Between the Lines / The big clean-up

When Dad opened the wooden cellar doors for the first time in spring, I knew there was going to be trouble. Once the rickety cellar doors were thrown wide, the musty smell of winter escaped into the fresh spring air. We were all going to work, and Dad wasn't in a good mood. His face was ruddy and his stance was feisty. He had lived through the Depression and served on a warship in the Pacific, but nothing unnerved him like the prospect of a day of yard work.

This would keep him from a morning at the parish baseball diamond just beyond the church parking lot. He always preferred to be pitching batting practice and hitting fungoes in the wide open spaces of the ballfield with his little league teams. No other father in the neighborhood seemed so boyish, and I loved him for it. In Dad's mind, Saturday mornings were for enjoying the great American pastime and not for doing chores. Yet, he was a homeowner and periodically felt a grudging responsibility for marshalling the annual spring cleanup of our yard. Once the yard began to green up, sooner or later he would have to bite the bullet and face the music.

Dad detested everything about yard work. He couldn't understand men who kept gardens or fretted over their lawns. In turn, our suburban neighbors looked down on him as something of a slacker. He stood his ground, though. As far as Dad was concerned Saturday morning was for baseball and Sunday morning was for church, and that left little time for anything else on the weekend. There was no lawn to speak of in our front yard. It was shady and mossy there with spindly clumps of grass struggling under a maple tree. Our back yard was a verdant hodgepodge of skunk cabbage, ragweed, and masses of mugwort that flourished above the drywell. We never had to cut it. With seven children and a dog playing there with a gang of neighborhood kids, we simply trampled it into submission. Our yard was well used.

Now and then Dad would succumb to the pressure of being a good neighbor. He stood on the top concrete cellar step and called for all hands on deck. His irritated tone revealed his frustration with the impending task at hand. At such moments he would criticize us for the condition of the yard, and that wasn't far from the truth. His neglect of the property was obvious and his children reveled in it. We didn't think of our lot as a showpiece or a badge of our suburban respectability. We weren't respectable at all. Instead, we played hard all day, fervidly building forts, baseball fields, bowling alleys, circus tents, bridges and other creations. When Dad was most exasperated he accused us of embarrassing the family. "Do you boys want to disgrace your mother by living in a junk yard?" Of course, this question required no answer. Once he invoked Mother's name, the sacred oath of the Irish, we knew it was going to be a long day.

Our brother, Timothy, was the chief offender. Blonde, blue-eyed and freckle-faced, Tim was a modern day Huck Finn. Every day for him was an adventure. He was particularly curious about how things worked. Tim was our family inventor and he had big plans for rocket ships, steam boats and robots. In order to do this he needed a steady supply of raw materials. This included scrap metal, wires, lumber and pipes. Tim would drag home anything mechanical. Our postwar sylvan area was quickly becoming a built-up suburb, so there was no shortage of construction sites for Tim to find his supplies.

Although he was just a kid, he managed to gradually fill our back yard with baby carriage frames, steering wheels, tire rims, fan belts, motors, smudge pots, 2 x 4s, plywood, fuse boxes, antenna wire, cables, rebar, mufflers, gas tanks, carburetors, blue Bromo Seltzer bottles, oil cans, car seats and uncountable other assorted bits of 1950s American culture. The yard also contained a gas range tipped on its side, bed springs, an old couch and a '32 Chevy coupe. I can no longer remember how the coupe got into our back yard, but we loved the feel of the worn mohair upholstery. We would hop in the car with our brother Kevin at the wheel and someone else fiddling with the knobs of the radio. The rest of us were shooting our six guns out the back windows. We never had such fun!

On any given day Tim would go to his open-air workshop under the trees and assemble these parts into spectacular constructions fastened to plywood. Today they would probably be displayed in museums as found object art. Truthfully, I've seen a lot worse for sale in galleries. But for Tim they were meant to do fabulous things -- a space ship that dispensed free ice cream, a robot that did homework and blew bubbles, a lawn mower that became a helicopter and then converted into a submarine. His busy imagination never tired. Although Tim was my younger brother by seven years, I was in awe of him and thought of him as the family genius.

Dad was here to tell us that it was all going to stop. He counted heads and squeezed shoulders as we assembled for the great clean up. He kept an assortment of broken rakes and shovels in the basement for just such an occasion. Everyone had to carry something to work with -- brooms, buckets, saws, bags and boxes. We raked baseballs out of the long grass. We lugged sheets of plywood, warped planks and screen doors. We hauled truck fenders and rotting carpets. We bagged leaves. We sawed branches. We scooped dog doo. The wheelbarrow brigade ran non-stop all morning. We discovered things that had been lost -- a baseball glove, an alarm clock, Dad's bowling trophy, Cub Scout badges, forks and spoons and TV knobs. The Wallace yard had become a time capsule and a curiosity shop.

When Dad got to working he didn't let up. The yard had to be cleared of every Popsicle stick, every cat's eye marble, every scrap of paper and nail. We dragged all the detritus to the curb in front of the house. I had the sense that we were involved in some kind of heroic, even epic endeavor. By lunch time the pile had grown into a small mountain of rusting metal pieces, lengths of picket fence, porch railings and car parts. By mid-afternoon the heap of junk seemed to reach halfway up to the sky. We were really proud of it. Spurred on by Dad's cheerleading, we went from reluctant workers to inspired earth-movers. We had cleaned up every inch of the yard. We had finally defeated the monster.

The last job was to move the '32 coupe. Dad had had enough of it and Mother worried that Kevin, a mechanical wizard, would get it started someday. Somebody had called the Health Department on us, and Dad didn't want anyone from the city snooping around the yard. Kevin was positioned at the steering wheel and the rest of us got behind the old car and pushed it down the driveway and back out to the street. We stood there blinking at the yard that seemed to stretch out before our very eyes. Respectability had a strange feeling to it. I stared at the spotless yard and then ran out front and looked at the humongous pile of junk. I really couldn't decide which I liked better.

The following week several yellow city trucks came and took away the pile. The '32 coupe, however, sat rusting out front for a couple of years. In one of the supreme moments of my childhood, my brother Kevin did get it started one day and we took a spin around the neighborhood. I can't imagine where all that junk ended up, but I do know that a piece of my soul went along with it.

Barry Wallace writes a weekly column for the Fairfield Citizen.