Children in the Closet....Chapter 24

 Chapter 24

We spent the weekend at the motel rooms Summer rented for us that was just up the street from our house. We were trying to figure out what to do next. Thankfully, we had complete insurance coverage on the house including content replacement costs- meaning we could replace our losses at whatever the replacement cost would be rather than at the current cash value of what had burned.

We contacted our insurance company and were give a voucher to purchase what things we needed immediately. While Jesse and I had a suitcase each full of clothes and our toiletries plus personal items, Summer and Junior got out of the house in the clothes they were wearing. When we went back in on Sunday to survey the situation, they gathered up some clothing and things to take to the laundry. They reeked of smoke even after the first washing so everything had to be washed 2-3 times.

Summer had a hard time emotionally going back to the house so she took her brother shopping and to do the laundry while Jesse and I went back to see the full damage in the day light. Even so, we needed flashlights to see the rooms because of the boarded-up windows.

The contents were counted a total loss. Still, we had to make an inventory that listed every single item that was inside, when and where we bought it and the price to replace it. I had no idea what a long painful job that would be.

The firemen had been thoughtful as well as efficient in fighting our house fire. While the flames literally devoured the living room, foyer, dining room and sewing room, kitchen and den, the intense heat destroyed the rest. It was hard to look at melted masses and try to decide what it had been. Where possible, the fireman had closed the doors to rooms not in flames so that their high-pressure water hoses wouldn’t cause further damage. It was because of this I was able to save some family photos and mementos. 

We left the house that day realizing the entire interior would have to be stripped down to the rafters and redone and that would take a while. But for now, we had to regroup and find a place to stay.

Summer had no way of knowing that the motel up the street was a known place for drug dealers and not the family kind of place she thought it was. Jesse went out to where all the new hotels were around the relatively new DFW airport and booked a double room for us. We checked out of the motel and into the new one on Sunday night. Our real work of recovery started the next day.

Summer went to work Monday morning and Jesse met with the insurance adjusters while Junior and I went over to the house to begin the inventory. He took a spiral notebook and a pen and started the inventory of his room while I did the same in the kitchen. Things were still visible in the bedrooms – just damaged by heat and smoke. In the kitchen I took a stick and stirred up the debris in the floor trying to remember what we had and to think what a damaged item had been. Things were so misshaped and warped it was hard to identify anything. We couldn’t begin clearing out all the burned rumble until we had at least a rudimentary list of the contents.

You could only stay in the dark smelly house for so long before going outside to sit in the green grass and breathe in the fresh air. It was still early enough that summer to have pleasant days before the intense Texas heat arrived. It was while I was resting in the front yard, my sister Lanita pulled up to the curb and began unloading several boxes of cleaning supplies and snack foods. She and her husband owned a neighborhood grocery store and I teased her by saying she used the day’s profit to shop for us.

Jesse would go to work and I would go to the house and do inventory every day for over a week. On the weekends, friends and church members would come over and help us. At last, we had a basic list of what was in each room and we could finish it all up later. Now we could concentrate on the next stage – cleaning it all out and rebuilding. For this we had to wait for the insurance adjuster. Once he was finished inspecting everything, we were free to get a dumpster and start hauling all of our charred belongings out to it.

I couldn’t handle the stress of going to the house on a daily basis so I had what I called ‘Clean’ days and ‘Dirty’ days. On the Clean days, I would go shopping. When you lose everything in a house fire you must replace a vast number of things in a short amount of time. We all needed clothes, and even though I tried to salvage as much from our closets as I could, we still needed to replace quite a bit just for the time being. Jesse’s closet was in the hall and everything he had burned completely up.

On the dirty days, I would go through everything we were hauling out to see if there was anything I could salvage and redeem. The heat had been so intense that even the dishes I thought I could save would break so easily. It was really dirty work and we would go back to the hotel every evening after working until late at night, all filthy with smoke and black with the ashes we’d sifted through. I left a note in the dirty bathtub one day explaining that our house had burned and that’s why the shower was always so dirty when they came to clean the rooms. It was embarrassing for me so I bought a can of Comet to clean the tub myself but Jesse had a fit and said NO.

Our last week in the hotel, we treated all the people who had come to help us with the inventory to a big dinner in the restaurant downstairs before we all went up to our suite to spent a few hours doing more work on the inventory. This was a nightmare of a job to do so all the help was much appreciated. Someone brought a big stack of catalogs for us to find items that matched what we had lost. We had to just estimate where and when we bought things

Jesse negotiated with the insurance company and, instead of staying on at an expensive hotel, he arranged for us to rent a fully furnished apartment close to our house. This made it easier for us and less expensive for the insurance company. Jesse’s work had slowed down to the point that he acted as the contractor to rebuild the house and hired sub-contractors to do the plumbing and electrical work.

Summer continued to have trouble coming back to the burned house even as it was being cleared out and the rebuilding began. She wanted to help so she took on the meals for us. We would work so long every night that the fast-food places would be closed by the time we stopped to eat. Summer made sure she picked up dinner for us and, after moving into the apartment, she was responsible for buying the groceries and preparing easy sandwich meals.

One late afternoon she arrived at the house with a bag of dinner things for us to eat at the picnic table in the back yard. She came in and couldn’t see anyone, and called out but no answer.  Finally, she went out in the back yard and saw my purse hanging on the branch of a tree. There was no clean place to set anything inside so I would hang things wherever I could. When she saw my purse, she nearly freaked out. She thought the Rapture had happened because we were all gone and she was afraid she had been left behind! In reality, we were really tired and thirsty and a friend had taken us down to the 7-11 to get a bag of ice and some cold drinks!

It was a long, exhausting, hot summer as we worked steadily on the house. Thankfully, the insurance money was more than enough for all we needed to do. I love wallpaper and had even papered all of our closets and pantry – and the insurance adjusters gave us credit for all of that.  I did most of the painting and all of the wallpapering while Jesse put in windows and did the carpentry work. We both worked hard and often long into the nights.

On the weekends, Jr and Summer would put doors on saw horses and paint or stain them with Jesse yelling at them for not doing it right. It didn’t seem to matter to him that the neighbors could hear him. Indeed, Doug and Reaoma would stand outside and watch him berate us and he never acted like they were even there. Some days were easier than others but every day was stressful.

On Tuesday, August 2nd, 1983 we began to move back into our home just 52 days after the house fire - the same length of time it took Nehemiah to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Looking back, it was not quite ready to live in yet since we had no furniture. We slept on the floor for the first 5 nights because the mattresses we had ordered were delayed in shipping. Still, I was home and that’s where I wanted to be. 

We all went to a huge warehouse sale at Haverty’s Furniture – Jesse, Summer, Jr and I – and bought an entire house of furnishings. I picked out a living room sofa and coffee and end tables and Summer sat on it until a salesman came to write it up. It took hours to select everything we needed but we did it! I had been shopping on my ‘clean days’ buying up linens and dishes and pots and pans. It was overwhelming at times to refurnish everything as quickly as possible but I was determined to get it done and get it done fast!

Since all the furniture was brand new, I tried to find as many accessories as possible at thrift stores so the house wouldn’t look like a department store. I hung all manner of things up on the walls including empty frames in the living room and hats in the den. I had this sense of urgency to ‘dress’ the rooms back up. Because I was in such a hurry to get all the finishing up done, I did a lot of the trim work myself. Never mind that I didn’t know what I was doing. We bought the fake wood trim and a table saw and I learned to miter the corners and trim out doors and floors and ceilings. When I couldn’t get the corners right in my bathroom, I made pretty bows to go with the wallpaper and hung them in the corners.

While I worked inside, Jesse painted the outside a blue color and Jr kept the yard up. By the end of the month everything looked so much better. Best of all, there was not one hint of smoke smell! We were told that’s the last thing you get rid of but Jesse had sprayed every single board that remained in the house with Kiltz before he started rebuilding. The only time I would get the faintest whiff of smoke was when I opened the foyer closet fast. There must have been a board up in the attic that missed being coated with Kiltz. Within a year that smell was gone, too.

While the house had taken up all of Jesse’s time, Summer and Jr had been doing the bus ministry visitation on Saturday mornings so he could continue the work. Now he went back to visiting the bus kids and riding the bus on Sundays. I decided to take a break and not return to the bus ministry. We continued to go to church all that summer but I was relieved not to have the extra burden of seeing Jesse treat the bus children with such kindness and their parents with what appeared to be genuine compassion and then treat us with such scorn and downright hostility. I simply could not understand how this could be. It was as he were two completely different men.

By the end of September, the house was, once again, a comfortable home. Jr was in high school and Summer was working and all had seemingly returned to normal. Jesse was still a difficult man to live with and we walked on eggshells trying not to upset our lives. It was obvious to me that we had all been through a literal trial by fire and yet nothing had changed in the way Jesse treated us.