Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (6 page)

S
pring opened into summer, and Mary and I tumbled from job to job. We made built-in bookcases for a kitchen in Dorchester. We took down a wall, mended cabinets, and patched a ceiling in a just-bought fixer-upper in Jamaica Plain. We installed trim and painted, painted, painted for a southern belle in Cambridge. (“Oh darn, I think I want
atrium
white instead of
linen
white. Could y’all do the front hall, spare room, and parlor again?”) And we redid a bathroom for a widowed grandmother who had dozens of giraffe figures decorating her small condo in Somerville. I learned piecemeal, skill by skill as the job required.

I was delighted by the variety of what we were up to, the speed at which we moved from one small job to the next. But Mary was frustrated. She bemoaned the state of the economy—no one had money for big projects, so she was forced to cobble together odd jobs and fix-it gigs instead of the larger and more lucrative renovation carpentry work she loved and was qualified for. A day’s work here, a few days there, ten days, then out and on to the next thing. Here’s your back deck, your new windows, your wall. Mary talked with longing of apartment overhauls, kitchens redone floor to ceiling, work that would keep us at a place for six weeks, a couple months.

During a tedious stretch of days painting, Mary and I sometimes went an hour or two without exchanging a word. It was a comfortable silence that suited both of us—I think we were both grateful not to feel the pressure of filling the time with chatter. She would roll the paint, I would cut in with the brush along baseboard edges, in corners, where ceiling met wall. The phrase
Be the work
surfaced on my thoughts, some pop-Zen saying picked up somewhere. I tried to lose myself in the spread and flow of atrium white from the paint can where it looked like a tub of vanilla milkshake, to the brush bristles, onto the wall. Wooden paintbrush handle in my hand, the paint spread creamy, thick and slick, a silken gloss that pulse-by-pulse dried to coat the wall.

Other hours we chatted nonstop.

“You know that post I put up on Craigslist? I got three hundred responses. Three hundred.” This was not the first time she’d mentioned it. “Can you believe that? In less than twenty-four hours. I was getting e-mails from guys twenty years in the trades.” She slopped her roller in the tray. “Sign of the times.”

She talked about her daughter Maia, putting tomboyhood behind her and hanging posters of pretty boy bands on her walls.

“It sure makes time go a lot faster, having a kid.”

“How so?”

“It makes you way more aware of how much time you have left.”

Maia is the biological daughter of Mary’s wife Emily and their good friend Henry, who lives downstairs from them with his husband in that big pale yellow two-family in Winter Hill. Four parents, one family, one roof.

“Are there other family arrangements that you know of like this?” I asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“That kid must get a whole lot of love.”

“I can’t imagine how people do it with just two parents,” she said.

All five of them used to live together in a single-family home. When they bought the place they’re in now, divided up and down, Maia referred to it as the divorce.

Mary’s wife Emily is a social worker with a beaming smile and tattoos of cranes and ivy on her shoulders. She teaches fitness classes and competes in triathlons. They’ve been together for more than twenty years, and when they talked on the phone, Mary’s voice rose a pitch, there was sweetness and affection. “Hey, hon. Love you.” It was a good thing to see, this tough broad with paint in her hair and a nail between her teeth being so soft and affectionate even after so many years together.

Mary is thirteen years older than me, a good distance of time—not old enough to feel like a parent, and not close enough in age to feel like a peer. Without trying, without any sort of superiority or condescension, in the natural way she has, she gave the sense
you can learn from me
. She didn’t have it all figured out, nor did she claim to, and that, too, made her the ideal sort of teacher, someone who is also learning still.

But our conversation often went back to her craving for bigger jobs.

“I want something I can sink my teeth into again,” she said, rolling paint on a back-bedroom wall with a bay window overlooking a narrow Cambridge side street. “All this Mickey Mouse shit”—it was her phrase for amateur stuff—“I’m losing my mind.”

Not me. My mind was consistently being blown.

We spent a week building a back deck on a dead-end street in Somerville. After demoing the existing one, crumbling and rotted, we dug four post holes with a post-hole digger, a dual-sided shovel with two long handles that you plunge into the earth in a two-handed combination of throwing and stabbing. Once it’s in, you pull the handles apart to bring the shovels together to grip the dirt, then lift the load out of the hole and pile it nearby. It took hours and made my shoulders ache. Each hole had to be four feet deep, which is a long way into the earth, a depth that brings coffins to mind. Four feet is regulation depth in the northeast to support a structure like a deck; that’s the depth that reaches below the frost line, Mary explained. In winter, soil freezes from the surface downward. Low temps creep in and down, the way on certain days in February the cold seems to seep below the surface of your skin and deep into your blood and bones. As water in the soil turns to ice, it expands under the earth, and presses in at whatever it comes up against with magnificent force. Tens of thousands of pounds per inch can shift a fence post, a beam, a building. When, come spring, you see a fence post that’s risen from the earth, uneven with its partner posts, heaving is what’s happened. The freeze makes what’s under the surface shift and heave, like a chest rising with a big breath in the lungs, so it’s important to dig fence-post holes below that frost line. I’d known none of this, had never considered dirt and water and cold and their relationship to deck posts, all the action underneath the surface, the stuff we never see.

I started to notice stoops and decks and porches everywhere I went. I looked for the greenish tint of pressure-treated wood. It used to be impregnated with arsenic and other chemicals to repel water and prevent rot. When Mary told me about the arsenic, I started holding my breath as I chopped pieces for our deck. Pressure-treated wood is heavier than regular wood, and has a strange cold dampness to the touch. As I moved about my little world, I saw decks everywhere, with potted geraniums and hanging ferns. Twinkly Christmas lights twisted around railings. Balusters had bikes locked to them and waterproof cushions softened seats. Decks everywhere, each with wood that had been measured and cut by someone, and we were building one.

It was like standing front row at a parade of things I took for granted. Stairs, for example. Useful for moving between floors, for reaching your front door, for heading underground to catch a train to another part of the city. Codes regulate height and depth. We all know the feeling of a stair rising higher than the one before it, catching our toe on its lip; or more jarring, in the descent, stepping down with the expectation in your every bone that a solid thing will be there to meet you, to take your weight—and it
not
being there. Or it comes up too soon and sends a jolt through the ankle, up into the knee, the ugly vibration of impact. We’ve all felt that falling feeling right before sleep, the plunging feeling where we take a step and miss and make a fast thrash in our sheets. Muscle memory is fast formed—our bones know where the next step should come—and it’s important that steps answer those expectations. Rules for stairs go back a long way.

In
De architectura
, his ten-volume, first-century-BC treatise on architecture—and astronomy and anatomy and mathematics and color (“I shall now begin to speak of purple, which exceeds all the colors that have so far been mentioned both in costliness and in the superiority of its delightful effect”)—Vitruvius proposed, “The rise of steps should, I think, be limited to not more than ten nor less than nine inches; for then the ascent will not be difficult. The treads of the steps ought to be made not less than a foot and a half, and not more than two feet deep.” In the eighteenth century, French architect Jacques-François Blondel suggested in
Cours d’architecture
that the length of the human pace should dictate the rise-versus-run ratio, the ratio of step height to step depth. American builders closer to our own time subscribed to a useful approximation: that the sum of the rise and the run should total about seventeen and a half inches. Now, a stair tread, where you place your foot, has to be at least nine inches deep. And the riser can be no more than eight and a quarter inches. No space between two steps can vary more than three-eighths of an inch.

Looking at the deck and the skeleton of the stairs, I was grateful that Mary would be the one to do the math to figure out rise versus run. The phrase alone raised ghosts from school geometry class, my sullen self chanting in my brain
I’ll never need this
the whole way through—a rationalization for my lack of effort and ability. Mary determined the height of the rise between the steps and depth of tread, and how many steps we’d need to get from the platform at the height of the back door down to the ground. I cut planks for treads and risers and couldn’t believe what was happening. Three days ago, if the man who owned the house had walked out his back door, he would’ve fallen out and maybe knocked his skull on a deck post. Now there was a platform and seven stairs down to the ground. We hadn’t built the pyramids or the Parthenon, but this was something. When we’d fastened the final post cap to the deck, I climbed the stairs, grinning, going from ground up to the landing by the door, up those seven steps. I clomped on them, tested their strength.

“Can I jump on it?” I asked Mary.

“Knock yourself out.” So I jumped hard on the platform. Solid. Nothing shook. It took my weight. Mary reached up from the ground and hopped to grip the side of the deck and did a pull-up. “Pretty sturdy.”

We’d built a way to get from a door down to the ground, a passage and a place to pause, to pile groceries, to stomp snow off boots on the way inside. What a thing!

From there, we bounced to the next job and the next. Each one, over some months, aided in lifting the curtain that had obscured the physical world closest to me. Now, there were doorways, shelves, and walls. Wood, glass, plaster, paint. The awareness, this new noticing, had an intense effect on my sense of my own body and place in the world. I wasn’t just my own human sack of flesh, inhabiting mental space. There were walls around me, and thresholds. There were windows that let in light and sound, traffic noise, rain; panes that showed the shifting shadows as the sun described its curve across the sky. I knew now how many pieces of wood framed those windows and doorways, how they were put together. None of this stuff had occurred to me, I’d had no occasion to consider it, and now, with every day at work, with each new task and practiced act, it was being hammered home.

It’s a truth of travel that we see so much more when we are away from what we know. Removed from home, we notice: shadows and birds and sirens, the shifting color of the sky, the peak of a certain roof, the way a set of stairs descends toward a river bank. We notice: the color of squirrels scattling up a tree; the sound of chickens squawking in the road; the smell of burning garbage, of low tide, of baked bread. We’re blinded by the familiar. The sirens, smells, roofs, and sky, they’re all there, too, in the place you know the best. At home, awareness, open-eyedness, requires the effort of attention. The carpentry work, in these first stages, was like being in a foreign city. All this newness, it was a defamiliarizing of the most familiar: my kitchen cabinets, the doorway to my bedroom, the bathroom tiles.

W
hen we had a lull in work, a few days between jobs, we sometimes spent the day working at Mary’s house. It was in a steady state of half-done projects and mile-long to-do lists. One or another room was always in a state of renovation and change. One morning involved the demolition of her chimney.

The demo men showed up at nine fifteen.

“These guys are something else,” Mary said as they pulled into her driveway.

Rain threatened and the wind was strong. The guys thumped down out of their huge dump truck. The three of them, two young guys and the boss, surveyed the chimney with heads back, looking up at the roof. It needed to go away, from the third-story roof on down into the basement. Inside, one wall needed ripping out, three others needed to be stripped to the studs, and a ceiling needed to come down. These men were here to do it.

“All right boys, head on up,” said the leader, a legend in the trade, a refuse collector and disposer, a demo-god. He had curly hair and a handlebar mustache. His big belly looked hard to the touch and his fingers were thick and dirty. Scars, gashes, and scabs, some pink, others red-black, marked and cratered the skin of his calves and shins like dark dried fruit. He talked quickly, and when he laughed, often and out of nowhere, he wheezed and his eyes darted.

His two sons worked with him. Son One, in his early twenties, looked nothing like his father. He was lean to the point of scrawny, narrow of shoulder and back. His pants fell low off his non-ass. Mary mentioned the time he had finished an all-day demo job for her and then done one-armed pull-ups off the side of the truck. His large eyes were blue, and blonde curls hung over his face and beard. He looked like a folk singer or a cult leader. And when he climbed out onto the roof, sledgehammer over his shoulder, he looked like some kind of thunder god, a thinner Thor. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

Son Two, a little older, looked more of this earth, like a street tough in all the high-school movies. Built like his father with a softer tummy, his face was smeared with dirt. Chubby cheeks made his eyes small. He wore a Scally cap and purple sweatpants. Mary relayed a story about how he had once drunk a case of Molson and accidentally shot himself in the hand.