Wednesday, August 20, 2008

First Night in the Cabin

Sunday night was my first night to sleep in the new cabin. A group of church men, knowledgeable in the ways of lumber, saws, hammers and nails, drove up from town, led by the Preacher, and spent the weekend here building. The cabin went up remarkably fast, for sure. It is much taller than I expected, built with plans to someday add an upstairs loft.

The structure itself is so exposed, sitting nearly in the middle of a major throughway. The land on which it was built is an old runway that hasn’t been used for that purpose in thirty years, and has reverted to an unofficial but frequently used road. And the new building has only increased the traffic as locals who tend to get used to the way things are want to drive by and ogle the new, ugly house the preacher is building.

And though the cabin is done enough to get me off the ground, keep off the rain, and lock up my belongings, it isn’t finished beyond that. It is not insulated under the floor or through the walls. Though the roof and the walls are done, there is no interior ceiling. The eaves under the roof are completely open. A nimble thrush could fly in and out again without breaking its stride. I can feel the breeze blow through, and I can see daylight everywhere. It feels like a big empty barn, and I feel completely naked in it.

And it’s my personality not to want to draw any attention, especially in a place where pretty much any attention is negative attention. And this house has a great big “Here lives a white guy who doesn’t belong here and is stupid enough to build a house in the middle of a road” sign on the front of it.

To add to the drama, there are two young local men who have recently arrived in town whom I don’t recognize and whose names I don’t know. They recruited others of our local young men and partied hard while looking for trouble this weekend. On Saturday night, these two (drunk) guys walked brusquely up to me and another man looking for a confrontation before they saw the rest of our group and decided the numbers were not in their favor and veered quickly off into the woods. I didn’t think a thing of it until Sunday night when the group was gone, I was alone, and I was spending the first night in the structure.

So Sunday night, two car loads of guys were drinking and driving around with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. I don’t know if they realized I was in there or not, but they would drive by, stop, blare their car radio, rev their engines, shout inaudible slurred curses, and tear off. I lay there listening to the engines trail off into the distance, and in a few minutes return to repeat the drunken hurled curses.

Sure I was scared. I laid there, pistol beside me, trying to plan out each possible move like a chess game. If they bang on the door, I’ll ignore it. If they open the door, I’ll fire past them. If they cross the threshold, I’ll shoot them. And I prayed for my own safety, and for theirs. Here in a building whose ultimate purpose is to house the church and bring glory to God, I didn’t want the first act in this building to be a shooting. Even a justified one. It would never be a church, it’d always be known only as ‘that place where Johnny died.”

And so those were the thoughts I thought as I drifted fitfully off to sleep. No harm came to me that night, or to the building, or to my carousing neighbors.

In the past few days and nights I have warmed up to the building a little bit, though the building has not warmed up at all. I put a thermometer in there that has been reading low thirties each morning. I can’t call it a cabin, with the associations that word brings: small, snug, cozy, warm, a refuge from the winter world. This is a barn built three feet off the ground.

I know it will get better. The preacher is coming back up this weekend to do more work on it. It will get insulated. The eaves will be finished. And interior ceiling will be added. The wood stove will be installed. It will keep me warm this winter, and maybe then it will feel more like a cabin.


Calls from Jail

I wrote last summer about MJ, a local young man on whom Jme had been placing her affections. He graduated from high school this past May. Understand that high school diplomas are not the same thing everywhere.

This summer, we saw in the paper that MJ had been arrested in town and charged with first degree burglary. We’ve heard different versions of the story since then, but it really doesn’t matter what the details of the offense were. The fact is, he’s been in jail for about a month now, he’s had his day in court, and he’s still in jail.

This week, MJ called our house from the local correctional facility looking for Jme. Wifey hesitated for just a moment before letting her talk to him. Wifey said they only talked for about five minutes, but when I heard about it I made it clear that Jme was done receiving calls from jail. I immediately called the facility and blocked any further calls to our home.

We were never very comfortable with Jme and MJ being boyfriend/girlfriend, but we tolerated it. We closely supervised it, but we tolerated it. Now things are different. With his graduation from high school, and his move to town, he is now fully an adult, living independently, with no one to set any limits on his life. And now he has abused his freedom enough to lose it entirely. She is a sophomore in high school, living at home, and going to school. I think their relationship is done.