Thoreau, my daddy and me

   I read Walden when I was ten or eleven and loved it. What I loved most at the time was when he said that in all his travels he'd never seen a man building his own house. I loved it because my daddy had done that, and I'd helped. It was a hoot to know that had Henry Thoreau come walking down Massey-Tompkins Road he'd have seen our little house set back in the pines and very likely have been proud of us.
   My daddy only completed the eighth grade and never heard of Henry David Thoreau, and I didn't tell him. He was a skinny man, short and dark like an Indian. His quarter Cherokee blood showed all over him, and he was hard as split oak with muscles he could raise high when we begged him to do it. I heard it said once that he'd been a brawler in his youth. Years later I was shown a man with a bent arm and a limp and was told that a knife in my dad's hand had done it. I felt bad about it then, and still do.
   By the time we set fire to the underbrush and burned off the briers and scrub saplings on our two acres, he was the man who said prayers with me at night and rode me piggyback. My brother, my mother, my daddy and I were just who we were, neither good nor bad, merely us.
   When the house was finished we painted it green and moved in. I thought it a fine place, out in the country east of Houston near a sluggish bowel of water called Cedar Bayou, nested among tall pines and guarded by about ten-thousand copperhead snakes.
   At the rear kitchen door he neglected to build steps, but put a wooden box there temporarily. The box was still there the last time I saw it in the headlights of a car, leaving in the middle of a hard night a few years later.
   I'm writing these words sitting inside a house I, like Thoreau and like my daddy, built with my own hands. My son-in-law helped me do it. He held onto the other end of many a long board and went with me on trips to a ranch from which we hauled twenty tons of limestone rock. The house has treated me well. Its pipes hold water and its electric wiring behaves as it should. When I began, I didn't know how to build it, but I found some books at the library, and I took my time.
   After I moved in I started trying again to write books, something I put on pause long ago because my typewriter kept waking up my baby girl. The pause lasted a lot of years.
   Writing came hard, but I had some stories I wanted to tell and I figured that doing it was like building the house. Word on word, like stone on stone, day on day. And that is how it has been.