David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

Mike’s pot was so strong it made me paranoid, and the bar at the lake turned out to be all shitkicker music, so there went those temptations. I helped out some at the farm and put up a handwritten notice at the general store: Lawns Mowed, Leaves Raked, General Yard Work, Reliable Service , with Mike’s number repeated across the bottom where you could tear it off. He told me the locals did this shit for themselves, but I’d noticed that people with money were discovering the place: two and a half hours from Boston, four from New York. I spent forty dollars on a decent used mower, and if somebody called I’d bring it around in the trunk of Mike’s old Ford Fairlane, which didn’t look too professional. Still, there’s a right and a wrong way to mow a lawn—my father taught me that—and I’d always rake up after, so the weekend people started asking if I also did handyman stuff: put up a new gutter, fix a leak around the chimney, replace cracked clapboards, paint the house. Sure, let’s get together on a price. While I didn’t really know what I was doing, it was all pretty intuitive, and Mike’s farmer let me borrow tools and a ladder. When I got more calls than I could handle by myself, I talked Mike into coming to work for me. On account of my father, “businessman” always had a bad sound to me, but it turned out that’s what I was.

My company still does lawns and landscaping, anywhere in a fifty-mile radius; we cut, split and deliver firewood, plow driveways in the winter. Our main business, though, is construction. I’ll still put on a tool belt myself, but a lot of days I’ll just be driving from one job site to another, making sure stuff’s getting done right. At any given time I might have up to a dozen people working for me—master carpenter, plumber, electrician, a heavy-equipment operator who doubles as a mechanic, a girl to run the office and answer the phone, and a revolving cast of Asscrack Harrys for the grunt work. Though I’d rather do renovations and additions—I hate to see it getting too built up around here—if somebody comes in and buys five or ten acres and wants a nice log house, I won’t turn away the business. I’ve probably done my own part in fucking up the look of things. I had to put up a metal barn on Watch Hill Road, where I’ve got my office, for all the equipment—backhoe, dozer, tractor and brush hog, plow trucks, a flatbed. I had them leave a row of trees so in the summer you can’t see it when you go by.

Mike moved to Alaska twenty years ago; he said it was getting too suburban here, which I took to be aimed at me. He’d be sixty-eight, so he’s probably still alive, but I didn’t even know how to get in touch with him when our father died. My main guys now are Myron Stannard, Jesse Biggs and Johnny Iaconelli. Customers love to watch Myron when he’s doing tree work: he’s a rock star up there in the cherry picker, with an Asscrack Harry as his chainsaw tech to hand up a fresh saw when the one he’s using starts to get dull. Jesse, who does the heavy equipment piece, moved up here from Hartford to get away from what he called “the crime”—like there was just one. He’s the only black man in town. Both of them can bang nails and do whatever else, but Johnny’s my master carpenter. He’s not as old as the rest of us—he’s got to be late forties—and he’s been with me the shortest time. Myron warned me he could be hard to handle when he was drinking; still, he’s the best around, and I’ll take a drink myself. So will Jesse. They’re artists, those three. I’m the one who knows how to run a business, though, and how to deal with the clientele; I get why get rich people have a boner for plank doors, woodstoves, Hoosier cabinets and eight-over-eight windows. I keep track of sources for salvaged wainscoting and hand-hewn beams, or I can take a drawknife to a beam from the sawmill and make it look hand hewn. I bought an old house myself, on a dirt road. I’ve got three albums with pictures of all my projects; mostly to show clients, but some nights I’ll just take them out to look at them.

While my father lived long enough to know that at least one of his sons wasn’t a fuckup, I think it hurt him when my wife and I split up without having kids. That would be a whole other story, not really to the point of this one. You’d think Bozrah was a town where you’d want to raise a family, but the select board closed the elementary school ten years ago to keep taxes down, and what kids there are get bused twenty miles down the valley. The ones who have anything on the ball get away as soon as they’re finished with high school. Even Amber, the girl in my office, moved down to Greenfield for a while to go to community college. It’s only the Asscrack Harrys and their fat girlfriends who stick around, living with their parents, or in the shitbox houses people were putting up before the five-acre zoning came in, or over in Egdon where you can still stick a trailer on a half-acre lot. So we’ve got fewer people than we did in 1975, except now there’s an MIT professor, a Broadway actor and his boyfriend, a retired anchorman who used to do local news out of Boston, a Web designer, a mystery writer who supposedly sets her stuff in the area. What keeps this place from turning into a Lenox or a Stockbridge is that there’s nothing here. The nearest supermarkets are in Greenfield and North Adams, forty-five minutes either way, and the same for the nearest hospital, which if you’re retired could be a deal breaker right there. Since the general store closed you have to go over to Egdon for gasoline or a quart of milk. There’s not even an antique shop. The old bar at the lake is now a restaurant called Locavore; you don’t see many cars outside, and when that goes under, I’ll be the only employer in town.

For me personally, it’s all good. It was my company that turned the Lakeside Lounge into Locavore with barn board and copper countertops; we built a writing studio in the mystery lady’s barn; when a guy whose company makes drones for the military bought the sweet little Federal house next to the town hall, we dismantled it, numbered everything and put it back together for him in the middle of the hundred acres he owns on Charrington Hill. But I feel like I got in just under the wire. Last fall a real-estate agent from Pittsfield called me with an offer of four-fifty for my house, which I’d bought for a buck and a quarter. I hadn’t put it on the market—somebody from New York had just driven by while leaf peeping on the back roads. It’s like I’m finally one of the locals myself: if I were young and starting out again, I couldn’t afford to live here.

—

A couple of years ago, an investment banker bought the dairy farm where Mike used to work, and he comes up here for a couple months in the summer. His caretaker lives in Mike’s old cabin, which we moved out of sight of the main house. The Holsteins are long gone; now there’s a herd of shaggy longhorns grazing on his side hill among a flock of twisting metal sculptures. (It was Johnny who dug down with the backhoe and poured the concrete.) The guy also bought Billy Sibley’s little ranch house, just to tear it down so he wouldn’t have to see it when he turned onto his road. That got the locals’ attention.

Billy worked for me maybe fifteen years; before that he had a roofing business, and he built that little house with his own hands. Amber called him Uncle Bill; actually, he would’ve been her great-uncle. Billy never got married. He built the house for his sweetheart when he came home from Vietnam in ’66—he’d put in his years and he saw where shit was heading—but she broke their engagement and left town, and that was it as far as Billy and females. The banker offered him twice what the place was worth, then three times, and finally Billy grabbed his chance to retire in style. His younger brother was already down in Florida. We got the contract to tear the house down; if we hadn’t, somebody would have. I would’ve put Billy on something else while this was going on, but he said no, he wanted to do the job himself. Mostly he supervised, since his back was getting worse from sleeping on what he called a few-ton. Still, Jesse let him run the dozer when it came time to fill in the cellar hole.