I set my wrench down on the dirt real slow, because a live gas line running to a walled-off corner of an empty house is the one thing you never yank at, and twenty years on the tools had taught me that the first move is not to open it but to shut the gas off at the meter and get out from under that house.
So that is what I did. I backed out of the crawlspace, killed the gas at the main, and stood in the yard in the cold and called the county. Not because I knew what was back there, but because I did not, and a stranger tapping live gas into a bank-locked house is a thing for the authorities, not for a plumber with a flashlight.
The sheriff came, and the gas company came, and together we opened that fresh drywall corner. What was back there was no horror, but it was a danger all the same.
Somebody had been squatting in that empty house, a man with nowhere else to go, and he had spliced into the gas line himself to run a little space heater and a hot plate, not knowing he had rigged a leak that could have leveled the block.
He was not there when we opened it, but his few things were, a sleeping bag, some cans, a photograph of a young family. The deputies found him that same afternoon, a laid-off mill worker who had lost his house eleven months back, the very house he had grown up in, the one the bank now owned and had sent me to seal.
He had crept back into his own childhood home to keep from freezing, and nearly killed himself doing it, because a man running gas off a spliced tee is one spark from gone.
Here is where it turned. The deputy who found him did not just haul him off. He knew of a cold-weather shelter with beds open, and a county program that helps laid-off mill men find work. And when word got around town, the church that runs the shelter took the man in and got him back on his feet.
I capped that gas line proper and safe, the way the bank paid me to. But I did one thing more. I left my card with the deputy and told him if that fellow needed a hand once he was working again, I was hiring, because a man desperate enough to heat a house that way is a man who wants to live, and I have always had room on my crew for that kind of grit.
He called me that spring. He runs a truck for me now. Best worker I have got.