and rolled it out in front of the old-fashioned set. He sat down warily and relaxed into solid comfort.

  “That’s the way it goes,” he said. “There are men like you, but not very many of them. Just Yankee tinkerers. You keep messing around with things, trying one thing here and another there and before you know it you come up with something.”

  He sat on the nail keg, staring at the set.

  “It’s sure a pretty thing,” he said. “It’s better than the color they have in Minneapolis. I dropped in at a couple of the places the last time I was there and looked at the color sets. And I tell you honest, Hiram, there wasn’t one of them that was as good as this.”

  Taine wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve. Somehow or other, the basement seemed to be getting warm. He was fine sweat all over.

  Henry found a big cigar in one of his pockets and held it out to Taine.

  “No, thanks. I never smoke.”

  “Perhaps you’re wise,” said Henry. “It’s a nasty habit.”

  He stuck the cigar into his mouth and rolled it east to west.

  “Each man to his own,” he proclaimed, expansively. “When it comes to a thing like this, you’re the man to do it. You seem to think in mechanical contraptions and electronic circuits. Me, I don’t know a thing about it. Even in the computer game, I still don’t know a thing about it; I hire men who do. I can’t even saw a board or drive a nail. But I can organize. You remember, Hiram, how everybody snickered when I started up the plant?”

  “Well, I guess some of them did, at that.”

  “You’re darn tooting they did. They went around for weeks with their hands up to their faces to hide smart-Aleck grins. They said, what does Henry think he’s doing, starting up a computer factory out here in the sticks; he doesn’t think he can compete with those big companies in the east, does he? And they didn’t stop their grinning until I sold a couple of dozen units and had orders for a year or two ahead.”

  He fished a lighter from his pocket and lit the cigar carefully, never taking his eyes off the television set.

  “You got something there,” he said, judiciously, “that may be worth a mint of money. Some simple adaptation that will fit on any set. If you can get color on this old wreck, you can get color on any set that’s made.”

  He chuckled moistly around the mouthful of cigar. “If RCA knew what was happening here this minute, they’d go out and cut their throats.”

  “But I don’t know what I did,” protested Taine.

  “Well, that’s all right,” said Henry, happily. “I’ll take this set up to the plant tomorrow and turn loose some of the boys on it. They’ll find out what you have here before they’re through with it.”

  He took the cigar out of his mouth and studied it intently, then popped it back in again.

  “As I was saying, Hiram, that’s the difference in us. You can do the stuff, but you miss the possibilities. I can’t do a thing, but I can organize it once the thing is done. Before we get through with this, you’ll be wading in twenty dollar bills clear up to your knees.”

  “But I don’t have –”

  “Don’t worry. Just leave it all to me. I’ve got the plant and whatever money we may need. We’ll figure out a split.”

  “That’s fine of you,” said Taine mechanically.

  “Not at all,” Henry insisted, grandly. “It’s just my aggressive, grasping sense of profit. I should be ashamed of myself, cutting in on this.”

  He sat on the keg, smoking and watching the TV perform in exquisite color.

  “You know, Hiram,” he said, “I’ve often thought of this, but never got around to doing anything about it. I’ve got an old computer up at the plant that we will have to junk because it’s taking up room that we really need. It’s one of our early models, a sort of experimental job that went completely sour. It sure is a screwy thing. No one’s ever been able to make much out of it. We tried some approaches that probably were wrong – or maybe they were right, but we didn’t know enough to make them quite come off. It’s been standing in a corner all these years and I should have junked it long ago. But I sort of hate to do it. I wonder if you might not like it – just to tinker with.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Taine.

  Henry assumed an expansive air. “No obligation, mind you. You may not be able to do a thing with it – I’d frankly be surprised if you could, but there’s no harm in trying. Maybe you’ll decide to tear it down for the salvage you can get. There are several thousand dollars worth of equipment in it. Probably you could use most of it one way or another.”

  “It might be interesting,” conceded Taine, but not too enthusiastically.

  “Good,” said Henry, with an enthusiasm that made up for Taine’s lack of it. “I’ll have the boys cart it over tomorrow. It’s a heavy thing. I’ll send along plenty of help to get it unloaded and down into the basement and set up.”

  Henry stood up carefully and brushed cigar ashes off his lap.

  “I’ll have the boys pick up the TV set at the same time,” he said. “I’ll have to tell Abbie you haven’t got it fixed yet. If I ever let it get into the house, the way it’s working now, she’d hold on to it.”

  Henry climbed the stairs heavily and Taine saw him out the door into the summer night.

  Taine stood in the shadow, watching Henry’s shadowed figure go across the Widow Taylor’s yard to the next street behind his house
. He took a deep breath of the fresh night air and shook his head to try to clear his buzzing brain, but the buzzing went right on.

  Too much had happened, he told himself. Too much for any single day – first the ceiling and now the TV set. Once he had a good night’s sleep he might be in some sort of shape to try to wrestle with it.

  Towser came around the corner of the house and limped slowly up the steps to stand beside his master. He was mud up to his ears.

  “You had a day of it, I see,” said Taine. “And, just like I told you, you didn’t get the woodchuck.”

  “Woof,” said Towser, sadly.

  “You’re just like a lot of the rest of us,” Taine told him, severely. “Like me and Henry Horton and all the rest of us. You’re chasing something and you think you know what you are chasing, but you really don’t. And what is even worse, you have no faint idea of why you’re chasing it.”

  Towser thumped a tired tail upon the stoop.

  Taine opened the door and stood to one side to let Towser in, then went in himself.

  He went through the refrigerator and found part of a roast, a slice or two of luncheon meat, a dried out slab of cheese and half a bowl of cooked spaghetti. He made a pot of coffee and shared the food with Towser.

  Then Taine went back downstairs and shut off the television set. He found a trouble lamp and plugged it in and poked the light into the innards of the set.

  He squatted on the floor, holding the lamp, trying to puzzle out what had been done to the set. It was different, of course, but it was a little hard to figure out in just what ways it was different. Someone had tinkered with the tubes and had them twisted out of shape and there were little white cubes of metal tucked here and there in what seemed to be an entirely haphazard and illogical manner – although, Taine admitted to himself, there probably was no haphazardness. And the circuit, he saw, had been rewired and a good deal of wiring had been added.

  But the most puzzling thing about it was that the whole thing seemed to be just jury-rigged – as if someone had done no more than a hurried, patch-up job to get the set back in working order on an emergency and temporary basis.