Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (9 page)

The words for measurement were fluid, when we weren’t talking exact numbers.
Take a blade off this
, she’d say, passing me a piece of two-by-four. The kerf of the miter-saw blade—the width of the groove made while cutting—is an eighth of an inch.
Half a blade
means a sixteenth, but it’s an eyeball job: leave the tape clipped to your pants.
Less than half a blade
means almost sanding as opposed to slicing, using just a fraction of the teeth to chew off the wood.
Skosh
is the measurement she used most of all.
Just a skosh more
, she’d say. I usually took that to mean not quite a full blade, but more than half. When Mary wanted the scantest part removed, she narrowed her eyes and held up her thumb and index finger so that almost no light got through the space between and she’d say, “a millisecond, take a millisecond off this.” I loved it when she talked about distance in terms of time. A millisecond meant barely anything at all because you can’t see a second, or that’s what I took it to mean. Builders use the phrase
cunt hair
, or CH, as an unofficial term of measure. “Take a red CH off that board.” It’s a thirty-second of an inch. Mary did not use the phrase
cunt hair
.

When the Russian woman came out to the back porch with her son to get a look at our progress, Mary suggested she be careful of the wasps’ nest in the gutter above their heads. A volley of Slavic syllables and the woman hurried her son back into the kitchen.

“How are we going to get this done?” I asked over lunch.

“Like we always do. One piece at a time.”

I still didn’t buy it, and had visions of creatures moving through the wall during the night.

Watching Mary work, I tried to file everything I was learning into a cabinet in my brain. I found myself experiencing bolts of superiority. Walking down Mass Ave in Harvard Square, in the cereal aisle of the grocery store, sizing up passersby, I’d think:
I bet he doesn’t know how to dismantle a window frame; I bet she doesn’t know that kitchens and bathrooms require drywall that’s green and more resistant to moisture and weighs more than the regular kind
.

In “The Student,” a short story by Anton Chekhov, a young man walks through the woods on a grim cold spring evening, discouraged and pessimistic. He muses that “the same leaky thatched roofs, ignorance and anguish, the same surrounding emptiness and darkness, the sense of oppression—all these horrors had been, and were, and would be, and when another thousand years had passed, life would be no better. And he did not want to go home.”

He stops at the home of two widows, a mother and a daughter, to warm himself by their fire. It’s Good Friday, and he gives them a summary of the Gospels, the moment when Peter betrays Jesus. The older widow weeps; the younger looks as though she’s trying “to suppress extreme pain.” The student leaves the women and it occurs to him: if these women were so moved, “something that had taken place nineteen centuries ago had a relation to the present—to both women, and probably to this desolate village, to himself, to all people.” And what joy he feels. “The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.” An “unknown, mysterious happiness” overtakes him.

The horrors don’t disappear (a thousand years from now there will be ignorance and anguish and leaky roofs), but the despair in what connects us shifts to joy. What the student feels, I think, is a simultaneous presence—a total being there—and a dissolving into something so much larger than his own self.

There were moments, pounding a nail with a hammer through wood, when body synched with task, when I became palm and hammer handle and the motion in my shoulder and my elbow, and the only thing was the movement,
bang bang
, and the connection of the hammer head and the nail head,
bang
, and the sliding of the metal through the wood. Like the student, fully present and also dissolved into something beyond myself, into the history of hammerbangs.

When I dissolved into the motion, walls vanished, all the divides and barriers. An echo sounded, a big bang that reverberates forward and back. We’re all of us less of what we were each second, just the way roofs will leak ten centuries from now. We’re all of us inoperable at some point. And when the walls lift, when we are linked with what came before through the simplicity of swinging a tool through space, or sharing a story, we escape for a moment the prospect of facing the great wall of indifference. And instead of fear, grave dread, despair, it’s possible to find calm, and joy.

It didn’t happen every time I held a hammer. Often it was just bent nails and bruised fingers. Most times it was work. But when it was right, the experience was a tapping in with the motion before and after me, and the threads that connect us started to glow. A different sort of door is opened, one that, for glimmering moments, gives access to immortality.

When I walked down my old street, or along the cereal aisle, and thought myself exceptional for knowing what sixteen-on-center means, I should’ve known better. It’s not that I knew more than anyone else, it’s that I knew something that so many other people have known and know and will know.

By four-thirty in the afternoon at the Russians’ house, we finished framing the window. The shingles were back on. The wound was closed, the bugs were poisoned. It was sealed and mended, the rot eradicated and replaced with fresh strong wood. Solid and stable, inside and outside were back to being divided the way they should be. This verged on miraculous—that this was possible to do in a day. I stood below Mary up on the ladder and raised my hands.

“I can’t believe this!”

Mary laughed.

Annie Dillard in a poem writes:

That there should be mahogany, real, in the world,

instead of no mahogany, rings in his mind

like a gong—

I know that gong. It rang in my mind that afternoon. That this should be possible, real in the world—what a simple thing. It wasn’t miraculous, was it? Prying a house apart, removing the rot, chopping pieces of pine, and making the wall strong again. This was a matter of knowing and tools. Everyday this happens. But the fact is, the truth is, it was done instead of not done. Instead of a hole in the air, there was a wall. Dillard locates the recognition of the commonplace, a firm and welcoming embrace of what’s solid, ordinary, all around us. “Reality rounds his mind like rings in a tree,” she writes. We find the real: in rings that mark the years, in gongs that echo, in the framing of a window, the solid stuff of everyday. In love, too. Of all humans, that you exist instead of not, that I’ve found you. It’s not a miracle, is it? It’s the total lack of abstraction, wholly actual. And maybe it’s closer to a moment of grace, a noticing that takes on the weight of ceremony, and connects us to the world.

We packed the van that afternoon, loaded the saws and the ladder and lumber. On the drive home, Mary talked about the wasps and how bees in the winter stay warm by huddling in their hive and vibrating against each other. She said: “Isn’t that incredible?”

Chapter 3

SCREWDRIVER

On screwing and screwing up

M
onths accumulated. Experience accumulated. Our second fall together—shortened days and dropping temperatures—took us to a small deck job in a Somerville neighborhood near I-93. The street was densely packed with triple-deckers. The old man who ran the auto-body shop at the end of the block sat on a folding chair outside his garage, watching cars. Dust had collected on the shoulders of the tuxedos in the window of the formal-wear-rental store nearby. And I never saw any customers head into the scuba-diving shop on the corner. Car bumpers in driveways along the street wore Brazilian flag stickers.

The building we were working on signaled change to come: all clean concrete lines and well-appointed roof decks. It looked as if torn from a photo feature in an architectural design magazine. And it stuck out like a hammerbanged thumb from the rest of the neighborhood.

Four doorways along the side of the building led into high-ceilinged, track-lit spaces, each with a small front porch, a stoop with a few steps. One of these little porches had been wrecked. A resident had driven into it, and given how short and narrow the driveway was, it’s a mystery as to how the person could’ve demolished the deck, and the car, according to a chatty neighbor, so thoroughly.

Mary and I were bundled in hats and wool socks and vests. The morning was cool and we talked about the seasonal signpost of seeing your breath for the first time, as we had that morning. First we removed what was left of the old decking, pried and unscrewed with crowbars and ratchets. We heaped the old wood to the side. The day was dry and bright. The sky, the deep blue that comes in fall, pulled everything into sharper focus. The orange extension cord snaked bright along the top of a hedge and over to our saws. A Calderesque mobile dangled high and swayed gently in someone’s kitchen window, red shapes, industrial and delicate both. Seagulls landed on the roof and flew away again. We made quick work of the framing: four long joists across, two steps down, easy math. We secured the joists to the outer frame, hammered galvanized nails into the braces, and fastened it all together with long thick lag bolts. We cranked and cranked on the ratchet to make them tight.

Mary and I were in synch that morning, anticipating each other’s moves, our hammer swings strong and on target, each of us focused on work with few words exchanged. This was a new pleasure, something we’d now achieve on certain days, a rhythm and connection to each other and the work. We didn’t react so much as sense, as though riding the swells and dips on a river, an intimate flow. The sound of the pounding of the nails rang out, we tightened down the bolts, mirror images of each other, as the sun moved across the sky and slowly warmed the morning. We pulled off layers of clothes as the work warmed us. Language was an afterthought to our attention, almost inviolate, on the movements of the body and the action of the tools.

For the rebuilt deck, we were using Brazilian walnut the rich red color of freckles. When I sliced through it with the saw, it smelled like cinnamon, molasses, a little bit like chocolate. Other names for Brazilian walnut are embuya, imbuia, canela-imbuia; somehow those words sound the way this wood smells. Ipe (pronounced ee-pay or eye-pay depending on whom you ask) is another name for it. It’s called ironwood as well, for good reason. Brazilian walnut sinks in water. To lift a board is to feel immediately that this is not like the weight of wood we’re most familiar with. Feather-light cedar is twenty-two pounds per cubic foot. The mighty oak’s density is forty-three pounds per cubic foot. Ipe’s is sixty-six. It’s so dense we had to use a special sharp drill bit to predrill a hole for every screw used to attach the deck planks to the frame. We paused when the shank of the bit got too hot drilling through the ironwood. Tiny twists of smoke rose from the holes with a sweet smell like marshmallows, and something acrid behind it, a sharp and unfamiliar scent, nothing like the homey smell of brushfires in the yard or chimney smoke; the smell itself signaled the fight the wood put up against heat. We blew on the bit to cool it off, waved the drill through the air to lower the temperature of the metal. We’d already broken one bit. It got too hot and cracked off in the hole. When I removed the remaining piece of bit from the drill, it fell and landed on my forearm, bare skin with sleeves rolled up. It left a drill-bit brand, a red burn mark painful for the rest of the day.

At lunch, we talked about the wood, its lifespan, how resistant it is to wet and bugs. Mary lamented all the synthetic decks she was starting to see. The synthetic wood can be cut like regular boards, and sprays plastic instead of sawdust.

“I get it, but who cares if it lasts until the world ends. I’m a carpenter, not a plastic worker.”

We were sitting on the ground by the deck we were building. We ate lunch early. Mary’s day started at four-thirty in the morning, sometimes earlier, and she never ate breakfast—just a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with cream and extra sugar. Every morning she took her big dog to the Fells, a 3,400-acre reservation one town over. That time of year, it was dark for her walk in the woods. She came home, answered e-mails, did errands for the day, and then started to work. We took lunch around eleven-thirty, sometimes earlier. The length of her mornings, her lack of food, and her ability to function astounded me; I’m not out of bed for five minutes before I’m eating breakfast.