Country of Cold (18 page)

Back to the barn. Hours after midnight, and drunk. Cardboard or no, it had a certain grace about it. From here on in, timber would replace cardboard in a successions of transplantations like wax for bronze. She had made a thing. It wasn’t nothing.

When Brandy was born she had black hair as thick as a kewpie doll’s, and was more beautiful than can be said. Eyes like little wrinkles in a morel, her wee belly as flat as a cut cheese, her sex another folded cloth, feet little nubbins of bone and skin, each like a baby rodent. Even distractible Jim’s attention was caught for a few months, and they huddled together in that awful house-just-like-the-one-beside-it-except-that-theirs-was-the-mirror-image and just grinned, all three of them, for six months.

The day after her plans arrived in the mail she had driven into town and placed her lumber order at the Northern Store. For the planking she would use yellow cedar, and for the ribs and frames white oak. It was astonishingly expensive to buy such wood clear of knots
and defects. When she wrote out the cheque the clerk had scrutinized the distant city’s address on it and her signature. He’d have to wait to place the order until it cleared the bank, it’s policy. She nodded.

She climbed to the loft of the shed, where the lumber was stored, and removed the tarps. The cedar’s fragrance leaped up to her, like too much scent, and she could barely wait to cut into it and breathe in the perfumed air. The oak was rough and needed planing, but beneath the saw marks the hard open grain looked out at her. She held a length to her cheek and licked it. It tasted bitter, like dried carrot greens.

In laying the ballast keel and joining it to the backbone, it must be ensured that the whole member lies plumb and true, along all three axes. Along the horizontal axis the ribs must rise vertically in every instance; no cant forward or aft can be allowed if the subsequent joinery work of deck and planking is to proceed. And it would never do to have the keel cocked, however subtly, off to port or starboard—such a vessel would never hold a reliable course; nor can it be rotated even minutely around its longitudinal axis—the resulting displacement of the ballast would put the centre of gravity well outboard and the vessel would list drunkenly the moment she was launched, circling always in the direction of her list, as if on tether to some hidden, submarine anchor.

She had bought good tools, at Mr. Chapelle’s instruction, and had them shipped up on the rail line a few
weeks after she arrived. Her thickness planer was worth as much as a small car, her band and table saws almost as much again. Along one wall of the shed she had built a workbench out of clean, sanded white pine, and the peg-board above it held her Swedish chisels and mallets and handsaws. As they had arrived in cases she had taken them out and examined each one like it was artwork, and oiled and rubbed them until the act was feeling disconcertingly sexual. The workbench was the first thing she ever made out of wood. It had taken her three starts and nearly a week. But in the end it was solid and stable, and in building it, she was persuaded that she really could build a boat, which made the bench a success twice over. And the checques drawn on their bank account had kept clearing. He must have cashed in some of their mutual funds.

Making the mould in which to cast the lead ballast keel was the first really difficult thing she had to do. In the course of all the lofting work, she had cut out a series of ovoid patterns—cross sections—which laid out the lines of the ballast keel, growing larger from bottom to top. From these she sawed corresponding blocks out of two-inch white pine planks. Stacked on top of one another and bolted together, they composed the mould form. As she assembled the form, the curves of the hull came to be hinted at in the alignment of these blocks. The step-wise progression of the forms still had to be faired out, made flush.

An adze looks like a curved chisel attached at right angles to an axe handle—an ice pick but with a blade. It is a fierce-looking device and, Mr. Chapelle warned her, causes more injury in the shipyard than practically any other tool. Picturing his lined, concerned face, she swung it slowly and carefully. Standing over the wooden mould, swinging the blade between her legs like a croquet mallet, she thought, This could get dangerous. And then she set the adze down and lit another lamp, to better light the workshop. She resumed her chipping. You get hurried or frightened doing this sort of work and you lose a leg.

By the time Brandy started grade five, still a baby, her mother thought, things were already going badly. Each morning she drove Brandy to school, and when she got back Jim would have left for work. At nine forty-five she got into the car and drove to the library where she worked. When she got home in the afternoon, Brandy and Jim would already be there, each going about his or her business. For the next few years, Brandy played with the neighbourhood girls after school: hours and hours up in her bedroom giggling. At some point one of them—over the years they had all had a turn, all except Brandy—would emerge crying. That’s what they did, each and every day. And whenever there were variations—holidays, weekends, extended tantrums—everyone involved prayed for the routine to resume.

~

To melt the lead enough to get it to flow into the mould, she needed a casting pot, a container to hold the molten metal. The book suggested she use an old cast-iron bathtub. She had driven to the town dump, a little skeptically, and she had brought an old, chipped, claw-footed lovely back to her yard. She placed wooden blocks under each of the paws and lit a coal fire beneath the tub. She ran a steel pipe from the bath drain to the casting mould. This all struck her as a preposterous way to cast metal.

It took her days to get the tub hot enough to melt her lead blocks. In the end she had to buy a half-dozen thirty-pound propane tanks from the Northern Store, with torch heads that she set to fire all along the bottom of the tub. She had set this all up outside in the yard, concerned about fire in the workshed, but the wind seemed to dispel every bit of heat she generated the instant it was created, and these were long, cold days.

When the lead was finally hot enough—and it had to be much hotter than simply the melting point, or it would just solidify in the drain—she opened the valve and watched the lead drain slowly out of the tub. It ran nicely onto the mould, settling over it like thick silver syrup, smoking against the wooden form and glistening and steaming in the cold air. Every snowflake that landed on it hissed. The propane torches roared.

The ribs of the boat came next. Once again, she studied the loftwork she had prepared and was moved
by the fluid beauty of the complex curves she’d described. She had assumed that the ribs could be cut all of a piece out of larger blocks, and she was surprised to learn that even if timber of sufficient size had been available to allow that, the grain had to follow the curves of the ribs or else the member was irredeemably weakened. The wood wasn’t statuary—it couldn’t be chipped into the desired shape as if it had no grain, as if it possessed no intrinsic character.

To pressure-steam wood, you need a container that seals tightly. The manufacture of a welded steel box that would serve as the pressure cooker daunted her a little. She would have to learn to weld. And the consequences of a shabbily made steam box struck her as perilous.

There was a great deal of discussion from Chapelle about the need for a sufficient number of hands to handle the steamed wood, to get it bent onto the frame before it cooled. She considered this advice and concluded that she would have to make up with preparation for what she lacked in manpower. She cleared out half the floor space in the shed for this part of the operation. Another trip into town to buy an arc welder and steel plate and hinges and sealing rubber. And a welding-for-beginners manual.

She had told herself that her daughter hadn’t become a bad kid—how could there be a bad kid?—that she was just acting out, that if she could just get Jim to pay
a little more attention to her, if she could just get this family back on track together, then it would be clear that she was a lovely little girl, just as she always had been.

She had believed, despite the available evidence, that it was impossible to screw up, impossible to make anything other than an innately sweet and ultimately lovely daughter, that no effort was required beyond that of endurance, as if the outcome was preordained. You could just slip into stupor and sleepwalk through her life as you sleepwalked through your own, and nothing bad would come of it and certainly there was no responsibility to be taken for anything bad that did. She sat on the step of the shed, remembering this; the air inside was still settling and sawdust was precipitating out onto every horizontal surface and she hit herself in the centre of her forehead steadily, as if she were driving in a stubborn dowel.

When the wedding-present silverware disappeared and Brandy proposed that a burglar had got it in the middle of the night, but had taken nothing else, Carol had seized her and pulled her close, both of them shaking. They held one another for maybe an hour, long after Jim had gone back down to the basement, and then they released each other and never referred to the matter again.

These days, on the Arctic coast, passed for Carol without any real sense of time. A day was as long as what she managed to get done. Some days didn’t exist at all, as
when she mismeasured a piece of wood and was left at the end of the day where she had started. Some days stretched on and on, and task after task was completed, and she felt like she could do anything, charging from one perfect fit to another, glue curing flawlessly, joints so tight you’d think the pieces only lately split from one another by an especially sharp and slim blade. Days like that were unusual, but occurred often enough to keep her going.

She awoke in the mornings to an alarmingly cold house; she couldn’t seem to find a way to keep the stove stoked. Most nights she fell asleep in the living room listening to late-night radio, then woke at some point and ran shrieking through her abruptly frozen house into her stiff-from-the-temperature bedsheets. In the morning the house seemed like it could not be any warmer than the air outside, the sheets around her face soggy from condensation.

And then, lighting the stove, heating the water for a bath and her oatmeal and coffee. She took extravagant care over the preparation of oatmeal, which she came to appreciate as she never had in the course of her life in the city. She boiled it, lavishly, in apple cider with nutmeg and cinnamon sticks and vanilla beans. Breakfast was hard to learn to eat alone, and by making a big enough production of it she found that she could divert her attention almost completely from her isolation.

In the Northern Store they had looked at her dubiously when she said that she wanted something with which she could weld eighth-inch steel plate, but didn’t know what exactly, did they have any advice for her? The older man who had been working when she ordered her lumber and the lead and the rest of the supplies she had needed hadn’t been present but rather a younger man, his son presumably. The son had the younger man’s need to elevate himself, and he lifted his eyebrows archly and inquired whether she would be interested in an inert gas machine, or a simple arc welder, or was she thinking oxyacetylene, or what. Asshole. She had asked him what colour each came in.

On the way out of town she stopped at Gypsy’s Café and Bakery for a glass of beer and a pork chop. Postelwaithe was there, eating by himself. When she saw him she lifted up her plate and glass and walked up to his table and asked if she could join him. He looked surprised, but assented.

“How is your boat coming along?” he asked, raising his bushy eyebrows. She had never mentioned it to another person and until this moment it had felt like it existed only within her.

“Fine,” she said, tucking into her pork chop.

“What are you going to do with the boat when you are done?” he asked

“Launch it,” she said, chewing.

He nodded. “Here?”

“It’s the reason I came here,” she said. “The ocean being so close.”

“Good a reason as any,” he said.

“Better than most,” she said, enjoying the ranch-hand cadence to their speech.

“You said a mouthful there,” he said. She swallowed her chop and nodded.

Welding isn’t as hard as it looks. The noise and that bright light are frightening at first but you won’t get hurt if you keep your glasses on and for God’s sake don’t go picking up anything before you’ve doused it, even if it’s been many minutes since you heated it and the flange looks like it’s room-temperature. You really do need proper leather welding gloves (and a new pair after manoeuvres like that) and coveralls that can’t trap sparks. Keep the rod moving: too fast and the bead will be thin and interrupted, too slowly and you’ll melt through the plate, leaving holes in the seam. It takes a day or two to start to get the hang of it. And then you’ll get an idea of just how much there is to know. Steel is supposed to be a snap compared to aluminum or titanium. Even stainless steel is a lot tougher than plain steel. She found herself bent under the steel tube chairs in her kitchen, studying the neat little beads that she had never noticed before.

The steam box was, in the end, simply a large coffin-shaped box made out of excessively welded steel plate. In it were racks upon which she could lay precut pieces
of wood, and on the bottom of the box was a large pan that held water. Protruding out of the top, through fittings that had been rewelded many times, were a metal thermometer and a pressure gauge.

The first time she fired it up was an experiment. She inserted a piece of oak, filled the water tank, and sealed the box. Then she lit the fire beneath it. Within twenty minutes the pressure and temperature had reached the prescribed levels. She waited another three hours and then she released the steam out of the valve. When she opened the box she could hardly breathe for the clouds enveloping her. All she could smell was the scent of oak steamed to three hundred degrees and as pungent as a poached fish. She took the piece out with long tongs and quickly manoeuvred the limp board onto the clamp table. There she tightened and adjusted the clamps until the beam described the smooth arc of the hull’s cross section, like one half of a wineglass, cut lengthwise.