A Town, A House, A Landlord
Doing time in a top 100 Midwestern city, and the soggy reality of a house from Hades.
Author’s note: Looking back at this essay thirty years after my 1996 thesis project, I realize my portrait of Marion, Illinois, was unforgiving. Marion was a stable, thriving Midwestern community that fully earned its top-100 accolades. The “bad character” described below had less to do with geographical coordinates and far more to do with my own frantic state of mind—a youngish, anxious husband trying to build a life in a sweltering attic room with a long-overdue master’s thesis to complete. Consider this a first draft.
Some time ago, my wife and I had the privilege to rent a particular house in a town in the southern Midwest. This town of some twelve thousand inhabitants is situated near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and one could say that it is a place that time all but forgot.
Then Interstate 57 came along and helped it become a somewhat larger dot on the map. Those four lanes were a godsend. Long ago, the small-time gangsters who once ran this old coal town found better business opportunities elsewhere, and the demand for high-sulfur coal has flagged considerably. Yes, Interstate 57 has been good for this town, but damn it, why did they have to put an exit—no, two exits—leading into it?
The town is called Marion, Illinois, and I feel better having admitted it. As with most objects of complaint, Marion is not completely worthy of derision. The plaintiff’s point of view should be equally weighed. The house that we rented there is a separate matter. In any event, Marion somehow got itself included on a list of the one hundred best towns to live in.
A relative brought this to our attention as a way to wish us well in our endeavors in a new location. Shortly after we wandered into town, my wife and I began to wonder how Marion could have been included on the list. We supposed that the criteria included cost of living, recreational opportunities, the abundance of places of worship, and a comforting chart of crime statistics.
These are valid enough criteria, but they don’t tell the whole story. They don’t go into how a town, how its neighborhoods—how a house—can simply have a “bad character” in the same way that a person can be said to give off the scent of a bad character. “There’s something wrong with that guy, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
One could say that, not having the time, we did not delve below Marion’s surfaces to see how we might fit ourselves into its substructure, if there was one. Marion was a hard town for us to crack, but then we did not really want to crack it. We were afraid of what we’d find. But in the end, the town’s effect on us was secondary; it was the house we rented there that made all the difference.
We were first alerted to Marion’s allegedly tarnished reputation at a get-acquainted function held by the Southern Illinois University English Department, where my wife was starting doctoral studies in the fall of 1993. Upon learning that we had taken up residency in Marion, another new student said, “Oh, you’re doing time in Marion.” This was a punning reference to the nearby federal prison and also, as it turned out, to the general tenor of life in the town. We dismissed the observation as apropos of the brand of witty talk engaged in at such functions. But did this sentence put the first crack in our resolve to make the best of life in Marion? Were we to live a life of quiet shame, not to mention quiet desperation, while our peers, or at least the people we hoped to hang around with, lived the good life in nearby Carbondale?
Our conversant, who had quit practicing law in favor of studying creative writing, was not impressed with our reasons for choosing to live in Marion. She nonetheless wished our good intentions well.
The ride home that night was quiet, until we drove through Marion’s Tower Square, where I said, “Nice square, huh?” My wife accurately deemed my observation as not needing a response, but I had a feeling that she too was thinking about the Tower Square Dialogue, which I will get to momentarily.
In a matter of weeks we also became less impressed with our argument for living in Marion. Necessity spawns invention, but one ought to still take a second look at the invention. Our rationale for living in Marion happened to be a brown, innocuous-looking house. Squat and solid, with a front porch running along its front side, the house was of the type that a young family would have moved into during the years following World War Two.
As the years passed by, as the family matured, its members might have been seen watching life pass by as they sat on the halcyon front porch. The problem with this house we rented, and subsequently with all of Marion, was that it was not the house we invented in our minds.
Necessity—we had given ourselves just a few days to secure a habitation in a much picked-over market—had deteriorated into wishful thinking. Certainly the house was better equipped to house a young couple than were the variety of student repositories we had looked at in nearby housing-crunched Carbondale, where someone named Bonnie Owen was the reigning mogul of substandard housing and vintage house-trailers.
We were glad to see that the other people who had come to look at this house on the same night that we saw it had quickly looked and left. They saw what was there, and they left. We saw what we wanted to see and wrote a check. We saw a very nice house, in need of some TLC no doubt, but in a quiet, stable neighborhood, the kind of house we wouldn’t mind owning. We saw “front porch” and “yard” and “room” to roll around in and toss our stuff. We saw rustic pine wainscotting in the finished attic that we had translated into “study nook.” This house of our conjoined “young couple” minds was all of this and more.
The piece of realty we rented, which we later learned had stood vacant and musty and unkempt for some two years, was the gaping maw of hell itself.
Before we get into all that, meet our habitation services provider, known to us as Jarrell the landlord, or simply Ol’ Jarrell, which later became, “Oh, Jarrell...”
Jarrell’s most distinguishing characteristic was his resonant, drawling voice. Physically, he was a bit on the horsey side: jowly and lanky, but with a paunch. He was in the early range of middle age, but closer to fifty than forty. Jarrell looked harmless because he looked On the fateful summer evening when we wrote out our first rent check, we asked Jarrell where we had to go to get the water turned on. The voice replied, “Tire Square.” My wife and I looked at each other. “Where?” I asked again. “The northeast corner of Tire Square.”
“What kind of square?”
The voice spoke a bit more clearly this time: “Tar Square.” My wife and I looked at each other again. “Oh,” she said after a few moments, “Tower Square.” This was the Tower Square Dialogue, and it set the tone for the rest of our stay in Marion.
Jarrell did not say much that night. He did not have to. We were embarrassed at our inability to discern an accent, but at the same time we thought we had Jarrell pegged; of course we knew he wasn’t dumb, he just “seemed” dumb. It was that the voice. While we might not have fully trusted it, we felt that we could deal with its source.
More important than what we thought we had learned about Jarrell was what Jarrell learned about us. In an exchange of a few sentences, he knew that we weren’t from his neck of the woods. He knew that we were eager. He knew that we had overlooked a shit load of problems with his house.
As befits any skilled landlord, Jarrell was most happy that he had at hand a tenant anxious to beef up his home maintenance skills, which is to say that he had a tenant who was all but begging to be taken advantage of. They say a good salesperson is one who simply sets up the condition that lets people sell something to themselves.
Well, in showing us his house, Jarrell set up the conditions under which we sold ourselves on his rental, and I sold myself on becoming Jarrell’s lackey. I am exaggerating only slightly. Any casual observer would have said that we were paying Jarrell to let us fix up his house. We were paying rent, all right, a hefty piece of change.
We moved in the first of August, straightaway painted the walls, cleaned the carpets, and were generally pleased. We acted as if we held the mortgage and were building equity with every stroke of the paint brush. We thought that cleaning the carpet would alleviate the lingering musty smell. The leaky kitchen sink was easy enough to fix. The water stains on the kitchen ceiling were obviously signs of a former water leak that had been fixed.
The mess in the basement, the leavings of some prior occupant, would wait. We didn’t notice the colony of garden slugs down there. They were camouflaged to match the concrete block. We hoped that the persistent roosting pigeons would be put off by battening down a few pieces of loose aluminum soffit. The mildewed tub and shower enclosure was spruced up by recaulking, and windows were made less drafty by reglazing.
And the temperature of the sauna in the finished attic could be somewhat regulated by the whole-house attic fan. We pressed on in a state of blind excitement (a.k.a. blind, dogged persistence) that bordered on actual homeownership. Truly, we had all the benefits of homeownership without having a mortgage, which, as it turned out, was the best thing we could say on the subject.
Our frenetic bliss lasted for about a month. After it occurred to me that I was not getting paid for my efforts, my zeal for obtaining home fix-up skills began to peter out. My wife had already come to her senses.
A month was also how long it took the disastrous rains of 1993 to return. In Southern Illinois, skies were clear from late July to mid-August. Then the rains returned for an encore. They came and washed the beatific vision right off and out of our house—our rented house.
We began to notice things.
The water spots on the kitchen ceiling came to life with the voracity of mutating slime mold. The front porch roof took to leaking—more of a violent pissing, really, than a leak—and right above and all around the front door. Most of all, we noticed that even with the advent of a rain of less than a half-inch, the messy basement turned into a moat; those garden slugs had found suitable habitat.
Late one night, wakened by the sound of gurgling water downstairs, I found amidst the basement debris two submersible pumps. They had been much needed and well-used, but not for some time. Fortunately, they still worked. While I was threading the pump hose through a boarded opening in the basement (made, as it turned out, by someone else for the very purpose I was using it for), I came to a fuller understanding of Jarrell’s offhand statement:
“Yeah, I’m gonna have to get someone in here to look at that heater before winter gets here.” There were distinctive horizontal rust lines two feet up on the heater shroud—oh, probably just a foot, actually, but high enough. “Yeah, Jarrell, I think you’re gonna have ta do that.”
So we had water from two out of the four directions of the compass. Between the inland sea in the basement and the heat sink in the finished attic, we had ourselves a somewhat livable cave in the middle layer. Up to a point, we didn’t mind dodging the kitchen leaks, but it got a little tiresome.
Admittedly, the water table in all of the Midwest was somewhere above ground level, causing horrible damage and heartbreak in many places. But we were inundated in a place where we least expected it. We took it personally, like a bad joke. The Mississippi River was over thirty miles away. Even so, all that part of Marion, the area south of Tower Square, would become a swamp with the slightest provocation. The gangsters could have it—have it all. We were doing time in Marion. No doubt about it. The time had come to dispense with the handyman thing and think exit plan.
Meanwhile, I called Jarrell and let him know about the leaks. He had just bought this gem of a property weeks before we moved in, but I do know that despite any slowly spoken
intimations of surprised ignorance, he had to have been anticipating a call whose theme was water, water, everywhere. Jarrell expressed concern that I accepted as genuine but said that he was tied up for the rest of the week.
He’d be over as soon as he could and “get right on that roof.”
Understandably, the leaky basement walls would be harder to fix and therefore worthy of secondary consideration. When Jarrell did make it around a week or so later, he dabbed Blackjack roof tar under the shingles in the general vicinity of the leaks in the kitchen. About this time we also began the first of our home improvement discussions, which eventually led to our roofing negotiation.
I was under the impression already that the entire house needed to be re-shingled, or blown up. Jarrell, on the other hand, was wanting to find out if a finger would indeed work to plug up the hole in the dam. This was not a problem, so long as he could find the hole and plug it as soon as possible.
The problem was that there was more than one hole. I was surprised to find out, over a glass of lemonade, that Jarrell more or less agreed. “Price,” he said, “I gotta tell ya that these leaks are hard to track down.” He then indicated that it might take some time to correct the problem and requested that I “keep an eye on it.” Jarrell was not alone in having the idea that a house could regenerate itself. Marion had lots of people who thought along those lines.
Try as I might, I could not come around to Jarrell’s point of view, so I pressed him about the leaks in the front porch roof.
“You know,” his voice said, “I can’t figure that out. That part has been re-shingled.” He looked puzzled and vowed to come back and take care of it as soon as he could round up some help.
Then I reminded Jarrell about the leaky basement. He sat his glass of lemonade down on a pile of books on the kitchen table, and as we headed for the basement the voice said, “They had us read Plato back in high school, but I don’t remember much about it.”
The basement was still damp from the most recent deluge.
“I’ve got some hydraulic cement that oughtahj take care of this,” went the voice as Jarrell looked over the scene. I told him that if he were there to see the volume of water that poured in, he’d realize that hydraulic cement wouldn’t do the job. There was evidence that someone had already tried.
My idea, I theorized to him, was to build up the ground around the back side of the house. In effect, the basement was a cistern for the yard, which sloped slightly toward the house, which had seen fit to settle a bit. Matters weren’t helped by the concrete walk that someone had put along the back side of the house.
Following the yard’s example, it too sloped toward the basement. This walkway did such a great job funneling water into the basement window openings and into every crack and crevice that ran along the back wall, that it seemed designed and engineered for that purpose.
We headed outside to take a look at the yard idea.
Jarrell, to my surprise, agreed with me. “Price, give me a couple of days, and I can get some railroad ties and a load of dirt over here.” I wondered what Jarrell had in mind about the labor required to accomplish this project, but, doubtless, he failed to envision his own hands-on involvement. He was still picking up on the lingering handyman urge I was exuding. After all, I had made mention of a raised flower bed.
In any event, when he got into his old Chevy Suburban, he said, “Price, now keep an eye on that roof.” He said that he was having a busy week at his job at a power company. I asked him, “What do you do, Jarrell? Are you a foreman?”
“Something like that,” the voice said. An image of Jarrell as an overseer of a chain gang flashed through my mind.
About two weeks later, Jarrell showed up with his help, which consisted of two other middle-aged men who, along with Jarrell, were of such a stature that it caused me to wonder how wise it would be for them to be walking around on a rotten porch roof. The day was a scorcher.
Occasionally, I would take a look at their progress. They were replacing some roof decking and then re-shingling. Jarrell did not appear to be having a good time of it, nor did his two helpers. They took both days of the weekend. When they finished, Jarrell, heat-exhausted and worn out from hammering, mustered the strength to remind me to keep an eye on it and to let him know if anything developed. He said that he hadn’t forgotten about the railroad ties and the fill dirt. “There was no hurry,” I told him.
He was disappointed to hear that the Blackjack had not taken care of the leaks above the kitchen. His fortitude was almost admirable. Up we went to dab on some more tar.
When Jarrell got back down, he said, “Price, see if you can get up in that attic sometime and see where that water’s comin’ in.” I said I’d take a look at it, and by golly, I did. It was that voice again. It carried on even when Jarrell couldn’t. He left late that day looking like a whipped dog. Some effort was required, but I fended off the temptation to feel sorry for him.
The attic Jarrell was referring to was the unfinished part, which was accessed through an opening that was half-blocked by a large attic fan. The unfinished part of the attic was even hotter than the finished part. I couldn’t figure out how the pigeons could live in it. They must have spent the hottest part of the day and on into the evening on the front porch. They went inside only after it had cooled off some.
A few days later, I was the bearer of yet more bad news to Jarrell. It had rained again, and while Jarrell and his chain gang of two were successful in reducing the porch roof leaks, they did not stanch them entirely. The leaks in the kitchen had persisted as well.
By this time, early to mid-October, we had grown somewhat accustomed to the hellishly musty emanations coming out of the basement. We pretended the basement did not exist, except that Jarrell had not as yet sent anyone around to check up on the heater down there.
Perhaps he was waiting to see if the first tenants of his house were going to persist as
tenants. We were. We did. We had to. We figured we could hold out until early the next summer, when our lease was almost up and when we might have more to choose from.
That week, Jarrell stopped by yet again to check on the leak above the kitchen. I told him that I had spotted the area in the unfinished attic where the water entered. Again, the problem with this attic was that one could be enjoying a pleasant fall day of sixty-five degrees outside, but a trip to the attic could make a person retch.
This is what happened to Jarrell. He had fit himself through the opening into the unfinished attic and began replacing a piece or two of rotten decking. (Jarrell would be damned if he had to remove even one of those old, baked, and curled shingles.) He was in there for some time, hammering and sawing. I gave up on being his tool caddie and went downstairs. Not too long after that, I heard crawling and stumbling above. I wasn’t really sure at the time if Jarrell had gotten sick or not.
I just thought that he had, by way of certain telltale noises which made their way downstairs as muted belching sounds. Jarrell came down after a few more minutes. I could tell he felt embarrassed, not to mention queasy. Once again, he looked like a big whipped dog, but I still resisted feeling sorry for him. I fetched him a drink of water after he had stepped outside. “I’m getting too old for this,” he said. The voice was shallow and breathy; it had lost its resonant drawl.
Later, I went upstairs to discover that indeed Jarrell had taken ill. I was glad that someone had decided to install a toilet in the finished attic. That night, I informed my wife that our little rented house was not only getting to us, it was also getting to its owner. It was a bad house—a bad, bad house.
A few days later, Jarrell stopped by again. “Price,” he said, “I’ve just about decided I’m gonna have to roof this house.”
Jarrell might have been reading my mind. “You know how to roof a house? I’d do it myself, but I don’t wanna.” The voice, if it had failed when Jarrell had taken ill in the attic, had returned to full strength. The words came out slowly from deep in his chest. He knew that I had been thinking about making a deal.
He smelled it on me. “You’re gonna be up there in a matter of days, roofin’ this house. And you’re gonna be doing it for next to nothin’,” the voice seemed to say. I told Jarrell I had never roofed a house.
“Roofin’ a house is easy. There’s not much to it.”
The voice drew my gaze upward to the beckoning shingles—old and heat-curled, lonely on the roof, stained with acrid pigeon droppings.
The voice held me speechless for a few moments, but what Jarrell smelled on me was merely the residue of a formerly present state of mind, not the presence itself.
“You know, Price, I had a strong back once. Now I’ve just got a strong mind.”
By now, a switch had finally flipped in my head. Never again would I be Jarrell’s lackey. That voice could drawl on all day long for all I cared. But for the sake of curiosity, I wanted to see what Jarrell had in mind for me.
“Well, I’ve got a strong back and a strong mind,” I said. We chuckled. I figured he’d never accept my offer of trading two months’ rent for a new roof.
“Price, I know a professional roofer who’d do it for one month’s rent.” He let this sink in. “That’s good,” I said. The desperate are the bravest, but the naive often learn the quickest.
We rubbed our respective chins for a moment or two. Then Jarrell pressed on. “How much would you really do it for?” went the voice, which had taken on a pushiness I hadn’t noticed before.
I said I’d do it for “around” minimum wage—a hell of a deal. He then went into his “hammer” argument: “It’s a matter of hammerin’,” he began. Jarrell turned his gaze from the roof to me, and with an expression as serious as all get out said,
“Now, Price, are you a person who can drive in a nail with two swings, or the kind who takes ten or twelve little taps?”
“That’d take me three taps,” I answered.
“Gee, Price, I don’t know.”
He calmly scuffed his boots on the driveway and tried to look puzzled. “But you think about it and let me know. I gotta get moving on that roof.”
Jarrell was making as if to go when the voice came back and said, “Price, what do you think Plato would have to say about roofing this house?”
“Jarrell,” I said, “Plato wouldn’t be caught dead on that roof for less than $2,500.”
A few days later, I called Jarrell and let him know that I had thought about the roof. “Naw,” I told him, “go ahead and get that professional roofer. That sounds like a good deal to me.” And so ended our roofing negotiation.
Jarrell’s professional roofer showed up two weeks later. Sometimes working in early, sleeting snow, he took several weekends, but he got it done. At first, all the new shingles seemed to do was relocate the point at which the drips formed on the kitchen ceiling. But a couple of warmer-than-average days came along, and the shingles evidently warmed up, sealed, and dug themselves in for the winter. The leaks above the kitchen stopped.
But we had already turned against this house. The house could do nothing to change our minds—neither could Jarrell (he didn’t anyway), and neither could Marion. We found the house to be as expensive to heat as it was to cool, which is to say that we all but refrained from doing both.
Central Illinois Power seemed to know when we struck a match, or farted, and added a surcharge to the bill. The big L-shaped living and dining room area and the finished attic became little more than expensive, freshly-painted storage units. The phone number GTE assigned to us must have once belonged to a dozen other people. They all owed money and knew a lot of rude people, one of whom said, “Damn it, I know he’s there. Put him on.”
Even though Jarrell had the heater looked after, we used a space heater and huddled through a winter of record-low temperatures. When the pipes weren’t frozen in the gaping maw of a basement, the cracks still leaked. The slugs were frozen in their tracks. One of the
submersible pumps, the one that came on automatically, triggered by a float, broke, but the other pump labored on. The following spring was deceptively kind. There was just enough rain. We actually appreciated the spring bulbs that I had planted in November. However, we would not be duped again.
Jarrell said he was sorry to see us go, but we still expected to forfeit some of our damage deposit; we were moving out a month before our one-year agreement was up. Jarrell returned our full deposit and tacked on an extra twenty-five dollars.
So, in mid-summer, we moved into our exit plan: a 1972 Hillcrest mobile home. It too had its problems, but the simple fact that it was positioned twenty-one miles from our house from Hades, not to mention eighteen miles from the city limits of Marion, made it seem like heaven in our eyes.