Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  I never used to worry like this. Now, I do. Now, I worry about the boys getting hurt, and about how we are going to eat, how we are going to pay our bills, how we are going to keep warm for the next five months.

  Tonight it’s sure to get cold again, and sleet is in the forecast. You wouldn’t know it by looking out the window, but the deep freeze is out there, gathering strength. The second the sun goes down, it will get cold again, and it makes me tired just thinking about it. It’s difficult to do anything—play a game of cards, do laundry, make dinner—wrapped in a blanket.

  But it’s the weekend and tonight I don’t want to worry. Tonight, a Saturday, a family night with nothing planned, I’d like to do something fun with the boys. Something to take my mind off winter. Like, say, a campfire.

  For a century-old house, our place has an uncharacteristically open floor plan. The kitchen, dining room, and living room are all one large rectangle with a big fireplace between the dining room and the living room. The downside of all this openness is that it makes the house difficult to heat. The upside is that there’s plenty of space in front of the fireplace for three boys to sit cross-legged and roast marshmallows.

  “Let’s do an indoor campfire,” I suggest.

  “That’s cool,” says Owen, managing to stand and slouch at the same time, his arms crossed over his chest in the teenaged lean.

  “Then I call chopping the wood!” Luke says.

  Of all of us, he is the best with tools. They fit in his slender hands easily, and with an innate proficiency he knows exactly how to use them. Not just a hammer and a handsaw, but wrenches, chisels, Vise-Grips, and pliers, too. Even the hatchet.

  This last tool is out in the shop, a rustic room off the north end of our Quonset-hut garage that used to function as Mr. Wonderful’s office, workshop, and escape hatch. It has a pockmarked cement floor, but the walls and ceiling are drywalled, it’s well lit, and separated from the rest of the garage by an old sliding glass door. For heat, it has a small woodstove.

  Luke has recently claimed this space as his. It used to be referred to as “Dad’s shop,” then as “the shop,” and now it’s called “Luke’s shop.” He has made swords, spears, and shields here. He has sharpened the arrows he’s made for his bow here, spent hours reading, carving, cutting, nailing, and chopping things out here, too.

  Above the woodstove, my middle son has taped a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.”

  Luke and I head out to his shop together and he finds the hatchet hanging in its spot on the pegboard. My dad keeps his tools on a similar pegboard that hangs on the wall in his shop. My grandfathers both kept their tools on pegboards in their shops, and it brings me some satisfaction to see that Luke does this, too. I cannot teach him all the man skills he needs to know, but at least some of them are being filtered down from the men in my family. He could do no better than to grow into men like my dad and my grandfathers.

  Inside this small room, I exhale and realize I have been holding my breath. I don’t come out here often. The specter of Mr. Wonderful is still here, and I can smell him. Acidic sweat, the kind that rots the armpits and necklines of T-shirts. Old Spice deodorant, spearmint Altoids. And something else I recognize but try to ignore.

  “Not good,” Luke says, running his finger across the blade of the hatchet. The business end is caked with dirt and rust. It probably hasn’t been used since we all went camping together as a family at Leelanau State Park two summers ago. Somebody put it away without cleaning it first. It wouldn’t cut a dry leaf in this state, let alone logs for the fireplace.

  “Maybe the whetstone is still around here somewhere,” I suggest.

  So we look for it. I pull open the overhead cabinets that are too high for him to reach and he looks in the workbench. There are plenty of places it could be. Doors and drawers creak in complaint as we go through the room pulling and banging. Luke pauses and I notice him looking way back into the dark recesses of a far drawer.

  “Check this out,” he says, holding up a wooden pipe almost as long as his forearm. It has a big bowl on the end and is painted yellow, blue, and red. The painted finish is swirled, as if someone mixed three primary colors of paint together and then dipped the pipe in. Probably while sitar music played in the background.

  A cloud of the smell I’ve been trying to ignore floats out of the drawer in an invisible but unwelcome mass.

  “Go back outside,” I tell Luke.

  The night my marriage ended I was working as a waitress and had just brought home the most I’d ever earned in tips in a single shift: $112. Night editing, writing, or reporting jobs are nonexistent in a small town like ours, and I didn’t want my sons in day care, so I got a waitress job at a local tavern. On the busiest nights, I wouldn’t get home until after midnight.

  I wore a black waitress apron with two horizontal pockets tied around my hips. One pocket was for pens and my order pad and the other was for my tips. Although I usually took the apron off when I clocked out, on this night I left it on while I drove home. I wanted to feel the weight of all that money pressing down against my lap.

  What would we use it for? Something fun for the boys, like a trip to the movies, maybe? A special treat from the grocery store—shrimp or salmon steaks? Or something practical, like putting it in the savings account?

  I imagined the look on Mr. Wonderful’s face when I showed him my big handful of cash. How proud he’d be. It was mostly one-dollar bills—“the Michigan bankroll,” the waitresses I worked with called our end-of-the-night cash.

  When I pulled into the driveway the light was still on in the shop. I looked at the clock on my dashboard: 1:35 a.m. He must have left the light on. He was always leaving lights on. He left doors ajar, cars running, shoes untied, and gates opened, too. He just spaced out, I guess, always meaning to get to everything later.

  I opened the shop door and reached my hand in to turn the light off and there was my husband, sitting in this very spot, his back to the door and to me. He tossed a hasty look over his shoulder and then started grabbing at something. I didn’t remember how glazed his eyes looked until later. I guess he didn’t hear me pull in, didn’t see my headlights, didn’t hear the car door close.

  “Check this out,” I said, reaching my hand into my money pocket.

  He didn’t turn around, but just kept frantically grabbing at something on the workbench. His back was blocking my view, so I couldn’t see what it was, but something was off. He was acting weird. Guilty.

  “Look how much I made tonight,” I said again, a little cautiously this time, walking up behind him and looking over his shoulder.

  And that’s when I saw what he’d been trying so hard to hide. On his lap was a plastic bag. When I walked in, he’d been trying to brush everything into the bag before I could see what he was doing.

  I’m no antidrug crusader. I’d smoked my share of joints in college and at parties, but I mostly put that behind me when we had a family. He promised he would, too.

  “I can’t believe you!” I yelled, before slamming the shop door so hard it bounced right back open as I hurried into the house to check on the boys.

  This is not my life, I remember thinking. This is not my marriage. This is not me.

  I look out the window of the shop now and see Owen, Luke, and Will breaking up sticks for our campfire. Owen and Will are smiling, but Luke is not. I make a small fire in the shop’s woodstove, toss the painted pipe in, shut the door, open the flue all the way, and listen to the burn.

  I find the whetstone in another drawer, spit on it, and make circles with the flat side against the blade. It’s just surface rust and it falls away like dust. I head for the woodpile. The boys stop what they are doing and watch me go to town on a couple of logs. Chips of wood fly for several minutes, and the boys take a couple quick steps back but say nothing.

  I am not a delicate woman. I am tall and strong. My arms are still freckled like they were whe
n I was a young girl, but they’re not stick-thin anymore. I have good muscle, and my middle son didn’t get his facility with tools from his father, he got that from me.

  “Lumberjack Mom!” Luke cheers, half-smiling now.

  His fist is raised and his foot is perched on a big stump. Will copies his brother’s stance and repeats the pronouncement.

  Behind them, a corkscrew of smoke curls up from the woodstove’s chimney. I hack on, and soon sweat from all that chopping makes the hatchet slippery in my hand.

  “Here,” I say, wiping the rubber handle on my jeans and passing it to Luke. “Careful, it’s pretty sharp.”

  With measured strokes far more efficient than the ones produced by my hacking tantrum, Luke cuts up the kindling, then moves on to the larger pieces. It’s late afternoon, and in an hour the sky turns darker and the sleet the weather forecast promised starts coming down, but he’s cut up quite a bit of firewood. Enough to fill Will’s outstretched arms and Owen’s, too. Enough, at least, for our indoor campfire.

  You can tell just by looking at it that the fireplace in our house wasn’t an afterthought, but was built at the same time the house was. That it is part of the original design. The opening is wider and taller than that of any fireplace I can remember seeing in anyone else’s house. The interior bricks that line the sooty cavity are old and chipped and carbonized black with a century’s worth of fires. These bricks are big too, closer to the size of a cement block than to a regular brick.

  The deed on our farmhouse reads, “Year built: 1900, + or –,” and I can picture a circa-1900 family gathered around it before the glass doors or the decorative green-tile surround were added. In my mind, this family would be stirring something aromatic bubbling inside a cast-iron stewpot, warming their hands, drying their darned-over wool socks, and maybe their hand-knit mittens, too.

  I cannot picture them roasting marshmallows here, however. Even if marshmallows were invented and readily available to farm families in the Midwest’s northern hinterlands at the turn of the century, I’d like to think that the early inhabitants of my house would have known better.

  Because as it turns out, building a great big fire in the fireplace and suggesting to the kids that they roast marshmallows over it is not the best idea I’ve ever had.

  I’ve pulled my chair near the fireplace so I can watch my sons and so I can pass out the marshmallows. Owen does okay, because he is a perfectionist and slowly turns his single marshmallow until it is a yummy gold. He waits until it cools, then eats it straight from the stick in one bite. But Will is short on patience and long on sugar craving, and his fingertips are burnt. Luke has holes in his jeans from sparks popping out of the fireplace and landing on his pant legs.

  Every one of our roasting sticks is toast, and those big firebricks I was so proud of are now overlaid with strings of scorched marshmallow fluff.

  There’s also the smell. What comes out of the bag when you tear open a fresh package of marshmallows may be a puff of air that smells remarkably like sunshine. And even burnt marshmallows may smell fine and dandy when you’re sitting around a bonfire outside under an evening sky.

  But inside the house, burnt marshmallows smell like a chemical plant fire. Sulfur and burning hair mixed with flaming cotton candy. Be advised also that this kind of scorched-sugar snafu is going to set off your smoke detectors. Which will then, in turn, completely wreck any ambience you tried to create for yourself and your sons by building the fire in the first place.

  “Mobe, an I aff a ass a ilk?” Will is standing in front of me, his fingers are stuck to his burnt-black roasting stick with marshmallow goo, his lips are moving around a glob of more marshmallow goo, and his freckled face is smeared with ashes and what can only be tears. Between the shrieking smoke detector and the sugar glue in his mouth, it takes me a minute to realize that he’s just said, “Mom, can I have a glass of milk?”

  I look around at my boys and feel their burns and see the black streaks of char on their faces and smell the marshmallow goo all over everything and mentally take down the score. Happy family activity—zero, I think to myself. Powers that be—one. No, scratch that. We’re out of milk. Powers that be—two.

  “Owen, please go upstairs and take the battery out of the smoke detector. Get a chair or something to stand on. Luke, get your brother a glass of water—honey, we’re out of milk—don’t make that face. You do not hate water. No one hates water. Hold it, everyone. Show me your hands.”

  They line up like a trio of singed nesting dolls and flash me their palms. Owen’s hands have a few black streaks, but Luke’s and Will’s hands are covered with ashes from their burnt roasting sticks, there’s melted marshmallow layered on top of the ashes, then dog hair and wood chips and just plain dirt stuck to that.

  Will reaches into the front pocket of his jeans with a fuzzy paw, pulls out a raw marshmallow dredged with pocket lint, and pops it into his mouth.

  Then, small, medium, and large, they file past me, heads down, hands up, heading toward soap and water like a three-pronged human dowsing rod. Owen sprints upstairs and the smoke detector’s wailing finally ceases.

  While the other two are scrubbing themselves, I consider how to clean the fireplace. Even though the fire is out, the bricks are still so hot that heat radiates out from them in translucent waves. Put down a pat of butter and you really could fry an egg.

  It’s evening now, colder and windier outside, but the living room faces straight west, and there’s a little of the setting sun breaking through the sleet, reflecting off the undulating heat, and making the hardwood floors look, if I squint, like overheated desert sand. But this is no mirage. The living room, the dining room, the whole downstairs isn’t just warm, it’s almost hot.

  I check the outdoor thermometer at the kitchen window. Forty-five degrees. I check the thermostat on the living-room wall. Seventy-one degrees. I am a total moron.

  That’s why the farmers who built this house put in such a big fireplace. Not to cook over, not to dry socks and mittens in front of, and certainly not for ambience, which they could probably give a rip about in the middle of a Michigan winter. No, they made that fireplace big enough to heat this place.

  This is so obvious in retrospect that I feel as dumb as a bag of hammers for not understanding the real function of this ancient hearth.

  I got your gas bill, MichCon. I got your gas bill right here.

  “There’s one!” Luke says from the backseat.

  We pull over to the side of the road, Luke jumps out, clicks open the minivan’s back hatch, grabs the log he spotted from the window with two hands, and tosses it in. He’s back inside smirking at Will and we’re under way in less than ten seconds. Up front, Owen has disappeared into his iPod headphones.

  “That’s six for me and only two for you,” Luke says to Will, clicking his seat belt back into place in one smooth motion as we accelerate into traffic. Safety first.

  “So?” This has become Will’s standard response to his brothers’ relentless one-upping. In a year this will turn into “And I care because …?” But for now he sticks to this single-word defense. It usually works. Not much you can do to escalate your own perceived awesomeness when it’s received by your little brother with only a sigh, a bored sideways look, and a “So?”

  I file this realization away for future use. Yes, I am the kind of woman who is not above using juvenile tactics in adult conflicts. Nor am I above driving around our township in search of firewood that has fallen off someone else’s truck. And having my children get out of the minivan to retrieve it. That’s right, I will stoop that low. I am a stooper.

  “Hey, Bickersons. Quit yakking and watch for wood,” I tell them, turning down a forested and potholed side road sure to have something for us. I call this recently devised family bonding activity “Watching for Wood.”

  The day after the marshmallow fire, the boys and I spent the afternoon cutting up wood for the fireplace from our own property. We should have been doing this al
l summer, and I’m not sure how much wood we can amass before the snow flies, but we’re going to make a run at gathering as much as we can.

  I hauled dead trees and downed branches up the hill from the valley, piled them next to the shop, and then the boys used various techniques to hack them into pieces that would fit inside our fireplace. Sometimes this involved the hatchet, but sometimes it just involved leaning the branch or rotted tree trunk up against the cement foundation of the Quonset hut, climbing up and standing on it, then bouncing up and down until it broke into an approximation of the proper size.

  Kindling could be broken up by hand, snapped in half over a knee, or cut up with a couple swipes of the handsaw.

  This woodcutting went on for several afternoons. The boys would get off the school bus at the end of our driveway, run inside to hang up their jackets and put away their lunch boxes, then come back outside and go straight into Paul Bunyan Jr. mode.

  With the industry shown in these after-school woodcutting sessions, it was only a couple of weeks before we ran out of dead trees small enough to cut up with a hatchet and a handsaw. I don’t have a chain saw—and I don’t want one, either. There actually are a few things that I’m truly afraid of, and a chain saw is one of them.

  Large, hairy spiders are another, and I’ve faced my share of those since we started carrying all this wood through the door and into the house. These arachnid dinosaurs are called wolf spiders and they are horror-flick big, NASCAR fast, and with their hairy legs they twang whatever chord connects my modern brain with its prehistoric cortex. If one gets on me, my fifty-yard dash breaks the sound barrier. I know this because of the silent scream that exits my mouth mid-run.

  I can face these spiders if I have to, but I am not willing to face a bloody stump at the end of my wrist. And so, by chain saw–fearing necessity and after exhausting what we can cut with a handsaw, the boys and I take to driving around our township Watching for Wood.

  “Pull over!” Will says from his seat directly behind me. He is already unbuckled and sliding open the van door before I’ve come to a full stop. In my rearview mirror I see his stocky little legs pumping, his bare hands balled into fists and urging him forward like pistons as he runs toward a whole bunch of logs scattered alongside the road. There must be fifteen or twenty of them. Pretty logs, too. Seasoned and split and fireplace ready.