Entry #26
December 7, 2023 — 1:30 PM
The gypsum came early. I heard the truck before I saw it—air brakes coughing in the cold, the rattle of straps, the beep as he inched back along the drive. Sun off the cab glass, hard and white. I had the front door propped with a length of trim I’d pulled this morning, and the smell of damp paper and old plaster on me.
The driver was about fifty, wind-chapped, union jacket gone shiny at the seams. He checked the address, checked me, then looked past my shoulder into the hall like you do when you’ve forgotten something. “Inside drop?” he said.
“Yes. Front room, against the inner wall. I cleared a path.”
He swung the pallet jack down, rolled the stack to the porch. When the first wheel hit the threshold he stopped. Not a stumble—he stopped. He set the handle upright, flexed his fingers, and took off his gloves like that would help him see better.
“You doing this by yourself?” he asked. His voice carried like it was meant for closer walls.
“Mostly,” I said. “Neighbor kid helped with the carpet last week.”
He glanced at the windows—black rectangles in the day because the tarps are still up—then at the lintel. His eyes tracked some chip or scar there I hadn’t looked at in a while. The trim I used as a doorstop has a nail hole splintered out, and under it, on the stone sill, two letters scratched in tight and shallow. E and something like a B, softened by grit. He put his glove back on.
“I can leave it right here,” he said. He toed the line where the porch boards turn to the inside floor. “I don’t go into some places.”
“Union rule?” I tried to keep it friendly. “I can tip if it’s a time thing.”
He shook his head. “No. I just don’t go into some places.” He did look at me then, quick and flat, like he was checking a stranger’s shoes. “You get a heat going in there, it’ll feel different.”
“It’s on,” I said. It was. The thermostat ticks and the vents carry warm air, but the front room keeps its own season. The drywall dust rises when you cross it and hangs in the light like fog over a pond. The boards under the rug strips give underfoot then stiffen again. Cold fixed to place. But that’s old wood and open walls, not a feeling you can consecrate.
He wrestled the jack around so the pallet sat lengthwise along the steps. “Sign for it?” He held the tablet out, but his feet stayed pointed toward the road. A radio burbled inside his cab—someone laughing too loud for the hour.
“Is there a problem with the house?” I asked him. It sounded more annoyed than I meant. I didn’t want to work an extra hour ferrying boards through myself because someone was squeamish about a bit of dust.
He wet his lip and looked again past me, not into the room but at the dark between the hall and the stairs. “Some places keep what’s been said in them,” he said. “Don’t mind me.” Then he added, almost like he had to say something useful to even it out: “Don’t nail after dark. Noise carries.”
He left it like that. I signed. He wouldn’t take the door; wouldn’t even step onto the mat. He rode the jack back down the path, boots careful on the salt, and was in the cab before I’d folded the receipt.
Local superstition, or a man with bad taste in stories. Small towns like to assign moods to structures the way they assign nicknames to people. It keeps talk lively. The cold in the front room is the cold in the front room. The letters on the sill could be any pair of initials. If he’d delivered to a boundless number of foreclosures and rot-boxes, he’d have a stock of lines ready.
Still, there was something about the way he said “some places” that lodged under the rib. Not warning. Not even respect. More like the tone you use when you don’t put your hand in a jar because your grandfather never did, and you can’t say why.
— Thomas Hale