By Russ Farrell
This old Gus Nystrom, he lived down the road a-ways in a small shack affair and done his own cooking, on account of he was the only one living there. He’d quit the carpenter trade and was taking it pretty easy, except for some steelheading and stalking the mowich, except he would put in a few weeks once in a while doing some neighbor a small job, in order to get a jug or two ahead.
That’s how come he come to help me lay out the floor joists and stayed on till we got the roof on and moved in. Course he took some time off, ‘specially in the late afternoons when the sun was till warm, and he figured them mowich was about.
He said they’d stick their little pointed ears up above the ferns and listen, and maybe raise up a little higher and look at you. And if you was real quiet-like after a bit you’d have black tail for supper, on account of them deer is real curious.
A surveyor neighbor had brought his transit over when we poured the foundation, so I knew it was level, but by the Holy, I couldn’t get those joists to come level, no how. I’d shim up a little here and there, and set the level on the next one, and everything seemed okay. When I done them all, I thought I’d better give them a re-check, and the damned things was all off. So I done them all over again. And that went on all day. And they wasn’t level come night.
So I cussed myself out as a dumb, logger, and they say that Swedes is dumb, too, but anyhow Old Gus is a carpenter and I anin’t s, so I get him to come over in the morning, and he just nails that there level on a long straight two-by-four, and laid it across them joists and says shim a little here and take out on there, and in no time it was done, and we was flooring.
But when we came up with the sides of that there house, she just threw a brace in here or there, and went about doing something else and the walls was hanging out angle-goggling every which way.
And my wife says to me, real quiet-like so Old Gus wouldn’t hear, she says, “Is he going to let it be like that and put a roof on?” And I says, “Hell, I don’t know.” And she says, “Go ask him then.” And I does and he kind of squints up a little and moves his snoose over to the other side of his face and says, “Well, whet do you care for? You got eighty acres.” And he went off early that evening to see if any more mowich was sticking their ears up through the ferns.
Anyway, Old Gus straightened the wall out, and we put a roof on and just in time too, ’cause it rained, and it rained, and after that the weather got real wet and stayed that way all fall and Old Gus would go over to the North window, just before dusk every night, and it’s November now. And he looks and looks all the way across to Canada, and it’s eighteen miles, and then he shakes his head.
So after about a week of that, I asks him what the hell he’s looking for, and he says, “You know in the Bible it rained forty day and nights, and three solid months now and the Straits ain’t even come up over the hill yet.”
Hell, I didn’t know Old Gus knew nothing about the Bible.