“Of who? Mister Barrett? He nice as can be. He going to send me to Princeton”—he began but suddenly, taking thought, changed his mind and became chesty and huffy—“why you axing me?” His lip stuck out like Ludean’s. “Like I told him, I already got six scholarship offers from the ACL prior to his.”
Prior. She gazed at him curiously. Why did he flip-flop so fast, from courtesy to huffiness? “Why—” she began and fell silent. On the other hand, if you are curious, why not ask? Is there a law against asking? “Why are you pouting?”
“What’s that?” He ducked his head toward her.
“Is it because your hands are cold and this is a poor job compared with a job inside as a mechanic or a salesman?”
“What? What you talking about, pouting?” He stared at her, open-mouthed. “Lady, what you talking about?”
“I was just wondering—”
“Lady, if you got any questions, ax inside.”
“Very well. Thank you and good luck in the game.”
“Sho,” he said, nodding. “Have a nice day.”
“I will. Goodbye.” For some reason people had stopped saying goodbye. Very well.
Suddenly she noticed something. She could say goodbye! She wasn’t afraid to state her business, say goodbye, and leave! She wasn’t afraid of hurting feelings. No, her desire to please everybody had given way to an immense curiosity. What in the world made people so jumpy?
Jerry the parts man was sitting behind a counter reading a magazine named Hustler. She rapped. He looked up, frowning.
“Are you Jerry?”
“Yeah’m.”
“I came by to pick up my creepers,” she declared. She had no trouble making a flat declaration.
“What creepers?”
“Didn’t Mr. Barrett call?”
“Oh yeah. You a friend of Mr. Barrett’s?” His face had a new hooded expression. She frowned.
“Yes.”
“Uh huh.”
She was astounded. Was he leering at her? “I’ll take four creepers,” she said. Don’t give me that hustler look, you pimplehead, or I’ll hustle you upside the head. Why did she assemble these words, taking them not from the young black at the washrack but from Ludean the cook?
“He didn’t mention four.”
“I mentioned four. Call him. Tell him that will leave only ninety-six from the hundred you ordered by mistake.”
“Yes ma’am.”
While he stacked the creepers for her, she used the two nylon cords she’d already cut, one to lash the creepers together and lash the half-dozen lengths of ten-foot plastic pipe atop the creepers (the pipe as strong and light as weightless moon pipe), the other to tie to the bottom creeper as a pull cord.
Off she went down Church Street, backpack heavy with blocks, creepers rattling behind her, but feeling strong. Pavement lasted to the country club. Then: would the creepers creep on a dry golf links?
They did. But now as she surveyed stove and terrain, she had her doubts. There must be a better way than shoeing each foot of the Grand Crown with a creeper and dragging it over the littered ruin. She was a hoister, not a dragger.
The great stove had come out of the dark earth with a crack and a suck, toots popping. It reminded her of her father extracting a molar. The only trouble, requiring three false starts, came from knotting the sling properly and gauging the angle of pull in such a way as to clear the cellar stairwell with no more than a bump or two. A problem this and therefore a pleasure in the solving. But a pain also: the price of the rope. Figuring the weight of the stove at around eight hundred pounds — she could barely lift one corner as she reckoned she could barely lift a two-hundred-pound man — she calculated she needed an eight-to-one mechanical advantage. How to get it? with a tackle of one double block and one triple block! But there was another calculation: lifting the stove twenty-five feet would require not twenty-five but 5 times 25 equals 125 feet of rope! She settled on a half-inch W.P.S. nylon (mfg. in Madison, Georgia) at 35¢ @ foot, break strength 5,500 lbs. $42.75!!! The blocks were even worse; 2 simple pulleys @ $4.87 (for making a single block and tackle for smaller loads), 2 Wichita Falls steel double blocks @ $29.52, 1 triple block @ $43.71! Her cash reserve was devastated. She counted her money: $171.77—and she still had to buy plastic pipe and sleeves, stove polish, Brasso, and her meager groceries. But what blocks! Smooth satiny metal good for years of hoisting. And what a rope! Even as the blocks closed above her and the great ungainly molar of a stove popped out of its socket, the tackle running so smoothly through the blocks that she could pull with one hand, the tail of the rope lay loosely in her other hand as limber, supple, and heavy as a snake. There was always use for such a rope! In fact: why not rig a line from one chimney to the lonesome pine by the greenhouse, hang the stove on a pulley, and let it down the gentle slope like a trolley? Okay, except that, with her feel for angles and hefts, she gauged the distance from near chimney to greenhouse: yes, she could stretch the rope with the block and tackle as tight as you please, tighter than barbed wire, the break strength of the rope would stand it, but not the chimney. Her eye told her this. To clear the rubble and laurel and to allow for the down drag of the stove, she’d have to rig the rope high on the blackened chimney. The mortar mightn’t hold. She couldn’t take the chance.
Double half-hitching the tail around a stump of laurel, she covered the cellar hole with shards of stout two-by-six lumber and let the stove down.
Now that it was landed and only now did she give herself leave to take a good look at it.
What a stove! It was a castle of a stove, a rambling palace of a stove, a cathedral of a stove, with spires and turrets and battlements. A good six feet high and eight feet wide, it was made of heavily nickeled iron castings bolted together. Timidly she rubbed the metal with one finger. It was dirty but not rusty. Panels of porcelain enamel, turquoise blue for the oven doors and the four warming closets, little balconies jutting out head-high, snowy white for the splashback, were fused to heavy cast iron between frames of nickel. Bolted on one side was a nickel-iron box lined with heavy copper and fitted with a spigot. A water reservoir! On the other side, the firebox with a bay window of a door glazed with panes of mica, some crazed, some crystallized, but all intact. She opened the fire door. Inside was a grate, barely used to judge from the blacking, evidently a coal grate with four sides curling up like heavy petals, but observe: the end grates were attached by a single bolt and easily removable to accommodate logs, three-foot logs! Behind the firebox and attached by a short drawbridge loomed a squat Romanesque tower, yet another heater, it seemed, crowned by a nickeled dome, a great urn top fitted in turn with an ornamental temperature indicator (unbroken!). What was this? a newfangled 1899 water heater? (No, there was the copper reservoir which heated from the firebox.) A separate coal heater for sticking through kitchen wall into dining room? With a flue arrangement served by the main firebox so that, except in very cold weather, the two rooms could be heated from the firebox? She would see.
An hour she allowed herself and the dog to inspect her treasure in the sunlight, enough time to make sure it was in one piece and not only not rusted but, under the soot and grease and ashes, new. It must have been purchased shortly before the house burned, the super-stove of the nineteenth century, installed in the huge kitchen where during the fire it had the good fortune to settle early through the burning joists and into the cooled damped-down cellar where fire wouldn’t burn. A great eighty-five-year-old brand-new stove! Tut can keep his gold mummy case.
Carefully, as the sunlight came full in her face, bejeweling her eyelashes, she sprayed the bolt on the coal grate with WD-40 and attached the two crescent wrenches (10” Fullers, $7.95 each!). The nut held tight, but WD-40 seeped between metal. She wedged the inside wrench and took the outside in her strong boy’s hands: no way for you to go, friend, but around. It went.