Read Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter Online
Authors: Nina MacLaughlin
Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (13 page)
“The doctors told me it’d take eight months to a year to heal,” he said as he pulled the tape across the top of the cabinets. “You know how long it took? Three months. I was back in three months. If you know your body, you will heal. You will get through. You have to know your body.”
I liked that we were talking about bodies, about knowing them, something immediately physical and intimate. I repeated something my wrist doctor had told me about pain, how it can be a good thing sometimes. He let his tape whip back into its holster as though I’d said something he’d been waiting to hear. And he stood with his back to me, that strong back, and said, “It shows you’re alive.” He turned to face me, looked me in the eye and said, “We need to know that sometimes.”
And then he winked before turning again to measure where the sink would go, and it was too much and too smooth, but I smiled despite myself and my stomach dropped into my hips in that warm pulse, and I looked forward to him coming back with the granite slabs. How far these tiny moments of heat can go, a flash of the eyes, an elevation of the atmosphere, these brief pulses of shared intimacy, of energy passed back and forth. Nothing more than a conversation, less than a minute of talk. I wasn’t going to fuck this man on the smooth cold granite stone he’d bring, but I thought about it.
The next week, granite cut and ready to be slid into place, he came back to the kitchen. I flashed eyes and a smile at him like I’d done a thousand times at bars, to boys and men, friends and strangers. And he aimed it right back and said good to see you. It was nothing, the most basic interaction with another human, but the energy was there, that flash back and forth. And in that moment, I came to know the flash was just as strong, that power and its return. All it required was accessing the energy I had when I wasn’t in ragged sneakers with a chisel in my hand. He might’ve flashed eyes at anyone, likely did, this curly-haired countertop man, but it did the job of showing me that even in work mode, I could aim the energy and have it returned. And some sense of fullness returned, an embodiment—physically and mentally—of Woolf’s conception of woman-manly.
T
here is screwing, and there is screwing up. I did so much of it. Mistake after mistake. After the kitchen job with the countertop guy, we moved on to a job in Lexington, where the crosswalks are strictly enforced and tour guides in minutemen costumes lead history buffs around important historical sites. We were there to redo the first floor of an old carriage house—new floors, walls, kitchen, bathroom, some new windows, lots of doors and trim. It was a big job. The place edged up against an old graveyard filled with tiny headstones from the 1700s. One section of wobbly graves described an almost perfect circle, which created an additional layer of haunt and gloom. Every hour, one of the minutemen came around and showed his tour group a grave right by a big window where we were slamming in new floors. He wore full colonial-militiaman regalia. The thought of these guys climbing into their cars at the end of the day, placing their triangular hats on the seat beside them, made me feel sad. There’s something lonely about existing in two times. One damp afternoon, the tour guide was holding a can of Mountain Dew. What struck me wasn’t the anachronistic clash. It was more a sense, out of nowhere, that you shouldn’t drink soda in graveyards.
Mary had me trim the inside of a bedroom closet, an odd trapezoidal shape on an uneven floor against a bowed wall. I puzzled through how to get the correct angle of cut for a piece of baseboard that would line the section that ran from the side of the closet door to the corner on the right. This is a piece you would see if you stood inside the closet facing out into the bedroom. This was not a walk-in closet; it was a regular closet that you’d reach in to grab your button-down or your corduroy dress off the wire hanger. Unless you were hiding in there, there would be no reason ever to see this piece of wood.
I was trying to make the piece flush against the floor, flush against the wall, and flush against the other piece of trim it bumped into in the corner. These are always the goals with trim. Some days are easier than others.
I walked from the closet to the garage where we’d set up the saws. Over and over I traveled this path as I cut and re-cut the pieces of trim—across the new hardwood floors, through the kitchen, past the small bathroom under the stairs, and out into the garage. Frustration flared. Who cares how this piece fits? No one will ever see it. Such a waste of time. My motivation faltered—oh, it’s good enough like this, isn’t it, with a gap between the wood and the floor? Leave the wide seam there in the corner, just slop it up with some extra caulk.
I made half-blade cuts, shaving off pieces of the wood, one angle degree at a time. I took a degree off the lower edge of the right side where it would hit the other piece of trim in the corner. It fit snug and tight. The floor bowed so that the right and left sides of the piece knocked back and forth like a seesaw. I lay on my side, legs out the closet door, and ran my flat fat pencil across the length of the board following the rise and sink of the floor. The line on the wood that resulted showed me where and how much the floor swelled and where I needed to remove the wood. Shave and shave, and finally it fit flat.
“It takes years to get good at this,” Mary said as I walked past her toward the saws with my piece of trim, shaking my head.
When two pieces met in a perfect seam, when the pieces followed the bowed swell of the floor just right, gapless, steady, when it pressed in to fit tight and right, I exulted. The simple joy of it!
Whether Mary was trying to teach me a lesson that day, I don’t know. Part of me thinks she knew it’d be tricky for its bows and angles, and trickier still for its out-of-the-way-ness and won’t-be-seen-ness, a test of technical skill as well as something mental. Or maybe it was just another thing that needed doing, and she had more important projects. She heard me swearing. She saw me walking back and forth. She stayed quiet, let me puzzle my own way through. I got pieces wrong. I’d make one extra slice and take a little too much off and render the piece useless. Our board stretcher was always at the shop.
But if she had come to the closet, seen the fat gaps and teetering pieces and said, “Yes, to hell with it, it’s a closet, who cares,” I don’t know that I’d have felt much relief. Maybe in the short term—
thank god I’m out of that closet
—but it’d have been cheating. If you are able to maintain focus and attention for a piece that will not matter, that will rarely, if ever, be seen, if you are able to get that right, the rest of the work—the stuff that does matter, that will be seen—will be elevated.
During a trip to or from the saws in the garage, something shifted. Impatience changed to purpose, to mission mode. I went from being faced with a tangle and ready to throw it across the room to being able to see both ends and following the strands out of its snarl, slow, patient, precise, until one smooth string could be held and stretched, glowing between two hands. This will be right. I will make this right.
Were the eventual owner to look inside the closet, I’d bet he or she would not notice if it were done well. Done badly, though, with gaps and slop, it would come into focus and raise questions about the quality of the rest of the work around the house. An uncritical eye learns to see what can be wrong, what’s done sloppily, lazily, without effort.
Trim on the inside of a closet
does
matter. It might someday belong to a messy teenager who heaps sweaty shirts from soccer practice, old socks, damp and sandy beach towels, ragged school notebooks, so that piles hide the trim. So what? The pieces will disappear. That’s what’s supposed to happen. It wouldn’t have kept me up at night knowing I left a thick gap that required a smeary spread of caulk to cover up. But the satisfaction, the quiet sense that I got it right, that it mattered, made it worth it. And whether Mary had intended it or not, it made me glad to have done it.
“Finished,” I said to Mary, who was framing windows in the main room.
I didn’t notice when she put her tools down and walked into the bedroom where I’d been. But when she came out a few moments later, she gave me a thumbs-up and nodded her head. She walked back to her tools and said, “You want to start trimming the dining room?”
I made my way with the tape to a corner by a window that overlooked the graveyard.
There’s no backspace key in carpentry, no control+Z. You cannot refresh a miscut piece of wood. I took for granted the undo-ability of labor in my old job. A couple quick clicks and anything could be fixed. Correcting for the errors in carpentry involved a new set of brain skills, ones that do not come naturally to me, and ones I was so grateful to be gaining.
I botched a simple chiseling job working on the same carriage house. I needed to carve out the space in a door where the hinge would go. I’d traced the outline of the hardware on the side of the door and began digging in with the chisel, aiming for an even one-eighth-inch depth. The wood curled off like ribbon underneath the press of the chisel edge, paper thin, and fell to the floor without a sound. I liked those curls so much, I kept going. Mary came in as I straddled the door between my legs, pressing off another shaving of wood.
She placed the hinge against the space I made and shook her head. It sat too deep by an extra eighth.
“This isn’t going to work,” she said. And she gave me a container of gray-brown wood filler to smooth into the space I’d hashed so I could start again and try to get it right.
But look at those curls
, I wanted to say.
Look at how right they are
.
Smearing the gunk into the notch felt like a corruption, like I was defiling the pure wood with something chemical and artificial. The goop dripped and stuck and stank. It did not cooperate. I smeared it this way, back, diagonal across the small space where the hinge was meant to go. Mary came back in and leaned over my shoulder.
“It’s not icing,” she said. “You’re not working with cake.”
I said okay, and as she walked away she said, “Sometimes the most important thing is knowing when to stop.”
M
ary and I slipped into our third year together. Jobs presented themselves—bathrooms, kit-chens, decks, bookshelves—and we took the work. The rhythm of the days felt natural now, the rhythm of the jobs, familiar. Fall inched toward winter, and the heap of job debris in Mary’s backyard showed the history of our months and months of work. Every time we finished a job, we unloaded bags and bags of trash from her van onto this pile on the side of her yard by the fence. It was now the size of a subway car.
“I’ve got to get rid of this before it snows,” Mary said.
She called the demo guys, the same ones who took down her chimney, to come remove the pile.
On a morning in November, the three men arrived, dad and his two sons, thudding out of their truck. They stood by and assessed the pile: metal pipes, strips of drywall and cement board, a box spring, a pallet, two-by-fours, two-by-tens, wire backing to an old tile wall, wood scraps of varied length and thickness.
“We’re looking at five tons here,” said the leader, smiling under his thick mustache. Five tons struck me as an impossible weight for three men alone to load in a day. The blonde son, the lean one with the empty eyes, climbed on top of the pile. He stood there, hands on narrow hips, king of this trash mountain. He bent, picked up a group of long boards, thick nails spiking out, and tossed the wood into the back of the dump truck with a metallic clamor. And so it began. Once they started moving, they did not stop. Wood thunked on the bed of the truck. Drywall pieces broke in dusty fragments. Trash bags flew like feather pillows.
The father once again let his sons do most of the hefting and heaving. They shouldered and tossed while the boss discussed his loading system, practiced and refined over years of experience. Flat and wide go first into the deep bed of his truck, long planks next. Stack them neatly, one direction. Metal in another corner; it doesn’t go to the dump—there’s big money in scrap metal. The odd stuff and strange shapes go after that, with heavy bags on top to keep it all in place on the road. When one of his sons placed a bag of lath, dusty and full of rusty nails, upright, the boss chided him. “Hey, hey. No,” he said. And he explained where it should go and why. He said it without anger or impatience. He just wanted it right and wanted his son to know why it was right.