And Don answered him. "Good enough for me."
By the time the cable was ready to hook in, Don had the panel box up and the old fuse box out of the way. When the guy started to attach the cable Don stepped back out of the way.
"Ain't hot yet," said the guy.
"And my gun ain't loaded," said Don.
That earned him a grin. "I guess that means you don't need the lecture about having a qualified electrician do all your wiring and shut off all the power before you touch this box."
"You can read me my rights, officer, but I've been through it all before."
The Duke Power guy shook his head and chuckled.
Before he turned on the juice, he watched Don attach a single white electric cable to one of the breakers. Didn't say a word while Don did it, which was high praise among workmen. Afterward he nodded down toward the other end of the coiled cable, which Don had attached to a junction box with a quadruple outlet.
"Hundred feet?" asked the Duke Power guy.
"Hundred and fifty," said Don. "I won't tell you how many extension cords I'll be running off this thing."
"Good thing, cause I don't want to know."
"It'll be code before the inspection." In other words, I won't let you get in trouble for hooking me up with the wiring in this condition.
"I seen one of these jobs once," said the Duke Power guy. "Lath and plaster walls. Hope you ain't planning on saving the original plaster."
"I believe in drywall," said Don. "I'm renovating, not restoring."
"Have fun." And that was it. The Duke Power guy got him to sign off on the job and he was gone. Guys in suits would have done lunch and exchanged business cards and promised each other a golf game.
The cable trailing behind him, Don carried the junction box up the stairs to the ground floor. The basement access was in the apartment on the north side, by far the nicest of the units the house had been cut up into. The stairs led into the biggest kitchen, with a massive table that might have been the finest piece of furniture left in the house, if not for all the initials carved in it. Then there were two bedrooms off the narrow hall that led to the parlor in front—again, the largest of the parlors in the house. Don set down the junction box in that room, plugged a six-outlet power strip into it, and then plugged a worklight into that. He flipped it on and the room was filled with a harsh white light. The words from Genesis passed through his mind as they always did at such a time. Only it was Duke Power, not God, who said Let there be light. God didn't bother much with light and dark anymore, Don figured. It had been a seven-day contract with no warranty. He finished a day early, collected his bonus, and walked away clean to let somebody else live with what he'd made. That's how Don looked at God, at least for these last few years.
Now that he had light, it was time to divide the firmament. Actually that was his dad's old joke, to call furniture "firmament". "Word doesn't have any other meaning that anybody knows of," he used to say, "so I can assign it to any meaning I want." So it was furniture that Don moved, pulling it all up against the outside walls of the north parlor so it was out of the way. The cheap and filthy wall-to-wall carpet wasn't worth saving, so Don had no qualms about taking his utility knife to it and baring all of the floor that didn't have furniture piled on it. The floor underneath was what he expected—a badly beaten-up hard-wood floor so solid and well made that it couldn't be replaced today at any cost. This place had been built right.
He rolled up the huge piece of old carpet and carried it outside and laid it on the grass next to the curb. Then he backed the truck up onto the lawn so he wouldn't have to carry his tools so far. It took him about a dozen trips to get all the sacks and boxes of hardware in. He plugged in the cordless tools to freshen the charge.
Three things were left in the back of the truck—the garbage can, the workbench, and his cot. The cot had to be last and the workbench was the heaviest thing, so he pulled out the huge Rubbermaid garbage can he had bought that morning and carried it around the outside of the house.
He picked a spot near the back door. The really massive pile of trash would be established at the front curb where he had left the carpet, of course, but he had to have a place to throw leftover food and any dead animals he might find in the house; whatever would rot needed to be in a can with a lid.
It was a hot afternoon, and all the carrying and walking had given him a light sweat. It felt good. So did the shade of the house and the tall looming hedge that cooled and scented the air and made the carriagehouse next door invisible. And at the end of the tall part of the hedge, there stood an old woman leaning on a rake, her white hair done up in a ragged bun that left strands wisping around her head like a halo, her face creased and cracked from a hundred suntans. A neighbor. And from the bright eagerness of her eyes, a talker. It was starting. But Don was raised right. He smiled and said hey.
"Hey yourself, young man," said the old woman. "Y'all fixin' up the old Bellamy house or tearin' it down?" Her accent was pure hillbilly, all Rs and twang.
"House ain't ready to die yet," said Don.
At once the old woman called out to somebody invisible behind the high hedge. "You was right, Miz Judy, the landlord's gonna make this poor feller fix up the Bellamy house!" She turned back to Don. "I hope you don't think a couple of locks on the doors are going to make you safe. Strange people go in and out of that house. It's a nasty place!"
What was she doing, trying to scare him into going away? That made no sense. The neighbors should be glad somebody was trying to fix it up.
An old black woman now emerged from behind the hedge, leaning so deeply into her cane that Don wondered if she even had a hip. This must be Miz Judy.
"I'll bet you four bits, Miz Evvie, four bits says he's bought the place hisself."
So the white woman was Miz Evvie. But of course those were names they called each other. Don knew better than to call them by name until he was given the right name to call.
"Don't be silly," said the white woman. "People with money never do the work theirself."
Don hated to take sides. He remembered the story of the Trojan War in high school and how it all started because poor Paris got himself trapped into judging which goddess was most beautiful. Never get in the middle of arguments between women, that was the main theme of Homer, as far as Don ever cared—it was the only lesson that seemed to apply to the real world. These two old bats weren't exactly Athena and Aphrodite—or was it Diana? Didn't matter, it wasn't going to be a beauty contest. Don was the only one with the answer to their bet and while he didn't expect a war to start, he had a feeling that he was about to get himself roped into a lot of unwelcome conversations later. Oh well, couldn't be helped. His mother would come back and haunt him if he wasn't polite to old ladies.
Directing himself to Miz Evvie, Don shook his head sadly and said, "You made yourself a bad bet, ma'am. I own the place, or I will as soon as we close."
Evvie turned to Judy and pounded the rake into the grass a couple of times. "Damn all! Damn upon damn!"
At which Miz Judy seemed to take great offense. "Don't you go swearin' at me like some cheap hillbilly whore!"
"Gladys told you, didn't she!" said Evvie. "You're a cheater!"
"I never said Gladys didn't tell me, now, did I?"
"It ain't sportin' to bet on a sure thing!"
"I don't know what you mean by sportin'," murmured Miz Judy. "I'm having fun!"
They were so caught up in their argument that they seemed to have forgotten all about Don. Maybe they wouldn't be such bad neighbors after all—not if they did all their talking to each other. Don touched his forehead in farewell and made his way back to the pickup.