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all intertwined. Do walls talk?” he asked, as though the answer was self-evident. In dismantling these old New England homes, Gould has found evidence of many sorts of stories, and in his way, he keeps these stories alive. Some get told through objects left under thresholds, behind walls, above doors. Gould talked of slavery, of free and captive history, and his work with anthropologist Warren Perry, whose research focuses on slavery in the Northeast, and how slaves hid objects as well as parts of people deep within structures: you might find “a scab, some hair, a fingernail, a tooth.” Once he found a Bible from 1783 ripped in half, one part on each side of the lintel of the fireplace with an enslaved woman’s name written in it. There’s so much that’s not in the history books, he said. As someone whose life’s work has him living in history, Gould straddles now and then. At the time we spoke, his flip phone was 16 years old. “You can’t do this with an iPhone,” he said, lifting his phone in its worn canvas case off the table and dropping it down three feet. Downstairs, in his workshop, he showed his hand tools with pride: a gouge, a plane. We stood and felt the difference between a railing that had been planed smooth and one that had been sanded. He showed the ribbons of wood he’d planed off the rail—long, translucent coils. Layer by layer pulled away, to reveal something underneath. In the basement, cans of oil paint stand stacked on shelves and the sharp singe of turpentine fills the nose. He talked of the corner-cutting that goes on today, the shortcuts, the synthetics, and he’s sympathetic: Custom siding for a client is costing something in the ballpark of $50,000 for the clapboards alone. “Who can afford this?” he said. One can tell he’s a man of high standards, of getting as close to perfection as possible, and he’s aware, too, that perfection is an illusion, that boards and buildings sag, wiggle, bend, as we do, over time. “The work makes you conscious of the end,” he said. “It’s all part of understanding humanity. How we live, how we die, and what we pass on.”
PRINTMAKER ’S INN (GOULD, E X TERIORS); C AITLIN E PHOTO (INTERIORS)
His website (historic-architecture.com) lists a variety of properties for sale, and typically the kinds of properties Gould takes on will run you between $30,000 and $90,000. A listing for a two-story house built in 1750 in Hartford has the specialized language of the work: Drop summers, small joists, deep chimney girts and end beams as well as gunstock posts make up the hewn oak frame. Images from another property, an 1837 Cape in New Hampshire, show intricate molding, scrollwork up a staircase, a shaft of light against beams in the attic. In the listing for the Hartford house, there’s a photograph of an early chalk drawing discovered on the roof sheathing, depicting the house with a stick-figure tree. Such are some of the messages the old houses hold. A ghosty-ness up there above the rafters, stories under the floorboards. When asked if he believes in ghosts, Gould leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve never come in contact.” He paused for a moment. “But I do find myself to be a witness. “My business marks the end of the line for a building,” he continued. And he talked of entering places “that have been abandoned or ruined by ignorance,” and being alone in these old structures, and how that’s when he begins to feel the building. “And you start to wonder, Who was here? What happened in this place? ” Maybe a house had a small room, maybe it feels a little strange: “They didn’t deal well with oddities back then. Eccentricities. Deformities. Incest. So they put them in a room and fed them through a crack in the floor.” He’s seen those cracks in the floor. He talked of a house in Grafton, Massachusetts, standing in its kitchen and seeing light fall on a patch of floor, worn in the place in front of where the sink used to be. “It showed the wear of a woman standing there, who toiled there, worked there, took care of her family there. You tear it up, and the story’s gone.” For Gould, these old buildings aren’t just accumulations of joined wood, walls, and stone. “There’s nothing about one thing,” he said. “Religion, politics, sex, desire, interests, they’re
NEWENGLAND.COM
1/15/21 12:21 PM