Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (21 page)

“Finesse,” Mary said often. In other words, be gentle, go slow, don’t rip and yank with all your might. Let the materials tell you which way they want to go. Use your mind and listen closely. Allow physics and the tools and patience to get the job done.

“It’s all about coaxing,” Mary said. “Knowing where to put the pressure.”

T
he final days of a job involve lugging and loading. Striking items off a final punch list, cleaning before we leave it for good for the owners to pile their lives in their new, changed space. We would walk through a place, once, twice, three times, to make sure the dust was out from between the tiles, the bit of paint around the light switch got touched up, the small hole in the stair was patched and painted black like the rest. On the last day at Alice’s, we reviewed the punch list, nailed in a few last pieces of trim, slotted the huge chest freezer into the bay we’d built for it in the pantry. We swept, dusted, vacuumed, mopped. Done, and done. All day I couldn’t help but talk about how great everything looked. I went around knocking on the doors of the cabs. I rubbed the smooth white knob on a door in the pantry. I pulled out drawers (“Stop snooping,” said Mary). I felt excited and I felt proud. Mary felt it, too. She didn’t go around yammering about how amazing it all was, but she was smiling. We stood in the corner of the kitchen, the same place we’d stood on the first day there when the room was blank, and took a good look. Mary patted my shoulder. “Nice job,” she said.

So much work went into this kitchen. So many hours and so much sweat and effort, and we’d never see it again. It was ours—and not ours at all. All that was left to do was hang a screen door from the pantry out to the back porch. It was light and flimsy like a summer dress. We rigged it so it closed with a hush, a quiet tap against the frame. Perfect.

Alice appeared behind us. “No, no,” she said. “I want it to slam. It reminds me of summer.”

So we adjusted the spring and Mary and I stood in the pantry and we watched the door swing closed and we both blinked when it slammed like summer.

Chapter 6

LEVEL

On shifting, settling, and shifting again

A
fter Alice’s kitchen, we spent five weeks on the third floor of an old Victorian place with a turret where we moved walls and put down a hickory floor. The hickory, such hard wood, put up a good fight against the miter-saw blade, and gave off a rancid smell when cut, not sweet hickory-smoked barbecue, but something bile-like with a sour sting, likely from whatever chemical finish was used on the wood (
Contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer
it read on every box of boards). We did a kitchen at a place outside Harvard Square in Cambridge for a couple who became my favorite of all the people we worked for. They left us lemon cookies on the counter with notes that said “Eat these,” gave us jars of homemade jam from the raspberries and blackberries from their place in Vermont, joined us when we broke for lunch. The transplanted jade plant the woman gave me grows by my living room window. It wasn’t just their generosity: I liked the love the pair had. In their late fifties, early sixties, there was an amused exasperation between them, a sense of patience, an evident, affectionate closeness. “We want you to adopt us,” Mary told them.

We did a quick deck in Arlington, a historic suburb that edges up against Cambridge, on the route of Paul Revere’s ride. It took four days.

Somewhere along the way, I became the communicator in our team of two. Mary, besides talk of fleeing human company for Alaska, spoke fluent carpentry but forgot at times that not everyone understood her language. In situations where she outlined some aspect of the work to the client and got slow nods of semi-comprehension in response, I translated, with my beginner’s understanding of the grammar and vocabulary.

This: “We’re going to sister up the stud and patch the wall. The mud’ll dry overnight and tomorrow we’ll frame the cabs.”

Became this: “So we’re going to attach another two-by-four to this one here to give it extra support, then close up the hole here in the wall. Mud is drywall compound?” I’d say, to suggest,
Maybe you know this? Or maybe this is a weird quirk of Mary’s to call this mud?
“. . . And it can take about a day to dry. And we’ll be building the boxes for the bookcases, the outside shell of them”—using my hands to outline a rectangle—“tomorrow.”

Mary sometimes thanked me.

“I just think of what I wouldn’t have understood,” I’d say, which was everything. And I’m sure I’ve offended a homeowner in offering up an explanation of something that he or she already had full understanding of.
I know what
joists
are
.

Over these weeks, which piled up quickly to months, my muscles came back. I’d flex in the mirror, glad to see definition again in my arms. And Mary and I found our rhythm again.

A summer spent in kitchens and turreted third floors, on front porches and in closets lined with cedar, soon gave way to fall. Mary asked if I’d be willing to help on a project in her own house.

Her place was a work in progress, ever unfinished. The wallpaper up the narrow, twisting back stairs was faded and tearing. Holes in the plaster marked the walls like picked scabs. Plaster crumbs crunched under foot. Trim had been pulled from around the doors in a bathroom; the tub was a mess of old paintbrushes and kitty litter; the floor was battered oak; bits of prickly lath poked through holes in the bathroom wall. In the living room, where the chimney had been removed a couple years before by the wild demo man and his two sons, an ill-fitting piece of plywood covered the hole in the floor. Blue painters’ tape remained stuck to the ceiling from when we’d taped up plastic sheeting to keep brick and soot dust from drifting into the kitchen when the chimney came down.

The house was full of jobs half-done, and it stood in contrast to the meticulous way Mary tended to her worksites. Her own house was unfinished because paying work called again, and time rushes along. At first the kitchen had trim on only one wall for a few weeks, then a couple months, and then a year had swept by and there was blankness where the trim should be and maybe it had been forgotten, had disappeared into the familiar landscape of the house. Or maybe, with every time she entered, with every soup simmered, with every dish washed, a glance was given to where the trim should be, another reminder,
that, too
.

Mary was committed to a room on the third floor, a space of peaked ceilings, old dark wood, and small dormer windows. She wanted to make that room her office. It was dim, dusty, and cramped, with wood scraps and a big trash bin and rolls of insulation littering the floor. The two of us bumped into each other as we negotiated the small space, made smaller by the saws and tool buckets.

The ceiling slanted with the sharp rise of the roof. The house was built in 1886, and the boards were broad and dark. We framed a knee wall, about three feet high, used to support the rafters and named after its approximate height. We ran wires for lights at the top of the room. We shoved candy-pink insulation into the bays between the joists.

“Not there,” Mary said, as I reached to press another strip into a dark bay. “We’re going to do a skylight.”

We cut away the wood that ran across the rafters with the Sawzall—splintery old one-by-three—and pulled out old nails. We made the rough frame, cut two-by-tens and ripped them to match the wide rafters. Mary sliced through wood and roof to create the opening. A small flap at first, and there was sky, and light fell onto the floor as though it had been shoved, and cold air spilled in like water. Mary climbed out onto the thin lip of roof and crawled up and cut more of the opening from the outside, crumbs of roof tile rolling into the gutter. More light hit the floor. The room changed. And the same sense I had at the Russians’ house, where bugs had feasted on the wood of their bay window frame, returned: what if we can’t close it up in time? The days were shorter then. What if it rains? But those questions were quieted. We’ve done this before, a piece at a time. We’ll do it again now.

Mary went about removing the roofing tiles, prying them up without tearing them, pulling up the wide-headed roofing nails. I lifted the window itself out through the hole to Mary’s hands as she knelt on the roof. We placed it, made sure it was centered, shifted it back and forth within the hole, up and down, and Mary hammered in a few nails to keep it in place. It was a cold November day, bright and cloudless, and Mary puffed on her hands and clapped to keep them warm inside her work gloves. She installed the flashing and went about the slow process of re-installing the sheets of roof.

“I’d never want to be a roofer,” she called out.

While she was out there on the roof in the cold, I nailed lath to an arched space that led to the other window in the room. She hammered down on the roof. I hammered up into the ceiling. We pounded and pounded. Down and up, putting the room together, changing it and keeping it the same. She climbed back in through the window, pale with cold.

“All finished out there?”

“All finished.”

The sun, which had started at Mary’s back as she worked, beaming into the room, had shifted across the sky, was behind the other side of the house now, and setting. The sky softened to a purple and a few thin twists of cloud like cigarettes side by side rolled high above the horizon.

“It’s off by half an inch,” Mary said. I was silent and wondered if this meant taking it out, doing it all again. It must have slipped a bit before she nailed it in, she explained. “I should’ve thrown the level on it. You want to go see if we can tell from below?” I dreaded the look.

“Will it leak?”

“God, no,” Mary said. “I fucking hope not. I’m just worried it’s going to look crooked.”

She stopped by the woodstove to warm her hands on our way to the porch on the second floor. We looked up at the roof, at the new window. And what a relief—no evidence of the half-inch offness. It looked as it should.

Back upstairs, we stood side by side in front of the new window, shoulder to shoulder, and looked out. To the back porches and peaked windows of the houses nearby, lights just beginning to be flicked on, that inviting soft orange-golden glow against the dimming sky. To the Boston skyline three and a half miles away, a purple blur of buildings, rise and fall, above the stretch of Charles River we couldn’t see, and the bridges that spanned it. To new clouds, loose puffs, steady and high.

Red leaves clung to the tall maple out the window, leaves that would drop in the coming days, not long for this world, leaving the skeleton of the tree against the sky. I’ve always loved November, when the bones start to show.

I did my usual gushing—
it’s amazing, look, incredible
—astonished again at the work and its power to transform. The room remained unfinished, still a mess of guts and wires and wood, everything exposed, dust everywhere, thistles of insulation in the air. But it would all get done. In weeks or months. Slowly it comes together. The room was different now. It went from dim and cramped to bright-lit and inviting, a good place to sit and get some thinking done as the sun describes its arc across the sky, as the leaves fall off again to end another season and the tree adds another ring.

Mary nodded. “This changes everything.”

T
he maple leaves dropped, the temperature fell, and we slipped into winter. After the skylight, in the slowing of the year, Mary planned to pause the progress on her third-floor office space in favor of redoing a bathroom downstairs, the one with the paintbrushes in the tub and the crumbling walls.

I swung by her place to pick up the last check she owed me before we took our annual break. She walked me through her bathroom plan.

“Give me a call if you want some help,” I said.

“We’ll see if I can afford you. I’m scared shitless about how much the plumbing is going to cost.”

We parted ways with a hug and Christmas wishes, knowing it might be some months before we paired up again. I didn’t fear the slowing. I knew next season would come.