The Hour of Bad Decisions (15 page)

Or at the Christmas social, where Hennessey sat alone and drank his way through the nine red cardboard free drink tickets the company handed out in a row, all beer except for one too-sweet glass of white wine for the Christmas toast. And the women from the line all turned down his requests for a dance – Elaine Boutellier, Lorne's sister, in tight, tight jeans and a western shirt, three snaps unsnapped down to right between her jutting breasts, said “Come on, Dave,” dismissively when he asked, as if he were telling her an old, familiar and not-very-funny joke. Peg Godden and the DeVries sisters, all three of the women from the sanding station, had said no without even looking at him, watching other men on the dance floor and then laughing among themselves about something as Hennessey walked away.

The only thing he took away at the end of the evening was a door prize, once, a set of barbecue tools and a joke apron that read “Here's the Beef ” and had a bright red arrow pointing straight down the front.

He put it in the second drawer, one down from the forks and knives, the drawer with the glue and
unplanted carrot seeds, with the barrel-fuses for the oven and the replacement Christmas light bulbs he never took out of the package.

But when Hennessey came back to work after the accident, something had clearly changed.

“Did it hurt a lot?” That from Bette Godden, a gluer, one of the small, angry-looking women who spun like tops around the gluing station where the spindles went into the chair backs and were fastened tight. She had never even spoken to him before, but now she stood close enough that he thought he could feel the heat of her, like a quick and burning furnace, against one side of his face.

“Not much,” he said, although it wasn't even close to being true.

His knuckles were purple and angry-looking then, and in some half-remembered, incomplete way, the pain still swam in front of his eyes like a red film when he thought about it.

For a while everyone talked about it, about how the crew had taken three quarters of an hour to find and fully disentangle the pulped fingers, and one of the workers had thrown up after seeing the mangled digits. About how, as the ambulance was leaving, everyone else had sat on a row of finished chairs in the loading dock, watching. Whenever they all sat outside, there were always too few chairs for the number of workers, leaving one or more standing.

They sat looking at the white, tissue-thin apple blossoms and waiting for health and safety to come and inspect the equipment, and someone turned the
radio on, country music tinkling out of the small, tinny speaker, and the workers who weren't sitting fidgeted and walked around.

They lost a full day on the line, and some of the glue had hardened in the abandoned glue-gun nozzles, and a whole set of the nozzles had to be thrown away. They had tossed cigarette butts into the river waiting, and sent the office assistant into Black Rock for more smokes. And Lorne Boutellier from the loading dock had killed a young, brown-speckled gull with an artfully-thrown stone the size of his fist.

Later, Hennessey started smoking, too, holding his cigarette between his ring finger and his pinkie, and the scar tissue stood out hard and waxy-white where it pulled taut across the bony sockets.

Somehow, the scars became an introduction to the others, to the loose semi-circle of smokers who kicked around small talk about weather and sports, family and enemies.

Dave, who had always taken his breaks standing off to one side, found himself more and more often sitting in one of the finished chairs they drew up to the very edge of the dock. He liked listening to the stories, especially after the weekend, like the time Viv Morris had gotten wildly drunk on vodka-and-seven at a barbecue at the Goddens and had tried and failed to strip off her own pants, her fingers hopelessly confused by the button-fly of her new jeans. Or about a dust-up at the Anvil tavern in Wolfville, where Lorne Boutellier ran into yet another university kid who hadn't heard of his reputation, so became unwilling
victim number nine in Boutellier's collection of mashed and broken noses. And one summer day, the sun high and everything wilting under its heavy hand, Dave even thought for a moment it might be nice to own his own barbecue, thought that he might have some people from work up to sit outside his North Mountain trailer, that they could sit and laugh and pitch empty beer bottles far back into the woods.

It lasted through summer, while the apples fattened and bowed the branches in the orchards, and Hennessey began to be able to flip names into his conversation – “Lorne” and “Kym” and “Viv” – and sometimes he forgot what it had been like before, and was almost able to relax.

The plant was running flat-out by then, boards being clamped and glued and shaped into seats, the legs and crossbraces and spindles turned on lathes and then set into drilled holes by the gluers, and the strange and damp mystery of the bowed backs made of long, thin strips of birch soaked wet and then bent on hot presses. The steamers sweated like longshoremen in the vicious wet heat, considered themselves craftsmen, and wouldn't sit with anyone else. Finished and half-finished chairs travelled along their chain-driven journeys, and their legs clattered together with hollow, singular notes, notes that all combined like a particularly forceful army of wooden wind chimes.

Then, just as summer was ending, a lathe operator named Morgan from further up the line dropped a smoke in his own lap on a tight, rural-road curve and rolled his red Chevrolet pickup into the tops of a row
of midnight spruce trees near the South Mountain. And when the truck rolled, a case of twenty-four James Ready long-neck beer in the front seat flew through the air, all of the bottles breaking, turning the inside of the cab of the truck into a kaleidoscope of broken brown glass, foam and blood.

The truck hung upside down for an hour, swinging gently back and forth in the wind and dark, while the firefighters tried to figure out a way to get it down without doing more damage to its nearly-senseless driver, who mumbled swear words and bled slowly but ceaselessly from a zig-zagged collection of mostly minor cuts.

Morgan hung in his seat belt with a spectacular but inverted night view of the Gasperaux Valley and the North Mountain. And if he had cared to look, or had even known it existed, he might have seen the two yellow windows of Hennessey's trailer shining well up on the hill, back underneath the maples.

When he got back to work, Morgan's face was marred with rows of black nylon caterpillars where the doctor had picked out the brown glass slivers, the rows of stitches marching across his face like monotone cross-stitch. He lisped because he had bitten through his tongue, and the first thing Hennessey heard Bette Godden ask him was “Did it hurt a lot?”

“Not really,” Morgan answered, the nylon caterpillars writhing with the words.

Hennessey flicked a cigarette butt out towards the river, but it fell short.

The next day, Friday, he was late coming out on lunch break, and, wouldn't you know, there were no empty chairs left on the loading dock. Unwrapping a ham sandwich, Lorne Boutellier swore at the music warbling out of the small radio, stretched as far as he could while still sitting and slapped the radio off its perch on a packing crate, silencing its thin song permanently.

Everyone was teasing Morgan, telling him jokes, trying to make him laugh, because every time he laughed, he'd wince and moan “ouch, ouch” as the unforgiving stitches bit into the edges of his raw cuts. Morgan was almost encircled by the group, and Hennessey could see that every single person was looking at the lathe operator.

The trees that might become chairs moaned around Hennessey's trailer on windy nights, and when they did, he could not sleep.

Three and a half weeks after Morgan crashed his truck, the wind woke Hennessey near two am, the hour of bad decisions, as a fall storm danced lightning along the Gasperaux. He got out of bed, dressed in underwear and a t-shirt, the lights browning and brightening again as the lightning plucked absently along the power lines, and the rain outside sounded like gravel on the windows.

The drawers near the sink were made of thin plywood, painted glossy white, and the top drawer with the knives always stuck.

He stood next to the small kitchen table, his mangled hand flat, two fingers and a thumb spread on the
red and white plastic tablecloth. The taut skin over his knuckles hurt, the bones in his hand throbbing with the weather-ache.

He held the narrow filleting knife for a long time, the long, thin blade winking in the irregular light. The table had one short leg, and it tapped the floor lightly when he pressed his full weight down on the tabletop.

Tap-tap.

It didn't hurt that much. “Not really,” he murmured, pressing a cloth against the newly-raw joint of his knuckle.

“Not really.”

He put the knife in the sink, and looked out the window towards the trees in the dark, hearing the wind clack the saplings together. Imagining Bette Godden asking, then imagining himself looking down at the empty knuckle, shrugging unconcernedly and telling her brusquely, “Accident with a knife.”

And after he parked his truck on the first day back to work, he pulled his hand carefully and gingerly out of his jacket pocket, holding it out so everyone could see. He could hear the chairs already dancing on their chains before he even got in the door.

F
IRST, IT WAS CABINETS
.

He had talked her out of buying them, said he didn't mind the time it would take if she could wait, and it was her first year at the new school – “I'll be busy, John, so you'll have to do most of it on your own,” Bev said.

He was, he thought, ready for that.

“Not much work around now anyway,” John said.
“I can work away until things pick up.”

First birch, with its clean, green smell, that almost-wet sharpness, even when the wood was dry. John Hennessey had stacked it with spacers in the shed for three months, reading the moisture with an electronic gauge that barely touched the wood with its two tines before offering up its verdict. He wanted quarter-inch birch-faced plywood for the doors, and he didn't want the framing to warp or pull away.

So he waited, and ran his hands along the smooth face of the top few pieces of wood, already feeling the beveled edge he would cut with the router. And sometimes he would hold the solid and dependable wood up to the side of his face, smooth against his skin, its grain running true except for the occasional small, dark eye where a branch had anchored to the tree. There was something about the running flecks of the grain, gapped occasionally so you could fill in the spaces with the fine edge of a fingernail – for John, it was as if you could see the wood packed tight with energy, waiting to burst apart, held together only by the tensions of its internal structure.

It became almost like a conversation while he waited – every few days, checking, touching, and sometimes he would talk, too, self-consciously at first, urging the wood to dry, checking the stacks, moving spacers at the first sign of anything close to warping. Inattention, he thought, would not spoil this.

He built the boxes of the cabinet backs first, and hung them in the kitchen on a night when Bev was out, so there was no one to help him lift the awkward rectangles into place on the wall, no one to hold the level or watch the wandering little bubble inside the light green glass tube. No one to watch the crucial plumb line he had chalked along the wall to mark where the edge of the first cabinet should go, that one straight line upon which everything else depends. It was a warm September evening, and he had the windows open, the first strong winds of the fall swirling the dust on the kitchen floor. It was curriculum
night, and Bev was meeting with the parents of her grade three students, everyone crammed into the tight little chairs in her classroom.

“You should see them in there,” Bev said before she left. “Get them in the door, and the conditioning kicks in. You can see they have to fight putting their hands up before they even ask a question.” She told him about the discipline problems, and about a boy named Mike who vomited whenever he got picked on. She talked about the new teachers that year, and how more and more were women. “Male teachers are almost a rarity now,” she said. But she didn't ask about the cabinets.

So John held the cabinets as best he could against the wall, one-handed, the tendons poking out along his arm in long lines, and with his other hand he used the stud-finder to try and find the two-by-fours inside the wall.

He thought of the stud-finder as wood-yard alchemy: no batteries or lights or power cords, just a small magnetic tumbler that wavered straight when the device was pulled across a stud hidden behind the gyprock. A magic wand to tell him the right place to set the screws so that the cupboards would stay solid and fast and true.

Even after the doors were varnished on the outside, he could open any one and notice the smell of trees amongst the canned goods and dishes, as green and fresh as if the sap might just at that moment have started to run.

Once the cabinets were in place, he thought they hung as if they had always been there, the styles cut
and curved to match the molding in the kitchen, each run of the router as even and long and straight as the doors themselves.

“They're nice,” Bev said when the cabinets were finally finished. John had to admit he'd hoped for more than that, but he'd brought her into the kitchen right after she got home from work.

“You're tired,” he said, looking across at her while they ate dinner. “Want me to run you a bath?”

“That would be nice,” Bev said, smiling ruefully and putting down her fork. “But I've got marking and lesson plans for tomorrow. Not enough hours in the day.” That evening, she worked at the kitchen table – he drew up new plans, paper unrolled on the living room floor, hardly a word between them.

The cabinets were the first – the first project he did alone. The work was both satisfying, and unnervingly different. They had painted rooms together, newly married and still able to laugh about paint spattering on their faces when they were doing the ceilings.