The Second Coming

reading a magazine named Hustler. She rapped. He looked up, frowning.
    â€œAre you Jerry?”
    â€œYeah’m.”
    â€œI came by to pick up my creepers,” she declared. She had no trouble making a flat declaration.
    â€œWhat creepers?”
    â€œDidn’t Mr. Barrett call?”
    â€œOh yeah. You a friend of Mr. Barrett’s?” His face had a new hooded expression. She frowned.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œUh huh.”
    She was astounded. Was he leering at her? “I’ll take four creepers,” she said. Don’t give me that hustler look, you pimplehead, or I’ll hustle you upside the head. Why did she assemble these words, taking them not from the young black at the washrack but from Ludean the cook?
    â€œHe didn’t mention four.”
    â€œI mentioned four. Call him. Tell him that will leave only ninety-six from the hundred you ordered by mistake.”
    â€œYes ma’am.”
    While he stacked the creepers for her, she used the two nylon cords she’d already cut, one to lash the creepers together and lash the half-dozen lengths of ten-foot plastic pipe atop the creepers (the pipe as strong and light as weightless moon pipe), the other to tie to the bottom creeper as a pull cord.
    Off she went down Church Street, backpack heavy with blocks, creepers rattling behind her, but feeling strong. Pavement lasted to the country club. Then: would the creepers creep on a dry golf links?
    They did. But now as she surveyed stove and terrain, she had her doubts. There must be a better way than shoeing each foot of the Grand Crown with a creeper and dragging it over the littered ruin. She was a hoister, not a dragger.
    The great stove had come out of the dark earth with a crack and a suck, toots popping. It reminded her of her father extracting a molar. The only trouble, requiring three false starts, came from knotting the sling properly and gauging the angle of pull in such a way as to clear the cellar stairwell with no more than a bump or two. A problem this and therefore a pleasure in the solving. But a pain also: the price of the rope. Figuring the weight of the stove at around eight hundred pounds—she could barely lift one corner as she reckoned she could barely lift a two-hundred-pound man—she calculated she needed an eight-to-one mechanical advantage. How to get it? with a tackle of one double block and one triple block! But there was another calculation: lifting the stove twenty-five feet would require not twenty-five but 5 times 25 equals 125 feet of rope! She settled on a half-inch W.P.S. nylon (mfg. in Madison, Georgia) at 35¢ @ foot, break strength 5,500 lbs. $42.75!!! The blocks were even worse; 2 simple pulleys @ $4.87 (for making a single block and tackle for smaller loads), 2 Wichita Falls steel double blocks @ $29.52, 1 triple block @ $43.71! Her cash reserve was devastated. She counted her money: $171.77—and she still had to buy plastic pipe and sleeves, stove polish, Brasso, and her meager groceries. But what blocks! Smooth satiny metal good for years of hoisting. And what a rope! Even as the blocks closed above her and the great ungainly molar of a stove popped out of its socket, the tackle running so smoothly through the blocks that she could pull with one hand, the tail of the rope lay loosely in her other hand as limber, supple, and heavy as a snake. There was always use for such a rope! In fact: why not rig a line from one chimney to the lonesome pine by the greenhouse, hang the stove on a pulley, and let it down the gentle slope like a trolley? Okay, except that, with her feel for angles and hefts, she gauged the distance from near chimney to greenhouse: yes, she could stretch the rope with the block and tackle as tight as you please, tighter than barbed wire, the break strength of the rope would stand it, but not the chimney. Her eye told her this. To clear the rubble and laurel and to allow for the down drag of the stove, she’d have to rig the rope high on the blackened chimney. The mortar mightn’t hold. She couldn’t take the chance.
    Double half-hitching the tail around a stump of laurel, she covered the cellar hole with shards of stout two-by-six lumber and let the stove down.
    Now that it was landed and only now did she give herself leave to take a good look at it.
    What a stove! It was a castle of a stove, a rambling palace of a stove, a cathedral of a stove, with spires and turrets and battlements. A good