I set my tools on the top step because my legs did not feel all the way steady, and then I made myself go down, because a light burning in a locked basement is a thing a man has to look at straight.
Halfway down I smelled sawdust and heard a wood stove ticking, and at the bottom I found a whole workshop, warm and lit, and standing in the middle of it an old man with a chisel in his hand, more startled than I was.
His name was Gene. Once his heart settled and mine did, he told me a story that turned the whole cold feeling in that basement into something else.
The man who built this house, and lived in it fifty years, was Genes older brother Roy. Roy had died that winter. And in his last two years, knowing he was going, Roy had spent every good day down in this basement building one last thing: a model of the house. Not a toy, a real model, every board and window and shingle to scale, the house he had raised his family in, made small enough to hold.
He did not finish it. He ran out of days with the porch roof still bare.
Gene could not stand it, his brothers last work sitting undone in the dark. So after the estate sold the place, Gene had kept a key he was not really supposed to have, and he had been coming in the evenings to finish that porch roof the way Roy would have, board by tiny board.
He did not know a family had already moved in overhead. He thought the house still sat empty, and he had been slipping down to a dead brothers workbench to finish the last thing those hands ever started.
I went and got the couple, and I will tell you, I was nervous about how it would go, a stranger with a key in their basement. But when they came down and Gene showed them the little house that was their house, and told them why he was there, the wife put her hand to her mouth and the husband just said, finish it, please, take all the time you need.
So Gene did. He came in the daylight now, welcome, and the couple would bring him coffee and watch him work, and their kids sat on the steps and handed him the little shingles one at a time.
He finished the porch roof the way Roy meant it. Then he gave the model to the family, to keep in the house it was made of, so a mans last work would stay in the home his hands built.
Twenty-two years on locks, and that is the only sealed door I ever opened with a whole heart still beating behind it.
