Entry #37
February 19, 2024 — 1:30 PM
The chimney man came this morning. Beige truck, magnetic logo peeling at the corners, a ladder ratcheted to the rack so tight it sang when the wind pushed across it. He knocked twice and let the second knock hang as if feeling for an answer through the wood. I let him in. He stamped salt from his boots onto the mat and glanced past me, the way service people do when they’re clocking hazards and paths without being obvious about it.
He introduced himself as J. Morales, kept his gloves on. “Basement first,” he said, “then I’ll take a look at the stack.” We went down the front hall. It was bright outside; the kind of hard winter sun that makes the dust look like fine glass. In the hall, it went dim and two degrees colder. No draft I could find—no window open—but my breath felt briefly heavier in my chest, the way it does before a sneeze.
He reached for the cellar door before I got there, and I saw him slow. The door sticks. It always has. He put his shoulder into it, and the wood let go with a dry little cry. The smell that came up wasn’t sewage or dead animal. It was wet limestone, penny metal, something sweet like an apple left too long in a car. He didn’t comment. He flicked the switch with his elbow and the bulb hummed itself into a feeble orange.
He put one foot on the first stair and stopped. It wasn’t the creak—I’d warned him about that. He just stopped, like someone had touched his sleeve. He leaned forward, head turned, listening in a way I recognized because I’ve done it too, lately, without meaning to: head cocked, eyes on nothing at shoulder height, as if you’re waiting your turn in a conversation you didn’t start.
“How old is this place?” he asked, still not moving. His voice had gone flat.
“Deed says eighteen-nineties,” I said. “I can pull it—”
“No, that’s fine,” he said, and drew his foot back. He rubbed his forearm through the jacket as if brushing off sawdust and looked at the jamb. His eye caught the little cuts there—shallow, overlapping letters I’ve sanded twice and never fully lost. A thin S beside what might be an E, or just a scratch that wanted to be one. He didn’t point to them. He didn’t need me to explain anything.
“Air’s not right,” he said. Not to me. To the stair, or to his own training. He set his meter on and held it out. The tiny screen stayed calm. No alarm. He sniffed again and shook his head. “I can quote the liner from outside. We’ll, uh, we’ll schedule the cleanout once you’ve aired this down. Maybe set a fan. You got a fan?”
“I can get one,” I said. I could have told him the windows down there don’t open and never have, paint fused to paint, hinges thick with the same gray fur that gets on old pipes. I didn’t. He had already stepped back into the hall.
He didn’t go farther in. He glanced up the stair to the landing—where the door sits crooked at the top, where the floorboards meet in that odd way from Entry #36—and then he didn’t look again. He wrote quickly on his clipboard outside by the truck instead of at my dining table like they usually do. His pen scraped hard as if the carbon would smear here.
When he left, he apologized for “being picky,” and I said it was fine, because it was. Watching his back retreat through the yard, I felt the house settle around me again, the light in the hall go its honest gray, the hum of the fridge come back into my attention. I stood with my hand on the cellar knob until the metal warmed to my skin. His boot prints stayed a while in the drywall dust I still haven’t swept from the threshold.
I keep a list of the things I can blame on fatigue. The meter not chirping today doesn’t fit it. Neither does the way he stopped, or the way he backed out as if it were a room with a sleeping infant in it and he didn’t want to be the one to wake it. I’m irritated, more than anything, by the relief I felt when his truck pulled away, like the house had something of mine and I didn’t want to share it.
— Thomas Hale