Luke Whisnant

How to Build a House

A cap is the first thing you need, preferably a primary color, emblazoned with the logo of a tool company or a lumberyard—Snap-On, DeWalt, Remo, Plum Creek, Georgia Pacific—or a common brand of beer or perhaps a hot sauce—Tabasco, Texas Pete, Hot Cock Vietnam. Avoid mauve or chartreuse caps featuring yacht club names or internet service provider logos. Note also that although its correct name is “cap,” no one calls it “cap”; here, in the circles you move in, it is a “hat.” The second thing you will need is a truck, preferably a Ford, Chevy, or Dodge. A Japanese truck counts, but not much.

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Draw every stick of lumber, every brick, every nail, every strip of aluminum flashing, every bead of glue on each tongue-in-groove panel of plywood; draw in hyper-realistic enlarged detail; draw in colored pencils with coded colors for each material and construction sequence. Draw draw draw. Tell yourself: If you can draw it, you can build it. Delay breaking ground until you have finished the drawings, all of the drawings. Keep drawing long enough and you might not have to build it.

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Get back to nature. Find a waterfront building site on a beautiful tea-colored river eleven miles from the closest town, forty-two miles from a secular bookstore or an iced latte, two counties away from the nearest daily newspaper, a site where the display screen of your cellphone blinks no service available. Drive a few stakes under the cypress trees and string some line. Start digging. A few weeks after you’ve finished the foundation, get married to a local woman with two teenagers. Your two favorite rooms in the house—your study and your music room—are now morphed in an instant into teenage bedrooms. You stand where your built-in birds-eye maple desk was going to be and look out over the tea-colored river and you think surfboards, stuffed animals, Brittany Spears posters.

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The last time your wife ventured out to help you on the house you took her up on the roof with a 3000-count plastic bucket of button-cap nails and three rolls of 30-pound roofing felt; the two of you rolled out the long black strips of felt, overlapping the seams and nailing them down every six inches. Your wife, squatting on the hot roof with Little TapTap, says the nails’ orange plastic heads on the black tarpaper remind her of Halloween, as if these precise rows of nails were cute little pumpkins lined up like soldiers. You watch her bend a nail, pull it out and toss it over her shoulder, start another one and bend it, start a third and smack it sideways so that it ricochets off into the woods. Easy, you tell her, these are expensive. She reproaches you by hammering in the next dozen perfectly. You got it now, you say, but she just gives you a look. You turn for another handful of nails and accidentally kick the 3000-count bucket with the side of your workboot and watch it tilt and tip and spew two-thousand-nine-hundred-and-sixty-seven nails across the ridge and down the steep plywood sheathing, a rushing flood of airborne orange nails headed over the eve, a stormburst of orange raindrops pelting your backyard.

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When you can’t stand the sawdust and dirt on your plywood subfloor another single day, get in your Japanese truck and make a special trip to Beldon’s Welding and Hardware to buy a broom. There is a very pretty young woman in Beldon’s who can distinguish at a glance a half-inch lag screw from a five-eights inch lag screw, who coifs her brown hair in a loose swirl held in place with a couple of 16-penny nails, who wears bluejean shorts and tennis shoes and a chartreuse Beldon’s Welding teeshirt and has brown arms and legs in the dead of winter and level brown eyes, and just for fun you have a desultory crush on her and think of her as your Secret Girlfriend. You always contrive to check out when she is manning the rickety old cash register, and today she looks at you holding this broom, an ordinary black-handled yellow-strawed broom made right here in our beloved homestate, and she turns her mouth down further and her eyes dance as she says, “Goin to do some sweepin?” and you say yes, wondering why she finds that so god-damned funny, and she looks at the broom again and can barely contain herself and that’s when you realize that men in this county don’t sweep, or more accurately, they don’t sweep with this kind of broom; you should have gotten a push-broom, a janitor’s broom; but instead, by mistake, you’re buying a woman’s broom, and you might as well be buying a tube of lipstick or a box of Tampons. She takes your money and hands you your change and turns away with her face scrunched up and says “Enjoy your sweepin,” and you can’t do a thing but say that you will.

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Don’t take your hat off inside, even if you’re inside a church. Leave it on.

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When it is 97 degrees and 80% humidity with a heat index of 101 at 5:00 PM, and you have spent all day digging post holes for 4x4 pressure-treated posts, rough wet wood soaked in arsenic and copper chromate, hallucinogenic fumes of toxicity wafting off them in the staggering heat, and you are choking on concrete dust as you lift and tear and dump the 80-lb bags of Redi-Mix, just add water, and with the side of a hoe you are churning buckets of muddy riverwater into the choking powder until it’s a bubbling slurry you can hardly heave and pour toward the posthole, and when you have tried unsuccessfully for the fourth time to lift and set plumb a 12-foot post into the wet concrete, and the two snarky teenagers who will share this house with you are, one, at the beach surfing and two, back in town lying in bed in the airconditioning watching music videos, then there is nothing you can do except go inside the house you are building for them and stand in the teenagers’ rooms, first one and then the other, and spit on their floors.

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Jeffery is an idiot, and the reason you know this is because (a), Mr. Hollowell says “I knowed him all my life, and that boy ain’t right,” and (b), out of nowhere he materializes one afternoon—Jeffery Skittlethorpe, a grownup high school dropout skidding across your muddy yard on a rusted bicycle—to introduce himself and offer his help building the house, and when you ask him how much he would charge he squints at the white noon sky and then stares at his tattered blue bowling shoes and then looks up at you to gauge your expression and then says “Not much” and you ask him “How much” and a little uncertainly he says “How ‘bout two dollars an hour?”

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Invent goofy names for everything and give them a sardonic twist when saying them aloud. For example, at a used tool shop you find an ancient sledge hammer that some previous owner has painted pink, perhaps to forestall theft (who would want a pink sledge hammer?). Buy this thing and call it “Big Pink” and lisp a bit when asking your wife to hand it to you. You have four other hammers at the building site, so you name each of them: Wafflehead, Steely Dan, Cherry, Little Tap-Tap. In the evocative shadows that dapple the plywood subfloor you artistically arrange these four with Big Pink and a rubber mallet called Condom and take several photos from different angles: your hammer arsenal. In this manner you avoid working on the house.

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Call an electrician a few months before groundbreaking and ask him to put in a temporary power pole so you can run the necessary tools to cut and drill wood, mix cement and mortar, and maybe play a radio for a bit of diversion. Ask yourself what he really means when he wonders on your answering machine if you’re seriously framing the house yourself. Call him back and get his voice mail. Play phone tag for a few weeks. Look in the mirror one morning and say Fuck it, I’ll just build the whole goddamn thing with 14-volt rechargeable hand tools. When the battery on your circular saw gives out after two hours, reach for your Dad’s old snaggle-toothed handsaw and pretend you’re Amish.

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The word house comes from the Old English hus, derived from the Indo-European (s)keus, a word which means “to cover or conceal from the sky.” The word board is related to the Old French bord, the side of a ship, and derives ultimately from the Indo-European bher, meaning “to cut.” The word window is a compound from the Old Norse vindruga, vindr, wind, and auga, an eye: window, literally an eye for the wind. Now close the dictionary and go buy some nails.

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Go into Beldon’s Welding and Hardware, stroll the rows of farm implements, tractor hitches and feed bags and irrigation system replacement valves, dusty iron and steel and aluminum things you cannot discern the purpose of; say “hey” to your Secret Girlfriend behind the counter, feel stupid when she doesn’t reply, doesn’t nod, just waits, gazing with her brown impassive eyes; tell her that for the lally columns holding up the second story of the house you’re building you need two 6x6 quarter-inch steel plates cut and sized and drilled out just so and does she think somebody there can do that for you, and she says with her down-turned mouth “Well, yeah, this is a welding shop, you know,” and you stand there and think, It is? I thought it was an idiot shop, but you don’t say it, and all the men sitting around the drink cooler eating their Nabs and swigging Co-Colas look down at the tiled floor grinning and won’t meet your eyes because they’re idiots, all those idiots sitting around a idiot shop.

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For some reason all your life you have loved it when instead of “an idiot,” people say “a idiot,” as in “I don’t know what got into that boy; I reckon he’s just a idiot.” So when 85-year-old arthritic Mr. Hollowell from next door climbs out of his gleaming black-and-turquoise Dodge Dakota and hobbles over to the property line and shouts to you the same exact sentence he shouts every single day, You’re comin along real good now, ain’tcha?, you nod and smile and wave and say to yourself that he may be a idiot. “That man useta be mean as a snake,” Jeffery told you once, “but ever since he lost his health he’s been right nice to me.”

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A four-foot blacksnake lives under your lumber pile; you saw him one day when lifting the last sheet of plywood. Leave him alone.

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You see a black house in a magazine and read an interview with the owner; he says his neighbors hate his house and he doesn’t care. Stop framing your house—tell yourself the roof can wait and you’re sick of pounding nails and need a break—and paint your exterior walls black. Sing “I see a red door and I want to paint it black” over and over again while slapping your brush against the cedar siding. Think The neighbors will hate this, and laugh. Think of names for your house: The Black Box, The Death Star.

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There is no plot to the house, no sequence of causally related events. There is no order, no logical development. It yields no secrets to deconstruction. If there ever was a meaning to it, you can no longer express it. You build. All you are doing is creating an object distinct from the objects around it.

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Laying brick is a stressful occupation, so for comic relief the local brickmasons take to driving by for a look at your concrete block foundation.

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You go into Beldon’s hoping to impress your Secret Girlfriend by asking for a carbide tooth blade for a reciprocating saw, and they tell you she isn’t working there anymore, that she “had to” elope over the weekend, that her daddy is fit to be tied ‘cause he’s way too young to be a grandpa and he’s swearing on a stack of Bibles to shoot his new son-in-law on sight, and that the reciprocating saw blades are over there, by the C-clamps. You get rung up and bagged by Miss Myrtle, a palsied old woman who smells like cats. You spend the afternoon hacking out window holes with your new saw—ragged ugly slots in the plywood sheathing, empty eye sockets for a bitter wind.

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One drowsy day sweet with the scent of swamp magnolias in bloom, your wife and her kids surprise you by toting a picnic out to the house site, where with cries of delight they admire all you’ve done and ask how long it will be before they can move in, a question you cannot bear to answer honestly. Your wife sets down her wicker basket, lets down her lovely hair, spreads a yellow blanket on the riverbank, and feeds you hummus, olives, tomatoes and bread; the kids get boloney sandwiches and cheese doodles. You eat fresh strawberries for desert and toss the tops in the river and watch black and green turtles float up and nudge them with their snouts as sunset paints your black house orange and pink.

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One day you count the months backwards and realize you have been working on the house for almost two years. A little later it strikes you that you have been thinking about the house, imagining it, trying to will it into existence, for the past decade. Then you remember that as a child, you would put yourself to sleep each night designing a house in your head: a big house with lots of secret spaces, trick doors and hidden alcoves, walk-in fireplaces and spiral stairs. You find that you can’t remember a time when you weren’t building a house, and then, with despair, you realize too that you will always be building a house, you will never finish the house, that the house is your life: never quite what you wanted, always a work in progress, a collaboration at times but for the most part solo. One nail, one board, one window, one door at a time.

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Originally published in Arts & Letters and reprinted in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2006, and in Down in the Flood.