The Harrow ground lay empty for one year, and the town got used to the sight of it: thirty acres of gravel and weed behind a chain-link fence, the basins filled and grassed over in long pale rectangles, like graves nobody wanted to think about. Then, in the spring of 1986, the fence came down and the earthmovers came in, and Harlan Brooks's company put up a sign at the river road: LARKSPUR COURT β FINE HOMES FROM THE LOW 60s.
Harlan Brooks was a man the township liked. He had built two subdivisions already, both on time, and he gave to the fire department's boot drive and sat in the third pew at Grace Lutheran, and when he stood up at the township meeting in May he had the confidence of a man whose paperwork was always, eventually, approved. He unrolled the plat on the meeting room table. Twelve lots on a cul-de-sac. Water, sewer, storm drains, all to county standard. And β he laid a second document beside the plat like a man producing a character witness β a soil report, from a firm in Dayton, forty pages bound in blue, concluding that the site had been fully remediated and was suitable for residential construction.
Amos was in the fourth row. He had the composition book in a paper bag at his feet, having rehearsed it in the truck on the way over, and when the chairman opened the floor he stood up and said it anyway, with his heart going like a hammer.
He said he had worked at Harrow seven years. He said he had helped close the plant. He said the settling basins had been filled and certified and he believed that work, but the deep service shaft under the northwest corner had been capped in a hurry β aggregate short, concrete thin, no real inspection plate β and nobody, so far as he knew, had ever gone back and verified what was under that cap. He said the soil report talked about the top six feet of ground and the shaft went down forty. He said houses ought not to go over that corner until somebody with a drill and a conscience had looked.
The room went quiet in the way of rooms deciding to be embarrassed for a man. The chairman thanked him. Harlan Brooks, kindly, said that Mr. Keller's concerns were understandable, that closure had been state-inspected and state-approved, and that the township could hardly hold twelve families' homes hostage to one man's memory. One of the trustees β Amos never afterward held it against him, which took effort β said the phrase that followed Amos home and sat down at his kitchen table and stayed for forty years.
"A mechanic with a grudge," the trustee said, not quite into the microphone.
The plat was approved in June. The graders came in July and did beautiful work; even Amos, driving past, had to admit the ground looked clean and innocent, the way a made bed looks innocent. Streets went in. Foundations. Framing crews, roofers, the smell of cut lumber that he had loved all his life. By Christmas there were curtains in windows.
Amos watched the lot sales the way other men watched the river gauge. The lots over the old basins went first β big, flat, cheap to build on. Lot 7, up at the northwest end of the court, nearest the buried shaft, went last, because its yard sloped and its driveway was short and the surveyors had left an odd notation on its corner that made two buyers walk away. Harlan's salesman offered it to Amos himself at the hardware store, half joking: local boy discount, he said. Come keep an eye on the place, Keller.
Amos went home and did the arithmetic at the kitchen table, and Ruth did it with him, and in February of 1987 they signed. It was the cheapest house on the court by nine thousand dollars. It was also, by his own pacing from the old survey stakes in the tree line, roughly sixty feet from the top of the shaft.
"If it's nothing, it's nothing," Ruth said, the night they moved in, sitting on a box in the bare kitchen. "And if it's something β who would you want living on top of it? Some family that never heard of Harrow? Or you?"
That was the whole argument, and it was enough. He built the shed first, before the fence, before the garden β a good shed, square and tight, with its floor poured by his own hand directly over the one place in the yard where, by his pacing, memory, and the composition book's figures, a man standing at a workbench would be standing almost exactly above the cap.
Almost exactly. He was off by eleven inches, and it took him twenty-two years and a crack in his foundation to learn it. But that is getting ahead of the story.
Chapter 8: The First Crack