Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  The floor of the main part of the cabin, the long rectangle, was fully framed by about four p.m., and a cold winter dusk settled over our work. The sun was behind the trees, and dark blue-black streaks formed in the sky. We had only the floor frame of the ell left to complete. It was a very respectable day’s work, and I was satisfied with our achievement.

  “Shall we call it a day, boys?” I asked. “We got a lot done.”

  “No,” Kevin immediately said. “Let’s get it all done. I say we finish it.”

  I looked to the others, and they shrugged in agreement, carried away by Kevin’s enthusiasm.

  I admired our work in the dying light and praised my crew. “Son of a bitch if it doesn’t look like a cabin is going up,” I said.

  On the way home, Paulie, Kevin and his friend fell asleep in the backseat of the truck. Andrew rode with me in the front, and we talked of this and that. He missed Maine, he said, and he was eager to get home. He was counting the days until his discharge. Too much bullshit in the military, he said. He had declined an offer of more money to reenlist for a third tour in Iraq. His plans were vague: maybe he would use his emergency medical training as a civilian; maybe he would start a business.

  “I think I’d like to build a cabin too someday,” he said. “When I get the money.”

  “We can do that,” I said, pleased he was drawn to the project. “We can practice on this one and build yours right.”

  Two weeks later, after Christmas, Kevin, Paulie and I returned and put plywood over the girders and joists to make a deck, which would be the cabin’s subfloor. Paul said he was having trouble getting away—commitments at home and the church again. My nephews hauled the plywood up the hillside with a sled and snowmobile, and together we nailed the four-by-eight-foot sheets into place, using countless handfuls of nails, each of which required about four strokes of the heavy framing hammer. The hammer blows resounded in the frozen woods. By the end of December, my shoulder was sore and my right forearm was a knot, but we had a platform, something to walk on. The snow was getting deeper, but my work surface had risen too. The race was tightening. Now we were moving into the deeper and colder part of winter. My lead had diminished to a nose.

  The next step would be the one I enjoyed the most: building the timber frame. It would be Kevin and I together, getting it done as a two-man team.

  CHAPTER 5

  BROTHERS

  One day while I was working on the hillside, it occurred to me that the cabin, in a way, would be the embodiment of our mutual biographies, Paul’s and mine, blended into a single 640-square-foot structure sitting on concrete piers. Here we were, two brothers who had managed to remain close despite the passage of years and periods of separation. We had the same parents, had grown up in the same household, eaten the same food and drunk the same water, yet we had different temperaments and sensibilities. Outwardly we had led different lives, but inwardly we had similar values and impulses, which had come out of our strong shared experiences as children and young men: blood loyalty and the resourcefulness that children learn from having to wash out their underwear and socks in the bathroom sink each night before school or lift an alcoholic stepfather out of the bushes and clean him up in the house. All of this, the similarities and the differences, was playing out, and would further play out, as the cabin took its shape.

  My mother often had made the observation that I was the good boy, Paul the bad boy. I heard it a hundred times: “Paul, you’re so bad!” For many years, I believed it. Looking back, I see that it’s enough to make a child psychiatrist shudder. Many years had to pass before I saw the inaccuracy and unfairness of it.

  A story my mother repeated over and over again was about the time Paul, at age five, had deliberately gotten himself lost at the Korvettes department store in East Brunswick, New Jersey, so he could hear his name called over the public address system. “Shoppers, we have a lost boy in the office. His name is Paul. Will his family please come to the office at the rear of the store?” My mother was pushing dresses on hangers up and down the rack to find something that would fit when she heard her son’s name. She looked around. There was no Paul. She knew immediately that it was her Paul at the office. Her reaction was not worry. The announcement of the lost child was affirmation of her view that Paul just wanted to make a little excitement for himself or stir up some trouble whenever possible. We retrieved him. There he was, savoring his fame, attended by the store’s female assistant manager among piles of clothes, bare hangers and empty coffee cups in the tiny office. Paul was physically small then, even for his age, with blue-gray eyes, light brown hair and an impish grin. He greeted us sitting down. “You’re so bad!” my mother said as she grabbed him by the hand and led us both back to the dress rack, somewhere between sizes 16 and 18. It was only much later that I understood that she had secretly loved him for his unruliness. She admired rebellion. Maybe it was one of the reasons our family was always on the wrong side of authority and, indirectly, why we were always broke and on the move.

  My earliest memory of Paul was the time the robbers held up our stagecoach at Cowboy City. I could not have been more than seven years old, because my father is in the memory. Paul would have been three or four. Our mother and father—a memorable event in itself, that they were together—had taken Paul and me to Cowboy City, a low-budget theme park near our home in central New Jersey. There was a saloon, general store, wood-plank sidewalk and sheriff’s office with a jail. Cowboys with chaps and guns on their hips swaggered around the little town. They came flying out of the saloon and were dragged into jail by the sheriff and his deputies. In their big boots and spurs, they seemed seven feet tall. There was a stagecoach ride, which we took, and at the edge of town the coach was stopped by a group of cowboys on horseback wearing neckerchiefs over their faces and firing their guns into the air. The horses spun around and made a big cloud of dust.

  The cowboys ordered all of us out of the coach. It was a holdup. They demanded the chest from the driver. I had not been let in on the joke, and to me all this was as real as a traffic accident. When one of the cowboys approached us, to heighten the drama, I stepped forward and said something like, “Leave us alone. We weren’t bothering you.” Of course, the cowboy thought this was funny. My eyes must have flashed, or maybe they had filled with tears. I stood my ground and held Paul by the hand close to me. “Don’t you hurt my brother,” I warned the cowboy. The cowboy stopped laughing, and so did the adults who had been on the stagecoach enjoying this little bit of theater. I was dead serious, and while I was unarmed, I was prepared to do whatever it took to defend my brother and me.

  My mother loved to tell this story, too, because it contained the elements of character that she honored most: resistance, courage and fealty to blood. Somehow lost in her retellings of the story were the points that I was scared out of my wits and that I hadn’t turned to the adults around me for protection. I may have wet the cowboy pants I was wearing for the day, the ones with fringes down the legs—not the last time my bladder let loose in a childhood full of close calls, real and imagined. For a long time, the Cowboy City story was the perfect emblem of the relationship between Paul and me.

  It is difficult enough for any of us to unsplice the strands of our separate identities as individuals; it is even more difficult to understand the nature of a relationship, which possesses its own identity and shapes the behavior of the people inside it through a complicated reverb of expectations, perceptions and emotional history. I think there is still something of the Cowboy City dynamic acting between Paul and me, though much has changed.

  I’m also guessing that Paul and I together are not exactly the same people we are apart. Together, we behave in ways that tap into the demands and consequences of our history. I think this is probably not unusual. It seems to me unlikely that any person has one true self. We have an array of tightly packed contingencies of self, which may differ in small and not necessarily hypocritical ways, and we shuffle among them depending on
the present moment and the force field of our relationships. Sometimes Paul and I need a break from each other’s company, to breathe the air outside of brotherhood, but I’m also guessing that we are, more often than not, our better selves when we are together, especially when we are working.

  Paul comes in and out of my childhood memories like a cat in a quiet room. Sometimes he’s there; sometimes he’s not. I must have been watching out for myself most of the time as we were growing up and working out the confusion and trouble that was almost always going on around me—the shouting, the drinking, the insecurity. I also sensed from an early age that Paul’s only real vulnerability was his size and that if he ever grew big he would be able to handle the world better than I ever could. How did I understand this at age seven? I don’t know, but I did.

  The good-boy epithet that my mother hung on me could not have been entirely true, even though she had me convinced of it. Paul was a stutterer as a child. (Occasionally, he still halts for the briefest moment at a word when he’s making an explanation. No one is aware of it except for me, I think.) His stuttering was getting worse when he was about eight, and somehow the school nurse got involved. There was a conference with my mother at Lee Street Elementary School in New Brunswick, where we lived for just over three years in the same apartment, a long stretch for us. There was a series of follow-ups with a woman who was (I’m guessing) a speech pathologist. I recall her wearing a white uniform and white stockings, and those meetings and examinations concluded with the speech pathologist suggesting that I—the good boy!—was part of the problem. She wanted me to stop correcting Paul when he spoke.

  “You must try not to interrupt him, or tell him what he’s doing wrong,” she said.

  So I guess I must have been a bit of a shit when I was eleven or twelve, already a little too perfect. I remember, too, that we used to fight a lot—real fights, wrestling on the ground, rubbing knuckles in the scalp, headlocks. I was bigger and always won the fights, though there may have been a few that ended in a deadlock because Paul was unwilling to admit defeat. The source of the fights was almost always my attempt to coerce him into helping me clean the house, or some small part of it. My mother worked at her hairdresser job six days a week and was content with a messy home, and I often felt compelled to straighten it out for her. My compulsion was not so strong that I was willing to do it by myself. Each of our housecleaning sessions thus was usually preceded by a half hour of tussling. I would get up from watching after-school television and tell Paul we had to clean up before Mom got home, and he would say no. To get his cooperation, sometimes it was enough to push Paul’s arm up behind his back in a chicken wing to the point of pain; other times stronger measures were required to get him to clear and wipe the kitchen table. Paul, by the way, disputes all of this, claiming it was he who wanted to clean the house and I who refused. This is absolutely not true. He claims the fights were over my demand that he scratch my back. Again, completely not true. We took turns scratching each other’s backs, and I always gave him exactly the same number of minutes of scratching time that he gave me.

  As we grew up, Paul was always more popular and social than I. He kept count of his friends and could tell the number he had down to the person. He would occasionally brag that he had eleven or eighteen or twenty-three friends. He wrote down their names. He spent his time with them, playing, and later carousing, and was usually away most of the day from whatever house or apartment we were living in. He went out for sports teams and had girlfriends.

  Paul still has this sociability. He has a network of friends, at church, at work and even back in New Jersey, where he returns for occasional reunions. I’ve envied this about him. He has always been good at building relationships, doing people favors—coming through when necessary by pitching in on a friend’s backyard project, fixing a neighbor’s oil furnace or volunteering to help someone at work get his boat in the water. He has put on more than a few clambakes for retirement parties and wedding receptions. This web of relationships showed in the construction of the cabin—he had access to tools, equipment and help when we needed them. Friendship is important to him. I on the other hand have lived a rich inner life, but it has been a self-absorbed life. Paul isn’t reflective in the same way. He puts his thinking to work on solving practical problems—how to renovate the church’s parish house kitchen or help a neighbor start his car. He cooked a big meal nearly every Sunday for his kids and their friends. On holidays and birthdays, he let each of the eight children pick their favorite foods for him to prepare.

  It was in part this sociability—his ease with people and a straightforward engagement with the world and its simple pleasures—that brought him closer to our stepfather, Johnny. I had only one or two spasms of resentment about his relationship to Johnny.

  The most powerful episode happened when I was about twelve. We were still living in New Brunswick, our urban interruption between episodes of life in the country, and Johnny was staying with us even though he and my mother had not yet married. I was playing catch with Johnny when a boy who lived in the same apartment complex joined in. His name was Freddy De Leo, and he was a terrific baseball player. He was maybe thirteen, athletic and a little cruel in the way he threw the ball at you, and you had the sense he was destined for the major leagues. Soon Johnny was throwing him more balls than he was throwing me and complimenting Freddy on his arm. Eventually I was getting no balls thrown to me. I held back my tears until I reached the inside of our first-floor apartment. My mother saw me crying and asked me why. I told her. She ordered me to stop. It was unmanly, she said. That was the word she used: “unmanly.” Now I felt inadequate in the eyes of both my mother and Johnny, and I blamed Paul—maybe because I knew he would not have cried. Even then I understood he was stronger in that way. For about an hour I wanted to hurt him, and I concocted plans, but then the urge passed with a powerful feeling of guilt.

  These episodes were few, and they eventually stopped altogether even though it was clear Paul held a special position with Johnny. Paul was more of a man’s boy—tough, with an attitude, barely skirting trouble, sometimes inviting it. On the other hand, I was quiet and often alone, wanting to be reading or wandering in the woods or fishing, and I would do things Johnny could not comprehend, like asking for a typewriter for Christmas. At moments, I think Johnny, a big strong man whom Paul and I both loved, thought I might be gay. I remember the time, after we had moved down to the shore, that a new neighbor of ours, a former schoolteacher from out of town, suggested that I apply for a scholarship to spend my final two years of high school at a fancy prep school in New Hampshire. Johnny was stubbornly firm that I not go, in a way I had not seen in him before. He feared, I think, that I would tip in the wrong direction and be drawn too easily into a boarding school culture of buggery.

  But another reason I overcame the resentment was that I knew Paul was proud of me. I was sure of this because he was constantly arranging fights for me with neighborhood boys, and I knew Paul well enough to realize that he would not want to be associated with a brother who was a loser. A long straight city street, Lee Avenue, connected our scruffy garden apartment complex in New Brunswick with our elementary school, a four-story brick box with big windows and black iron fire escapes inside a tall chainlink fence. I remember fighting my way down that street on my way home on more than one occasion. I was tall and skinny with a high threshold for pain, and a pretty good fighter, especially once the punching stopped and the other boy and I began twisting on the ground. I had long legs that could scissor my opponents into immobility. My best move was the one I used on Paul: I pushed my opponent’s face to the ground and brought an arm around his back and lifted it until the pain forced him to say he had had enough. “My brother can kick your ass,” Paul would say, and he was only eight years old. He had stronger words, but that phrase usually sufficed. I hated the fighting but enjoyed my brother’s unspoken respect.

  As boys, we took the bus to summer day camp together, sang in the child
’s choir together and swam naked together at the Y, but as we moved into the higher grades, then high school, we occupied different worlds. I moved with the good kids; Paul with the bad, or those on the margins.

  It was a difficult period for all of us—the root problem was the same, but the manifestations in our lives were different. My mother had met Johnny while separated from our father when we were small boys, and Johnny lived with us on and off for several years before they married. He usually slept on the couch in those nonmarried years, my mother’s gesture toward family morality. As far as Paul and I were concerned, he was tightly and irrevocably inside our family—a combination father and big brother. He always drank a lot, but he was a happy and exuberant man, with a big presence and sense of humor and mischief, and full of surprises and stories. He liked to sing country songs: Hank Williams, Johnny Cash. We were proud of his size and strength, and we craved his attention. He gave it generously, taking us fishing, watching television with us and planning preposterous trips—boat shopping, as if we would ever buy one—in his broken-down cars. Often we ended up in a darkened bar in the middle of the day, and he had us sit next to him, served birch beers by the bartender. Sometimes we played shuffleboard with him in the cool dimness of the tavern. We all loved him, and if it is possible to say who loved him most, that was probably my mother.

  Just as I was entering the eighth grade, Johnny and my mother married and bought a house (“Waterfront Living, No Money Down”). He had finally, after long effort, obtained a union card for the merchant marine, but after two years and four extended trips at sea, his drinking had worsened. The money he made disappeared mostly to liquor and there were long periods of unemployment. My mother worked furiously to hold on to the house—I remember the mortgage payment to this day, $166. It was the amount she—we—had to come up with each month for the bank. It was clear by now that Johnny was an alcoholic, unreliable and often sick. He had hard vomiting episodes in the bathroom. Unable to make the payments, we lost the house. By then, I was a junior in high school. We moved to another garden apartment.