Billy Ray's Farm

  I figured I could get whatever information I needed from books, since there are books about everything, including carpentry, and I had one, and I started looking through it pretty carefully, too. That book was a gift from M.A. a long time back, Modern Carpentry by Willis H. Wagner. It showed how to build any damn thing. There were diagrams of how to lay it out, dig the footing, put in the foundation, lay out the walls, raise them, put the roof on, the siding on, the windows and doors in, everything. But it didn’t have any tiny houses in it. Still, I figured the same rules of construction would apply for even a small house. So I went back to looking through the other book, the one by Mr. Walker. There was one house in there that had caught my eye in particular.

  An architect had built himself a tiny cabin using rough-edged boards for the outside and a steeply pitched roof with an overhang on the front, and three big windows. I loved his roof design but I didn’t think I could pull that off. What I was mainly interested in was figuring out how he’d framed it.

  I could see that little house, or at least one that vaguely resembled it, sitting up there behind the pond, in the middle of those trees.

  I studied the drawings of the construction so closely that sometimes I had to use a magnifying glass to look at the tiniest details. I went over and over the drawings, trying to figure out his floor plan, which was framed up from two twelve-foot beams that were cantilevered. I knew that meant something. I had a terrible time trying to figure it out. I’d get back to work and forget about the little house for a while, and then pick up the books again, at night, over coffee, and I began to sketch plans of my own on graph paper so that they would be precise and neat. They were never big houses. I drew different roof plans, drew windows into walls, drew floor plans that showed where things went: a desk, a chair, a stereo. Some even had lofts. A two-story tiny house. In another book I saw one that was indeed split-level, at only six hundred square feet.

  The beauty of building a tiny house was that smaller cost, and there would be the intense pleasure of making it, of laying it out with strings and a level. I knew enough to know that you had to drive batter boards in the ground, and use stakes, but I didn’t know all the details. I wondered if I might be able to build a floor frame that was sitting on concrete blocks. But the ground was steep for such a short distance. I would have to fit it into the side of that hill.

  So I daydreamed some more and drew more plans. I drew trees in the yard and stuff, a puff of smoke from the chimney it might have if I wanted to get elaborate and hire a bricklayer like Gayle Allen, a guy I used to work for. I just wanted to have a little house sitting on that pond.

  I spent a lot more time looking through the tiny house book and the carpenter book. I read about cedar shingles, and casement windows, and the different ways you could build a roof, all the interesting things you could do with beams. (Whoa, now. Don’t get carried too far away.) I thought of what kind of windows I’d like to have, whether or not it would have a porch (it would, naturally, and possibly a side porch or deck, too), what would the ceiling be like, would it be flat or would it be vaulted, maybe steeply pitched? Beams exposed? Would that be possible? Probably so. Could it have all glass across the front like the architect’s little house up in the Adirondacks? If I built it that way it could. There were all kinds of possibilities. I’d looked at pictures of the work done by Frank Lloyd Wright and had admired it for years. I knew that Falling Rock? Falling Water? was cantilevered somehow, maybe long concrete beams laid out to hold a house jutting out on the end? Was that how he’d done it? He figured out how to do just about anything with a building. And this was only going to be a small one. I was probably only limited by my imagination, and the strength of my arms and hands, in what I was physically able to do as far as raising a building by myself went. A building within limits. A building that wouldn’t kill me to build it.

  I daydreamed more. I wouldn’t mention it so much if it hadn’t gone on for so long. I kept drawing small houses. Some of them got pretty fancy, lots of nights with the tongue stuck out the corner of the mouth while struggling with a ruler and freshly sharpened pencil as the coffee got cold in the cup. That part of it went on for a long time. But I had to keep making some money, so it took a while before I ever moved the first shovelful of dirt. I sat down for a long time and made some money since there was lots of stuff I needed, lots of stuff indeed. I made a list. I needed wood, nails, maybe concrete blocks. Studs and shingles. I probably needed a new level. I probably needed a new circular saw, hell, the old didn’t cut too good anymore. I had a good leather nail apron. But as yet I didn’t have a house plan.

  I stayed up far later than I should have at night, drinking coffees and more coffees, keeping my pencils short, drawing little houses with my graph paper on my lap while the television played, while books I meant to read went unread and finally back into the dust of the shelves.

  I had another book I’d ordered from Progressive Farmer magazine a few years back. They happen to have an excellent line of how-to books covering just about any aspect of farm or ranch construction, and this book told in a really simple way how to lay out a house. It was just a matter of establishing the corners with stakes and strings and then making sure the corners were square by measuring with a steel tape across the diagonals. You had little saw kerfs cut into batter boards at the corners and you moved the strings until it was square. Then you marked your footing and started digging it. But I didn’t think I was going to need a footing. I could see that lots of the houses in Mr. Walker’s book were on simple concrete blocks. That looked like what I might want to do. A plan began to form in my head. But it was deadly hot outside. It was August. I decided to go ahead anyway.

  I attacked it first with the chainsaw. Lots of little bushes and stuff were growing on it. There was poison ivy all over it, so I had to mix up some 2,4-D and spray it after I got most of it cut. Ticks kept getting all over me. But I was carving an enclave out of the wilderness.

  After a couple of days of that whacking and cutting, and being covered with insect bites, it was looking fairly clear. I was ready to start putting down the frame for the floor.

  In my head and on paper I’d figured it: The house would be ten by twelve, and the floor frame would be built of treated two-by-eight joists, doubled on the edges, spaced on eighteen-inch centers, the backs of them butting into a doubled two-by-twelve treated beam. The bottom of them, two feet back from the front wall, would rest on another beam. Both beams would be supported by concrete blocks set into the ground or on top of it, depending on what it took to get it level. I had finally come to understand what cantilever meant. In my case it meant the front two feet of my little house could project out into thin air because of the beam the floor was resting on. All I had to do was just get the frame square and level. I knew that was going to take a lot of work, but I thought I could do it.

  The first day I didn’t last long swinging with the pick ax in the hard gray clay. It was like soft rock. And the mosquitoes were feeding on me, and it was noon or near one or something like that, and it just burnt me down. I collapsed with my clothes soaking into the little brown pickup I still had then, and went on home to cool up under the air conditioner. I’d gotten too soft. I hadn’t done a decent day’s work in years. I knew I just needed to get acclimated.

  So I started taking little short trips over. Dig a little, rest a little. I had some strings and stakes and stuff up by then. I could see how far down I needed to dig. The two at the back were just cap blocks, solid concrete four inches thick, but they had to be level with each other. There were tree roots and stuff to deal with. But I felt like I was making progress.

  I had to get a board twelve feet long to lay on top of the two blocks so that I could put my level on it and see if it was level. Four or five times of digging and then setting up the board and putting the level on it and looking at it, it wasn’t. Then I’d dig some more, go through the whole thing until finally it was.

  I had made a run for wood. I had made su
ch a run for wood that my little truck had gone down the Highway 6 bypass with its nose stuck up toward the sky. I had the big heavy beams. I had all the two-by-eights it would take to make all the floor joists. I had brown bags of big heavy nails. I knew by then how I was going to put the walls together. And how I was going to raise them. I was going to use the come-along. Same one I’d pulled the dead baby calf with so many years back. I knew I could hitch it to a tree with twenty penny nails and a log chain, and it would move three tons of whatever I wanted it to move. I had some frigging enthusiasm built up.

  There was indeed one little niggling thing wrong with my ideal tiny house site. There was a monster dead pine within about fifty feet of it, and the tree was easily sixty or seventy feet high. The pine beetles had killed it. It was far wider through than the bar on my chain saw, meaning you’d have to attack it from two sides, the engine screaming, the sawchips flying. It had been dead long enough for some of the bark to have already fallen off, some of the limbs. And what I should have done was just suck it up and cut the damn thing down to start with, as soon as the idea of putting a little house there began to take on serious consideration in my brain. But that’s not my way usually, to take care of a potential problem immediately. Oh no. Me, I like to wait around a good long time and then let things get serious before I do anything about it. But in all fairness, this tree was a bad son of a bitch. I’m saying this as a semiprofessional ex–pulpwood cutter, a man who’s carried a jug of gas and 2-cycle oil around in the woods all day like a goatherder with his sheepgut tankard of old funky hot wine. But a man can get killed real easy messing around with something like cutting down a real big tree and even easier with one like that. So I went happily on with my plans. I didn’t cut the tree down. There was nobody to watch above for me for falling limbs while cutting it down, and with a dead one you couldn’t ever tell what they were going to do because they didn’t react to the cutting of the trunk like a live one did and you never knew what stage of rot the trunk was in unless you’d been watching it. This tree had been dead for a long time. It was just a little worry. It wasn’t a big one.

  Once in a while, later, after I was underway with construction, I thought about high winds. Or having the little house sitting there and then the tree rotting enough to fall right in the middle of it. But it wasn’t a major consideration. Not then.

  I nailed the beams together in the carport. I nailed a treated two-by-four ledger all the way across one of them so that the butt ends of the joists could rest on it. That beam would go in the back, between the two solid cap blocks I’d finally gotten level with each other.

  It was hotter than the hind wheels of hell. You’d swing the hammer for a few minutes and the sweat would start coming through your shirt. If you kept on, your hair would turn into a crown of sweat and even your pants would stick to your legs. I figured as long as I didn’t make myself fall out with a stroke I’d be okay. Hell, I was damn near fifty.

  All that stuff was heavy, heavy, heavy. I have to carry every piece of lumber across the spillway of my pond and up the hill about fifty or sixty feet to the little house. That’s after I back all the way across the levee because there’s not enough room to turn around at the end. That treated lumber has a lot of moisture in it because of the stuff they pump into it to make it impervious to rot and termites for forty years. That’s with direct ground contact. That’s what they say. We’ll see. It’s supposed to have a money-back guarantee.

  I had the other blocks. They were hollow, but I was going to fill them with concrete. This is how I laid it out: I had stakes driven that outlined a twelve-by-ten-foot rectangle. Four stakes. I tied a piece of twine from the back stake on each side to the front stake on each side, and then I hung a little thing called a line level on it. It costs about four bucks. It’s a little plastic tube with an oil-filled bubble inside it, with little hooks to hang it on a line. It works just like a carpenter’s level. I adjusted the string on the back stake so that it was resting level on the block, and then I pulled it on out and tied it to a front stake. I read the level and drove the front stake a little deeper, carefully. Once I got it level, I could measure with my tape down from the bottom of the string and add the width of the beam and the thickness of the concrete block to tell me how far down into the ground I needed to dig to make the house level against the hill it was going to be sitting on. It turned out to be about five inches. I dug it, sweating in September’s heat by then, the boys already out with their guns for doves, people already reconnoitering the woods with their four-wheelers on the back ends of their trucks. Orange vests would be out soon, all the pickups in the roads with the guns in the rack. I ran another string between the two front stakes and got that one level, too. Level all four ways. I was set after that.

  I dug, I set the blocks. I cut my joists in the carport and made sure that everything was going to fit together. I had old sawhorses that fell apart and I went out to Wal-Mart for new ones that you just clamped together on some two-by-fours you’d cut, and they didn’t work worth a shit. One leg was always falling or something while you had the saw running. I cussed and fussed. But finally I had it all ready.

  A groove was coming. The weather was cooling and I had money in the bank from the work I’d done. I had to go teach in Montana the next year, sure, but that was no big deal. I figured I’d probably have my book finished by then. The important thing was to get as much work done on this thing as I could now, while the weather was cool, while I had the money to buy the material, the time to do it. Maybe maybe maybe get the roof on before winter rains set in. Because when they set in here, they set in.

  The truth is that if I hadn’t gotten sober for a long time the year before, none of it would have happened. The idea of building it had always been in my head. It had probably been in my head for ten years. I work hard, and I play too hard all the time. But I get sober for a while, and I look around, and I see what all is possible. It’s always a revelation. I saw that I felt good enough to do the physical labor that would be required, and be able to put in the hours it would take. I might not do it all at once, probably wouldn’t, because there would be other things that would come up that I’d have to do, but when those times came along I could just wait. Bide my time.

  In two afternoons I nailed the frame together, on site. I ran my steel tape from corner to corner and bumped it this way or that until I had it square. I doublechecked it twice. It looked good to me, and I started nailing the subflooring on. It was three-quarter-inch sheets of four-by-eight flakeboard. In almost no time at all there was a nice level square platform of new wood twelve by ten sitting in that little glade I had chosen for myself.

  It’s hard to say what it felt like. It felt more than good. I carried my guitar over there a few times late in the evenings and just sat there and played it, listening to the last of the crickets. Before long they wouldn’t be singing at all. And the frog would be sleeping somewhere deep in the mud.

  The squirrels would still be around. The hordes of hunters would be after the deer. They’d probably get all jumpy and nervous. I would be too if somebody was after my ass with a gun all the time. I wanted to go on and work on it, start putting the walls up. But then I had to do a bunch of other stuff I didn’t want to do. But it was stuff that had to be done.

  SOME PEOPLE THINK a writer can’t drive a nail. Look at Thoreau and you know that’s bullshit. He built that whole thing on the pond for about fifteen bucks.

  I had to paint the house we live in. All the outside doors. There are eight of them. Two of them are double doors. You have to inch very slowly and carefully along the gaskets of the doors with the edge of your paint-brush, dipping frequently, that is, if you are a fastidious painter, which I believe I am. I feel there can be no other kind. Some people want to just slop shit all over another door or something. But that’s not my way. I like to be careful with the stuff that belongs to me.

  I had to paint the whole underside of my front porch, which is sixty feet long. I had to spra
y all the mildew off the underside of my carport, which is about twenty by thirty-five. I had to build five new posts for my front porch out of clear pine one-by-sixes and I had to set up the sawhorses and wear an apron all day long and make sandwiches for myself while everybody was gone. It went on and on. It got ridiculous. I was even painting outside at night sometimes wearing a black leather jacket. I got some blue paint on it. It’s still on it.

  It went on from about the twenty-second of September until the fourth of November. In between all that I cooked a chicken stew for two hundred people, sat around some campfires with friends, played some guitars, cleaned out my old writing room and repainted it and moved back into it, read a bunch of books, got rid of a car and bought another one, did some driving around, and tried to learn a few new chords.

  I finally got through with all that stuff and went and bought studs, long two-by-fours for the top plates, long treated two-by-fours for the sole plates. After months of studying the pages of Modern Carpentry, I knew again what a header was and how to build one, had reacquainted myself with the process of building a corner or a tee. When I was a lot younger I had worked for David Parker, putting in additions and doing carpenter work on jobs like that, but I hadn’t learned anything, had only nailed where they told me to, and in truth hadn’t wanted to learn any of it, was only earning a paycheck while I was getting ready to get married and live a life of happy harmony with my new wife.

  Now I began to see why things were done the way they were, that there was a reason for everything in carpentry. I decided to raise the east wall first. It was on the short, ten-foot side, and it only had one window in it. And I already had all my windows, and a door with fifteen panes, and a generator, all bought out of the Home Depot on I-55 up near Hernando where my little brother lives. I’d done a lot of studying about windows and I’d decided that I wanted three across the front, just like the little architect’s cabin, but with one on the east side, and I figured that I wanted them about three feet wide, or a little less, and about four feet high, two panes that swung outward with hand cranks. I knew they’d be high-dollar, but it just so happened that on the Sunday afternoon we went to Home Depot to look about windows and a door, we found four that were exactly what I wanted that somebody had ordered and then failed to pick up. They were three hundred dollars apiece. Twelve hundred dollars worth of windows. But the dude with the orange apron said he’d check and see what they’d take and came back in a few minutes and said I could get them all for six hundred. I loaded them up on the cart, found a door for $115 and put it on the cart, found a gasoline generator for $400 and put it on the cart, and we strapped all that stuff into the back end of Billy Ray’s pickup and brought it home. So I knew what size my window openings had to be.