by Tom Bouman
I moved through it and was startled when, all of a sudden, the forest disappeared; I looked behind me at a line the vegetation wouldn’t cross, a wall of it stretching right and left as far as I could see; I looked below at a steep slope into black; I could not see the other side. Above me, sunlight roiled on the lake’s surface far more distant than I liked.
After breaking for lunch we searched the south shore, dredging up a collection of beer bottles, tires, televisions, flip-flops, and toys, but no sign of Penny. A sunken dinghy contained no secrets.
Matty and I surfaced to change tanks, put our elbows up on the county inflatable, and floated with Deputy Jackson, turning our faces to the sun. A kayaker had joined us on the lake. Rhonda Prosser’s gray, twinkling dreads gave her away, even at a great distance.
“I guess we have to go down there and see Davey,” said Matty, crestfallen. I took that to be a diver’s expression I wasn’t familiar with. “I don’t know how much you’ve done at that depth—”
“Not much.”
“So stay close, stay in sight of each other. It ain’t pretty down there.”
We circled down, the beams of our flashlights cutting through the dark, the dark closing in again just as quick. I blew out my ears. At fifty feet I began to feel some pressure and, looking up, fought an urge to surface. We got to within sight of the lake’s bottom, which might as well have been another planet, so empty was it, at first. A small cylinder rose out of the mud. I picked it up and the mud coating it swirled away: salt stoneware with a faint blue pattern, a bird. A toddy jar left by an ice fisherman long ago. My light caught something distant, a reflection of metal or glass, and my heart started to pound. I gestured to Matty and moved in closer. Under a fine layer of sediment, a vehicle, too small to be a car. A snowmobile upside down. From its body type, it was older, maybe as old as the sixties or seventies. Under it, a shapeless wad of fabric was disguised by the lake’s floor. I pulled at it and it flaked away into the water around me, revealing bone beneath. I swam back in a panic. Matty caught my attention and directed his beam around us. Several more dead hulks of machinery lay scattered in the mud, though nothing else that looked like a body. We surfaced. Back at the boat, I removed my mouthpiece and said:
“What was that?”
“That was Davey,” said Matty Lehl. “Davey MacCabba. He’s one reason you don’t see too many of us at Maiden’s for sport.”
“Well,” I said, “why is he still down there? I mean . . .”
“Good question. Been down there, oh, thirty-nine years now? And a half? Since ’70 or so. Bunch of old boys went out ice fishing too early in the season, ice started to crack, they all left their machines and ran the fuck back to shore. But Davey, he—do you want to hear this?”
“I have to, now.”
“So the story goes, he was going about sixty, he doesn’t know the conditions, and he busts through. But it was fast enough to where all of him didn’t make it under in one piece. The ice took his head clean off and it rolled a good way north. The littlest guy in the fire department tied a rope around himself and walked out there to get it. They thought they’d get the rest of him come spring, but they never did.”
“But . . . why not?”
“Davey didn’t have much family. And they had the head.”
LEE HILLENDALE asked Magistrate Heyne for a continuance, given that the alibi witness, Sage Buckles, was still nowhere to be found; Heyne gave Kev three more weeks before prelim. No good reason not to. The continuance worked for us too, and I logged many an hour searching for the missing yellow pickup and signs of Penny. The weather got hotter, and though with every passing day Penny’s chances of survival withered away to nothing, there was a certain kind of grim freedom in those days for me. Not so for Kev, who remained locked up in county.
At the sheriff’s urging, I visited once to show him the pictures we found on Penny’s phone. This struck me as cruel, but we had to have his reaction, so in I went to the cells to show him through the bars, so as not to have to chain him to a table. He did reach for them, likely to destroy them, but with no real violence or hope. “It don’t make any difference,” he said.
He didn’t have much to say after that, not any of the times I saw him. It was hard to tell whether sobriety had killed a part of him or brought something back to life, some channel of thought or sense long stifled.
Kevin’s jail time was a headache for Ed Brennan, who was on the hook to the grocery store magnate regardless of labor shortages. Though Kev was a drunk, and unbelievably simple in some ways, he had been able to focus on the subtleties of carpentry and joinery to a rare degree. Ed valued his work highly. Through some tortured logic, he partly blamed me for the loss of his worker, and thus, early that June, he convinced me to moonlight after my shifts policing Wild Thyme.
So one day after closing and locking the station door, I stowed my belt in the gun safe and stripped naked. From a bag under my desk I took a pair of work shorts and a T-shirt that was still stiff with yesterday’s sweat, and put them on. Then I locked the office, got in my personal truck, and headed to Fitzmorris. At Liz and Ed’s farmhouse, a rooster strutted across the driveway. Little Ed, who was seven, had a rusted lawn tractor up on ramps, and lay beneath it turning a wrench, only his elbow and bare feet visible. I drove past the house to the scrubby woods behind.
Ed’s workshop had escaped the bounds of one mere building. His materials were scattered over several acres of field turning to forest behind his house: a lumberyard full of ancient wooden beams, rafters, and siding, some scrap metal and scaffolding, and half a dozen large trucks that almost ran, shoulder-high in blackberry brambles. At the center of this maze stood a lofty garage with several bays cobbled onto a much older barn and surrounded by a gravel apron. A radio blasted classic rock and Ed sang along, a pipe clenched in his teeth. He stood poised over an ancient beam with a wooden mallet and a two-inch chisel. While he had a boundless, almost religious capacity for work, his rotating gang of employees did not. So here was I, wrestling beams and hogging out pockets with him until dark, once the others had gone home for the day or out to the bars. I’d asked Ed to apply my wages against my land contract for his late Aunt Medbh’s house, where I lived.
“Henry,” he called. He set down his hammer and chisel, sighed expansively, and said, “You know what? I like to drink beer and work on buildings.”
“Yessir, I know.”
“There’s nothing better, I find.”
“I can think of some things,” I said.
“What, Saint Francis, finding a bird’s nest in the forest, alone?” He looked around him, up into the leaves, and pointed with the stem of his pipe, from which he smoked a mix of tobacco and homegrown. “Hey, an indigo bunting.” Bending over his work once again, he shaved a sliver of wood out of a mortise and peered at the result.
Inside the garage, I passed a roadster convertible half covered with a tarp, raccoon prints crisscrossing its dusty windshield. On a workbench I found the mallet and chisel I had been using, and returned outside to where a beam lay on mason’s lifts. The timbers had been salvaged from a Bradford County barn dating back to the 1850s. Our first job was to convert them to the dimensions of the new, smaller building that, as of yet, existed only in blueprint. We had been measuring and measuring again, dadoing pockets in the sills for the rafters and floor joists to sit in, and hogging out mortises where beam would meet beam, pinned with fresh locust pegs. I studied Ed’s pencil markings where they lay over the original craftsmanship; you could see roman numerals scratched into the dark surface a century and a half ago. Fitting my chisel to a line, I struck a blow and was lost in work.
The truth was I did enjoy those evenings, the sun kaleidoscoping through the trees, seeing Liz and the kids. Later, as the mosquitoes took flight and the sun was almost gone, Ed and I perched on the tailgate of my truck, drinking bottles of cold pale ale.
“I don’t know anymore,” said Ed.
“Yeah.”
“W
illard Meagher came by today.” He shook his head. “I had the feeling he didn’t think we were going to get this done.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t either.
“It’s like the artist who sits still for three years and then, whoosh, a perfect butterfly. You follow me? We’re sitting still now. But Willard sees sloth, junk in a heap. He thinks, where’s the progress?”
“Progress is overrated.”
“Yeah. What’re you going to do when you’re done making progress?”
“Make some more, I guess.”
“Exactly. And if all you ever do is make more progress, doesn’t that call into question the very notion of progress itself?”
“What about hiring more hands, any luck?” I asked.
“I’m not rushing into new commitments,” he said.
We had dinner and the kids got put to bed over their strong objections, and as the night got dark we—me, Liz, and Ed—made it to the fire pit to rehearse once again as the Country Slippers. We had a gig coming up in July, so we took it fairly seriously, always remembering to drink beers before they got warm.
After a long, veering drive back to my place in the hills of Wild Thyme, I bumped to a stop in my driveway, stepped out, produced my johnson, and took a long piss, gazing up at the stars. The world was blinking on and off, and I was the kind of drunk and high where I’d spend about an hour muttering to my wife Polly. While I often thought about my wife and tried to reach her with some purposefulness, this was not that; I’d long avoided this particular approach as self-deception. I may already have begun telling Poll about things, when I noticed I was not alone. With some difficulty I put the buzz to one side and focused on the set of headlights moving slowly past my driveway.
IN THE hot afternoon Ed and I rode in his flatbed up a rutted track. Several large timbers were strapped down behind us, on their way to Willard Meagher. It was a silent journey, no bullshit, no radio, no toughening up on any dank homegrown. After having seen nothing recognizable take shape either in Ed’s studio or at the site, Meagher had, in the nicest possible way, demanded assurances. Waiting for us on the hilltop above Walker Lake was Willard himself. His brown hair was turning to silver and his silver goatee was turning to yellow. There was nothing showy about him save a large gold watch on a hairy wrist. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and shorts, and leather sandals.
A young woman, blond, stood beside him in a tank top and work shorts. Hands were shook, and Willard introduced the woman as Julie, his daughter. We knew each other. She was an EMT with the professional crew out of Fitzmorris. I had seen her at many an MVA and one murder scene of sorts, spoken with her some. She knew her job, and we each had the thing of, hey, we can skip the part where we talk about what a shame it is. Of course it’s a shame.
After lighting a small cigar, Willard put his hands on his hips and gazed about him. Ed led him off to the site, which they framed with their hands, imagining the barn there. Julie looked as if she wanted to join them, but stayed.
“Never seen you out of uniform,” she said to me.
“I don’t get out much,” I said.
“Second job?”
“Just a few hours on the side,” I said. My contract with Wild Thyme forbade moonlighting. “A favor. Don’t tell anyone you saw me, or I’ll get fired.”
“Ha. I hear you. Or, wait. Are you even here?”
“I never made the connection with you and Willard.”
“Yeah . . . yeah. Dad’s got his projects. This is one I’m taking an interest in.” We watched Ed and Willard rearrange the air and sky around them.
A word about Ed Brennan’s way of putting a building together. He was a master in reconstruction and restoration, carrying history forward in structure. It mattered to him where a particular post or tie came from, how it had been joined to the frame as a whole, where the building had stood, who owned it and how it had been used. Because it mattered to him, it mattered to me. If you didn’t care about this, if what you wanted was a sturdy outbuilding with few concessions to history, you might build your barn square rule. This means you take your timbers, rugged individuals all, some still retaining the shape of the tree trunk on three sides, and fit them into a standard system of measurement, frame them that way, one and done. Ed worked scribe rule. Scribe rule construction embraces the unique timbers you have at your disposal. You love the pieces you have for what they are. But it means you have to lay everything out, over and over, frame it in your mind, frame it on your shop floor, then assemble the components, take them apart, and reassemble them until it’s proper. And then you mark them—the old way was with roman numerals scratched near the joints—take them all apart one last time, and then comes the raising.
We had brought three timbers only: two posts and a tie beam. Ed had a dozen or so pegs hand-hewn from green locust wood and a couple mallets.
Ed said, “Henry and I are going to show you the very heart of your barn.”
“Oh, good,” Meagher said. “I’ve been curious.”
We dropped the timbers gently to the ground. I took one of the posts and held it in place while Ed slid the tie beam to it, fitting the tenon into the mortise a mere inch before gripping up a mallet and pounding at the exterior face of the post. Bit by bit the tenon moved home, until you could look straight through the peg holes and see daylight. It was Ed’s most favored joint, a wedged, dovetailed mortise and tenon in a diminished housing, through the post. He hammered locust pegs into the joint, and then a long wooden triangle into the mortise from the exterior side. We attached the other post to the tie beam in the same way. Ed let the cable out from the winch on the front of the truck, threw it over a high branch on the ash tree that provided the only shade in the field, looped it around the tie beam, and raised the H-bent so that it loomed over us like a piece of Stonehenge.
“There it is,” said Ed. “The heart.”
“This is my barn,” Willard said. He stepped through the massive gateway with no little ceremony. When he was done, he said, “I’m almost tempted to sink this in concrete and call it good. What do you think, kiddo?”
Julie nodded without conviction.
“Let me explain,” Ed said, pointing to the two mortise-and-tenon joints. “In a manner of speaking, this structure is the stuff of your barn, your studio. This is a dropped-tie bent. You’re going to have six of these in a row, connected by plates up top. Plates, they’re beams the length of the barn, long ones. And then six smaller bents on the second floor, with plates on top of them. The plates support the rafters, and the rafters support the . . . roof . . . yes?”
Willard had placed a hand over his goatee and was scrutinizing one of the joints. “What’s this?” He pointed to where the end of the tenon came out the exterior side of the post. “Can this be fixed?”
“That’s what you call the relish. That’s the part of the tenon that extends beyond the peg holes. In this joint, you could say the relish is proud of the post.”
“What does it have to be proud of?”
“Because it’s a strong joint, a through housing. The tenon passes all the way through the post. It’s stronger that way. The more tenon, the less apt it is to split.”
“Oh,” said Willard, brightening. “That’s the way it should be.”
“Now, in order to find material that’ll work for the barn, that can be sized right and is from the correct era historically, we go all over the county. All over the area. Sometimes we’re lucky, sometimes we strike out. We get it while we can, right, Henry?”
“Right.”
“And we puzzle it together. Each individual member within a unified whole.”
“But . . . you could just knock a barn all together and be done by now. I mean, you could just make it fit.”
“That’s one way,” said Ed, his horror visible only to me. “But it’s not my way.”
“These days, I don’t know anymore,” said Willard. “I don’t look for comfort, I don’t look for material things. I look for real things. I don’t have your
expertise, Ed, but I believe that’s what I see here.”
We had beers and talked a bit of nonsense. When we had a moment to ourselves, Ed muttered to me, “He understands.”
Before long, Willard and Julie stood to make the walk down to the lake. “Ed,” said he, “I can’t give you more time. That’s the other thing in life I want, and I can’t do without it. But I can give you a pair of hands, no additional cost.”
“Oh,” said Ed, all politeness. “You know your way around this kind of work?”
“Ha! Not me,” he said. “Julie, though.”
Julie gave a cheerful wave. A hilltop breeze scrubbed some of the day’s heat away. But to Ed it offered no relief. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, sure, sure. Welcome aboard.”
“My schedule’s all over the place,” she said. “Afternoons tend to be good? I’ll text you.”
“The place’ll be hers one day,” Willard said. “She takes an interest.”
“Proper,” Ed pronounced it. No woman or girl had ever worked on his crew. It had simply never come up before.
As we drove away, Ed glowered.
“What?” I said, amused.
“Meagher,” he said. “Meagher’s daughter.”
“She’s just keeping busy,” I said. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
“She’s a spy.” A minute or two passed before Ed muttered, “I’d bend one into her, though.”
“Shame on you.”
“What? You can see she’s got a nice rear end. Like a shelf. To set a drink on.”