The Carpenter (20 page)

They got out of Bud’s car. Bud locked it.

—Leland King, said Clifton. We have a problem.

Lee stiffened a little. Was this a problem with him? Did Clifton know, somehow, about Lee having some drinks again, or about the fight he’d gotten into outside of the poolroom? Warily, Lee said: What’s the problem, Mr. Murray?

—Our good pal Wally decided to forget what side of the bread is buttered. You hear?

—I’m not following you.

—Wally’s walked off the bloody job, Lee. You don’t just get paid to do odd jobs. You get paid to think.

Lee nodded. It was nothing to do with him, after all. He said: So you’re not going to the wedding.

—My faith can move mountains but there’s some things even out of my reach. This is your chance to make good on what you say you can do. I want the kitchen cabinets up before you leave today. Bud can do the piers. Understand?

—I understand. I’ll get them cabinets up. You’ll—

—At the end of the day I want the rest of the concrete mix and the mixer brought back. Jeff’ll be out here with a truck to pick it all up. You and Bud can help him.

—No trouble, Clifton.

—This is it, mister man. This is what I need from you. Get to it.

Bud had piloted the barge before, so Clifton gave him the keys. Bud perched himself behind the wheel. Then they were moving away from the pier while the sun rose behind murky clouds.

The island seemed particularly quiet with only Bud and Lee there. They got the generator going and started the cement mixer. They smoked with impunity. Bud disappeared under the building to work on the piers.

In the kitchen, the new counter was built but there were two cabinets that remained to go up. Lee found the cabinet plans and laid them open beside the table saw. It was cold but his palms were moist. He buckled on his tool belt and he took out his pencil and put it behind his ear.

Then he got going. He pulled sheets of pine and marked out lines and measurements. He measured twice. He labelled each piece. He set the fence on the table saw and then he threw the switch, listened to the blade spin up. He fed the first sheet through. The blade on the saw was new and the cuts it made were completely smooth. Lee cut out shelves and cut dadoes and rabbets for the joints.

Late morning, Lee went out to piss. It was still very cold. The house had been brought back to level by a collection of railroad ties and kickjacks while new concrete piers were poured. This was what Bud was doing. Underneath the house you couldn’t bend up higher than your waist and Lee didn’t envy Bud at all. He made sure Bud was okay for smokes and then he went back into the kitchen.

They had a quick lunch in the living room. Bud was surprised at Lee’s work. He said Wally or any of the other inside guys never moved that fast. Lee let the observation stand but he was secretly pleased.

After lunch he got going again. He put the carcasses together and put the shelves in. They fit smoothly. Wally had left a bottle of glue on the new counter. Lee took it and beaded glue where the shelves and panels fit together. He found a box of finishing nails and a punch. He tapped the finishing nails into the pine and then fingered putty into the holes.

The cabinets were to be hung on French cleats, which he
ripped out from two-by-fours on the table saw. He fixed the first one up and checked it for square and levelled it. He stood back to look.

Joe Holmes was on Lee’s mind as he worked, Joe talking about things going together. Otherwise, Lee had little to think about. Not Helen, not his mother, not his sister, not money, not anything in his life that had brought him to this.

After Lee hung the second cabinet he realized it was past three already. The cedar in the yard was skittering against the kitchen window-glass. He put on his jacket and went outside onto the deck. The wind had picked up. He turned his back to it until he had a cigarette lit.

After three calls, Bud came out from under the building. He was crusted with raw earth and liquid concrete. Lee squatted and offered him a smoke through the boards.

—How’s the pier?

—Just about done. How’s the kitchen where it’s nice and warm?

—Second cabinet’s up.

—Not bad for a Saturday.

—Not bad for a Saturday.

Lee had to relight his cigarette. The wind was moving faster now, building up a great black reef of clouds. The evergreens were leaning. They were little more than an hour from dark. The light was pallid and the wind knifed through Lee’s clothes.

—I think we’re getting some mean weather.

Bud looked off to the northeast. He dug in his nostril with his thumb and said: You think so?

—That could be snow. We should pack up.

Bud licked his teeth.

—Okay. Let’s get going. That pier is nothing I can’t finish Monday.

—How many bags you got left? Bud glanced under the building.

—Maybe thirty of the bastards.

—Clifton wants the extra ones back at the shop tonight.

Bud kicked a stump and called Clifton a mean old bastard. Lee went into the kitchen and put away the tools and swept up. He ran his hands along the cabinets.

The weather was getting worse. Most material could stay on the island except the mixer and the remaining bags of Sakrete. There were twenty-eight bags and Lee and Bud piled them in the barge. They brought the mixer down and strapped it next to the console. They collected their pouches and lunch pails.

—A couple days ago I seen this chick in the grocery store, said Bud.

—You what?

—I seen this chick in the grocery store. A mother. She’s got these five little brats. All of them are running around, screaming, bumping into old ladies. Just tear-assing around. Finally the mother, she loses it, and she screams at them, screams, I knew it, I should have swallowed you all!

Lee looked at him for a long moment. Bud was able to contain it briefly and then he was laughing. Lee laughed with him.

—That’s the first one I ever heard you get right.

—That’s a good one, isn’t it?

Bud went to the console and turned on the motor. Lee untethered the barge and hopped in. There was no snow yet but the clouds had a smudged quality that troubled him. Bud navigated the barge in the direction of the hogback south of the islands. Their motion was ponderous with the weight of the concrete mix they were carrying. Bud pushed the throttle forward. Lee put his toque on and hunched inside his jacket. The late autumn treeline on the hogback was colourless but there were two glaring gaps where the foliage had been razed away from new lots. He could just make out the orange stakes of the property boundaries.

The barge angled around the hogback and into the open lake.

—Jesus Christ. Lookit it out here.

Outside the bay, the open water was breaking hard. It crashed at the steel hull. Lee turned his head to watch forward and his eyes filled with spray. They were five hundred yards off Echo Point to the east. From there it was another four hundred yards south to the public landing. There were lights scattered around the north shore but he could see nothing of town in the south.

Bud’s face was bright red and the concrete dust was running in veins off his head. They crossed a hundred yards out into the open water and the hogback became indistinguishable from the shore behind them. Bud grinned around his cigarette and gave Lee the finger. Just then, a plume of water broke over the starboard gunnels and doused Bud from head to crotch. It put the cigarette out. He stood there blinking, his middle finger still lifted. A second wave boomed against the side of the barge. Lee strained to see ahead of them.

The frigid wind was blowing harder, chopping the water. Whitecaps peaked around them. Lee looked back around and immediately he saw sheets of water coming in over the transom in the aft. Two or three inches of water were sloshing around his boots. A horrible feeling filled him. The barge slugged forward, water sluicing in on all sides. Lee dove onto the Sakrete bags. He took them up one at a time and threw them overboard, desperate to lighten the weight they were carrying, Clifton be goddamned. The bags were monstrously heavy. He stood with legs spread wide, trying to keep his balance, casting the Sakrete bags into the dark waves.

Bud shouted something. He pointed. A curtain of falling snow was sweeping across the whitecaps. They could see it closing in.

Lee lifted and threw as quickly as he could, feeling the strain in his forearms. Something pulled in his midsection. Half a dozen bags remained and then the snowfall was on them. It blanked out the shore in all directions, leaving them in a white netherworld.
Lee threw the second-last and then the last bags overboard and stood mute until the barge lurched and he was thrown against the mixer. His shoulder blades smashed painfully into the rim of the drum.

A light resolved out of the snowfall to their front. Bud was bent at the console, his lips pulled back from his teeth and his hands clamped on the steering wheel. He angled the barge towards the light. The silhouettes of conifers began to take shape. It was Echo Point and they were coming up on it fast, no longer so weighted. The west face of the point was bare rock where the waves smashed up and sprayed apart.

Bud heaved the wheel hard right and Lee fell back into the cement mixer, feeling it shift against the tethers they’d tied it down with. Neither of them had seen the marker bouncing in the waves, marking a shoal. Bud had turned them right on top of it. The propeller and hull barked against rock, and the impact was tremendous. Lee cartwheeled overboard. The cold of the water struck his head like a hammer blow and there was water in his nose and his mouth and he was looking stupidly into the black. He could not determine up from down but his boots were drawing him in one particular direction. He pulled the opposite way.

When he broke through the surface of the lake there was no feeling in his hands or in his face. He could hear the motor revving some distance away through the eddying snow. He thrashed about, calling for Bud. Lee’s boots were touching the shoal below. He saw a grey beach south of the point, not far away at all, where the water was sheltered almost to stillness. The barge was raking towards the sand, propelled at an oblique angle by the damaged motor. He couldn’t see Bud.

Lee swam for it, clawing the water until he struck on sand. He hauled himself up onto the beach. He was shaking all over. He got to his knees, fell sideways, got back up. Up on the point was the profile of a building. A single window-light. Lee heard a dog barking. Sixty feet away in the other direction was the barge, resting
partway out of the water. He could make out one upthrust leg of the mixer.

He moved haltingly down the sand, holding his hands in his armpits. He was frigid to the core. He called Bud’s name. He sloshed back out into the water to the depth of his knees and laid his unfeeling hands on the gunnels.

—Oh, Bud. Oh come on, man.

There were eight inches of water in the bottom of the barge. Bud was face down beside the console, pinned beneath the drum of the mixer.

—Bud, you dumb motherfucker.

The dog barked again. Lee looked back and saw a man and a dog resolving out of the snowfall. Lee leaned over the gunnels and jabbed the kill-switch on the console. He reached down and took hold of one of the legs of the mixer. He could not feel it and it wouldn’t move and Bud did not move beneath it.

E
mily was napping in her grandfather’s house when the storm came up. She had come out in the early afternoon to help him stack firewood. For the last week there’d been some tension at home, something that had happened between Grandpa and her dad, but nobody was talking about it. In any case, the old man needed help around the house and was being too headstrong to ask, so Emily had come out on her own.

They’d stacked wood all morning. After a late lunch, with a fire in the woodstove and the house warm and dry, she’d gone into the front room, closed the door and lain down on the couch and fallen asleep. When she woke, it was near dark through the windows and the snow was blowing sideways on the wind.

Something had woken her. Maybe the dog barking. She sat up and stretched. There were photographs of her grandmother’s cousins, Margaret, Bette, Ida. She could remember her grandmother
naming them. Telling their histories. Next to the cousins was a photograph of Great-aunt Rose, who was still alive, whom Emily and her mother would visit this year before Christmas.

The piano was in the front room. Emily remembered her grandmother placing her hands—she wasn’t yet five years old. C chord, D major, E major. Doesn’t that go together nice? The foot tapped along. Grandmother smelled like lavender. In her absence, the room smelled like dust.

There were books of music stacked on top of the piano. One was a United Church hymnal. On top of the stack was Erik Satie. Grandmother had liked Satie best. She said how he didn’t have so much to say in his music and what he did say was pretty simple. When you thought about that, wasn’t that good? More with less.

Emily held her hands above the keys for a moment and then she began to play. She played Satie and the snow fell against the window.

The piano music came from somewhere in the old man’s house, muted through the walls but plainly audible. Before the piano, there had been the sound of the old man’s voice speaking on the telephone on the other side of the kitchen. Then the old man had gone back outside.

Lee was hunched in front of the woodstove, clad in dry clothes the old man had given him. They were too big for his frame but too short for his arms and legs. He was wrapped in a wool blanket and the old man had had him put on a dry toque and clean wool socks. Lee listened to the piano. The tune was not anything he’d ever heard.

Stan came back into the kitchen, Cassius following. The dog was agitated and whiny until Stan stayed him with a gentle hand on his head. Stan took off his jacket and his gloves. Then he paused, listening to the music. He spoke quietly: She’s awake,
then. My granddaughter was having a nap. If she’s up, I’d just as soon let her be. I don’t want to upset her.

Stan had brewed a pot of tea before he’d made the telephone call and gone back outside. He filled two mugs. He mixed three spoonfuls of sugar into the one he brought over to Lee. Stan sat down.