Bell Street

They moved the house on a Tuesday, and Eliza stood in the side yard with her mother and watched it go.

The men had been three days getting ready for it. They had dug out around the foundation and run heavy timbers under the sills and laid a road of greased planks and log rollers across the lot, north, toward the far corner where the house was going to stand for the rest of its life. Now a team of horses leaned into the chains, and a man walked backward calling to them low and steady, and the whole house, the house her father had bought the land under and never finished paying attention to before he died, came up off its rest with a groan of old wood and started to slide.

Her mother did not say anything. Sarah Hamilton stood very straight in her good dark dress with her hands folded in front of her, watching the house she had kept for years move away from her across the yard on logs, and whatever she felt she kept it where she kept most things, behind a face that had learned long ago not to give itself away. She had been born in Louisiana a slave and been carried west to freedom by strangers, and she had married Eliza’s father in California before the war, and she had buried him here six years ago, not a month after he had signed the homestead paper that made this ground finally, lawfully theirs. The paper had called him William Hamilton. The town, in the notice it printed when he died, had called him Uncle Billy, one of the oldest residents of the state, known to all the pioneers. Eliza had cut the notice out and kept it.

The reason the house was moving was that the church was coming.

Her mother had sold them the ground for it, the southernmost forty feet of the lot, to the little congregation that had gathered barely three years back and had no building of its own and met wherever it could. They were African Methodist, Bethel, the first of their kind in the state, and the national church had sent a minister out from the East to see the building raised, a careful man named Solley who came by most days now in his shirtsleeves and stood in the dust with the carpenters and studied the plans. On the cleared forty feet the frame was already up, the studs pale and new, the shape of it plain to read against the sky: a small church with a steep gable, a door that would open on Bell Street, a round window like an eye set over where the entry would be.

The house had to move so the church could face the street. That was the whole of it. A house that faced the street kept the church looking out the side, and that would not do, so the house went to the back and the church took the front, and Eliza understood without anyone telling her that this was her mother’s way of leaving something behind that was larger than a house.

“There,” Sarah said, when the men had it settled at last on its new footing at the north end. That was all. There.

Bell Street ran through the part of town west of the river, in Powning’s addition, where the lots were cheap enough that working people could hold them: Italians off the railroad, a Portuguese family, a scatter of others, and the small number of colored families in Reno, which was not large, a few hundred souls in a town of ten thousand, but which was growing, which felt to Eliza as though it grew a little every season. There was no one street they were made to live on, not the way she had heard it was in other places, and no street that welcomed them either. There was only the work, the depot and the laundries and the kitchens and the yards, and the church going up on her father’s ground to give them a place that was theirs by daylight and not on sufferance.

Ezra came up the street while the men were knocking the rollers loose, still in his porter’s coat, having walked straight over from the yards where the Southern Pacific trains came in. He took his cap off when he saw her mother and held it, and Sarah gave him the small nod she gave people she had decided to approve of, and went inside the moved house to see what the moving had shaken loose.

“They’ve got the frame closed in,” Ezra said, looking at the church. “Man on the platform this morning said the windows are coming up from the city. Colored glass. Four of them.”

“I know,” Eliza said. “I heard.”

“Four windows.” He turned the cap in his hands. He had been on his feet since before dawn carrying other people’s bags up and down the length of the platform and smiling at people who did not always trouble to look at him, and she could see the long day in him, but he was looking at the church frame the way a man looks at something he has decided to believe in. They were to be married in the fall. They had not settled where they would stand to do it, but she knew now, watching him look, that it would be here, on this ground, under whatever roof these carpenters got over these walls before the cold came.

“My father used to say the pioneers all knew him,” she said. “Uncle Billy. Like he was a joke they were all in on.” She had not meant to say it. It came up out of her the way things did when she was tired and the day had turned. “He came out to the Comstock when there was nothing here but the mines. Before the railroad. Before any of it. And they printed that when he died, that everybody knew him, and then they went right on not letting his people into the front of the theater.”

Ezra did not answer that, because there was no answer to it, and he was a man who did not waste words filling a silence that did not need filling. He put his cap back on. Down the lot the carpenters were arguing pleasantly about a rafter, and the minister Solley was pacing off something with his heel, and her mother’s voice came from the moved house, calling her in to help lift a wardrobe that had walked itself half across a room.

Eliza stayed one more moment. The afternoon light was coming level down Bell Street now, and it caught the new wood of the church and turned it gold, the whole raw frame of it, the gable and the empty window over the door where the colored glass would go, and she tried to see it finished, tried to see her father’s ground with a steeple on it and a bell if they ever raised the money for one, and could not quite, the way you can never quite see the thing before it is built. But the door was framed and it faced the street. That much was already true. She turned and went in to help her mother with the wardrobe.

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