Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (14 page)

After detailing his loading process, he talked about the merits and drawbacks of area dumps.

“The place over there, you don’t want to go there. You know why? Because they don’t care. There’s going to be nails on the driveway. Do you know what I mean? That place, I’m telling you, it’s a mess, and what you do is you risk a flat, you risk a puncture every time you roll in there. You don’t want to go there.”

Another place nearby takes anything, he told me.

“For them, it’s all about the weight. They’ll take it all,” he said. “Anything. I’m talking about dead bodies.”

“Come on,” I said.

He looked at me and his face was grave. “You think that doesn’t happen? You think that doesn’t happen? It happens.”

Five tons did not turn out to be an impossible weight for three men to load in a day. In less than an hour, every board and bag had been loaded onto the truck, Mary’s backyard emptied, the earth raw underneath.

The boss waved his arms at the load.

“You see all that? Tomorrow it’ll be five hundred feet underground in Bangor, Maine.”

It felt like I was being let in on a secret I didn’t want to know. Trash in a grave, dead bodies at the dump, the remains of our jobs under the ground, decomposing, leaching into the earth, doing damage impossible to see, the same damage it does to our bodies as we work. A familiar feeling of unease returned.

A
s the jobs grew familiar, so did the fears that rolled in before I fell asleep—about the dust and spores and toxins we were exposing ourselves to in the work. Eyes closed before sleep, the last things I often saw in the darkness behind my eyelids were dust particles, shifting in the light, dancing in the air in a way that spoke illness and menace. When I coughed I’d think,
Here is the first sign of the tumors growing on my lungs
.

Mary thought of me as a worrywart and teased me gently about my nerves. That was fair. She told me to take a look at the guys we worked with who never wore masks either. She also indulged my fears, which was a great kindness. When we worked at her basement workshop, we’d sand outside if it wasn’t raining. She’d often mix mortar for tiles because she knew how I hated the dust. No doubt she wished that she worked with someone less fearful, because precautions can slow things down. I worried for her, too.

She made the argument, half jokingly, that smoking protected her lungs from worse poisons. She rarely wore a mask. “Nothing’s going to get in there,” she’d say. “Why do you think I’ve smoked for all these years?”

Part of me bought this magical thinking.

I envisioned her lungs coated with something black, shiny, cratered, firm to touch. And in microscopic vision, I imagined particles sucked in, tiny pricks of fiberglass, arsenic bits from the pressure-treated wood, formaldehyde from the plywood glue, mites of cement that start to cure when mixed with water. I saw these bits float into her blackened lungs, drift around, and bounce off the black, entry denied.

No protection is gained from the tacky tar in her hand-rolled cigarettes. Despite knowing this, it made me feel like my own pink lungs were even more vulnerable, lacking that black shield.

I had the habit of reading warning labels on all the products and materials. Somewhere in the safety section of almost every label were the words:
Contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer
.

“Good thing we’re in Massachusetts,” Mary would say.

She talked of doing some insulating on a small project. She said she was going to break down and get a respirator. “I can’t do it anymore, with the insulation. It gives this prickly rash around my mouth.” She joked about getting me a hazmat suit and I told her I would like that very much.

“See? You don’t need to worry,” she said. “I get a rash now. Your body has a way of telling you when there’s something wrong.”

I didn’t say anything about the body’s ability to keep dark secrets, too.

Once, on a late summer afternoon, a few months before the November morning of the demo men, we sat and watched birds dip and wing in the garden of a client’s backyard during the break. Celine, the owner, joined us outside. She remarked how I always wore a mask and Mary never did.

“You’re being exposed to so much. You can’t even know what you’re being exposed to,” she said. She made her own yogurt so she could store it in glass containers instead of the store-bought plastic tubs that leached chemicals.

“Something’s going to get me,” Mary said. She shrugged off the issue with her usual no-nonsense nonchalance. But I sensed a deeper sort of resignation. She was acknowledging that
yes, someday I’ll die, I do not know how or when
, but there was something dismissive, too—
perhaps a polar bear will eat me, or a man-eating slug
. She pinched the burning tip off her cigarette and mashed the ash with her foot. “As long as it’s not my lungs. That’s the one thing I don’t want.”

What? I wanted to shake her. You don’t want it to be your lungs? Be smarter. Smoke if you want to smoke, but wear a goddamn mask! A shyness followed my initial disbelief and frustration—it was an honest, vulnerable thing to say, and it surprised me.

I wondered if the dust clouds ever appeared to her in those moments before sleep. I wondered if she worried about her cough. Wood and mortar dust and fibers and smoke and tar, these were Mary’s pursuants, the things that will catch up with her, the things that will get her in the end. She takes them in. Maybe it’s not a death wish, but something closer to the sensibility Joseph Conrad captures in “The Secret Sharer.” A man throws himself overboard and escapes the ship; his crew think it suicide. “Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank—but that’s not the same thing.”

T
he demo guys left that morning, and the empty space and the raw earth in Mary’s yard marked the unofficial end of the season. From mid-November until the end of the year, work slowed to a halt. People do not want chaos and mess in a time of chaos and mess; hammerbangs do not make the best accompaniment to Thanksgiving feasts or Christmas cheer. Mary and I tied up a few things in her basement, tucked tools away, slotted boxes of screws into bins, swept and neatened. We stood chatting and I held the Jorgensen wood screw clamps, tightening them and loosening them as we talked, pedaling my hands to make the wood tips press together, tighter, tighter, then release. Made of maple and steel, the clamps are tightened by cranking on the handles as though pedaling a bike with your hands. They are powerful, able to eliminate even the smallest space between two pieces of wood when tightened. The power of them, how they erased space, came as another surprise—so simple yet so strong.

“Nothing lined up for the next little bit,” Mary said.

I pedaled the clamps, tightening again. “Call me when you need me.” I hung the clamps on the pegboard wall, let them dangle with the rest of the tools. The word comes from the ancient German word
klam
, which meant to press or squeeze, and the tight-closed shells of the bivalve, like hard lips locked in silence, got its name from there.

I anticipated the slowing, the early winter hiatus. It was a pause for breath, with a quick odd job here or there, until things started up again in earnest in the new year.

We parted ways that day, wished each other happy Thanksgiving and good luck for handling holiday mania, and said we’d talk before Christmas.

That winter brought huge snows to Boston, more inches every week. The new year arrived and I waited to hear from Mary about the next big gig. But no call came. I left messages on her voicemail:
Hey Mary, just checking in, seeing what’s cooking these next couple weeks. Give me a call
.

I got no word back.

The days were short and full of snow. High snow banks narrowed streets, and great battles for parking spots flared across the city. Traffic cones and folding chairs marked saved and shoveled spots.

I read and wrote and took long walks in the snows—there are worse ways to spend the days. I stayed out late, said sure, I’d love another beer. I had nothing to get up early for, after all, didn’t need my body to be rested or my head clear.

I languished, got softer. Muscles strong from carrying saws and swinging a hammer and pressing on a drill weakened, got slack from lack of use. Days disintegrated.

Fallow periods are something to savor. Times of low productivity can be one of life’s luxuries. Though there might be no outward proof of action or making—nothing written, nothing built—such time is hardly wasted; puzzles are explored and problems solved in the head. And these quiet times give me a chance to scrape off the emotional muck that accumulates and coats my brain over time. Fields are left fallow, after all, to make the earth fertile in future seasons. Just because we can’t see the cornstalks or the swaying wheat doesn’t mean that nothing valuable is happening there underneath the surface.

In a poem called “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver writes of strolling through fields and kneeling in the grass, of being “idle and blessed.” “Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”

She wrote the poem in 1990, before most of us had cell phones. A couple decades later, in our frenzy of scramble and dash, who has the time to be “idle and blessed”? Who but poets fall down in the grass? Strolling the field may seem lazy, but think again, Oliver says. Who knows what might happen in the stillness? Who can guess what you will come to know eye level with the grasshopper? And she gives us the most crucial reminder: “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” That’s the grass. That’s the grasshopper and the fox and the flower. That’s you, too, and me.

We can’t clutch every moment, but it is good to step back and consider our plans. To kneel in the fields, to laugh with pals at the bar, to look at the swirling grain of the floorboards. This is not original advice. But for those fallow periods to feel both purposeful and luxurious, they need to be bookended by accomplishment, by doing and producing.

But this pause in carpentry was not a fallow period. It did not have that fertile feel. The ability to spend nine days on something that should’ve taken two, or one day on something that should’ve taken three-quarters of an hour, provoked a feeling of uselessness. It dredged the question, again and again,
what now?
I did not know when work would come again, if work would come again, and I allowed the fear to keep me from translating this quiet time into something productive or worthwhile.

T
he more you do, the more you get done
. I don’t remember when I learned the adage itself, but I know when I learned the truth of it. My dad lost his job in 2001, a few months after I graduated from college. I no longer lived at home, but my young brother relayed what the scene of this sudden unemployment looked like. My father, at the computer, logging hour over hour playing backgammon and solitaire, reading online fishing forums, scrolling idly. A constant clicking from the office, which in the evenings was punctuated with ice cubes plinking against the glass as he took another swallow of Scotch.

There were efforts at first. Résumés dusted, updated, sent off, lunches and coffees with old friends. Eventually those efforts waned. Determination seemed to evaporate. Perhaps finding a suitable job at age fifty-five seemed hopeless, perhaps the initial lack of response signaled that it wasn’t worth trying. From my twenty-two-year-old vantage, it didn’t register as hopeless in my father. It looked like settling in, and it was strange and frightening to see. If shame and fear existed—motivators both—they’d been pitched into a deep hole in the dirt far below the frost line and buried there under dark earth so that any evidence of either was darkly gone, worm-chewed and composting, inaccessible even to him.

“What are you up to today, Dad?” we’d ask.

“I’ve got a dentist appointment at three,” he’d say, and we’d wait for more. With nothing else to do, a teeth cleaning was a day’s duty. He put on a suit for his appointment, carried his leather briefcase with him, let the world know he was a man who wore an eighty-five-dollar tie. At the time, it struck me as a lie. He tricked other people in the waiting room, crinkling through dated issues of
Time
. He tricked the hygienist and the dentist as they flossed him, had him rinse and spit. He tricked the driver stopped at the light next to him on the drive back from the appointment. I knew the truth, or thought I did, with the indignation and confidence of someone who’d been paying her own rent for less than a year. The tie, the briefcase, these were dishonesties meant to make people believe that this successful man of business was headed straight back to the office after his teeth cleaning.

There’s so much I didn’t know then. It wasn’t until after I left my job at the newspaper that I realized how significant a part of my identity working there had become; it was how I understood myself and made myself understood to other people.
What am I now?
I wondered, jobless. And that was after less than a decade. My dad’s working life had spanned more than thirty years—that’s a hard habit, and a hard self-conception, to break overnight. I couldn’t imagine the terror of losing your job (and part of your understanding of yourself) at that age. No wonder he did what he could to maintain it. No wonder he put on a suit and carried his briefcase and selected from the hanger a favorite tie. Maybe it wasn’t a lie after all, not a trick, but a continuation of how he understood himself, and wanted to be understood.

Months passed. My father still wasn’t working. My mother said quietly to me over the phone: “He’s always
around
, he never leaves the house.” She started waking up at four-thirty in the morning to have time to herself in the house alone before going to work. Picturing her in the predawn darkness, showered and dressed, alone with her coffee, puts a sadness in me I don’t have words for. “It’s the best part of the day,” she said.

Isn’t this a problem?
I worried.
Shouldn’t he be working?
I asked my mother:
Do you ever say, hey, hi there, you need to work?
She didn’t want to nag him, she told me. She said if she asked him once, she wouldn’t be able to help herself but ask everyday. This seemed like an error to me. Even with what little I knew then about relationships, joblessness, I knew enough to sense that this was the wrong approach. Why not summon enough willpower to ask once, and then ask again sometime later? Not nagging seemed like a good impulse, but doesn’t someone who spends the hours of his day shifting backgammon pieces across a board on a screen deserve a bit of a nudge? And what if you exchanged the word
nag
with its connotations of henpeckery and the worst of tiresome wifehood, with a word like
challenge
, or even the neutral
ask
? She never asked him how his job hunt was going, or if he was having any luck, or if he’d considered this or that. There was neither encouragement nor pressure. Neither
I’m rooting for you
nor
Figure your shit out fast
. He took her silence as a lack of interest, and his voice was pinched with blame when he talked to me about how
if only Mom had asked me about it
.