High Plains Tango (12 page)

“You play football or anything like that?”

“No. I don’t have time, and I’m not interested anyway.”

“Then you’d be available on Saturdays and after school during the school year?”

Carlisle’s pulse rate escalated twenty points. “Yes, sir.”

Cody returned to sifting through the pile of long, slender pieces of wood, speaking without looking at Carlisle. “I watched you mowing a lawn across the street from where I was working about six weeks ago. Thing that impressed me was how you finished up on your hands and knees, clipping the few blades of grass your mower couldn’t reach.”

He looked up at Carlisle for a moment. “Finishing is what it’s all about, in carpentry .  .  . and in life, for that matter. At the other end is the phrase that injects cold fear into the bones of all home handymen: ‘Prepare the surface.’ Most people don’t prepare the surface correctly, and that’s another aspect of good craftsmanship and life in general. So whether you’re doing life or carpentry, if you prepare the surface, carry out the finishing, and do everything else in between in the right way, you got things covered. Craftsmanship is a matter of attitude first, technical skill after that. Follow me?”

“Yes, sir, I follow you all right.”

Cody straightened up and looked straight at the boy, squinting. “Dollar an hour. You start by doing cleanup work, since that’s always part of both preparing the surface
and
finishing. Tomorrow, right here, seven a.m., ready to work. Need a ride out here?”

“No, sir. I have my bike.”

The Legend carried a piece of molding over to the door, humming. Carlisle took that as a signal to leave. On his way home, pedaling fast, breathing hard, lifting off, he already felt like a craftsman. Just being around Cody Marx did that to a person. The anchor chain was parting.

Wynn McMillan had been mildly upset with the arrangement. Not that she had anything against Cody Marx, but Carlisle was averaging more than a dollar an hour doing lawns and boats, and his earnings were important to a household where things were always lean. Yet she listened while Carlisle told her all the reasons why he wanted to work with Cody. And Wynn McMillan understood.

She smiled then. Carlisle never forgot how she had smiled and what she had said. “Be the finest carpenter Mendocino ever produced, Carlisle, if that’s what you want. We’ll manage somehow.”

Some of Carlisle’s best years were those he spent working alongside Cody Marx. He grew to love the old man. Loved him for his skill, for his outlook, for the fine work he did. But it ran deeper than that. Carlisle had no father, Cody and his wife had no children, so the bond was a natural one. Carlisle never even considered that in the beginning, but later on came to believe that Cody had. As was true of men in those days, Cody felt he knew some things worth passing on to someone, and that someone had turned out to be Carlisle. During the years the two of them worked together, he tried his best to teach Carlisle everything he knew. All of it.

With his first couple of paychecks from Cody, Carlisle bought a pair of dark blue bib overalls and a tan workshirt, exactly like those Cody wore. That year at Christmas, his mother gave him a black lunch bucket and a red metal thermos that were almost identical to Cody’s. In the years after, to this day, in fact, his lunch and his coffee have ridden in that battered bucket and battered thermos, the artifacts of his learning days, a way of reaching back to the strong hands of Cody Marx and the understanding ways of his mother.

During the first two years Carlisle worked for Cody, he called him nothing but “sir” or “Mr. Marx.” It was like apprenticing yourself to a Zen master, and the master was to be given the respect due him.

On Carlisle’s fourteenth birthday, they were remodeling the inside of a lovely old drugstore downtown. Carlisle reported for work at six-thirty in the morning. He learned early on that when Cody said “seven,” he really meant a half hour before that.

He said, “Good morning, Mr. Marx,” as always, his voice mercifully beginning its decline into a steady pitch at the upper end of the baritone range.

Cody had been tamping down his first pipeful of tobacco for the day, cocked his head toward Carlisle as he lighted it and between efforts at getting it to draw properly asked, “This your birthday, is it?” He knew that, somehow.

“Yes, sir.” Carlisle was grinning, proud of being fourteen and working for Cody Marx, proud of his burgeoning skill.

Cody bent over and reached into a brown paper sack on the floor. Out of it he pulled a new leather tool belt, stiff and light brown. When he held it out, Carlisle could see old but still serviceable hand tools protruding from various pockets.

“Happy birthday, Carlisle. I just want you to know it’s good working with you. And, by the way, I think you’re due a raise to a dollar fifty. One other matter: I’d prefer it if you’d call me ‘Cody’ from here on out. Now let’s put these ceiling joists up correctly so we can get on to greater things.”

Carlisle had tears in his eyes as he strapped on the belt. Partly because, as Cody intended, he took the present to be a symbol of progress in his long climb to skill and understanding and partly because Cody had said Carlisle worked with him, not for him. That was important.

Over the years, through windows not yet closed and doors not yet hung, Carlisle could hear the high school marching band practicing late on autumn afternoons. If Cody and he were working in the evenings to get a job completed, he sometimes could hear the crowd and the public address announcer over at the football field. From the gabled ends of Mendocino, he watched other kids go to the beach on summer afternoons and sail their parents’ boats in the mornings.

None of that bothered him. In fact, he would not have changed places with them, not for anything. He was creating things of permanence with his hands. For that’s what Carlisle loved helping Cody Marx do all over Mendocino County, California. They prepared surfaces, finished, and did everything else in between. More than that, and most of all, they did it right, working to close tolerances, following Cody’s Way. People smiled when Cody’s truck went through town, Cody driving along in his blue bibs and tan workshirt, talking with the boy who was dressed just like him.

Carlisle worked steadily with the old carpenter until he graduated from high school, and he still worked with him part-time during his first two years at Stanford. When Cody had a job requiring more than two hands, Carlisle would catch a bus up from Palo Alto. During the ride he would study his textbooks, thinking what a poor substitute they were for the taction of fine woods moving through your fingers and the pleasure of standing back and looking over good work when it was finished.

Cody had started mumbling about retirement, but Carlisle didn’t believe it. Then on a Thursday afternoon, Carlisle’s mother telephoned. In a soft, halting voice, she told him Cody had died. “They found him out at the old Merkle place where he was putting in some closets.”

A day in a man’s twentieth year coming down, spring day, low sun running groundward. Carlisle sat in his room and cried for two hours without stopping, quietly beating his fist against a desk piled high with books whose combined knowledge was no more than fleeting twaddle compared with what Cody Marx knew and tried to pass on to him. At that moment, Carlisle decided he would finish at Stanford—he would do that for his mother—but afterward he would follow Cody’s Way.

Cody’s tools and old truck were bequeathed to Carlisle. Anna Marx turned them over to him with tears in her eyes.

As he finally prepared to drive away, she took his hand in both of hers and said, “Carlisle, you were the main topic of conversation at our house for the last eight years. Every evening Cody would have something to tell me about you, about how much you were learning, about what a good boy you are and how much it pleased him to watch you growing into a fine man. When you showed up for work in your shirt and overalls that were just like his, he came home, sat at the kitchen table, and said, ‘Anna, I think I’ve got a son.’ And then ever after he always thought of you that way. He was so proud of you. My God, how he loved you, Carlisle. He truly loved you.”

Carlisle nodded. She had told him something he already knew, but it was good to hear her say it. “I loved him, too, Mrs. Marx, every bit as much as he loved me. He gave me a place in life, a purpose, and I’ll try to live up to Cody’s Way.”

In the old truck, which still ran like new, since Cody had done the tune-ups and repairs on it, Carlisle drove slowly around Mendocino for hours, looking at all the places where they had worked together. He remembered, it seemed, every mortise, every tenon, every dovetail, every bevel and compound angle they had ever created.

He would stop the truck and wipe his eyes when he heard Cody’s voice saying, “I think we can get it a little better than that, Carlisle,” which was Cody’s gentle way of telling Carlisle he hadn’t done something right. He leaned his head on the steering wheel, thinking of the old man who had tried his best to make a decent craftsman out of him. The smell in the truck of ash and cedar and East Indian satinwood and Honduras mahogany mixed with the smoke from Cody’s pipe. The memories .  .  . God, all the memories.

Even these years later, particularly when he was working on something intricate, Carlisle would catch himself humming. When that happened, he would stop for a moment, finger the old tool belt he was wearing, which had been mended a dozen times and darkened by the oil from his hands and the wood he worked, and think about Cody Marx. He would think about how the old man prepared the surface on a lonely, quiet boy named Carlisle McMillan.

The decrepit house on the property near Salamander was the unchiseled stone for the monument he would build to the memory of Cody Marx. He was bent on making ol’ man Williston’s place into something that represented the finest of all that Cody Marx had taught him. In the best tradition of craftsmanship, he would reclaim a derelict and make it live forever.

Out of habit, the bad habit he had picked up building for developers and other people caring little about work being truly finished, Carlisle found himself cutting corners and doing things just to get them done. When he realized that, he slowed down, sometimes tearing apart a piece of work that wasn’t up to Cody’s standards, and started over. If he had to sleep in the cab of his truck through the roar of high plains blizzards, this job would be done right.

The roof was first. In autumn, cedar shakes could be bought at a decent price. The lumberyard in Falls City had twenty-five squares ordered for a project that was canceled, and Carlisle got his shakes for even less than he anticipated. They let him sort through them, picking out the very best. By California standards, he stole them.

Standing inside Williston’s place and looking up, he saw rafters and roof sheathing, with no cavity for insulation. So raising the entire roof system to create the space he needed was essential. Carlisle knew that was going to be the worst part of the entire project. It was also the most critical.

He started by ripping off the old shingles and rotted sheathing underneath. Most of the rafters were in bad shape. These were replaced with kiln-dried two-by-twelves. He built up and repaired others, nailed down one-by-threes across the rafters, and started laying the shakes, using hot-dipped sixpenny galvanized nails. And he sanded the rafters and one-by-threes, though he was tempted not to. Nobody would know, except him and Cody. But that was quite enough.

Putting in a big skylight over what would be the main living quarters and a smaller one that would let moonlight come easily into the bedroom area slowed him down. But he did it right and fashioned them so they could be cranked open from the inside when the days warmed.

That done, Carlisle worked on the interior floors, laying down well-cured, double-tongue-and-groove car siding he found stacked on a nearby farm. The farmer charged him almost nothing for it. Later on, he would put down fine wood over the planks. For now, it was a matter of getting in a subfloor he could live with in rough weather.

The siding was in bad repair, a result of cheap material from the outset and little maintenance afterward. As Cody would have said, “Looks like someone decided to kinda let this place weather in.” Carlisle tore it off, all of it, along with the inside plaster, leaving the old house standing there like somebody with a new hat and shoes but naked otherwise.

Early fall rains, cold rains, hit him twenty days into the work. Still, he continued tearing and pounding, wearing his slicker and sometimes using the truck headlights and a gas lantern as he worked into the night.

As the old man said, folks from Salamander began driving out to see what Carlisle was up to. He tried to be polite and answer their questions, but he kept working while they talked.

If the roof is an umbrella, the siding is a slicker. He wanted to make the house as lasting and maintenance-free as possible, so his choice was planking, either western red cedar or redwood. Both were expensive, and as a matter of principle, he refused to use either of those in their virgin state. He simply couldn’t countenance the felling of the big trees to supply planking. Of course, the lumberyard offered the standard four-by-eight sections of pressed wood with a cedar veneer. But, as he told one visitor who suggested he ought to make his life simple and use the veneer, “I worked with enough of that in my California days to last me a lifetime, not my kind of material. Besides, ever see what a woodpecker can do to cedar veneer?”

A local retired carpenter came by to kibitz and offer unneeded advice, of which Carlisle was already acquiring a surplus. But he listened when the man talked about a hunting lodge up in Three Forks that was being torn down. The old fellow had helped build it fifty years back and still remembered the nice redwood they used to cover the inside. Carlisle drove up to Three Forks, shuffled his feet, haggled with the demolition crew supervisor, and got what he needed. In fact, there would be enough left over for a redwood shower and hot tub later on. Maybe enough for the atrium-greenhouse he was thinking about hooking on to the south wall, once he had sanded off the glossy clubhouse finish and returned the wood to its natural state.