The Boatmaker (24 page)

The foreman laughs, puts the pipestem between his teeth and speaks around it. “The pay's not much, either. Barely enough to hold body and soul together.”

“It will be enough.”

“How do you know? I haven't named an amount.”

“It's enough.”

“Alright. It's enough. So are you ready? Now that I've made it sound so appealing?”

The foreman removes his pipe, knocks the bowl against his hand and lets the ashes float to the pavement. He takes a last look at the man of Small Island, more than a head shorter. Then he turns and goes through the open door, the boatmaker following him into the
compound. At the center is a beautiful townhouse with a tapering Seventeenth Century façade. Clustered around the townhouse is a warren of workshops and storage spaces where men in canvas jackets, some short, some long, move quietly and purposefully as they practice the art of making furniture held together by nothing more than the affinity of wood for wood.

As the foreman warned, the boatmaker begins at the very bottom of the ladder that leads to mastery. Day after day he does no more than carry wood, aged and sawn, from the places where it is stored to the shops where the journeymen and masters shape it. He carries the woods of the Mainland—oak, pine, three kinds of walnut, spruce, maple, cherry—along with woods from far away, which he has never seen before: rosewood, ironwood, hornbeam, teak.

While he is becoming familiar with these woods, the boatmaker learns to find his way around the workshops, storage areas and outbuildings, all organized according to a plan centuries old. Through this tangle Sven Eriksson moves smoothly, smoking, cleaning his pipe, making notations in his notebook, overseeing everything without raising his voice or appearing to oversee anything. After the boatmaker is admitted to the compound, the foreman says nothing to him for weeks, seeming, in the buzz of the workshop, to have forgotten hiring him.

From time to time, the hum of work pauses as a finished piece of Lippsted furniture is loaded onto a wagon, wrapped in big quilted blankets, like a racehorse after a workout. At the moment of departure the men in the compound stand for a moment and bid Godspeed to wood they have lived with for years: as logs, sawn boards, then pieces planed and sanded, fitted together before receiving many coats of oil or varnish and standing to cure before shipping.

As a particularly beautiful piece is loaded onto a delivery wagon, the men watching in the yard can only imagine the richness of the city or country houses, on the Mainland or in Europe, where these pieces will be installed. Sometimes the drivers of the wagons, dark green with no identifying marks, return with stories of the places the furniture has gone. Over the decades, many have gone to the two royal palaces: the Winter Palace in the capital and the Summer Palace fifty miles to the north, in the fertile plains around the port of Christaborg.

But beyond the occasional tale, not much is said in the compound about where the furniture goes, about the people who buy it or, for that matter, about the outside world in general. The boatmaker is surprised at how little loose talk there is among the workmen of the House of Lippsted. There is none of the muttering about the Jews
he heard when he worked on the construction crews, and which he has heard in the background since arriving in the capital. Perhaps that is not so surprising, given where he is. Still, he notes its absence as he is called from workshop to workshop, carrying boards, pausing to watch pieces being fitted, carrying away excess wood, sweeping up sawdust or the curled shavings that remind him of the sidecurls of the men on the streets of the Old Quarter.

As he moves through the compound, he wears the canvas jacket he was given on his arrival. It is not a long one like the masters wear but a short jacket without pockets, signifying that he is not yet authorized to carry pencils to mark the wood or tools to shape it. In fact, the boatmaker is not authorized to use any tools at all, except the big pushbroom and his two Small Island hands.

He is surprised to find that being at the bottom of the ladder, mostly invisible, quite insignificant, does not make him angry or make him want to drink and fight. After all, he is not a boy but a man—and a carpenter who has been told since he was small what a wonderful touch he has with wood. To compound his insignificance, the pay of an apprentice is, as the foreman warned, a laughable amount meant for a boy still living with his parents. Most of the other apprentices are younger, some the sons of Lippsted craftsmen. If the boatmaker didn't have money in the cache
under the green floorboard, he would be eating potato soup for every meal and washing it down with water.

In spite of his low station, the boatmaker is, in his way, content. He eats well. He has a place to lay his head down at night. And six days of the week he is at the compound at seven o'clock, ready to work. He has never worked in a place where so much reverence is paid to wood, where each piece—from a board of precious African rosewood to a plain pine plank—is seen for what it holds within. This reverence makes it easier to bear being an apprentice in a short coat, easier to work without the obliterating fire of alcohol as the days shrink, darkness expands and winter conquers the sky. The first flakes are yet to fall, but the air already smells of snow. Those who have warm beds are grateful.

Soon the first snow dusts the city; it will not be long before the ground is covered. As he walks to work in the morning or home at night, the boatmaker can imagine what is happening on the New Land: the harvest in, livestock in the barns, the ground turning hard and cold, life narrowing down to reading and prayer as the winter solstice approaches.

When he thinks about the New Land, it is always with a small note of fear. He is sure Father Robert is still looking for him. He doesn't know whether the priest
wants him to return and resume his role as Number IV in the New Christ or whether he would like to hang the boatmaker on a telegraph pole for all the New Land to see. In either case, he needs to avoid anyone from that community, especially Neck and the priest. He is surprised they haven't found him yet. He assumes one day there will be a knock on his door in the middle of the night and Father Robert and Neck will be there to march him away.

As he thinks it over, day after day, he concludes that Crow and White must not have told the priest where he lives. Perhaps, he thinks, the thieves never spoke directly to Father Robert. It is a reassuring thought. Still, he never feels completely safe. He has repaired his sealskin bag and it rides on his chest under his jacket at all times, much of his money inside. If he sees Father Robert or Neck—or anyone he recognizes from the New Land—he will turn and run without looking back.

As winter begins, the boatmaker moves up one short rung on the ladder that leads slowly to mastery of the Lippsted craft. In addition to carrying boards and sweeping, he is now allowed to make the pegs that hold much of the furniture together. Many of the joints require no fastenings: They are just one piece of wood fitted cannily into another. But some require wooden fasteners, pegs
carved from the same wood as the furniture itself. To make these pegs, a journeyman first turns out dowels of a specified diameter. Then the dowels are sawn to the right length. Only after they have been sawn is the boatmaker allowed to take an old wicker basket filled with the raw pegs and use a knife and sandpaper to round them into the correct shape.

From time to time Eriksson looks in on him, but most of his contact is with the journeymen who make the dowels. These journeymen never praise. They tell him what needs improving. Anything done correctly is passed over in silence. It seems the road to being a master in the House of Lippsted is endless: Praise would be nothing more than time wasted on an infinite journey.

The boatmaker attends to their correction without protest. He does not need to be corrected often—and never for the same fault twice. As he works, he makes a discovery that pleases him: His gift is more than something that flows directly from the wood into his hands. When he entered the compound, he was drawn to being part of a tradition. But having learned everything about his craft on his own, he was afraid he could not begin at the bottom and learn from others without destroying his gift. Once inside the walls he finds this is not so. He is learning from the others—and his skills are improving.
Like the reverence for wood he sees around him, it makes his status as an apprentice easier to bear.

The days grow shorter. His apprentice tasks now begin and end in darkness. Each trip from one building to another requires the boatmaker to button up and make his way through drifts of snow, feeling with his toes for solid footing. He knows from experience that if he falls, there will be little sympathy for his bumps and bruises and much concern for the precious wood.

One day, as he carries a basket of his pegs through the falling snow to be inspected, the main gates swing in. A carriage clips and rattles through, drawn by a pair of glossy black horses with plumes of the same shade rising from their foreheads. The carriage, a two-wheeler, luggage strapped to its roof, pulls to a stop, and the heavily bundled driver steps down. He opens the door and extends a hand to a small, elegant woman with a fur over her shoulders, her hands in a muff of the same fur. Holding his basket of pegs, the boatmaker sees that it is the woman who lectured the workingmen of the Mainland about money.

Rachel Lippsted is concerned about her footing. She does not look up to see an apprentice in a canvas jacket holding a basket of pegs, snow melting on his thinning hair and thick mustache. A man with a dark beard edging his jaw steps out of the carriage behind her without a
hand from the driver. He is compact and wiry. He and the boatmaker could be brothers, though this man's hair and skin are darker. He wears a black overcoat worth more than the boatmaker has ever been paid for any job. The man of Small Island carries his basket across the yard through a curtain of white flakes to a workshop where he finds the others buzzing with the news that Jacob Lippsted and his sister have returned to the townhouse after many months in Europe.

CHAPTER 18

After the boatmaker sees Jacob and Rachel Lippsted, they do not appear in the courtyard for many weeks. But the two of them are in his mind as he lies on his narrow bed, smoking and watching the moonlight move across ancient flowered wallpaper.

Even in the brief moment he saw them, something emanated from Jacob Lippsted and his sister that adds to the puzzles the boatmaker has been accumulating since he arrived on the Mainland. On the New Land, as he prepared for the task Father Robert offered him, he had let those questions go. But now that he is back in the capital—and working in the House of Lippsted—his questions have returned full force, with Jacob Lippsted and his sister at the center.

As they stepped out of the carriage into the falling snow, there was something powerful about them. They
looked infinitely well cared for, as if they had never had a material need that could not be satisfied by lifting a hand, if not at once, then with little trouble, the outcome assured no matter where in the world the object of their need was to be found. And yet the boatmaker thought he also saw a tentative quality, as if the power on which their luxury rested, though generations deep, could not be fully relied upon. In these elegant, luxuried creatures the boatmaker thought he saw a wariness that he never saw in Father Robert. The priest never stopped to worry about the obstacles that lay before him: He strode into the world with complete assurance, always ready to deal the first blow.

Lying on his bed smoking, the boatmaker finds that his feelings for this pair, particularly the sister, are strong and complicated. Perhaps these feelings have been germinating ever since his visit to the Royal Mint. He feels a desire to protect the slender figure with the dark curls, along with a desire to overwhelm and take her. And now he works in the compound where she lives, glimpsing her in comfort and luxury, while he wears the short canvas coat of an apprentice, carrying baskets of pegs for the furniture her family's business makes. He pushes his feelings down and crushes out his cigarette. Then he concentrates on falling asleep, on what he must do the next day to continue learning the secrets of the Lippsted craft.

One evening as he sits on his bed he remembers what his landlady told him about Crow and White's belongings. It's a cold night, one of the longest of the year. The streets are quiet. A soft layer of new snow covers everything. Underneath it are the crusted layers that make up the history of the season. The boatmaker gets up and looks out his window down at the alley, at the cobblestones covered in white. The alley is empty, not even a cat or a rat scurrying through the snow.

Down there, he thinks, is where White bashed him with his huge fists. But why didn't they find his cache? He still doesn't understand that. Surely it was his money Crow was asking about while White beat him. And if they had searched, they would have found it. Yet apparently they didn't bother to look very hard. The question of why they didn't tear his room apart to find his money takes its place among the riddles, once left behind, that are returning with a new intensity.

Suddenly, he needs to see Crow and White's belongings—immediately. Somewhere in this house is everything that remains of the two men he thought were his friends. When he last saw them, their eyes were wide, staring. Perhaps they were held down and strangled in this house. That might account for the commotion the landlady said she heard in their room the night they
disappeared. It would have taken more than one man to strangle White. The huge man would have fought desperately to prevent them from hurting Crow.