The Clubhouse
He put the case in the bed of the county truck and stepped back and I drove away and neither of us said goodbye, and for two days after that the only thing that happened was weather.
The engineer came Friday. Grzyb and Associates out of Carnegie, a geotechnical outfit with a good name, and they sent a young engineer with a beard and a driller, and I stayed off the property entirely because it was theirs now and because there is nothing worse for a young engineer than the county inspector standing behind him with her arms folded.
They put two borings in on Friday and a third on Monday and I got the report on the following Thursday, copied to the county because it had to be.
They agreed with me.
They agreed with me on the rotation, on the drainage, on the surcharge, and on the wedge, and their wedge came out a foot and a half deeper than mine, which meant the building was worse off than I had said.
That is the part nobody outside the work understands.
I did not want to be right. I sat at my desk with the report and felt something I could only describe as being sick with correctness.
And they priced the remedy.
Soldier pile and lagging wall with tiebacks, full removal of the existing stone, new drainage, restoration of the lot.
Three hundred and eighty thousand dollars, plus or minus fifteen percent, plus permitting, plus a right of way agreement with the county, plus a thing they called mobilization difficulty because there is no way to get a drill rig to the bottom of that slope except through somebody’s property.
Three hundred and eighty thousand dollars, for a club whose dues had fallen off, that was a hundred and forty thousand in the hole to a servicing company in Columbus, on a note that had been in default since December.
You do not need to be an engineer to run that one.
Bish came to my house on a Sunday.
He did not call first. He parked the dually across the end of my driveway like a man who has decided in advance how the conversation goes, and he stood on my porch with his hat off, which I want to record, because for all of it he stood on my porch in March with his hat in his hand.
“Can I come in,” he said.
“No.”
“Okay.” He turned his hat around a half turn. “Three eighty.”
“I know.”
“There is no three eighty. There is not thirty-eight. We had eleven thousand dollars in that account on the first of the month and four of it is the food bank.”
“I know.”
He looked at me for a while.
“Vera,” he said, “I have got to ask you something and I want you to know I have thought about whether to ask it for four days.”
“Ask.”
“Did you know it was that bad when you looked out that window.”
There it was.
“Say the whole question, Bish.”
“That is the whole question.”
“No it is not. The whole question is, did I go looking for a way to take that building away from you because your club took my husband.” I stood in my own doorway with the storm door between us. “You have thought about it for four days. Ask it the way you thought about it.”
He did not look away. I will give him that too.
“Did you,” he said.
“I saw an eighteen foot wall with a rotated cap and iron staining down the face from a window at eleven in the morning,” I said.
“You want to know what I felt. Here is what I felt. Relief. Because for eleven days I had been standing in a life where nothing could be measured, and then I looked out a dirty window and there was a thing that could.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the whole answer, and if you cannot hear it, that is not my failure.” I put my hand on the door frame. “Bish, if I had walked away from that wall, what would have happened. Say it out loud.”
He was quiet.
“Somebody would have gotten killed,” he said.
“There is a school route at the bottom of it.”
“I know there is a school route.”
“Then you know that I did the only thing available to me, and you also know that you are going to spend the next twenty years telling this story in a room, and in that story I am going to be a woman who got even.” My voice did not do anything.
That is the part I am proudest of. “And there is not a single thing I can do about that, so you may as well go home.”
He put his hat back on.
“For sixteen years,” he said, “I have run a club where the rule is you do not put a brother’s family in a bad spot.
And I have known about Cal and that woman for a year and a half and I did not do one thing about it, because I told myself it was between the two of them.
” He came down one step. “I want you to know that I have not slept right since Jonah broke that kid’s nose.
That is all. I am not asking you for anything. ”
“Bish.”
“Yeah.”
“Take my house off that paper,” I said. “That is what you can do. That is the only thing left that you can do, and it is going to cost you the building, and I am telling you now that you should do it anyway, because there is not going to be a building either way. The wall does not care about the vote.”
He stood at the bottom of my steps in the March wind.
“Tuesday,” he said. “Come to church.”
“Women do not go to church.”
“Come to church,” Bish said again, and got in the dually and drove off up Herron.
Jonah called me that night from a job trailer.
“Mom, what did you do.”
So we had that conversation, and it went the way those conversations go when a nineteen year old has spent four days in a lunch shack listening to ironworkers who are also Red Quarry, and I explained the wedge to him twice and I sent him the photographs and he went quiet, and then he said the thing that took the legs out from under me.
“So it was true the whole time,” he said. “That whole place. It was sitting on something that was already going.”
“That is a wall, Jonah. It is not a metaphor.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “Okay, Mom.”
I stood in my kitchen after he hung up.
Out the window over the sink, past my mother’s neighborhood and down the cut, you can see about two hundred feet of the Allegheny between two buildings if you stand in exactly the right place, and I stood in exactly the right place, and the ice was going.
It had been going all week. Whole plates of it coming down from Kittanning, riding the high brown water, turning slowly and knocking into each other and breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, and by the time they got to us most of them were the size of a table and by the point they would be nothing at all.
Every year I watch that and every year it takes me about nine days to notice it is happening.
That is the trouble with a thaw. It does not announce itself. You cannot point at the hour. All you can say afterward is that there was ice, and it held everything, and it held everything, and then one warm week took it apart, and what is underneath was always moving the whole time.