The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  “She don’t can’t of say why for!”

  “She can’t don’t! No at!”

  I took my usual seat midway down the aisle on the right and made a study of the smaller river as we went along our route. Beyond the metal bridge the bus made a loop through what I thought of as the close-together houses and then turned back onto Main Street and rumbled past St. Mark’s.

  “Hey, it’s Margie’s office!” the same boy yelled.

  “It’s where at she works of now!”

  “She don’t can’t say why for!”

  The fact that they knew about my new job meant Cindy had already told someone, but that didn’t matter much to me. Cindy wasn’t the kind of person you gave secrets to for holding. And, in any case, I heard the voices at the back of the bus as if from a great distance. Little mice squeaking in the bushes. Just seeing the work site made me happy, just feeling the soreness in my hands and shoulders. I caught sight of Sands as we passed. He was sitting on the rectory steps in the morning sunlight, so still he seemed to be sleeping. I would work twice as hard that day, I told myself, to make up for the fact that I’d missed. If he asked about it, I’d tell him I’d felt sick, that there was no phone in the house, no way to call and tell him. I’d ask him not to fire me off.

  It was a testing day at school. With the rest of my class I sat over the state booklet all morning, filling in squares with a number-two pencil. Geometry—which I liked and was good at. Vocabulary. Social studies. Reading comprehension. A fog of anxiety hung over the rows of seats—it meant staying back or not staying back for some of the others—but I had gotten fair grades that year and testing days were the best part of school for me: no answering questions aloud; no chance of a teacher making you stand up and give a presentation. At lunch, Aaron Patanauk sat diagonally across the long table from me, close enough to say something when the other kids had left. “That’s a devil’s church you’re making now, everybody says it. You’re a she-devil.”

  Aaron and his family, including his uncle Cary, had gone to Pastor Schect’s church for a time and probably believed things like that, but I knew he was just teasing. “Boys don’t of know,” I said.

  “Your boss is a boy, what I could hear.”

  “Not the kind as you.”

  “That’s right,” Aaron said happily. He took hold of his tray and stood up. “I’m white.”

  “And skinny.”

  “Not everywheres.”

  At the end of the day, with my books and papers stuffed into the pack, I walked from school into town, and when I reached St. Mark’s, Sands was standing there, waiting. Instead of lying I said, “I’m sorry at not being for work. I won’t again.”

  “You feeling okay?”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “It’s not too hard for you.”

  “Not ever.”

  “All right, I made a couple more dump runs yesterday, so in another few days we can start getting ready for the walls. Get your boots on.”

  “I’ll be to paying you for them.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “You’re not going to fire me off?”

  “Probably not. We’ll see how you work today.”

  He smiled, so that I wondered if he could be joking. I changed what was on my feet and started filling the truck bed with the broken mortar and slate and small pieces of stone.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Whoa, Laney. You can’t keep up that pace. Take it slow.”

  But I worked like a plow horse that afternoon, not stopping to rest until Sands forced me to, packing stones and scrap into the pickup as if my survival in this world depended on it.

  Ten

  And my life did depend on it, I see that now. The work saved me. Little by little, day by day, I started to know stone, to understand the fault lines along which a piece could be broken with a single hammer strike and the ways two stones could best be fit together in a wall. I learned how to make mortar by adding water to the powdery gray mix that came in eighty-pound bags (Sands had to lift those). I learned to be careful opening the bags with the shovel blade because the dust would burn your eyes, and to clean the shovel, hoe, and wheelbarrow immediately to keep the mortar from hardening there.

  Sands showed me these things with a teacher’s patience, and seemed kind enough, but he was a mystery, too. He talked only a little more than my parents. Concentrating on setting a stone in place, or on sawing and nailing pieces of wood to make the frame for the thick lower section of the walls, he seemed to me to be working out some problem in the center of himself, and I suspected it had nothing to do with what he called “the cathedral.” I studied him the way I studied all the people in my life, noticing the changes of his mood, the times when the edge of his patience came into view, even small physical details like the sickle-shaped scar on the top of his right forearm and the small flourish he made with his hand whenever he set down a tool, as if he was brushing bad air away from it.

  Sometimes when I arrived at the site in the afternoon I’d find him sitting on the rectory steps with his eyes closed, very still and quiet. It reminded me of the glimpse I’d had of him from the school bus that one morning. “Just praying, sort of,” he said when I asked about it. “Just a little internal relaxation. My parents are both gone. Sometimes I send them a thank-you.”

  I wanted to ask him other questions about his life, but I made a promise to myself not to do that. I brought lunch in a paper bag—a peanut butter sandwich, usually—and he’d share his cookies or fruit for our snack, and sometimes, on Saturday especially, take me into town to Art and Pat’s for soup or a sandwich. But even sitting beside me at the counter there, or on what had been the front steps of St. Mark’s, he talked only a little, and mainly about the work. I began to understand that the project was more than a job for him, in something like the same way it was more than a job for me. But I was too shy then, too afraid of making a mistake, to ask him about that.

  There was hardly any anger in him, and after a time I started to come slowly around to believing that maybe he was a good man, or at least, as Aunt Elaine promised, that he wouldn’t hurt or cheat me. I went to sleep thinking about the work, and woke up thinking about it, and suffered through Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, half-alive, just doing what I had to do.

  It wasn’t long before word spread through the town that something other than a regular church was being built where St. Mark’s had stood. I worried Pastor Schect would hear the news and try to make me quit, and every Sunday I rode to the service with a gnawing fear inside me. But for some reason that didn’t happen. Pastor Schect didn’t live in our town, and it’s possible he didn’t hear about Sands’s project, or, if he did, he wasn’t made aware that one member of his congregation was working there. I doubt my parents would have told him. In school, the reaction was mixed. Some of the girls assured me it was a devil’s chapel or the wrong kind of work for a girl. Some of the boys thought it was cool, a good skill to learn, and they asked if Sands was hiring. Once, someone drove past and yelled “Jews!” out the window of a pickup truck.

  Sands didn’t seem to care what people were saying. If passersby stopped on the sidewalk and watched us, he’d say hello or wave a hand and go on working. When a reporter from the newspaper came to do an interview, he stepped aside and patiently answered her questions for fifteen minutes—I watched the way he stood at a slight angle to her, as if too shy to make eye contact—then he made me pose for a photograph, standing beside him. (I saw myself in the local paper at the 112 Store but didn’t buy a copy, and didn’t mention it to my parents.) When a delivery truck from Warners’ brought more bags of mortar mix, and the driver said, “You’re another nut like all the rest of the nuts around here, aren’t ya?” Sands smiled and gave him a five-dollar tip, and every time the man passed by the site after that he’d sound his horn. I know now that, in films and on TV, small-town life is often made to seem like a kind of lesser version of real grown-up living, the people simple, eccentric, and unsophisticated, ignorant
of the larger world. It’s not really that way. But it is true that news spreads fast and that local events carry more weight than they might in a big city. In that town, in those days, an outsider who had a ponytail and a girl helper and who was building some kind of religious structure on the commercial strip—that was a story to put in second place, behind the tragedy of the disappearing girls.

  At the start, when we had just been clearing rubble and moving piles of stones, my arm and back muscles were sore every day when I woke up. Even with the gloves, there were blisters and then calluses on my hands, and I didn’t like that. But by the time we’d moved on to the next stage of work—repairing the foundation wall and the floor where the explosion had been—the soreness had mostly disappeared.

  I helped Sands lay down a chalk-line perimeter of the cathedral, a “footprint,” he called it, which was smaller than the footprint of the church, and more intricate. Then wood arrived on a lumberyard truck and I helped him make the frames that would hold the concrete in place when we repaired the foundation. Every day when I showed up for work, he had a new tool to give me, sometimes still in its plastic casing: a trowel, a carpenter’s belt, a hammer, a measuring tape, a square, a small stone chisel and then a larger one. He built two sawhorses and let me use the circular saw to cut lumber—watching me carefully at first to make sure I wouldn’t slice off a finger or a hand, and then leaving me on my own.

  It wasn’t long before two of the walls came up as high as my knees, and in my mind I could begin to connect the work Sands and I did every day to the drawings he showed me—the twelve-foot-tall stone walls and arched windows, the various roof lines intersecting at neat angles.

  At times—usually just when things seemed to be going well between us, when the work was progressing, when I’d learned something new, when I felt close to him—Sands would put a sour drop into my mood by trying to correct my speech. “Say, ‘Can I use the saw again?’ Laney, not ‘Can I saw for another?’ Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Say, ‘Is it time to put the tools away?’ Not ‘Can we finish on the tools?’ All right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” But instead of changing, I relied, as much as possible, on a strategy of one-word sentences.

  The cathedral filled my life. I ate better, thanks to his snacks and our trips to town. My arms grew stronger. In school, partly because of the picture in the newspaper, I’d become something of a minor celebrity, a curiosity in a positive way for once. There was still mockery and meanness, but not as much. I learned how to make a ninety-degree cut, to nail two boards snugly together, to anticipate what Sands was going to do and set a sawhorse in place, or move the extension cord, or carry the saw over to him, or set up the wheelbarrow for mixing mortar. If he was looking for a certain-size stone, I hurried off to find it. When he asked for sixteen-penny staging nails, I knew what they were and where to get them. When he needed the saw plugged in or the sawhorses set a certain distance apart, I did that. “It comes natural to you,” he said once when he was in a talkative mood. “You’re a natural worker.” And every time he said something like that I felt as though I was wrapping the words in paper and setting them in a neat stack inside myself, gold coins in a vault.

  After two weeks of work, Sands gave me an advance—twenty dollars—and told me that if I didn’t use the money to buy some nice clothes for myself, he’d fire me.

  “I now should to pay you off for the boots for part.”

  “No, you shouldn’t. You didn’t hear me. Buy yourself some clothes. And don’t give it to your parents, their share is coming.”

  So I used the money to buy a skirt and a pretty blue shirt at the secondhand store in town, got up early to put them on, and changed out of them after school in the rectory bathroom and carried them home in my backpack after work so my parents wouldn’t see. For those weeks at least, their mood stayed good, or at least neutral. There was no more boying, no dousing, no conversations about my job. I wondered if Aunt Elaine had spoken to them, or if they’d just had a talk with each other and come to the conclusion that some money once a month was better than no money at all.

  But then my mother—who would periodically go through my drawers and closet—found the skirt and the shirt and started to wonder what other secrets I was keeping from her, and my parents’ mood made a bad shift. By then, the money from my father’s check was running out; my mother mentioned that once, then a second time. I watched my father when he came into the house from his day in the woods, noticed that his eyes went immediately to the center of the table, looking to see if I’d been paid and had set the green bills there for him to count. I’d told my mother I’d be paid after working four weeks, and I could feel them watching me, counting days. In hindsight I can see that my mother wanted the money from my work but didn’t want what went with it: the fact that bringing home a regular income would give me a new status in the family, make me more important in my father’s eyes. She’d always had a taste for ugly remarks, but at that point she started to use her razor tongue more often. “Majie the church builder comes home now from work, hi, Majie.” And “That’s a devil’s church you’re building, you Majie. Everybody says so, girl you. Wait till when Pastor Schect hears.” But there was a way in which her remarks could no longer dig deep into me. They couldn’t reach as far as the neatly wrapped compliments Sands had given me. She sensed that, too, and turned up the volume: “Ugly Majie with her little skirt to show fat legs. What boy wants a stone lifter girl, ugly Majie?”

  “Aaron has a like for me. At school.”

  “Aaron Patanauk? Yah, he has a like. Real like. Like for what’s between your legs. Even ugly Majie has one of them.”

  My father changed, too, but in a different direction. Twice, on afternoons when I wasn’t working, he let me accompany him into the woods. He showed me places where he’d set the traps when winter came and showed off how much he knew about the trees—that a certain kind of edible mushroom grew near oak trees but never near ash or maple; that some people made a drink out of the sap of the white birch; that if you ever needed to make a fire in winter, or in rain, there was usually dry deadwood on the lower part of a spruce or hemlock. Popple burned cool but was good for cleaning off the inside of the stovepipe. Hickory gave the best heat. Beech you had to cover and dry for two years before you burned it. On these outings there was something close to kindness in him. I knew that his own father had taught him similar things, and I knew how much he’d adored Dad Paul, and I had the feeling, maybe only because I wanted to, that he was trying to reach out some warm hand to me through a curtain of hard memories.

  Though I worried about it constantly, I didn’t raise the subject of my pay with Sands. Long before I ever met him I’d made a rule for myself never to tell outsiders anything about my family, and though I accepted his offer of a ride after work, I never let him drive me beyond the 112 Store and tried not to give him any indication of what the money would mean to us.

  Two more weeks passed—eleven working days in all. Two large walls and a small one stood as tall as the middle of my thigh by then, and I was beginning to have a better sense of the shape of the building and of Sands’s personality.

  One day, when I had been working with him nearly a month and we were taking our afternoon break, he said, “You don’t have to kill yourself, you know.” I thought, for just one moment, that he meant it literally. The fathers of two schoolmates had killed themselves within a week of each other when I’d been in fifth grade. On Labor Day weekend the year before, a boy in ninth grade had jumped to his death from the big bridge. Showing off, some people said, but I knew him in school and didn’t think so. On particularly bad days, I had thought about it. I assumed everyone had thought about it at one time or another.

  When spring finally came for us, it came quickly. The last small piles of grainy snow were suddenly gone, the maple syrup lines and buckets disappeared. At lunchtime, the sun was almost hot. One day, Sands and I were sitting on the piece of marb
le that had been St. Mark’s front step. He’d brought me a blueberry muffin, and I was drinking a warm Coke. While we were eating, an old man and an old woman, walking arm in arm, stopped on the sidewalk, facing us. The man nodded. Sands nodded back, and then the couple walked a few steps closer.

  “What is it going to be once you’re finished?” the woman asked. In the mild air she was wearing a wool coat.

  “A cathedral,” I told her, because I loved to hear myself say the word.

  “What kind?”

  I looked at Sands. He wasn’t a particularly neat eater, I had noticed, and he was brushing crumbs off the front of his T-shirt. “Church of the Loving God,” he said, looking up at them through his thick spectacles. It was the first time I’d heard those words. I studied his mouth, trying to see if he’d meant it as a joke.

  The old man and the old woman made identical faces, mouths down, eyes squinting. “Catholic?” the man said suspiciously.

  “Denomination of love,” Sands told him.

  The man narrowed his eyes still further. “Some cult?”

  “It’s just a private cathedral, a place to come and sit. I might make it available to the public some hours if people want.”

  “Who would want it?” the man asked.

  Sands shrugged his big shoulders and gave a two-second smile. “Old retired stoneworkers,” he said. “Farmers, carpenters, insurance salesmen, nurses.”

  “A place for the aged?” the woman asked. “A senior center?”

  “Seniors, juniors, anyone who wants to.”

  “If you leave it unlocked, they’ll come and steal the chalice for drug money,” the man warned Sands. They stood there another minute, examining the partly built walls and the damaged rectory, running their eyes over the skin of Sands’s face, his ponytail, his girl helper. Then they nodded in tandem, turned, and shuffled on.