Coleman

A month before the freeze I got in touch with Coleman to get his help with a large Mulberry tree which had died in the yard of my fourplex. It was beautiful wood for lathe work and I hated to see it go to waste. I had known him for years, though we had never hung out. We were cohorts, men spaced evenly through a community who interacted more through women. We had watched each other age over the years. He had a reserved manner that was turning gruff in a not unpleasant way. His voice had always been sonorous, a quiet undercurrent below steady eyes. He used few words and those he used were often peculiar, as if he read more books than he had conversations. 

When he met me at my fourplex, he was not in a hurry, and took the time to explain my trees to me. I found this irritating because I knew all about trees, having been an arborist, and was accustomed to bestowing my knowledge upon others. I took it as a disability on his part that he could not detect this, and figured he spent a lot of time alone. As we worked, I found him more and more interesting. We spent about an hour levering sections of the trunk into the perforated bed of his 1980s toyota pickup with a maasdam come-along, anchored to parts of that bent when the ratchet advanced. He told me later one of the logs fell out during the trip back to his place and he had to repeat the process on the side of Menchaca Road. 

He was already out fixing things when I asked him to help with plumbing, so what I offered was really just camaraderie and scheduling services. Like David, he disliked spreadsheets and I detected the edge of a bad relationship with technology. I couldn't see him signing up for the city-run warming shelter rides program or Meals on Wheels or any sort of institution-mediated service. If a specific person needed his help though, he would work like a one man Amish barn raising. 

I found a job near Coleman that had been put on the sheet by a mutual friend named Nelson. I was anxious for him, it can be exceedingly strange to meet someone for the first time during a crisis. Dogs may be loose, people on edge, buildings unsafe. To enter such a world and take enough control to improve it, one has to carry one’s own reality with them. It's like being an ambulance driver without the ambulance. I feared it would leave a bad taste in his mouth because I was questioning the whole endeavor myself. That evening, I called him to hear how it went. He told me the story in a voice that was slow and profound in a way that could have borne either good or bad news. 

He had arrived at the woman’s apartment and met Nelson, who introduced him. The woman was old, schizophrenic, traumatized, and dehydrated. Her water was turned off at the curb because a pipe had burst somewhere, pooling along the floorboards from inside the walls. The job today would be to be with this woman in her world, to “hold space”, in addition to getting her water running. 

He located the leak, patched it, turned the water back on, and then, as would happen to all of us again and again, at house after house, found other leaks and turned the water back off. He cut holes in walls and found ugly little copper smiles. He didn't have what he needed to repair the pipes and there was little chance he would be able to find it at the hardware store. He walked down the block and chatted up the professional plumbers working at multiplexes. I sucked in my breath when he said this, as I feared that professional plumbers would be our undoing when they learned what we were up to. They had some extra copper pieces, and it turned out some of them needed parts that Coleman had rolling around the back of his truck. There was no turf here, not now. It was just people helping people helping people. 

It took the entire day but he was able to leave the woman with cold running water. He said it had been one of the most beautiful, fulfilling days he had ever had. 

This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.