Part 2: The Night Before
I want people to understand something about my husband.
Jake is not a man who walks away from his father.
He hauled hay for that man every summer of his life. He pulled calves for him at two in the morning in February, with the wind chill at thirty below.
Making this choice cost him far more than it cost me.
But he had a wife and two kids sleeping under a roof that his own father said wasn’t theirs.
And standing in that kitchen doorway, Jake decided his children would grow up in a house that belonged to them.
A company out of Scottsbluff has been moving buildings across the Panhandle for three generations.
The man they sent was named Arnie Kessler. He looked like he’d been moving houses since before I was born.
He was short and wide, with a gray mustache and a seed cap so faded you couldn’t read the logo.
He walked around our house twice with a tape measure and a flashlight. Then he got down on his belly and crawled underneath.
He came out with cobwebs on his shoulders, grinning.
“One story. Block crawl space. No basement. Good square framing,” he said. “Whoever built this knew what they were doing. She’ll go.”
“My husband and my dad built it,” I said.
“Well, they built it right. Makes my job easy.”
Then he told me the price.
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Twenty-three thousand, eight hundred dollars. That covered jacking the house up, setting it on steel beams, loading it onto the trailer, and lowering it onto a new foundation.
And that didn’t include the county moving permit. Or what the power co-op would charge to send a crew to lift the lines at the crossings. Or the new foundation itself.
It didn’t include a new well line and a septic system at Dad’s place either. Dad said the old yard well would reach, but we’d need a line trenched. The septic was a bill of its own.
That night I sat at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and added it all up.
A little over thirty-eight thousand dollars.
We had nineteen thousand in savings. It had taken us nine years to put that away. A little at a time. For the kids. For emergencies.
Jake stood behind me, reading over my shoulder.
“This is an emergency, Kay,” he said.
Dad covered the rest.
He wouldn’t take a note. He wouldn’t even let us discuss it.
“Your mother would haunt me,” he said. “Now hush.”
Jake told his father himself.
He wouldn’t let me come along.
“He’s my dad,” Jake said. “It’s mine to say.”
On a Sunday afternoon in September he walked across the yard to his father’s shop, where Gordon was greasing the swather.
I watched from the kitchen window. The big shop door stood open. The two of them stood a few feet apart, not looking at each other.
They talked for maybe ten minutes.
Gordon never once stopped working that grease gun.
When Jake came back, he didn’t come inside.
He climbed into his pickup and sat there with both hands on the steering wheel for almost half an hour.
Finally I carried him a cup of coffee and slid into the passenger seat.
“What did he say?” I asked.
Jake stared through the windshield at the shelterbelt.
“He said he wasn’t going to stop us,” he said. “He said it’s our lumber. Take it if we want it. He said the ground stays with him.”
“That’s all?”
“He said we’d be back by Thanksgiving.”
Jake laughed. But it wasn’t a laugh.
“He said nobody moves a house over five hundred dollars a month.”
I took his hand. His knuckles were black with grease from the shop.
We sat there together in that pickup until the coffee went cold.
People have asked me since whether Gordon could have stopped it.
Maybe.
He could have called somebody. He could have planted himself right in front of the jacks.
He never did.
I think that even then, some part of him didn’t want to win that way.
Moving a house isn’t a one-day job.
It’s six weeks of a hundred little tasks, and every one of them costs something.
Dad, Jake, and two men from church poured the new foundation at Dad’s place. Concrete block on a footing. The same twelve hundred square feet, laid out to the inch.
Jake measured it four times. After Jake went home, Dad measured it twice more.
The county engineer came out to inspect the route. Three miles of gravel county road. One cattle guard. One culvert Arnie didn’t trust. And two spots where the power lines hung low.
The power co-op scheduled a crew for the second Saturday in October. They’d ride ahead of the house in a bucket truck and lift the lines at every crossing.
Jake shut off the water and the propane. A plumber from Hemingford came to disconnect the septic. An electrician pulled the meter.
For the first time in eleven years, our house went dark.
We lived out of Dad’s spare rooms for those last two weeks. The kids thought it was a grand adventure. They slept on air mattresses in my old childhood bedroom and ate cereal at my mother’s kitchen table.
Every evening after work, I drove back to the house and packed. Dishes wrapped in newspaper. Pictures off the walls.
Arnie said we could leave most of the furniture in place if it was strapped down tight. But anything that could fall would fall.
I left the curtains up.
I can’t tell you why. I just couldn’t take them down.
I wanted our house to look like a home while it traveled.
The night before the move, Jake and I took the kids over one last time to make sure everything was tied down.
Arnie’s crew had already been under the house for two days.
Our house now sat up on cribbing, resting on two long steel beams, three feet higher than it belonged. We had to climb in the back door on a step stool.
It felt strange inside. Empty and echoing. Just like the October Hailey turned two.
Our footsteps sounded far too loud.
I was checking the kitchen cupboards when I realized Cole wasn’t behind me anymore.
I found him in the pantry doorway, his flashlight pointed up at the door frame.
He’s nine years old. He’s a tough little boy. He plays flag football. He catches frogs in the stock tank. He doesn’t cry much anymore.
He was crying.
“Cole? Baby, what’s wrong?”
He wouldn’t look at me. He just kept his flashlight aimed at that door frame.
Every birthday since Hailey turned two, we’d stood the kids against that pantry door frame and marked their height in pencil, with the date beside it.
Hailey’s marks climbed the left side. Cole’s climbed the right. Some were in Jake’s handwriting, some in mine.
And one mark sat at the very bottom, barely a foot off the floor.
Cole. 1st birthday. Wouldn’t stand still.
Ruthann wrote that one, in her slanted, careful handwriting.
“Do we have to leave them?” Cole asked. His voice was very small. “Grandpa’s going to keep the marks, isn’t he? Because they’re on his ground.”
That’s when I understood how much my kids had heard that summer.
However quiet we’d tried to be.
I knelt on the linoleum and wrapped my arms around him.
“No, baby,” I said. “They’re part of the house. They’re nailed right into it. Wherever this house goes, they go too.”
Hailey had come up behind us. She’s thirteen. She doesn’t let me hug her in public anymore.
She sat down on the floor next to us anyway and leaned her head on my shoulder.
“Can I write tonight’s date?” she asked. “So we always know it was the night before?”
Jake pulled a carpenter’s pencil from his shirt pocket.
Hailey rose onto her tiptoes. At the very top of that door frame, higher than anyone had ever been tall enough to reach, she wrote the date.
And under it, she wrote:
The night before we took our house home.
The second Saturday in October dawned bright and cold.
Frost lay on the stubble in the fields. The sky over the Panhandle was that hard, clean blue you only get in October.
Arnie’s crew arrived at six in the morning.
By nine, they’d rolled the big trailer under the beams, lowered the jacks, and chained everything down tight.
Our house sat high on that long trailer behind a big red Peterbilt with yellow lights flashing on top.
It looked smaller than I expected.
And bigger, too.
I don’t know how to explain that.
Jake rode up front in the escort pickup with Arnie’s nephew, an orange flag on the bumper and the light going. The co-op bucket truck went ahead of them.
I stayed behind with Hailey and Cole to walk the first stretch along the road.
I hadn’t expected anyone else to be there.
The whole road came.
The Petersons pulled up first. Mel and his wife, in their old Chevy, with their dog in the back.
Then the Kramers.
Then the family from the Lutheran church who live past the section line, all four of their kids piled in the back seat to watch.
By the time Arnie eased that truck out of our driveway and onto the county road, nine pickups had lined up behind the trailer with their hazards blinking.
Two beet trucks headed for the sugar beet piling ground in Hemingford pulled onto the shoulder to wait. The drivers climbed out to watch.
Somebody’s grandma, a tiny woman in a quilted coat, came walking down the line with a thermos and a sleeve of paper cups. She poured me a cup of coffee without even asking.
“I saw one of these go down this road in 1971,” she said. “The old Swanson place. I was younger than your girl there.”
“My dad says he saw it too,” I said.
“Well, then he remembers it went just fine.” She patted my arm. “This’ll go fine too, honey.”
Our house rolled down the county road at walking speed.
I mean that exactly. Hailey, Cole, and I walked beside it on the shoulder for the first quarter mile and kept pace without even trying.
Gravel popped under the tires. The trailer creaked. Every so often the whole house rocked, just a little.
My heart leapt into my throat.
Then it settled.
My kitchen curtains still hung in the window. Yellow, with little white flowers. Ruthann had helped me sew them that first winter.
I watched them sway with every bump.
Cole kept his hand pressed flat against the front of his coat, as if he were holding something in.
“Are the marks okay?” he whispered.
“The marks are fine, baby,” I said. “Arnie’s the best there is.”
I put my own hand on my chest.
I didn’t even realize I was doing it until later, when Hailey showed me the picture she’d taken on her phone.
The first power line went up and over as if it were nothing. The co-op man in the bucket lifted it with a long fiberglass pole, and Arnie crept the house underneath.
A cheer rose from the pickups behind us. Somebody honked.
Then we rounded the bend by the shelterbelt.
And I saw the end of Gordon’s driveway.
