Chapter 77: The Core Sample

The Queen Anne stands just off Main Street in a small central Utah town, where it has stood since before anyone in town expected water to come indoors. When the water finally did come in, it arrived the way most things arrive in an old house: late, through a hole someone drilled, and with no plan for how it would leave. Every owner since has held an opinion about where the water should go after the dishes. Every one of those opinions is still under the house.

Larry restored the Queen Anne before the Barth, which is to say he practiced on it. The house taught him what he would later call “the despair and elation of fixing stupid shit no one cares about.” Then, satisfied with his education, it waited.

On Monday morning the house stopped waiting.

The Morning

“I’ve got a plumbing nightmare this morning,” Larry wrote, and attached the eye-roll emoji, the face a man makes at a toddler who has done the thing again.

The message was not the first notice. Jonathan replied that he had already smelled it while dropping his child off at school. The smell had outrun the text message.

Larry answered with the composure of a man reading his own weather report: “Not shit fortunately at least not yet . The cess pool hasn’t overflowed yet . Sounds like another Claude comedy”

Two yets in three sentences. A man who uses the word yet twice before ten in the morning is not reporting. He is forecasting. He had also, before breakfast, commissioned the chapter.

The Crawl Space

The crawl space of a Queen Anne is not a room. It is the space a room leaves behind. Dirt floor, hand-hewn joists, square nails, and the kitchen line running toward the street at a grade chosen by someone who has been dead for most of a century.

Larry went under in the orange fleece and the black beanie, the uniform he wears to every appointment with consequence.

“My whole pipe under the house is clogged with this from the kitchen sink . Don’t know what it is it’s like clay”

Then, unprompted: “I try not to put fat down the drain”

Nobody had accused him. This is how a man pleads before the charges are filed.

He installed a cleanout in the line. A cleanout is a door cut into a pipe so a man can see what the pipe has been keeping from him.

“I put a clean out in the line under the house . It’s crammed full of this . I don’t know what it is from . It’s like clay”

He had now used the word clay in two separate messages, as if repetition might produce a different mineral.

The Specimen

At fourteen minutes past ten, the evidence was entered into the record. A portion of the material sat in the corner of a zipper sandwich bag on the dashboard of Larry’s mid-2000s Honda Odyssey, in full Utah sun. It was gray-beige and granular, flecked with dark particles of no known origin. Then Larry did what any serious man of science does with an unidentified substance from beneath his own kitchen.

He poked it.

The finger went in. The material received it the way wet concrete receives a handprint, without resistance and without forgiveness. When the finger withdrew, the dent stayed. It did not spring back. It did not ooze. It kept the impression, the way the house keeps everything.

Municipal engineers have a name for this family of substance. Fats, oils, and grease go down a drain warm and agreeable. In the pipe they cool, meet the calcium in hard water, and slowly turn into a kind of soap that no one would ever wash with, laid down in rings like a tree. In large cities the deposits grow to the size of buses and are called fatbergs. London once removed one from beneath Whitechapel that weighed one hundred thirty tonnes.

A small central Utah town has a smaller population. It has had more time.

Lamb or Legacy

There are two theories.

The first theory is Larry. Larry eats lamb. “I wonder if it’s lamb grease just the residual I wipe it all off the plates but still has residual”

Jonathan, who also eats lamb, submitted comparative data. “My sense is that’s a lot more than the residual from a plate. I give my lamb fat plate to my dog to lick”

“Yes I need a dog .”

In those five words the entire engineering question resolved itself. For a hundred years, the households of rural Utah ran a two-stage grease management system. Stage one was the plate. Stage two was the dog. The pipe was never meant to be stage two. Larry has been operating a dogless house, and the kitchen line has been doing the dog’s job without the dog’s enthusiasm or the dog’s digestive tract.

The second theory is the house. The Queen Anne has fed families for longer than any one of them lived in it. Sunday roasts. Bacon drippings poured just this once. Funeral potatoes for funerals the house itself attended. Lard from the decades when lard was a food group. Each household assumed the pipe would forget. The pipe forgot nothing. It filed every contribution in order, like the county recorder, and waited for someone with a cleanout.

Mikayla’s Law holds that it would have to be in pieces and a hundred years old for Larry to buy it. The Queen Anne met the age requirement at closing. As of this morning, the plumbing has satisfied the rest.

The specimen in the bag is, in all likelihood, both theories at once: a century of the small town at the bottom and a thin, recent, fragrant layer of Larry on top. Geologists call this stratigraphy. Larry calls it like clay.

The Only Solution

“How do you even fix this” Jonathan asked.

“I guess I’m just going to have the sink drain directly into the crawl space for an open cess pool .”

He followed this with the emoji of a face throwing up green, which is the closest Larry has come to filing an engineering report.

“lol that’s the only solution.”

The witness had concurred. There are no further appeals.

The Hardware Store

Larry went to the hardware store, which is where men in Sevier County go when a problem is beyond prayer but not yet beyond retail.

“Hardware store guy told me what to do . I got to maintain it every six months”

He came back with two bottles and photographed them side by side in the Odyssey, like a couple at their wedding.

On the left: Roebic K-37 Septic Tank Treatment Concentrate, Professional Strength. Thirty-two fluid ounces. Treats fifteen hundred gallons. A purple label promising powerful bacteria that destroy tank sludge and digest paper. It is a probiotic for a building.

On the right, sealed in its own plastic bag, as though the store did not want it touching the other merchandise: MAR Heavy Duty 55, from Mid-American Research Chemical. White bottle. Red label. Skull and crossbones. It will open sink drains, grease traps, and floor drains. It causes severe burns. It may be fatal if swallowed. It may cause blindness.

One bottle brings life to the pipe. The other brings death to everything in the pipe, including the life from the first bottle. The hardware store man had sold Larry a resurrection and an execution in a single transaction and told him to repeat both twice a year.

Larry now has a maintenance schedule with his kitchen sink. The Barth, at least, has a black tank that admits what it is.

The Hands

The final dispatch arrived in the afternoon.

“More material for the Claude comedy . My hands smell like putride fermenting shit . I wash them off but it must seep into the pores . Hopefully it challenges my immune system”

His wife’s position on the hands has not been entered into the record.

This is the man who believed a motorhome was testing him to see if he was worthy. He has now extended the same courtesy to a century of grease. If the house is testing him, the examination has moved past the mechanical and into the dermatological, and Larry has done what Larry always does. He has found the upside. Another man would see contamination. Larry sees a vaccine.

The specimen remains in its bag. The clay remains unidentified. Both theories remain open.

Larry still needs a dog.

More: All chapters of The Barth Saga · Claude Comedy by Jonathan Leusden