Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  I still had time before dark, and it was too early to crawl into the sleeping bag, so I walked along the Adams Road and turned down Cold Brook, following it downstream. I came to a beaver pond that I had been unaware of. It had been created by a mud dam that held back a small tributary to the brook. A couple of swallows swooped over the water, picking insects out of the air, and then I saw a beaver making his way across the pond, only his big head breaking through the surface. He spotted me and gave me the angry slap. He went down and did not come back up. I waited quietly. I walked a little farther to an open spot near the brook and listened. This seemed to be a perfect place to hear woodcock whistling. It was the time of year for their courtship display of high flights and sudden twisting drops, but I heard nothing except the sweet melody of the peepers, which was its own reward. It is among the brightest and most cheerful sounds of the woods. The sun was setting now, so I headed back. I reached the big pond, and the sun’s rays lit the trees along the far shore and sent a red glow over the water’s still surface. Once again, I witnessed that incredible bowl of light—this time as it was rapidly losing its luminescence, like a gas lamp that has been shut but whose glow takes a few seconds to extinguish.

  I returned to the cabin, taking my time along the way to examine the hillside. I arranged my sleeping bag and slipped into it. The deck was hard, but at least it was flat and without rocks as there would have been had I been sleeping on the ground. I was using my son Adam’s sleeping bag, a fancy mummy bag from L.L.Bean. It had a little hood that rolled up into a small pillow. The peepers were singing loudly, and occasionally I felt a cool puff of damp spring air come up from below when the wind lifted. The air smelled of the wet thawing ground and the new season. Somewhere off in the distance I heard an owl’s windy nine-syllable hoot: Whoo cooks for you, whoo cooks for you all?

  The stars shone brightly in the sky, and I watched them through the crossbeams of the cabin frame. It was as if I were looking through the rigging of a sailing ship, maybe a coastwise schooner making its way down the Atlantic shore. I folded my hands behind my head and stared upward. Another gentle damp breeze blew across the deck, and I imagined my cabin lifting into the sky like some heavenly gaff-rigged raft, ascending into the night sky toward the stars, tacking toward Polaris and then hauling south and west toward Orion and bright Betelgeuse, and eastward for a closer look at the planet Saturn, and silently, behind a big spinnaker full of moonlight, sailing home again. I fell asleep to the sound of the geese gabbing away in the pond, here on earth.

  CHAPTER 7

  SUMMER WORK

  I had been away from the cabin for nearly a month, back in temporary disguise as a professor. I had left the hillside in late April just as the black limbs of the swamp maples had pushed out their delicate red flowers, and now, on my return in May, those same lithe trees were showing tender five-pointed leaves. The fiddlehead ferns were fully unscrolled in the wet places, and along the brooks the skunk cabbages were as big as Alaska cauliflower. It was no longer possible, as it had been in winter and late spring, to see into the woods. The deep spaces were filled in with greenery.

  I was free to put my hands and back into the work of cabin building for three uninterrupted months. The time spread ahead of me like a gift, an indolence of chosen work in the outdoors. This was pleasure of a high order. I had sketched out a sequence of building tasks and they stood in my mind as orderly as a long row of Indiana corn. If the need came over me—as it might at any moment—I was accountable to no one but myself and could grab my fishing rod and explore some nearby brook for wild trout. 161 I guessed my conscience would hold me fast to the cabin at least until the roof was overhead, but the combination of pleasurable work and freedom to slack off if I wanted it was delicious.

  I splurged and took a room with a small kitchen at the nearby inn for six weeks: clean linen, fresh towels and a good bed. I had packed a box of books for the empty nights: novels, field guides to birds, trees and flowers, and a couple of histories of Maine. There was a small refrigerator, which I filled with eggs, bacon, frozen vegetables and bottles of wine and beer. This was high gypsy living, and I thought of those banged-up men, and sometimes families, from my boyhood down the shore who would occupy beachfront hotels and motels in the off-season when the rents plummeted.

  There was a small staff at the inn, and I came to enjoy their company. Megan, the clerk and manager, lived down the road from the cabin with her husband and three children. Martha was the second clerk. She was a cute blonde, hardworking and determined, raising two children on her own. Not long after I arrived, she married a young man from Guatemala who had been part of a Spanish-speaking crew that was clearing brush along rural power lines in the area. The workers had stayed at the inn, and a romance developed between Martha and one of the handsome young men. Four months elapsed between their meeting and the wedding, held in the inn’s side yard on a lovely summer day. And there was Kenny, the overnight clerk. He was twenty-two years old, with light brown hair and fine sparse whiskers that were not quite a beard. He had a long face and fine nose, and he reminded me of the boys seen in Civil War daguerreotypes who had enlisted on both sides by exaggerating their ages. Kenny always had a book in his hand, and I soon learned that he was an insatiable and organized reader.

  The first time I met him he was reading The Pilgrim’s Progress. A seventeenth-century English allegory of Christian life struck me as an unusual choice. I asked about it and learned he was working his way through a reading list that he had taken from a book titled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It was a peculiar litany of recommended reading, smelling of arcane discernment and fusty British tastes. So far, he had read The Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote, The Unfortunate Traveller, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Thousand and One Nights, The Golden Ass, Aithiopika, Chaireas and Kallirhoe, Metamorphoses and Aesop’s Fables. He had also knocked off Jane Eyre, Oroonoko, Little Women and Justine, to mention just a few.

  I don’t think I could have found a single professor at my college who had read as many esoteric classics. I told him what I was reading—a novel of New England by Russell Banks. I thought he would recognize the setting and characters. He made a note and said he would get a copy. Over the summer, I came to learn that he had attended the high school in Bethel, where, he said, the teachers had not taken much of an interest in him or his hunger for reading. He was living in a mobile home in nearby Albany, the town where he had grown up, with an elderly couple who had taken him in. He had left home in high school over a dispute with his father. “We didn’t see eye to eye,” he told me in typical understatement. His father was a woodcutter, and his mother and father lived apart. He was active in the Albany Congregational Church and helped serve the church’s monthly public suppers.

  We spent many nights near the inn’s front desk talking about books. One night I told him I was also working my way through Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. He was interested in the book’s argument, and I explained that Fiedler, the towering literary critic, had traced the history of the novel to Clarissa by Samuel Richardson in the mid-eighteenth century. “Is that the same Richardson who wrote Pamela?” Ken asked me. I said that it was. “I read it last year,” he said. “Good book.”

  This small group at the inn welcomed me, and when I returned there at night after a day’s work at the cabin and felt the need for company, I made my way out to the desk, poured a cup of coffee from the pot that was always there and found a willing partner in conversation.

  My plan was to have the cabin habitable by the middle of July—a new deadline—and then I would move from the inn to the hillside and finish the work as a cabin dweller. The cabin frame, including all of the rafters, was fully complete. Paul, Kevin and I had muscled those giant rafters into place in April. The tasks ahead of me were, in order: sheathing the exterior walls and roof, which still was not done; applying the pine-board siding; framing inside rooms; stuffing insulation between the studs
and rafters; laying up the boards for the interior walls and ceilings; and putting down a floor, which would be planks of wide pine. This was a lot. Paul was available on weekends; I was on my own during the week. Kevin, whose driver’s license had been suspended, would come with Paul when he could.

  On that first morning of work, I made a distressing discovery. It was going to be awfully difficult for me to put up the sheathing on my own. The four-foot-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood weighed around fifty pounds each, and they were ungainly to maneuver. Putting up a sheet required lifting it, getting it properly aligned right and left and up and down and then keeping it in place as I drove the nails. I used my knees, shoulders, head and back, in a variety of poses and contortions, to hold the pieces against the frame, but it was obvious that this was a job for a Hindu god with four arms—or more likely, here in Stoneham, two men. I went looking for a second man. I found him at the inn.

  Billy Mann handled the inn’s maintenance. This included mowing grass, splitting firewood, unclogging sinks and toilets, rebuilding steps, refilling propane gas tanks, changing lightbulbs and hauling garbage to the dump—about anything that came up. He was fifty-four years old, big in the chest and shoulders, with white-yellow hair and glasses that enlarged his milky blue eyes. His face showed some roseola and a puffiness that suggested high blood pressure, and his hands were large and rough. His usual outfit was jeans, a heavy flannel shirt and camo baseball-type cap. He had a laugh the timbre of which would change slightly to underscore the basic sense of whatever it was he had just expressed—worry, displeasure, optimism, certainty. He might say, for example, “I got an awful pile of wood waiting for me to split out there.” His trailing laughter made it clear he was not eager to begin. Or he would say, “I might have to sneak away on Saturday for a little fishing,” and then light laughter indicated this was a reward he was looking forward to. I met him at the inn’s front counter, where I saw him each morning leaning on his elbow and collecting his jobs for the day. I asked him if he had any interest in working with me at the cabin, after work or on his days off.

  “Yeah, I can help you,” he said. His laughter indicated a degree of ambivalence, which was understandable since I had not yet mentioned money.

  I soon learned that Billy knew how to work. At the cabin, I explained what needed to be done, and he immediately began carrying sheets of plywood to the cabin frame—by himself. I insisted that we do it together, and soon we were putting up the sheathing in rapid order. One of us would hold the sheet and the other would nail it. I noticed that he often became winded and occasionally pulled an inhaler from his pocket. “It’s the asthma,” he said. He worked thirty hours a week at the inn (at thirteen dollars an hour), so he had some weekdays open to help me, and sometimes he came after work too.

  Billy had been born in Lewiston, Maine, an old mill town. His parents had moved to the tiny village of North Fryeburg when he was six months old. He grew up in North Fryeburg with four brothers and three sisters, and he had lived there ever since. It was about ten miles from the cabin. There was one brief foray to nearby Bridgton when he was eighteen and newly married. The marriage lasted one year and produced a son, Bill, who lived in New Hampshire. When the marriage ended, Billy moved back to North Fryeburg. He had grown up fishing and hunting, and on a Saturday in the late spring he could be found somewhere in the hill country, maybe up near Evans Notch, fishing for brook trout. He was a worm dunker. He left high school in his third year to earn money, and through the years he had worked as a truck driver, farmhand, logger, builder, maintenance man and heavy equipment operator. He always tried to have a job, he told me.

  Before the inn, his most recent job had been the best paying but most stressful. He had driven a bucket loader at a biomass energy plant in New Hampshire. He made fifteen dollars an hour straight time, and time and a half after forty hours. He received health benefits there. (He did not at the inn.) His job was to scoop the wood chips brought by trucks to the plant and dump them in the hopper, in the proper mix and at the proper rate. A bad mix, one that was too wet, for example, would slow the generation of electricity. It was stressful work, he told me as we put up the plywood. The job required him to work overtime, sometimes thirty additional hours a week. “They were screamers, too,” he said. “You couldn’t do nothing right.” The money was good but the pressure and the hours, he said, had begun to wreck his health. He was smoking heavily. He developed an ulcer, which burst, and he spent a week in Bridgton Hospital, where he nearly died. He went back to the power plant after his recovery, but the ulcer returned so he quit. By then, he had bought a four-wheel drive pickup truck, and the payments were five hundred dollars a month, which he had been able to afford when he was working at the generating plant. His second wife worked at a plant in New Hampshire that manufactured dog collars, but with his reduced hours and pay at the inn, he was struggling to make ends meet, with the truck an especially big burden. It was one of the reasons he had jumped at the prospect of working with me—he needed the money. He was also worried about the heating bill for his home. Heating oil was going for $2.50 a gallon that season. Sometimes the anxiety that the bills brought on was too much, he told me, and the doctor had written him a prescription to help control it. He was also taking pills to control his blood pressure.

  We also talked of more pleasant topics. His favorite times were hunting deer with his son Bill, now a mechanic, and deep-sea fishing for cod and haddock down the coast. He lived in a house he had built himself twenty years earlier. He had four children: Bill, from his first marriage; a girl from a relationship following his first marriage; and two girls from his current marriage, one of whom his wife had brought into the marriage but who counted Billy as her father. His house, which I once visited when I drove him home, was on a sandy road not far from the potato fields that occupy the Saco River bottomland where he had worked as a farmhand. It is just about a mile from the location of the house where he grew up.

  “There aren’t many people who can do what you’re doing,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean there aren’t many people who could just build this place the way you are—buying what you need as you go along and, you know, just deciding to build a place, and then going to the lumberyard or hardware store and getting what you need and having the money for it.”

  I told him that he was right about that, and I felt fortunate I could do it.

  I sometimes walked to the cabin from the inn, and the trek would take me through the intervale, which was alive with robins picking up worms from the damp alluvial soil, and along the southwest edge of the pond. In any season, a pond is endlessly absorbing. In late May, the painted turtles pushed their plow-point beaks out of the water, and tiny green leaves—the floating roofs of the pondweeds that were anchored in the mud below—dappled the surface. On several mornings I spotted a young bull moose, belly deep in the water with a muzzle full of weeds, looking preposterous, slightly puzzled and self-satisfied in the way that only a moose can. These trips, just over a half mile, sometimes took an hour or two. I dallied along the way and rewarded myself with the leisure of observation even before I could claim a single driven nail.

  I began some mornings at Melby’s, where I was slowly drawn into the town’s conversation. There was a general wariness about me at first, especially since I bought the New York Times, but it seemed to dissipate as I developed a breakfast routine. I sat at the same stool, always ordered two eggs over easy with dark toast and no butter, and quietly read the newspaper. The talk around me was mostly about the weather, the Red Sox, the latest outrage by the state legislature, logging, farming or the condition of the town roads. These were well-worn subjects. Customers inquired after each other’s health, and the responses acknowledged the greeting but revealed nothing: Can’t complain. I’m okay, I guess. Not bad, you? Been worse.

  One morning, a big man, well into his sixties, leaned toward me about three seats down the counter and said, “What do you
think of them Sox, huh!” It was an exclamation but it wanted an answer. Clearly a door was being thrown open. I was prepared to handle the weather or the roads, maybe even to weigh in on the state budget, which I might have mischievously suggested was too low given the condition of the state’s schools, which in turn would have caused any number of the frugal countrymen around me to choke and blast their eggs across the counter, but at the moment I had no opinion whatsoever about the Red Sox. I had not yet keyed into their play for the season. I was mute for a slow count of five, then responded, “Well, they’re something else, aren’t they?” It was a volley of rhetorical ambiguity with no meaning on either side, but it was response enough to show good faith, and he was off and running on the beauty of Josh Beckett’s slider, which he had stayed up late into the previous night admiring. I added nothing to the conversation but encouraging assent and wonder at the young man’s extraordinary ability with the ball.

  I learned over the following mornings that my acquaintance at the counter had been a long-haul trucker, a senior owner operator, and that the trucking company had canceled his contract. “Can you imagine that?” he said. “After all those years, they just cut me loose.” He still couldn’t grasp the abrupt and coldhearted action. Things like that just did not happen in the United States of America—although, he added with a scornful laugh, he guessed they did now. “After all those years,” he said again, still in disbelief. The company had wanted him to work for less pay, he said. He had calculated that he could not afford his rig’s payments at the new rate, so he sold the truck and retired. “I tell you,” he said as he put a big fat hand flat on the counter, “I miss it.” He lifted his frame off the stool and hauled himself out the door.