Chapter 7 – The Walls

By Thursday of that week, we had a big load of supplies in from Karl:  more wood, more nails, another saw, another tarp and the possibility of a big find, which he wouldn’t tell us about until it happened.  We finished the floor frame that afternoon, and, in a burst of enthusiasm, decide to lower it into the pit right away.

We had all seen in the movies or on TV how they lowered coffins into a grave, and we had decided that was the way to do it with our floor.  It was a disaster.  We tried and tried, but we couldn’t pull the frame all the way over the hole while holding it up with the ropes.  The fact that there was only three feet between the northern edge of the pit and the spruce hedge made it really difficult to maneuver.  We almost lost Roy.  He slipped and fell into the pit, which meant he was no longer holding his rope, and the frame started slipping down on top of him.  Desperate grabbing on the other side slowed it down, and Larry and I rushed around to add our strength to the effort.  It took six of us to pull the frame back and away from the pit.

Back to the drawing board.  After much debate, we decided to turn the frame upside down, so the two-by-fours were facing up, then slide it down the southern edge of the pit, so it was standing straight up.  We would then just push it over so it would fall flat on the bottom.  It worked.  It wasn’t exactly flat; leaning a little against the north side, but by going down the entrance tunnel and pushing, we were able to get it flat.  Almost flat, but as close as we could get it.  By that time, it was pretty late, so we just threw one of the tarps over it and headed home.

That evening, I tried to draw up some plans.  I really wanted to use my father’s drawing board, with its mechanical arm and angles and measures and everything, but, to show an interest in such things would have been so unusual that it might have been a giveaway that something was up.  So I just took one of my school notebooks downstairs to the cellar, where I worked on the rough workbench with a carpenter’s pencil and a T-square.  I knew that, in order to achieve the slanted roof we needed, the side walls had to be the right shape.  So I drew a rough design for each of the four walls.  It took me a couple of hours, and I was barely able to conceal what I was doing from my second-oldest brother, who was always suspicious of me anyway.  At the cost of a couple of punched arms, I was able to get away from him and hide the notebook where he couldn’t find it.

We needed to get some building done the next day, because Saturday was the Fourth of July, and all the kids who were in Little League (everyone but me and Tom) had to be in the parade, and everybody’s family had something planned for afterward.  It was still early in the summer, but each of us would be gone a part of the summer, with camps, and family trips, so I wanted to get a good start while we were all together.

Everybody showed up the next day, even Roy, whom we had almost killed the day before.  I showed them all the plans I had made, and they all seemed to approve.  I had decided that, since our pit was deep enough, we should do an eighteen inch rise for our roof, rather than the twelve inches Win had suggested.  That meant that the north and south walls had to have a triangle of plywood added on the top, eighteen inches tall at the eastern end and twelve feet long.  It was going to be a bastard to measure and cut it, especially as it had to be at least two pieces.  The frame of two-by-fours had to be made to fit that, as well.  Fortunately, some of our two-by-fours were ten and twelve feet long (thanks, Karl!) so we could build the frame with all solid lengths of wood.

We decided to do the south wall first; it was complicated, and I wanted to see if we could get it done while we had a full crew.  The east and west walls were a lot simpler, and I thought those could be done with a smaller crew.  I wanted Tom in charge of the triangle, because he could be counted on to be meticulous with the measuring, and Roy and Rollo would do what he told them to do.  Jimmy and Larry worked on the frame with me and Win.

It was fun.  The music was blaring, the jokes were flying, the farts were ripping, and it was a great time.  We were doing everything wrong, from the point of view of a professional, or even a good amateur, but we didn’t care.  By a little after noon, we had the frame completed, and we stopped for lunch to fill up and take a break before we tackled the job of sliding the wall down into the pit.

The lunchtime talk was all about baseball.  We were all Yankee fans except Rollo.  He tried to talk about Yaz, but we just hooted him down.  The Yanks were struggling, and Yogi Berra was taking a beating in the press.  Not that the local press knew anything about it; they were all Boston ass-kissers.  But a couple of the kids’ dads got the New York papers, so we were able to get the lowdown on our Yanks.  We all loved Yogi, of course, but the tabloids were already calling for his head, even though he had been the manager for less than half a season.  Yogi kept saying they’d be fine when all the injured players got back, and we believed him.

I had been thinking about something while we ate and talked.  When we all started climbing down from the ridge, I asked Win to help me grab a twelve footer from our wood stack.  With Win’s help, I laid it along the wall frame, four inches from the bottom.  I explained, with words and gestures, that if we nailed this two-by in this position, it would rest on the floor when we lowered the wall down, with the bottom of the wall on the ground, beside the floor.  That’s how we could attach the wall to the floor and make it stable.

Win liked the idea, and he made it better.  He turned the two-by up on its edge.

“We take another one, and lay it flat right here.  We nail this one to the frame, this one to this one, and we nail this one down to the floor.”

He was right; it was better.  So that’s what we did, and when we lowered the frame down the side of the pit, it came to rest with that long two-by sitting on the floor.  A couple of guys started nailing it down, while the rest of us held it up.  We all realized before long that we were going to have to brace it, but one of the guys had seen his dad do something like this, so he ran and got a few cut pieces of two-by-four and nailed them to the floor on the north side.  Then the guys got three two-by-fours for braces and stuck them between the south wall and the blocks.

We stepped back and admired our work.  It wasn’t level, it wasn’t square, but we had a floor and a wall that were attached to each other, and we were happy.   

Nothing got done that weekend, as I thought, because of the holiday, and there were only four of us on Monday.  Still, we managed to get the west wall built.  It was a simple twelve by eight stud wall, so three sheets of plywood, with no cutting.  Making it was simple, but getting it in the pit was a bitch, with only four of us.  We sweated and yelled and swore, and I think we went through a whole box of Band-Aids, but we got it in and nailed to the floor.

The vertical edge of the west wall should have come up perfectly against the edge of the south wall, but it didn’t.  I suspected that those mystical concepts of “level” and “square” had something to do with it.  But we weren’t going to be defeated.  After we had braced up the new wall, I had Jimmy and Roy go up and sit on the edges of the pit and push the two walls with their feet until they came together at the corner.  Looking at where the walls came together, I knew what we needed.  I didn’t know what they were called, but we had some at home in the basement.  I told the guys to relax, that we could fix it tomorrow. 

We did fix it the next day, but it wasn’t easy.  I brought four angle braces, of different sizes, from my Dad’s workshop and, using those and some miscellaneous pieces of wood, Win and I were able to get the two walls held together, with Jimmy and Roy using the force of their legs to hold the walls in place.  When we had finished, it looked okay, but we could tell there was a lot of strain; the two walls were trying to pull apart.  Win suggested we should pile the dirt back into the space between the walls and the side of the pit; maybe that would ease the pressure.

So we spent a couple of hours shoveling dirt from the gully into the buckets and dumping it down the sides.  It seemed to work, as the corner where the walls joined showed less sign of strain.

We worked on the east wall the next couple of days.  It was more complicated than the west wall, because it was eighteen inches higher, but there were only square cuts, not angles.  We got the frame finished, but decided to wait to drop it down.  With a couple of kids coming back from vacation, we hoped to have six people on Sunday, which would make it a lot easier.

That Saturday night, Win and I repeated our raid on the Parish Hall, coming away with as many blankets as we could carry.  It was easy.  We would figure out later if we needed more.

That Sunday started with some of us gathering at the sandpits after church to carry the blankets up into the woods.  When the others showed up, we had six bodies, so we proceeded to drop the east wall down the side of the pit and nail it to the floor.  In the middle of this process, we had a surprise visit from Karl, with two very useful items.

Thanks to a heads-up from Win, he had brought us a bunch of angle braces he had lifted from a construction site, and, the biggest prize of all, a two-burner camp stove, with a half-full gas canister and a full back-up.  We whooped with joy over that, and somebody asked where he had got it, but he wasn’t saying, and Win and I both shook our heads and made a zipping motion across our lips.  No questions was the rule.  I figured out later that Karl and one of his buddies had been raiding deer camps in the back woods.  Some of the hunters would just leave stuff in the camps over the off-season.

I was musing out loud about how we might ventilate the pit, which we would obviously have to do to use the camp stove.  Whatever we were going to do, we would have to figure out before we built the roof.  Karl had an idea, and he said he would get back to us.  Meanwhile, we braced up the new wall and tied the corner together, this time with Win and me in the pit, nailing, two guys pushing the walls together, and the other two going back and forth with buckets of dirt, back-filling between the walls and the sides of the pit.

Karl just stood and watched, his loud, raucous laugh filling the air over the sound of Tom’s radio.  He loved to watch us at work, and he laughed a lot at our enthusiastic amateurism.  He never helped with the work, just laughed at us, but we didn’t mind that; he was doing enough.         

Over the next week, we worked on the fourth wall, which was not easy at all.  Not only did it have to have to have the slope at the top, it had to have an opening for our entrance, and I knew we had to build it that way; we couldn’t just build a wall and saw a hole in it.  It took a lot of arguing and wrong decisions and re-doing before we had the north wall built, with a square opening, framed with two by fours, and measured to match up with our tunnel.  We hoped.  It took all week, because there were days when only a couple of us could be there, and it also rained all week, which really sucked.

We had the pallets and the tarps, so we could keep the stuff dry that really mattered, but there was no way to keep water out of the pit, so our floor and walls got soaked.  We just shrugged it off and hoped for better weather to dry things out.  There was nothing else to do.

With a major effort of bitching and haranguing, we got all of our helpers to show up the next Monday, which was the twentieth.  The weekend had been dry, and the pit had drained well, although the walls were still a little damp.  The north wall had been covered with a tarp, and we were ready to drop it in.

It was a beautiful day, and we seemed to regain some of the enthusiasm that had been missing the last couple of weeks.  The radio was blaring “Can’t You See That She’s Mine,” “Rag Doll,” and “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” and there was a new Beatles song that had just hit the charts, called “A Hard Day’s Night.”  We all knew it was from the movie they had made, which wouldn’t be out for a couple of months.

With seven of us to help, we managed to get the north wall in, even though it was very awkward with the short space between the pit and the hedge.  When we got the bottom brace nailed down to the floor, we found that the floor was actually almost level, and almost square with the walls.  The ends of the walls didn’t match up, of course, but they weren’t as far off as I had feared they might be.  And the opening for the entrance was only two inches off from matching up with the tunnel.  It would have been horrifying for a carpenter, but for us, it was near perfection.

We went through our usual routine of pushing the walls together, nailing them in place with the angle braces and backfilling behind the wall.  We took some pieces of plywood and nailed them on all four sides of the wooden tunnel, extending into the pit, as a temporary measure, just to keep the dirt from falling in.

When we had finished, we all stood back and cheered.  Look what we had done!  We had four walls and a floor, and a crude entrance tunnel.  All we needed now was a roof.

Before leaving that day, we stretched two tarps over the top of the frame, hoping to keep the water out.  The best way to keep the water out, of course, was to build the roof as quickly as we could, but we needed to do some more planning for that.

Back all chapters