My Southern Journey (27 page)

The young reporter asked my mother what she said to the baby, but it took my mother a moment to answer.

“I never had a doll,” my mother said, not looking for sympathy, just stating a fact. A child of the Great Depression, she had had almost nothing nice, nothing, in a house crowded with children, to call her own. And now there was this thing, this beautiful child.

“And I just kept telling him, ‘You’re mine.’

“ ‘You’re mine.’ ”

My grandfather, the master carpenter, worked every day he was physically able to rise from his bed. Sometimes it was a roofing job, or framing up a house, or digging a foundation, but sometimes, to be honest, he was nowhere near a hammer. He augmented his carpenter’s pay by making liquor. When he came home, sometimes smelling like sweat and sawdust, and other times smelling like sour mash and wood smoke, he would reach down with one big hand and snatch up the baby and sit him on his knee. Sometimes he would talk to the boy like he was grown, about floor joists and shingles and such, and sometimes they both went to sleep in the
straight-backed chair, the child on his chest. When he was a year old, the baby began to go through the pockets on my grandfather’s overalls, curious, searching, always busy, so my grandfather took to hiding a piece of soft candy there, for the boy to find. I like to think something fine passed between them, there in that chair.

And then, when my brother was not yet 3 and I was not yet born, the white whiskey that my grandfather had drunk most of his life took him from this world, and then there was nothing, really, except those tools. A toddler does not remember much, truthfully, although people, being romantic, like to say they can. But I swear, something passed between them, maybe nothing more than plain genetics, like a fine tenor voice, or a strong nose, or big feet. But something broke off the old man and stuck in the mind of the boy.

By the time he was walking, he was working, putting together junk and taking it apart and putting it back together, to make it slightly better junk than it had been before. He made wagons, and rafts, and tree houses, and then bicycles out of abandoned pieces. I called them Frankenstein bicycles, some of them so ugly you would leap off the thing when you saw a girl coming and hope it’d get swallowed up by the weeds. But they rolled, man. They took us down the road.

He could build anything, and I was his unskilled labor. We built dams, and stopped rivers … well, creeks, but when you are 3 feet tall anything bigger than a roadside ditch is a raging torrent. We built boats … well, plywood rafts, and sailed them around the world or at least as far as the depth of Mr. Paul Williams’ cow pasture creek would allow us to go. We built treehouses that reached into the clouds … or at least eyebrow high on a tall man. We built clubhouses where we threw lavish parties … really just a shed, but it was straight, plumb, and watertight. We sat there with our cousin and listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival, and sharpened our pocketknives. I guess if I am being truthful I let him sharpen mine. “A dull knife ain’t no ’count,” he told me. He sharpens mine still, because I did not draw from that blood the skills a man needs.

In construction projects, I toted wood.

I sawed crooked, at a slant, ruining the precious lumber we scrounged.

I bent nails, on, it seemed, every swing. I hit my own fingers
every fourth or fifth lick, and once, with my big brother looking, not only missed the nail but missed the
board.

And in time, in all construction or mechanic jobs, I became the boy who held the light, when the sun sank in the middle of a project and we were intent on finishing before our mother chased us into the house. A chucklehead could hold the light. But even in that, I was inept. I got bored, and shone the beam on every other place except the board Sam was cutting, or the head of the screw he was feeling for in the dark. Come to think of it, he never hollered at me, much.

In time, in junior high school, I fell in love with books, and I abandoned my family’s legacy almost completely. I tried, now and again. As a young man, I came into possession of a great Saint Bernard dog named King, big as a Shetland pony. I had to build a fence but wire was expensive, so I borrowed some one-by-eights from behind my Uncle Ed’s house and commenced construction. I sank some creosote posts, nailed on some two-by-fours, and then tacked the one-by-eights onto them, to make a respectable 6-foot-tall fence … respectable until the first windstorm, when the whole thing began to lean drunkenly toward the house in some sections, and away from the house in others. I rode by there not long ago to see if it had survived, but I guess the new owners of the house were ashamed of it.

In New Orleans, I tried to build a shelf in my office and gouged out holes in the wall so big you would have thought someone was looking for a time capsule.

In Tuscaloosa, I destroyed whole walls just trying to hang a picture. The contractor said if I would promise not to try to put any more nails in the wall, he would promise not to write a book.

In Miami, I built bookshelves too big to get through the door when I moved. I fled in the night.

In Fairhope, after a thousand-year flood sent water into a basement that had been bone-dry since the Johnson Administration, I went into something very much like a rage and took a shovel to some wet drywall. It cost $5,000 to fix what I did. It might have been too much tool for the job.

“A shovel?” the contractor said.

“Yep,” I said, and did not try to explain. I am not sure I could.

My brother looks at my projects with an undeniable pity, but he has tried not to be unkind. He listens to my ideas for home improvement, and offers sensible suggestions, like, “Don’t.”

Still, I like looking at those old tools. They are our history, my brothers and mine, our legacy. The rich folks have their Confederate sabers over the mantel. These tools, that rusted roofing hatchet, that old box-end wrench, is our crest, our insignia. My brother Sam hits the nail head every time, dead and true. Even my little brother, Mark, born years after my grandfather’s death, has the ghost of my grandfather in him, can sight down a board and tell you, to a fraction, how much it is warped, how far it is off true.

Me. Well, surely I inherited something.

I am told, now and then, the old man was a good storyteller.

STUCK FOR GOOD

I
guess the best way to tell the story of how I glued myself to the wall of my house, how such a thing could even happen, is to tell it chronologically. Otherwise, I might appear stupid. But if I walk you through it, tiny misstep by tiny misstep, you will come to see that such a thing could happen to almost anybody, even a smart person.

It began, as all great disasters do, with a plausible theory.

It began with the simple thought,
I can fix that.

I have a rambling old house in Fairhope, Alabama, made of 50-year-old cypress that has turned hard as iron. It all sits on ancient bricks shaped by men who are only ghosts now, and is shaded by long porches on the front and back. It’s not a fancy house but one with sheltering trees and rocking chairs and screens to keep the stinging, buzzing things at bay. The bamboo is out of control, the hedges have not been pruned in this decade, and a 3-foot snake—a copperhead with an attitude—suns himself at the corner of the house and retreats into a crack in the foundation when he sees me coming with a shovel. If I am barehanded, he just looks at me. I swear he knows. There is a raggedy swimming pool in the back, and I like to float there and listen to the wind in the branches of the pecan trees, but there is a yellow jacket nest in the ground close by and, no matter how many generations of them
I kill, they return every year to chase me out of the water and across the yard. I am told it is hilarious.

The point is, it is not a perfect house, but it is perfect for a man like me, a man who hates new things and pretends to be a carpenter. I have a real carpenter, a real electrician, and a real plumber, and that is fortunate. If I tried to plumb, to twist a wrench on a pipe, I would drown myself. If I tried to mess with wiring, I would become a human torch.

But carpentry? How much trouble can you get into driving a little-bitty nail?

I do not permit myself power tools, beyond a drill, so mostly I hunt for jobs that involve only hammering and prying, and occasional sawing. You have to work hard at it to maim yourself with a handsaw. You have to be dedicated to drill yourself to death. But I digress. One day, I got to lookin’ at a chair rail that ran around the living room walls.

That bothers me,
I thought.

It bothered me more, the more I looked at it.

After a week or so, I came to hate that chair rail.

I can fix that,
I said inside my head.

No, you can’t,
another voice said, a voice that we will refer to as common sense.

But it is not a very clear voice and is easily ignored.

So, I got out my framing hammer, and started yanking. The man who put that chair rail up meant for it to last through The Rapture, but after yanking, pulling, cussing, and questioning that man’s parentage, I had the chair rail boards on the floor … and immediately saw why it was there in the first place. Every 3 feet, there was a hole, about 3 inches wide and 6 inches deep, in the painted wooden paneling. The holes had been cut for obsolete light switches, and instead of patching them, the way a master carpenter such as myself would have done, the man whose lineage I had questioned chose to hide them with the 6-inch-high chair rail.

Well that’s unfortunate,
I said in my head.

You think?
Common sense said.

I told that voice to shut up.

I sat for a minute and stared at the holes.

I can fix that.

Common sense had left the building.

I got some wood putty, cut some patches out of thin scrap wood, and commenced. I knew I could not cut the patches precisely to
fit the holes, which were irregular, odd shaped. So I planned to just place the patches inside the quarter-inch-thick paneling, glue them in place, and later fill the shallow depression, the quarter-inch, with wood putty, sand, and paint. The problem was, there was nothing, no stud, no beam, to fix the patches to. The logical step—at least inside my mind—was to angle the pieces, which had been cut slightly larger than the hole in the walls, inside the hole and bring them up flush against the inside of the paneled wall. I would first put glue around the edge of the patch, facing the inside of the wall, and pull it flush and let it dry. The problem was, there was nothing to hold to on the patch in order to secure it in place as it dried. But I am a genius. I put a small, thin screw into the center of the patch, safely away from where the glue would be, which gave me a little handle to manipulate the patch into place and a way to hold it flush as it dried. Once it had, I would carefully remove the screw, fill the now-shallow depression with the wood putty, which is the finest invention since onion rings, and sand.

What, as they say, could go wrong?

It actually worked, once, twice, three times. I got sure of myself. I was a carpenter, after all, the son and grandson of capable men.

I held the fourth patch in place till it was good and dry. I had seen in the first patches that the glue sometimes ran, but I was careful not to get any on me, and I thought I had done the same on the fourth patch. I really did think that.

When I tried to turn loose, I couldn’t. A glob of glue had run unseen from the side and secured my hand not only to the screw I was using as a handle but to the patch of wood itself. I was glued to the patch, the patch was glued, apparently forever, to the wall, the wall was nailed to the iron-hard cypress of the house, the house was fixed to the brick foundation, and the foundation was dug into the earth. We were one.

I can fix this.

At first I just tried brute strength. I pulled, and twisted.

It hurt.

But it held.

That was my own damn fault. Some men would have carefully selected the glue they used on such a delicate operation, but when it comes to glue it seems to me that the job of glue is to stick and you ought to get the kind that sticks the most and the best. No one ever walks up to the counter in the local hardware store and says,
“Excuse me, but do you have any glue that just sticks a little bit?” I had perused the glue aisle, which is a whole lot more complicated than you’d think, and settled on Gorilla Glue.