The Vote
Church happens in the main room with the front doors locked and the shades down, and it has happened on the second Tuesday of the month in that building for thirty-one years, and no person who is not a patched member of the Red Quarry Motorcycle Club has ever sat through one.
I sat in a folding chair against the wall by the jukebox with my coat on.
There were twenty-three men. Eight of them were over sixty.
Rooster was on oxygen now, which had happened in three weeks, and there was a kid in the corner who could not have been eighteen, and Marnie stood in the doorway to the kitchen even though the kitchen was red tagged, half in and half out, holding the frame.
Bish ran it off a legal pad.
They did the ordinary business first, which I had not expected and which took forty minutes.
The food bank pallet. A run in May. A man named Delgado whose wife was having a surgery, and a hat that went around the room, and I watched eleven men who had eleven dollars put eleven dollars in a hat, and I thought about how much simpler my life would be if this building were only what I had needed it to be for the last three weeks.
Then Bish said, “All right. The wall.”
He read the Grzyb number out loud. Three hundred and eighty thousand.
He read the note position. A hundred and forty-one thousand six hundred and change, in default since December, cure date the ninth of April, secured by the premises and by the residence of Calvin and Vera Doyle at Herron Avenue.
He read the offer.
That was the part I did not know. There was an offer.
The same outfit that was buying Tessa Kilbride’s street in Hazelwood, some entity three names long out of Columbus, had put a number on the Nineteenth Street parcel in January, before the wall, and had put a second and smaller number on it eleven days after my red tag, and the second number was four hundred and sixty thousand dollars, as is, buyer assumes the slope.
“Sale clears the note,” Bish said. “Sale takes Cal and Vera’s house off the paper. Sale leaves us with better than three hundred after fees, which is a down payment on some other building somewhere that is not sitting on a hill that is coming apart. That is the motion. Sell.”
Nobody said anything for about ten seconds.
Then Rooster said, from behind the oxygen, “Lonnie is in that floor.”
And I understood that the vote was already over.
Because he was right. They mixed Lonnie Sabak’s ashes into the mud for the bar footing in 2013.
There is a plaque with nineteen names on it and eight of them are dead.
There are men in that room whose entire remaining social world is that building, whose wives are gone or whose kids moved to Charlotte, who are on a fixed income and cannot ride anymore and who come on Thursdays for the food bank and stay for four hours because it is warm.
You cannot beat that with a spreadsheet. I have spent seventeen years learning that you cannot beat it with a spreadsheet.
They went around the room.
Some of them were angry and some of them were sad and two of them said things about me, one of them out loud with me sitting right there, which was a man named Petrosky who I had known since 1998 and who said that the county could take a hike and that a wall that had stood since 1974 was not going anywhere in his lifetime.
And I sat with my hands in my coat pockets and did not say a word, because I was a guest, and because he was going to be dead of the truth or not and it was not going to be my argument that decided it.
Cal spoke last. He was standing at the end of the bar.
“I put my house on that paper,” he said. “Nobody made me. Bish did not ask. I came to him with it drawn up because I wanted this building to exist and I was thirty-three years old and I thought that was what a man does.”
He looked around the room.
“My wife did not know,” he said.
You could hear the compressor kick on in the back.
“She found out from an envelope from the county three weeks ago,” Cal said.
“Nineteen years she has lived in that house. She paid the taxes on it out of her check every October because I am no good at that and she is. And for eleven years she has been living in a house that a hundred and forty thousand dollars of somebody else’s paper was sitting on top of, because I signed it and I never told her, and I want every one of you to hear that from me and not from somebody at the bar. ”
Nobody looked at me. I was grateful.
“I am asking you to sell,” he said. “I know what I am asking. I put the roof on this. I cut the letters for that sign out of quarter inch plate with a torch in Ray Nowicki’s driveway.
There is nothing in this building I did not touch.
” He stopped for a second. “And it is going down the hill. Maybe this year, maybe in nine years. Vera did not do that. The wall did that, in 1974, when somebody poured a cap over dry laid stone and never put a weep in it. All Vera did was be the person who looked.”
“You are asking us to hand it to a shell company from Columbus,” Petrosky said.
“I am asking you to be a club that does not hold a woman’s house,” Cal said. “That is all I have got. I have said it as well as I can say it.”
Bish called the vote.
Sell: six.
Do not sell: sixteen.
One abstention, the kid in the corner, who did not know what he was allowed to do and put his hand halfway up on both.
Bish voted to sell. I want that in the record too. He voted against his own room and he did it first so that everybody could see him do it, and it did not matter, and he knew it would not matter when he did it.
There was a long, bad silence.
“Motion fails,” Bish said.
And then a man in the second row, a man I will not name because he has grandchildren and because he was not wrong about the arithmetic, said the thing that ended the entire thirty-one years.
He said, “So the paper stays. They can go after her house or they can go after the building, and if they go after her house first, that buys us time.”
Nobody agreed with him out loud.
Nobody said a word against it either.
That is the thing. I have thought about that for a long time since.
It was not a decision. Nobody voted to feed my house to a servicing company in Columbus.
A tired man in a folding chair said a true and horrible sentence about how collateral works, and twenty-two other tired men let it sit in the air, because to argue with it would have meant reopening the vote they had just won.
Silence is not a decision. Silence is just a load path.
I stood up.
I did not intend to speak. I had promised myself in the truck that I would not speak.
“I want to say one thing and then I will go,” I said, and twenty-three faces turned around.
“That wall is going to fail. Not in nine years. The rotation profile says it is failing now. When it goes it will take the back thirty-four feet of ground and the rear third of this building and everything that is standing on that ground at the time.”
I put my hand on the back of the folding chair.
“I am not saying that to win the argument. I lost the argument, and I am a guest, and I am going home. I am saying it because in about a year there is going to be a Thursday when the food bank is running and there are forty people in this room, and I need every man here to know, tonight, in advance, that he was told.”
I put the chair back against the wall the way you do, and I went out the front, and the March air off the river came up that hill and hit me like a hand.
Behind me, through the door as it swung, I heard Cal say, “Bish. Point of order.”
And Bish say, “Cal, do not.”
And my husband say, “I am asking the chair to recognize me for a surrender of colors.”