Free Renewal 6 - Cold by Jf Perkins Page A

was happy to have a job that didn’t rely too heavily on his aching leg. He took a pile of old bricks, and some bags of mortar they had pulled from the supply yard, and enclosed the woodstove in a massive brick labyrinth. From the outside, it looked kind of like one of those barbecues that people had once built in their backyards. It was a rectangle that rose in stages to the top, where the flue escaped. The lowest platform was like a hearth, and covered the entire floor behind the old outhouse. The second layer contained the stove, and rose up to a shelf about eighteen inches wide. The third layer was the top of the construction, and eventually gave way to a brick chimney that enclosed the flue pipe to the roof.
    He called it a masonry heater. On the inside, it was far more complex. Through a painstaking process of sketches and trials, he laid the bricks in series of channels to cause as much brick as possible to contact the escaping heat. This efficiently warmed the entire brick mass, which radiated the heat into the entire building. When he was done, the outhouse was our version of a luxury spa, warm, comfortable, and efficient with firewood.
    We worked as a team to laboriously drag an old cast iron tub from the old homestead, up the hill, and into the improved outhouse shed. The tub barely fit through the door on its side. It was a wrestling match. We tipped it up on end to get around the original outhouse and set it on the hearth layer of the masonry heater. We had to push it right to the end of the hearth to keep it from blocking the door of the stove, but the fact that it did indeed fit was another vast improvement. Dad rigged a drain under the wall with some PVC and ran the pipe far enough that the water would flow downhill, in theory. In reality, we were tasked with shoveling dirty ice away from the outflow every time the tub was drained. From then on, the tub was kept full, along with a row of buckets on the second ledge, so that warm water was always available. It’s hard to explain how much that meant to us during that winter, but it’s safe to say that Arturo was our hero once again.
    Dad pronounced our stall excavations perfect, except for one thing. He had us cut tunnels between the pits in each stall. Kirk and I were so immune to digging by that point, we didn’t even grumble. Compared to the pits themselves, the short tunnels were nothing. In fact, they were more like thick doorways than tunnels. Again, we had no idea what we were doing, but we had learned that Dad always had a plan, and we paid close attention when he showed us how to use plywood and two-by-fours to shore up the doorways.
    With the doorways complete, Mom joined the pit team. She directed the careful transfer of our food supplies into the front stall. She handed the containers down, and Kirk and I stacked them where she wanted. Once the food was stacked in the pit, it looked like we had enough food for an army, but even then, I knew it was an illusion.
    Arturo built a smaller masonry heater in the well pump house, but it lacked the mass and multiple channels of his first masterpiece. He planned it to get the most out of every last brick, and declared himself thankful that it was warm enough inside the little house for the mortar to cure. When that was done, we had another warm shelf for water buckets. The heat was more direct, able to cook certain foods if we wanted, but not nearly as even or enduring. We would need to manage the pump fire more closely than the outhouse. Between the two stoves we had scavenged, the two from the old homestead and the one in the Carroll’s house, we were maintaining five fires at all times. Mom preferred to keep the cooking stove hot. It was much easier and more efficient than starting a new fire several times per day. Dad watched the wood supply, and decided that five fires were too many.
    George stopped by for his daily visit, one bitter afternoon right at the end of September. Martha had taken to