Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  The horrors don’t disappear (a thousand years from now there will be ignorance and anguish and leaky roofs), but the despair in what connects us shifts to joy. What the student feels, I think, is a simultaneous presence—a total being there—and a dissolving into something so much larger than his own self.

  There were moments, pounding a nail with a hammer through wood, when body synched with task, when I became palm and hammer handle and the motion in my shoulder and my elbow, and the only thing was the movement, bang bang, and the connection of the hammer head and the nail head, bang, and the sliding of the metal through the wood. Like the student, fully present and also dissolved into something beyond myself, into the history of hammerbangs.

  When I dissolved into the motion, walls vanished, all the divides and barriers. An echo sounded, a big bang that reverberates forward and back. We’re all of us less of what we were each second, just the way roofs will leak ten centuries from now. We’re all of us inoperable at some point. And when the walls lift, when we are linked with what came before through the simplicity of swinging a tool through space, or sharing a story, we escape for a moment the prospect of facing the great wall of indifference. And instead of fear, grave dread, despair, it’s possible to find calm, and joy.

  It didn’t happen every time I held a hammer. Often it was just bent nails and bruised fingers. Most times it was work. But when it was right, the experience was a tapping in with the motion before and after me, and the threads that connect us started to glow. A different sort of door is opened, one that, for glimmering moments, gives access to immortality.

  When I walked down my old street, or along the cereal aisle, and thought myself exceptional for knowing what sixteen-on-center means, I should’ve known better. It’s not that I knew more than anyone else, it’s that I knew something that so many other people have known and know and will know.

  By four-thirty in the afternoon at the Russians’ house, we finished framing the window. The shingles were back on. The wound was closed, the bugs were poisoned. It was sealed and mended, the rot eradicated and replaced with fresh strong wood. Solid and stable, inside and outside were back to being divided the way they should be. This verged on miraculous—that this was possible to do in a day. I stood below Mary up on the ladder and raised my hands.

  “I can’t believe this!”

  Mary laughed.

  Annie Dillard in a poem writes:

  That there should be mahogany, real, in the world,

  instead of no mahogany, rings in his mind

  like a gong—

  I know that gong. It rang in my mind that afternoon. That this should be possible, real in the world—what a simple thing. It wasn’t miraculous, was it? Prying a house apart, removing the rot, chopping pieces of pine, and making the wall strong again. This was a matter of knowing and tools. Everyday this happens. But the fact is, the truth is, it was done instead of not done. Instead of a hole in the air, there was a wall. Dillard locates the recognition of the commonplace, a firm and welcoming embrace of what’s solid, ordinary, all around us. “Reality rounds his mind like rings in a tree,” she writes. We find the real: in rings that mark the years, in gongs that echo, in the framing of a window, the solid stuff of everyday. In love, too. Of all humans, that you exist instead of not, that I’ve found you. It’s not a miracle, is it? It’s the total lack of abstraction, wholly actual. And maybe it’s closer to a moment of grace, a noticing that takes on the weight of ceremony, and connects us to the world.

  We packed the van that afternoon, loaded the saws and the ladder and lumber. On the drive home, Mary talked about the wasps and how bees in the winter stay warm by huddling in their hive and vibrating against each other. She said: “Isn’t that incredible?”

  Chapter 3

  SCREWDRIVER

  On screwing and screwing up

  Months accumulated. Experience accumulated. Our second fall together—shortened days and dropping temperatures—took us to a small deck job in a Somerville neighborhood near I-93. The street was densely packed with triple-deckers. The old man who ran the auto-body shop at the end of the block sat on a folding chair outside his garage, watching cars. Dust had collected on the shoulders of the tuxedos in the window of the formal-wear-rental store nearby. And I never saw any customers head into the scuba-diving shop on the corner. Car bumpers in driveways along the street wore Brazilian flag stickers.

  The building we were working on signaled change to come: all clean concrete lines and well-appointed roof decks. It looked as if torn from a photo feature in an architectural design magazine. And it stuck out like a hammerbanged thumb from the rest of the neighborhood.

  Four doorways along the side of the building led into high-ceilinged, track-lit spaces, each with a small front porch, a stoop with a few steps. One of these little porches had been wrecked. A resident had driven into it, and given how short and narrow the driveway was, it’s a mystery as to how the person could’ve demolished the deck, and the car, according to a chatty neighbor, so thoroughly.

  Mary and I were bundled in hats and wool socks and vests. The morning was cool and we talked about the seasonal signpost of seeing your breath for the first time, as we had that morning. First we removed what was left of the old decking, pried and unscrewed with crowbars and ratchets. We heaped the old wood to the side. The day was dry and bright. The sky, the deep blue that comes in fall, pulled everything into sharper focus. The orange extension cord snaked bright along the top of a hedge and over to our saws. A Calderesque mobile dangled high and swayed gently in someone’s kitchen window, red shapes, industrial and delicate both. Seagulls landed on the roof and flew away again. We made quick work of the framing: four long joists across, two steps down, easy math. We secured the joists to the outer frame, hammered galvanized nails into the braces, and fastened it all together with long thick lag bolts. We cranked and cranked on the ratchet to make them tight.

  Mary and I were in synch that morning, anticipating each other’s moves, our hammer swings strong and on target, each of us focused on work with few words exchanged. This was a new pleasure, something we’d now achieve on certain days, a rhythm and connection to each other and the work. We didn’t react so much as sense, as though riding the swells and dips on a river, an intimate flow. The sound of the pounding of the nails rang out, we tightened down the bolts, mirror images of each other, as the sun moved across the sky and slowly warmed the morning. We pulled off layers of clothes as the work warmed us. Language was an afterthought to our attention, almost inviolate, on the movements of the body and the action of the tools.

  For the rebuilt deck, we were using Brazilian walnut the rich red color of freckles. When I sliced through it with the saw, it smelled like cinnamon, molasses, a little bit like chocolate. Other names for Brazilian walnut are embuya, imbuia, canela-imbuia; somehow those words sound the way this wood smells. Ipe (pronounced ee-pay or eye-pay depending on whom you ask) is another name for it. It’s called ironwood as well, for good reason. Brazilian walnut sinks in water. To lift a board is to feel immediately that this is not like the weight of wood we’re most familiar with. Feather-light cedar is twenty-two pounds per cubic foot. The mighty oak’s density is forty-three pounds per cubic foot. Ipe’s is sixty-six. It’s so dense we had to use a special sharp drill bit to predrill a hole for every screw used to attach the deck planks to the frame. We paused when the shank of the bit got too hot drilling through the ironwood. Tiny twists of smoke rose from the holes with a sweet smell like marshmallows, and something acrid behind it, a sharp and unfamiliar scent, nothing like the homey smell of brushfires in the yard or chimney smoke; the smell itself signaled the fight the wood put up against heat. We blew on the bit to cool it off, waved the drill through the air to lower the temperature of the metal. We’d already broken one bit. It got too hot and cracked off in the hole. When I removed the remaining piece of bit from the drill, it fell and landed on my forearm, bare skin with sleeves rolled up. It left a drill-bit brand, a red bu
rn mark painful for the rest of the day.

  At lunch, we talked about the wood, its lifespan, how resistant it is to wet and bugs. Mary lamented all the synthetic decks she was starting to see. The synthetic wood can be cut like regular boards, and sprays plastic instead of sawdust.

  “I get it, but who cares if it lasts until the world ends. I’m a carpenter, not a plastic worker.”

  We were sitting on the ground by the deck we were building. We ate lunch early. Mary’s day started at four-thirty in the morning, sometimes earlier, and she never ate breakfast—just a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with cream and extra sugar. Every morning she took her big dog to the Fells, a 3,400-acre reservation one town over. That time of year, it was dark for her walk in the woods. She came home, answered e-mails, did errands for the day, and then started to work. We took lunch around eleven-thirty, sometimes earlier. The length of her mornings, her lack of food, and her ability to function astounded me; I’m not out of bed for five minutes before I’m eating breakfast.

  “And can you imagine breathing in plastic particles all day?” she said. “You’d hate it!” Mary teased me for my nerves around the stuff we breathed in, but it was comforting that she understood my fears.

  “What don’t you like about working with it?”

  She looked at me like I had a foot for a head. “Just—”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, as though obviousness negated the need for words. Though Mary didn’t articulate it, I think she would’ve said that it’s like using margarine instead of butter—something chemical and false. Something that lacks soul, lacks an essence. “Wood alternative” has the same processed connotations as polyester and substitute sweeteners.

  Real wood poses hassles: weather has its way with it, snow and rain and sun break it down. It rots. Mold and mildew grow and spread. Bugs make a meal of it. Slivers of it lodge themselves in the sole of your foot or the tender skin of your palm. Synthetic wood—a composite of plastics and wood product like sawdust and pulp—requires less maintenance than real wood. Though not impervious to the elements, synthetic wood need not be treated or stained or sanded. Wood chewers like termites don’t make it their meal. Synthetic wood does not give you splinters. It’s usually more expensive than real wood at the outset, but possibly less over time because you can ignore it. Try as the manufacturers might, in the laboratories and factories, they haven’t yet succeeded in making fake wood look real. Like a faux-fur coat with a leopard print, the grain in the synthetic wood is a close approximation of what exists in nature, but an approximation is all.

  How connected can you feel to something developed in a lab? Is it possible to love something you don’t have to care about? The comforting thing about wood, with its swirling grains, its knots and imperfections, its splinters and its vulnerability, is that we know exactly where it comes from. First there was dirt, a seed, sunlight, and water. Then a tree! A product of nature, and from that tree now there is a wood plank hewn from its trunk. What is polyvinyl chloride or polyethylene or polypropylene? Some people can answer that. But all of us know what a tree is. I also understand they’re a dwindling resource, and I wonder if and when composite wood will come to replace what comes from forests.

  In Mythologies, Roland Barthes laments the disappearance of wooden toys for ones made of “a graceless material” which “destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch.” Wood is “a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor.” He’s talking about kid things, but the argument is the same. A synthetic deck, though easy to maintain, severs our contact with the essential. Run your fingers over a piece of raw wood, a mixing spoon, a banister, and you can sense the vibration of the natural, the warmth of the known, a subtle hum that says this is of the earth. Lay your palm on a deck made of PVC; there is no murmuring there, no link to forest shade or pine sap.

  To witness the decay of wood on a fence that lines a field, on a forest path’s fallen trunk; to see it changing color, from rich brown-red, paling to gray to green, darkening to black; to see it changing texture, from solid and strong to flaking, chewed by bugs, softened by water, dissolved by time and moisture to a pulpy mess—it comforts us somehow, echoes our own wasting, our own softening and weakening over time. There is no existential comfort to be found in artificial wood, unchanged by time, none of the melancholy that paves our understanding and embrace of time and dying. It’s not that it taunts us with comparative immortality. It speaks nothing.

  The Brazilian walnut was speaking. As I chopped boards for the steps and the platform of the deck, it spoke. Of weight, of toughness, of time. I basked in the day and the work, the clear sky, and the strength in my arms from months of lifting saws and holding cabinets against walls and hammering. This is so good, I thought: to be outside, to be making this thing you could stand on. The smell of the wood, sweet and charry, reminded me of s’mores. It dusted the skin of my arm and the sleeve of my shirt and I could smell it there, too. In his Natural History, Pliny writes that each kind of tree is “immutably consecrated” to its own specific divinity: the myrtle to Aphrodite, the poplar to Hercules. Pliny says the beech was Zeus’s tree; other sources link him with the oak. This wood had the sacred about it, so dense it sinks.

  In the midst of this reverie of trees, I moved a little too fast. The miter-saw blade was still spinning when I realized I’d sliced too much off our final full-length plank. It was the last long piece and would run horizontal across the front face of the deck just below the platform. Such a simple mistake—I didn’t take into account the three-quarters of an inch that the top stair had added to the length of the deck. Blood heated my face. I swore under my breath. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

  “Mary?”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “I can—” but I didn’t know what I could do. Mary had told me once how they used to rib the young guys on the crew by telling them to go grab the board stretcher from the back of the truck. Where was the board stretcher now? I told her what happened.

  Mary went to the van and got her pouch of tobacco. She rolled a cigarette and smoked it and looked at the deck. I stayed quiet, my mind blank while Mary’s cooked. In these moments I felt most helpless, shut out of Mary’s thinking, unable to solve—or even think of solving—the problem myself. I was becoming aware of how deeply I relied on Mary to solve problems, have answers, tell me what to do. It was comfortable, in some ways, not having to be responsible for the mental heavy lifting, for the planning or problem solving. It was like riding shotgun on a long drive with a driver you trust—all you have to do is look at the hills and trees at the side of the road while the other person finds the way, makes the right turns, looks out for potholes, avoids hitting squirrels or moose. At some point though, you want to take the wheel yourself, or at least offer to drive a couple miles.

  Mary exhaled through the side of her mouth and the smoke drifted toward the window with the mobile inside. Her solution was simple and had taken about a minute to come up with. She picked up a scrap piece of the walnut and placed it vertically on the far left side of the deck. It ran from below the platform to the ground, and it would hide the three-quarter inch gap I’d created on the horizontal piece. Just one extra piece of trim, and the deck actually looked better for it. I should’ve been able to figure it out myself.

  “So much of carpentry is figuring out how to deal with mistakes,” Mary said. She’d said it before and she’d say it many times again. Her problem-solving ability, the way she could locate solutions or alternative approaches or work-arounds impressed me over and over, and struck me as maybe the most valuable quality she possessed. It comes in part from a brain suited to puzzling out problems in the physical world. It comes mostly from experience. “Half the job is knowing what to do when something goes wrong.”

  A lot was going wrong. The learning curve had leveled off and the initial exhilaration of the new had given way to the slow climb toward comp
etency with its setbacks and frustrations. More than a year and a half in, I could no longer claim unfamiliarity as an excuse. Some mistakes predate the job: time and moisture have slanted a floor; a previous countertop installer wasn’t so concerned with the concept of level; an overconfident homeowner has tried his hand at wiring; walls have bowed, plaster has swelled, tiles have cracked. But some mistakes are of your own making. Many, in my case.

  Mary’s desire for bigger jobs had been answered a couple times over. We got a big kitchen renovation job on a third-floor condo in Jamaica Plain for folks on a short budget. The neighborhood, south of Boston, inspires deep loyalty in its residents. At the Arboretum, the trees are labeled, and it seems like everyone owns a dog. E. E. Cummings, Anne Sexton, and Eugene O’Neill are buried in a nearby cemetery. One store has over seven thousand hats to choose from, and City Feed & Supply has a general-store vibe, with fancy cheese from Vermont, good sandwiches, and a community-shared commitment to sustainability. It’s a sign of the times that the Lucy Parsons Center, a radical bookstore and community space that welcomes all lefty tendencies, moved from Cambridge to Jamaica Plain some years ago.