In the arrogance
of memory, I had come to think of my Dad as not being able to do things, to fix
physical things. My father was an intellectual, a Mathematics professor, a
reader of Thomas Aquinas. He was a photographer, and a pretty fair piano
player. For recreation he played chess, and hardly watched TV except for the
news or other special occasions.
My memory was
shaped by the end game in the old house on Pleasant Street : the panel missing in the
ceiling of the downstairs living room, the poorly constructed second floor
joists exposed, and the drain pipes that ran flat and uneven below the second
floor bathroom and dripped whenever a bathtub full of water was released. Toward
the end my parents kept a large pan in the living room, and the pan, placed
just in front of one of the worn couches, would catch the drip.
1958. Our family
moved back to Massachusetts , to my father’s
new job at Merrimack College , and the massive rambling farm house on Pleasant Street in West Andover . Farming in West
Andover was ending. The last family to live in this house was the Dixon ’s, who retired from
farming, left the house in a state of disrepair, and built a new modern house
around the corner. So maintenance was an uphill battle from the start. My
parents were 35.
The first work on
the Pleasant Street
house was repair of the L-shaped two story shed attached to the back of the
main house. With the help of friends, my father replaced the large beam at the
base of the wall. Our family had little extra money, so a full restoration of
the interior remained a dream, The ground floor remained a storage shed for
successions of bicycles and other tools, and the two dusty rooms in the top
floor were stages for numerous children’s projects and fantasies.
The main part of
the Pleasant Street
house sat on a fieldstone foundation, the top of which was a couple of feet
above the ground level. The house was two stories, each ceiling somewhat higher
than modern construction. Above that was a full attic, with a steeply pitched
roof at the top. The roof leaked, so early on my father, with the help of
friends, re-shingled the roof. The tall, skinny ladders seemed dwarfed against
the side of the house. Standing close to the walls, craning my head back to see
the sharp edge of the roof cutting across the sky, the ladders seemed to ascend
forever. Working from those ladders, they fastened brackets on the roof, much
like the metal shelf brackets that you would fasten to a wall to make book
shelves. Long boards were hauled up the ladders and rested across the brackets.
These boards kept the men from sliding off as they worked their way along the
length of the roof and up toward the peak with row after row of new shingle.
Another summer. I
was fourteen. The grass grew unkempt on the edge of the gravel driveway. The
left rear spring of the black hand-me-down DeSoto had begun to sag dangerously.
It was morning: the light slanted across the front yard and the dew sparkled on
the grass. My father and I got out the bumper jack and jacked up the left rear
really high. We blocked up the frame and rear axle with cinder blocks and an
old beam from the barn. Our shirts were damp with sweat, and gravel and grass
ground into our jeans as we wrestled the rusty nuts, shackles and U-bolts with
breaker bars, hack saws, and a bit of cursing under our breath.
When the long,
multi-layered leaf spring was finally free, we headed for Lawrence
in the rusted out Plymouth .
We waited through the afternoon at the spring shop, a dark barn of glowing ovens,
dirt floors, light sifting through a haze of rust that floated up from wire
buffers and grinding wheels. Men in grimy coveralls and damp gray skin
disassembled our spring. Then they heated each leaf orange in a glowing oven,
bent it back across a vice just so by eyeball and instinct, and quenched it in
a tub of oil and water to harden in its new curve.
By the next
afternoon we had the DeSoto back together again. The left rear sat a little
higher than the right, but good enough for a couple more years. I learned to
drive in this car, up and down the driveway, kicking up gravel from a spinning
rear tire and stomping on the brakes to cause a small but satisfactory skid.
And I learned from my father the feeling of physical work, the satisfaction of
changing things. I feel like a fool for forgetting all this. The lesson my
father couldn’t teach me, for there are some things that a person can’t learn
from their parents, is that after a while we all get a little tired. I am
having to learn that lesson on my own.
Frank
Kearns
September
2015
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