Cape

The Habit

Chapter 31: Cape

The drawing came in a manila envelope with three stamps and Lila's handwriting on the front, which had the determined, unstable authority of a person newly convinced the mail should answer to her.

Noel opened it at the kitchen table with his thumb under the flap and the caution he reserved for important paper and old caulk.

Inside was a single sheet of printer paper folded twice.

The drawing showed Bishop as a blue marble with eyes, a red cape, and what appeared to be either a crown or a severe weather event above his head. The porch had been drawn too, with four steps, a railing, and Noel himself in stick form near the top. Underneath, in green marker:

BISHOP PROTECTS ARCHITECTURE

On the back Renee had written:

She used my good markers and feels no remorse.

Noel stood the drawing against the sugar canister while he made coffee, then changed his mind and taped it to the wall beside the back door where he could see it from the sink. The tape looked too temporary for the importance Lila had assigned the matter, but the house had always been asked to accommodate provisional arrangements.

Outside, February had begun to soften around the edges.

The cold had not left. East Tennessee did not surrender winter cleanly enough for that. But the afternoon thaw had pulled dampness up from the yard, and the patch of earth below the south corner of the porch had gone dark and loose. Noel stepped onto the porch with his mug and felt, halfway between the second step and the chair, a motion that was not the old familiar sag.

He stopped.

Shift, not groan.

He set the mug on the windowsill and stepped again, slowly this time, letting his weight settle near the corner post. The porch answered with a faint sideways give, barely enough to register in the eye and more than enough to register in the knees.

Leon was in his driveway with a rake turned upside down, using the tines to drag last year's leaves out of the gutter line in a way that suggested he did not trust any modern tool not invented before Watergate.

"That corner's thinking thoughts," he said without looking up.

Noel put his hand on the post.

"How long have you been watching it?"

"Long enough to know you were going to pretend not to notice till spring."

Noel might have argued with that if the porch had not chosen the moment to prove Leon correct. He leaned a little harder. The post moved almost imperceptibly toward the yard, then returned.

The motion was small.

The meaning was not.

He called Darren after supper.

"Tomorrow or Saturday?" Darren asked when Noel described it.

"Tomorrow if you can."

"You say that like a man who finally heard a noise he's been earning."

"Can you come or not."

"I can come," Darren said. "Five-thirty. Bring a flashlight and a willingness to be annoyed."

Noel hung up and stood at the sink rinsing his plate while Bishop in his cape looked on from the wall with evangelical confidence.

The porch had been the book's first deferred repair. Not on paper. In the body. In the route from truck to door, in the angle his foot took on the third step, in the way he learned to distribute weight without conceding there was anything wrong with the structure.

Now the problem had migrated forward.

It was no longer below the house where only kneeling and trouble could find it. It was at the front, where every arrival and departure passed over it. A defect with witnesses.

The next day Darren came in work boots and a canvas tool bag that looked heavy enough to have opinions of its own. He stood with Noel at the corner post while the light thinned over Linden.

"Step there," he said.

Noel stepped.

Darren watched the joint where the post met the beam.

"Again."

Noel stepped again.

Darren made the low sound mechanics and doctors make when they are trying not to frighten the owner before they have all the facts.

"Base is gone or near enough," he said. "Might be the post, might be the brick pier under it, might be both. Water's been walking down that corner a long time."

"Can it wait?"

Darren looked at him.

"That's not a structural question," he said.

They shined the flashlight under the porch. The last of the daylight caught the damp earth in strips. The south corner sat darker than the rest. The brick pier beneath the post looked less vertical than a thing designed for bearing ought to look.

"Saturday," Darren said. "We'll jack it, open the skirt, and see what truth lives under there."

"We?"

"You keep forgetting I know where you live."

After he left, Noel stood on the porch alone with his hand around the railing.

The house had changed categories again. It was asking to be opened from the front.

That night he wrote:

Since the thaw started, the south porch corner has been moving in a way wood should not move. Darren came by and said Saturday ought to tell us whether the post failed first or the pier under it. Lila mailed a picture of Bishop in a cape and I taped it by the back door where he can supervise the damage honestly.