11

The Furnace Expert

THE storm Mother had expected set in while she was reading to us. None of us noticed the howling of the wind until she had finished the chapter and closed the book. Then a window blind slammed shut, and when I went out to fasten it I was powdered from head to foot with snow that was finer than sugar.

“Oh, my!” Mother said as she brushed me off. “With snow as fine as this, we’re in for a long, hard storm. We’d better go down and close the drafts and dampers on our furnace, so that we’ll have a gentle fire all through the night and a nice warm house in the morning.”

When we got down to the cellar we found that our fire was far from gentle. A blast of heat rushed out as we opened the door, there was the smell of overheated metal, and a red glow shone from behind the furnace. “Good heavens!” Mother cried, “it’s a wonder we didn’t burn the house down over our heads! I should have thought to tell you about closing the ash pit door as soon as the fire had caught in good shape.”

Mother hurried to the furnace, pushed the ash pit door closed with her foot, and stepped around to the back. “Gracious sakes alive!” she called out. “Just look at this funnel! Why, it’s as red as a berry!”

I got there just in time to see her hand reaching for the handle of the damper. “Don’t touch it!” I yelled. “You’ll burn your fingers off!”

“Don’t you ever shout at me!” Mother said quickly, then added, “But maybe it’s just as well you did this time. Suppose you find a stick or something to turn it with. That’s it! But don’t turn it too much. All the adhesive tape has burned off the holes, and I’m afraid coal gas might escape if we checked it too tightly. It’s deadly, you know, and could kill us all in our sleep. We’ll have to check our fire by opening the upper door and letting a cool draft draw in across the top.”

“Well, if we’re going to get any cool draft I’ll have to open a window,” I told her. Then asked, “With all the adhesive tape burned off, how can we be sure that coal gas hasn’t already escaped?”

“Smell it,” Mother said quickly. She stood for a minute or so, pinching her lips together and sniffing, then she said slowly, “I’m not sure, Son. With a cook stove one smells the gas if she closes the damper too quickly after adding coal, but I’m not sure about a furnace. It seems to me I have read that the fumes from a furnace have no odor, and that one may drowse off to sleep from the effect of them, never to wake again. Open a window, Son! Open them both! Quickly! I can’t be sure, and we will run no risks until we can learn more about it.”

I couldn’t open the windows quickly. They were both nailed tight on the inside and there were storm sashes on the outside. I was just starting to pull the first nail when I heard the clanking of a furnace door and Mother almost shouted, “My stars above! Would you look at this!”

I dropped the hammer and ran to peek over her shoulder, but all I could see was a dull glow at the bottom of the fire box, with a bright red circle of coals around the outside edge. “Why! Why!” Mother said. “We couldn’t have been reading for more than an hour, and here’s our whole bag of coal all burned to ashes. Why, this furnace could ruin us! Fifteen cents’ worth of coal in scarcely an hour! At that rate a single day’s supply would cost us . . .”

“Three dollars and sixty cents,” I told her.

“Oh, you must be wrong, Son!” she said. “It couldn’t be that much!”

“Well, there are twenty-four hours in a day,” I told her, “and twenty times fifteen cents is three dollars, and four times fifteen is. . . .”

“Yes. Yes, that’s right,” Mother said in a dull voice, “and for a month it would be . . . let me see . . .”

“A hundred and eight dollars if it’s a thirty-day month,” I said, “because three times thirty-five is . . .”

Mother cut me off by shutting the furnace door with a bang and saying, “Why! Why! Preposterous! Well, that’s the end of our trying to experiment by ourselves. You’ll have to be up bright and early in the morning. We must find someone who is really a furnace expert, then you’ll have to bring several bags of coal from the store, and go to Medford Square for new flue pipe. I hate to spend so much money right at this time, but with this storm blowing and the ladies coming tomorrow we can’t get along without heat.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to stay out of school in the forenoon,” I told her. I didn’t give her any chance to say “No,” but hurried right on and asked, “Shall I open the windows now?”

Mother didn’t answer me right away, but stood sniffing the hot air for a minute or so, then looked around to where the leaky flue pipe had cooled to a dull reddish-blue. “It seems a shame to waste all the heat in this cellar,” she said slowly. “Even without a fire it would seep up through the floors and keep the house comfortable during the night. No! No! I can’t risk it! I’ll set the lamp right here, so that you can see, and you get these windows open while I air the upstairs room thoroughly. I may be over-squeamish, but only fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

If angels go barefooted, as the pictures in our Sunday School magazine always showed them, I’ll bet they’d have feared to tread around our house by the time I got the windows open and went upstairs. The younger children were all in bed, covered with overcoats and all the quilts and blankets we had. Every door and window was wide open, the house was already colder than the North Pole, and the wind was streaking through in a hurricane, but Grace and Mother were flapping aprons, trying to drive every bit of warm air out of the corners.

It was half-past-five when Mother called me the next morning. Her teeth were chattering when she told me, “I’m afraid we may have overdone it a particle when we left the cellar windows open last night. This morning there is no water in the faucets, and I’m terribly afraid some ice may have formed in the pipes. If we let them freeze too hard they will burst, you know, and the expense of repairing them might be staggering.”

“Do you want me to start another fire in the furnace?” I asked her.

“Good heavens, no!” she said. “We can’t risk filling this house with gas again, and besides, we haven’t enough coal. I will need every particle we have for the kitchen stove. I have a wash boiler of water heating, and just as soon as it bubbles we must wrap all the pipes with hot cloths. In the meantime you will have to close and secure those cellar windows.”

When I’d finished with the windows Mother and Grace were wringing out sheets that they’d dipped in the boiling water. As they went down the cellar stairs with them Mother called to me, “Get right in here and help us. Dip a couple of those bath towels and bring them right along quickly.”

I nearly scalded my hands in trying to wring out the towels, and they were still so hot that I had to keep bouncing them all the way down the cellar, but before I could get them shaken out and wrapped around a pipe they’d be almost cold. Then, too, if I touched the cold pipe with a wet finger it would stick and burn like fire.

After we’d made a dozen trips for more hot cloths Mother said, “There! If that won’t do it, we’ll just have to wait until we can find out how to get this furnace to burn properly. There’s no sense in soiling every inch of cloth we own on these sooty pipes, and I think we’ve warmed them up enough by now to keep them from bursting. Son, isn’t it about time for the store to open? You’d better run along and find out from Mr. Haushalter as much as you can about furnaces, then hurry right back with two bags of coal. I hate to think of keeping you out of school for a half-day, but it may be necessary. Do you think Mr. Haushalter would mind if you were to go to the Square for a new funnel the first thing, then made up the time you’d lost after we had our fire started?”

Mr. Haushalter was late in opening the store that morning, and before he got there I thought my hands and feet would freeze off. “Why, bless my soul,” he shouted when he came around the corner and saw me, “there wa’n’t no need of you shinnin’ out of a warm bed so early this mornin’. Won’t be nobody a-stirrin’ out in a storm like this lest they’re after the doctor, and there won’t be no coal orders to deliver till John fetches ’em in.”

While he was unlocking the door and starting the fire in the pot-bellied stove I told him about the trouble we’d had with the furnace, and about the ladies coming to talk with Mother, and about the rusted flue pipe and the coal gas. Then I asked him if he could tell me how I ought to set the drafts and dampers to get the right kind of fire without wasting coal. He didn’t answer until he’d tossed a cupful of kerosene into the stove and got the clean ceiling all smoked up again. Then he leaned his elbows back on the counter and told me, “Well, sir, an old furnace is about the same sort of a critter as a wife, and there ain’t no more profit in tryin’ to tell a man how to get along with one than with t’other. He has to live with ’em a spell and get used to their critchets and crotchets, and there ain’t no two of ’em has the same notions, nor keeps ’em for more’n two-three days hand-runnin’.”

“Now you take an old furnace in a house with a big chimbley, one that used to have three-four fireplaces to it. Well, sir, apt as not, when the wind’s from the nor’east you got to set your drafts and dampers one particular way. Then come a so’wester, that settin’ would be wrong roads about; you got to set ’em different. But you tell your ma she don’t need to worry none about coal gas with a red-hot flue pipe and the wind a-blowin’ the way it’s been endurin’ this storm. Bless my soul, with the dampers wide open it’s a wonder the draft didn’t suck the whole blessed fire, ashes and all, right on up the chimbley.”

When Mr. Haushalter was all through telling me about furnaces I didn’t know any more about running ours than I’d known before, but I thanked him and asked if it would be all right for me to go for the new flue pipe after I’d taken the coal home. He didn’t let me get through telling him I’d make up the time, but said, “Lord love you, boy, don’t you worry none about the store till you get your ma squared away to home. John and me’ll make out all right, and you’d best to get that furnace a-goin’ ’fore them pipes freezes any harder.”

When I took the coal home and told mother what Mr. Haushalter had said about running a furnace she shook her head and said, “Now doesn’t that sound just like a Yankee storekeeper. I suppose we might as well start finding out about these critchets and crotchets, even if we do have to waste a lot of coal, but I won’t risk it with that rusted-out old funnel. You take three dollars out of my purse and run up to the Square for a new one. Tell the man in the hardware store that you want twenty-one feet of eight-inch furnace pipe and two elbows. I know the length is right; Gracie measured it. And, oh yes, while you’re up there drop in at the coal yard and ask them to deliver us a ton of furnace coal right away. Tell the man we’ll pay for it when it is delivered.”

Whenever Mother sent me anywhere she always told me to run, but I couldn’t have run to Medford Square that morning any more than I could have flown. I had to lean against the wind all the way, and in some places the snow was drifted more than knee-deep. I’d thought that with the wind behind me, the coming back would be easy enough, but it wasn’t. The bundle of flue pipe was bigger than I was, and the wind used it for a sail. I don’t think I’d ever have got home with it if I hadn’t met Al Richardson just as he was finishing his paper route.

Al was the boy I had a fight with on my first day at school, but I liked him better than any of the other boys, and I guess he liked me. If he hadn’t he never would have helped me the way he did that day. The wind was howling so loud we couldn’t do much talking, but when we stopped to rest I told Al about the trouble we’d had with the furnace, and about the ladies coming to see Mother. We were just coming into our yard when the fire bells began ringing, and I shouted, “Whew! I pity the poor people who had their house catch fire on a day like this.”

“That’s no fire,” Al shouted back. “Two-two sounded four rounds is No School. As soon as I go tell my mother where I’ll be I’ll come back and start your fire for you. I’m a furnace expert.”

If Al Richardson wasn’t a furnace expert, he came pretty near being one, and if it hadn’t been for him Mother’s laundry business might never have got started. He was back at our house by the time I’d finished my breakfast and changed back into my working clothes. And by nine o’clock we’d taken down the old flue pipe and put up the new one. As soon as Mother had come down and looked it all over to see that we had it tight, we started a fire in the furnace, but it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped it would. If we left the ash-pit door and the damper in the funnel open it burned like fury, and didn’t smoke at all, but most of the heat went up the chimney or out into the cellar. If we closed the drafts, even part way, the heat would go upstairs, but most of the smoke went right along with it.

I knew Al was doing the very best he could, and I think Mother knew it too. It was nearly half an hour after we started the fire before she came down to the cellar again. She looked real nervous, and her eyes were as red as if she’d been crying, but all she said was, “Is there anything I can do to help you boys? I’m just a little mite afraid that if more smoke comes up the ladies may get here before we have the rooms aired out and warmed.”

“I’m sorry about the smoke, Mrs. Moody,” Al said, “but the heat chamber above the fire box is so rusted there are holes in it, and if we check the fire the smoke goes up with the heat. If we don’t check it a little, the wind is strong enough that it pulls all the heat up the chimney.”

Mother pinched her lips together for a minute, then asked, “Isn’t there anything we can do to prevent it?”

“Well,” Al told her, “we could put in both bags of coal and leave the drafts wide open till the smoke burns off, then send the heat up, but that would waste a lot of coal and be very expensive.”

Mother didn’t hesitate a second. “Do it!” she said. “This is no time to be parsimonious. And if you can get us some good clean heat up there before the ladies arrive I shall be grateful to you for the rest of my life.”

It took nearly two hours and both bags of coal, but the house was aired out and comfortably warm when the ladies came to call, and Al and Mother have been good friends ever since.

He and I had planned to have the coal bin all sealed up and finished by noontime, but we hardly made a start on it. The frozen pipes began to thaw and drip at about the time we heard the ladies ring our doorbell. For a while Grace was able to find us pots and pans enough to catch the drip. But before the ladies left, water was squirting from nearly every joint, and the floor was covered with sooty puddles. Grace and Al and I were trying to mop them up when Mother opened the door from the laundry room.

For a minute or two Mother stood in the doorway, looking around the cellar as if she were taking her last look at a world she had loved. “Well,” she said at last, “it appears that we have quite a task before us . . . and quite an expense. I should have had better judgment than to have left those windows open last night . . . but there’s no use in crying over spilled milk . . . or spilled water. Now let me think where we’d better begin. Ralph, I’ve told the ladies that you’d pick up their laundry this afternoon, and they want it back by Thursday. With this storm blowing it will have to be dried inside, and that will mean plenty of steady, smokeless heat. Al, do you think this old furnace will do it?”

Al opened the furnace door, looked inside, and shook his head. “Not without an awful lot of coal,” he told her. “Those two bags are just about gone now. I had to waste half of it before I could burn the smoke off, so it wouldn’t go upstairs through these holes in the heat chamber. I could go to the pit for some clay, and patch up the holes when the furnace cools off. If it works you wouldn’t have to waste so much fuel.”

“Ummm, hmmmm, that might be a good idea,” Mother said slowly, “and in the meantime we could see what can be done about these pipes. Ralph, do you think the leaks could be mended with adhesive tape? Of course, it wouldn’t last permanently, but it might tide us over until we get this first batch of laundry out of the way.”

Mother and I tried to bind up the leaks in the water pipes with tape while Al tried to plug up the holes in the furnace with clay, but neither of them worked. The clay fell out of the holes as soon as it dried, and the water leaked right through and around the adhesive tape.

Mother was looking up at the leaking pipes when Al called from inside the furnace to tell her the clay wouldn’t stay in the holes. For a minute or two she just stood there, pinching her lips together, then pushing them out and in, as if she couldn’t make up her mind. “Well,” she said, “my father used to say that it’s a good notion to know when you’re licked, and I guess we’re licked as repairmen. Whether we can afford it or not, we shall have to call in a plumber and a furnace man. But it doesn’t seem to me that we should have to bear the full expense; the furnace was rusted out before we came here, and the water pipes far from new. You boys might take baths while I’m getting a bite of lunch ready. Then, Ralph, you might run over to Mr. Perkins’ house and tell him I’d appreciate it if he’d drop by to talk with me a few minutes.”

When Mr. Perkins came he and Mother talked for a little while in the parlor, then she brought him down to the cellar. He didn’t say a word when he came in, but walked all around, looking up at the pipes and whistling in kind of a tuneless way. Then he looked inside the furnace and all around it. “See you put up a new funnel,” he said.

“Yes,” Mother told him. “The old one is right over here. You see it was completely rusted through and filled with soot.”

“Ummm, hmmmm. Ummm, hmmmm.” Mr. Perkins hummed as he stood looking down at the old pipe. Then he looked up at Mother and said, “Now I’ll tell you, Mrs. Moody, I didn’t figure on spending much money to fix this place up when I rented it for fifteen dollars a month. To put a new furnace in here would cost me near onto a year and a half’s rent, and your lease is only for two. How’d it be with you if I’d have new water pipes put in, and just have the old furnace fixed up so it wouldn’t smoke?”

Mother had been looking as sad as I always felt when I had to come home and tell her I’d broken somebody’s window, but she chickered right up when Mr. Perkins said that. “Oh, I would never think of asking for a new furnace,” she said quickly. “This one will be quite all right if it’s just fixed so that it doesn’t smoke so badly. And as for the water pipes, I’d be more than glad to share the expense; it was I who let them freeze and burst.”

Mr. Perkins seemed to be as pleased about Mother’s not wanting a new furnace as she was about his offering to put in new water pipes. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said pleasantly, “the frosting probably sprung ’em, but it’s mostly at the joints where they were pretty well rusted out; I’ll take care of it. How you coming along with your laundry business?”

After Mother had told him that she’d just got her first two customers that morning, and that she’d have to finish their work by Thursday, he said, “Well, well! Then you need things fixed up in a hurry around here, don’t you? I’d best get to a phone right away.” Before Mother could thank him he started away, then turned back and told me, “There’s a shutoff for the water under that heap of rubbish in the far corner. You’d better find it and close it before you’re flooded out.”