Quarter Turn

by R. Buckminster Fuller, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The surveyors had come through the orchard in April and left a line of stakes across it, each stake with a strip of red flannel nailed to the top, and by June the flannel had faded to the colour of a healthy tongue. Ruth Haskell could stand at her kitchen window and see seven of them. They ran along the slope below the house at what the District's letter called the five-hundred-and-twenty-foot contour, which meant that when the dam at Pittock Falls was closed and the Soule River had backed up and filled its own valley, the water would stand exactly there, among the Baldwins, and no higher. The house was eleven feet above the line. The cellar floor was two feet below it.

The District had paid her two thousand four hundred dollars for the house, the barn, the orchard and nineteen acres of pasture, and it had given her a choice. She could leave the house for the salvage men, who would take the doors and the window sash and burn the rest, or she could have it moved, at her own expense, before the first of October. Her cousin Alden had a lot up on the Ridge Road that he would sell her for a hundred dollars. It was six hundred and forty yards away and ninety feet higher, and from it you would be able to see the whole of the new water, which nobody had seen yet, because it did not yet exist.

Hollis Varney came on the second Monday in June, in a Diamond T truck loaded with timber, and his nephew Dana drove behind him in a Ford truck with the jacks in the back. Hollis was seventy-one. He had moved, by his own count, three hundred and eight buildings, among them two churches, a bank, a schoolhouse with the school still in session in one room, and the Grange hall at Dexter, which had been moved twice because the first lot turned out to belong to somebody else. He did not knock. He walked once round the house without speaking, the long way, and then he came up the back step and asked her how much it weighed.

"The house?"

"The house."

She said she had no idea. She said she didn't suppose anybody knew what their house weighed.

"Nobody does," Hollis said. "That's why I ask. They know what it cost and how many rooms it's got and whose it was before them. Not one in a hundred has ever thought what's standing on the ground." He took a shingle from the pile by the woodshed and a carpenter's pencil from behind his ear and sat down on the step. "Let's find out."

He did it the way she had seen Walter do the accounts for the cream, a column at a time, without hurry. He asked her when the house was built, and she said 1791, or so the deed said, and he nodded as though that were a measurement. He asked whether the walls were plastered on lath or on the boards, and whether the roof was shingle or slate, and how many layers of shingle, and she found she did not know how many layers, and he went and looked. He counted the windows. He paced the sills, thirty-four feet by twenty-six. He went down into the cellar with a flashlight and came up again with cobweb on his hat brim and wrote down a number for the frame, which was oak and chestnut, and a number for the floors, and a number for the plaster, which was heavier than people thought. He added the column and drew a line under it.

"Twenty-two tons," he said. "Give or take one. That's the house." Then he turned the shingle over. "Now the chimney."

The chimney stood in the middle of the house, the way they had built them in 1791, a great square stack of brick on a stone base that came up out of the cellar floor and went through every room. It had three fireplaces on the ground floor: the kitchen hearth with its iron crane and its beehive oven, and one in each of the two front rooms. It went up through the attic between the rafters and out through the ridge. Walter had relaid the top six feet of it in the October of 1938, after the hurricane had taken the cap off and dropped half the bricks through the roof of the woodshed. He had done it on a Sunday, alone, in a wind, because the Monday was forecast for rain. Ruth had held the ladder for the first hour and then gone in, because she could not stand to watch.

Hollis went into each room and measured each fireplace and put his hand flat on the brick above each one, the way you would feel a horse's neck. He went to the attic and measured there. He went down to the cellar and measured the base, which was nine feet on a side. Then he sat on the step again and worked for a long time.

"Nineteen tons," he said. "Maybe twenty."

Ruth looked at the two sides of the shingle.

"It weighs as much as the house," she said.

"Very near." He turned the shingle in his fingers. "It's the heaviest thing on the place. And it don't hold up a single board. Your house stands round it, Mrs. Haskell. It don't stand on it. The frame carries the frame. That chimney carries nothing but itself."

"It carries the smoke."

He laughed at that, not unkindly. "It does. Tons of brick to lift a pound of smoke up to where the wind can have it." He handed her the shingle. "I can move twenty-two tons up the Ridge Road. I can't move a chimney. Brick holds together because it's pressing down on itself. Everything in it is pushing on the thing below. Lift it and tilt it and roll it six hundred yards and it'll come apart like a barrel of eggs. Nobody moves a chimney. They take it down and leave it, or they take it down and number the bricks and build it again, and that'll cost you more than I will."

She asked what he would charge.

"Five hundred and eighty dollars for the house. Taking the chimney down inside and framing over the hole, another forty. A stovepipe and a good range will heat the kitchen better than that hearth ever did, and you won't burn a cord of wood a month doing it." He stood up. "You think about it. I've got to look at the road."

He went off down the drive with Dana to look at the road, and Ruth stood in the kitchen with the shingle. The crane was swung back against the side of the fireplace, where she always kept it. The oven door was cold. In the corner of the hearth there was a black place on the brick, the size of a hand, where Walter had knocked out his pipe for thirty-one years. He had died in March, of his heart, in the barn, between one milking and the next, and she had found him on the floor of the tie-up with the cows standing over him perfectly quietly, waiting to be fed.

When Hollis came back she told him to take it down.

---

It took them nine days. They started at the top, standing on planks across the rafters, and worked down. Dana knocked the bricks loose with a cold chisel and passed them to Hollis, and while they were in the attic Hollis passed them out through the gable window to a chute of boards that ran down to the dooryard, and they came down the chute one at a time with a sound like somebody knocking at a door. The mortar was lime and sand and came away in a fine pale dust that got into the bread. By the fourth day the stack ended at the attic floor, and by the seventh it ended at the ceiling of the kitchen, and there was a square hole in every floor of the house through which Ruth could stand in the kitchen and see, past the floor joists of the chamber above and the rafters above that, the underside of the new patch of roof that Hollis had put over where the chimney had come through the ridge.

She had asked him to leave the kitchen hearth till last, and he did. On the ninth day he took the crane off its pins and laid it on the grass, and then he and Dana took down the hearth and the oven and the two front fireplaces, down through the floor to the stone, and the base went on standing in the cellar, nine feet square and five feet high, with nothing on it. Hollis framed over the hole in the kitchen floor with two doubled joists and boarded it, and suddenly the kitchen was larger than it had ever been, and lighter, because there was a whole wall of it Ruth had never seen without brick in front of it. The plaster there was the colour of skimmed milk, and quite clean.

She kept the crane. She kept forty bricks, which she picked out herself from the pile in the dooryard, the ones from the kitchen hearth, including the one with the black mark on it. The rest of the bricks, about seven thousand of them, Dana loaded in the Ford and took down into the cellar, a load at a time, and stacked round the old base.

"The water can have them," Hollis said. "It won't mind."

---

Then they began to get under the house.

They knocked holes through the old stone foundation, two on each long side and two at each end, and through the holes they slid four long steel beams that Hollis had bought from a railroad yard in Bangor in 1931, twelve inches deep and forty feet long. The beams went under the sills and right through the cellar, side to side and end to end, so that the house was resting on a crosshatch of steel. Under the beams, on the cellar floor and on the ground outside, they built cribbing, which was short lengths of squared hemlock laid in pairs, each pair crosswise to the one below, like a child's log cabin with no walls. On top of each crib they set a jack.

There were twenty-four jacks. They were screw jacks, cast iron, each one about the size of a quart milk can, with a square hole in the head for the bar. Each was good for fifteen tons. Ruth asked why, if each was good for fifteen tons, they needed twenty-four of them for twenty-two, when two would do.

"Two would do," Hollis said, "for about a minute. Then something would crack. You don't lift a house with jacks. You lift it with all of them at once."

He explained it to her the next morning, the morning of the lift, standing in the dooryard with a whistle on a string round his neck. The trouble with a house, he said, was not the weight. Twenty-two tons was nothing. A locomotive was a hundred. The trouble was that a house was put together to stand still. Every joint in it had been cut to sit on the joint below, and if you lifted one corner an inch before the rest, the whole frame would try to twist, the way a table does when you lift it by one leg, and the plaster would crack, and the doors would stick, and in the worst case a mortise would split and you would have a house that leaned for the rest of its life. So you never lifted a corner. You lifted the house. Each man had a row of jacks. At the whistle each man gave each of his jacks one quarter turn and stepped back. A quarter turn raised a jack about an eighth of an inch. Then the whistle again, and another quarter turn. Nobody went ahead. Nobody fell behind. The weight went where it wanted to go, into all twenty-four of them at once, and none of them ever had to carry more than its share.

"How long does it take?"

"To get her up two feet? All morning."

There were four of them turning: Hollis, Dana, a man named Elwin Thibodeau who had come over from Skowhegan for the week, and Elwin's boy, who was fifteen and had a row of four jacks on the north side where the load was lightest. Ruth sat on an upturned bucket by the woodshed with a cup of coffee held in both hands. It was the twenty-ninth of June, a still, hazy morning, already warm at seven, with the hay standing ready in the pasture that she would not cut, because the District had bought the hay as well.

Hollis blew the whistle. The four men went down the rows, bending at each jack, setting the bar in the head and giving it a quarter turn and moving on, and at the end of the row each of them straightened up and looked at Hollis. Nothing had happened. The house stood exactly as it had stood for a hundred and fifty-eight years. Hollis looked at the north-east corner and the south-west corner, sighting along the sill, and blew the whistle again.

At the tenth whistle Ruth went and crouched by the back step and looked at the place where the sill met the foundation stone. There was a line of light between them. It was no thicker than a knife blade, and it ran the whole length of the wall.

She stayed there for the next half-dozen whistles and watched it widen. She could not see it move. Between one whistle and the next she could only see that it had. At some point the line of light was as wide as a pencil, and then it was as wide as her finger, and she could feel a faint cold breath coming out of the gap, the air of the cellar that had been shut in there since before she was born. It smelled of earth and potatoes and the lime dust from the chimney.

Upstairs something cracked, quite loudly. Hollis held up his hand and the men stopped. He went inside, and she heard him walk across the kitchen and up the stairs, and then nothing for a while, and then he came down.

"Plaster," he said. "Over the door in the north chamber. Hairline, about a foot. It was there before, under the paper. It's only letting us know." He blew the whistle and they went on.

By eleven the house was two feet off its foundation. It stood in the air on its crosshatch of steel, and the steel stood on its twenty-four jacks, and the jacks stood on their cribs, and Ruth walked all the way round it, slowly, the long way, the way Hollis had on the first day. You could see right under it. You could see the cellar, which had become a kind of open pit full of daylight, and the old stone walls, and her shelves of empty preserving jars, and in the middle of everything the chimney base, nine feet square, with the seven thousand bricks stacked round it in neat walls, and the rest of the house nowhere near it. A shaft of sun came down through the gap at the east end and lay across the top of the base where the kitchen hearth had been.

From the dooryard, when she came round again, she could see one of the surveyors' stakes through the gap under the sill, down in the orchard, its flannel hanging straight in the still air.

Hollis was standing by the jack at the south-east corner, the one by the back step. He had the bar in his hand.

"One more," he said. "Then we'll crib her up and let the jacks rest and have dinner." He held out the bar. "You want it?"

She put down the cup. The bar was warm from his hand and heavier than she expected, a yard of round iron with a squared end. She set the squared end in the head of the jack, and it took her two tries, and she felt the men waiting and did not look at them. Hollis blew the whistle. She pushed, and for a moment nothing moved, and she pushed harder, and the bar went round under her hands, ninety degrees exactly, and stopped at the chalk mark Hollis had made on the cribbing, and over her head, all the way along the sill, all twenty-two tons of the house went up an eighth of an inch together.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Buckminster Fullerō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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