The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  Tap-tap.

  It didn’t hurt that much. “Not really,” he murmured, pressing a cloth against the newly-raw joint of his knuckle.

  “Not really.”

  He put the knife in the sink, and looked out the window towards the trees in the dark, hearing the wind clack the saplings together. Imagining Bette Godden asking, then imagining himself looking down at the empty knuckle, shrugging unconcernedly and telling her brusquely, “Accident with a knife.”

  And after he parked his truck on the first day back to work, he pulled his hand carefully and gingerly out of his jacket pocket, holding it out so everyone could see. He could hear the chairs already dancing on their chains before he even got in the door.

  Heartwood

  FIRST, IT WAS CABINETS.

  He had talked her out of buying them, said he didn’t mind the time it would take if she could wait, and it was her first year at the new school – “I’ll be busy, John, so you’ll have to do most of it on your own,” Bev said.

  He was, he thought, ready for that.

  “Not much work around now anyway,” John said.

  “I can work away until things pick up.”

  First birch, with its clean, green smell, that almost-wet sharpness, even when the wood was dry. John Hennessey had stacked it with spacers in the shed for three months, reading the moisture with an electronic gauge that barely touched the wood with its two tines before offering up its verdict. He wanted quarter-inch birch-faced plywood for the doors, and he didn’t want the framing to warp or pull away.

  So he waited, and ran his hands along the smooth face of the top few pieces of wood, already feeling the beveled edge he would cut with the router. And sometimes he would hold the solid and dependable wood up to the side of his face, smooth against his skin, its grain running true except for the occasional small, dark eye where a branch had anchored to the tree. There was something about the running flecks of the grain, gapped occasionally so you could fill in the spaces with the fine edge of a fingernail – for John, it was as if you could see the wood packed tight with energy, waiting to burst apart, held together only by the tensions of its internal structure.

  It became almost like a conversation while he waited – every few days, checking, touching, and sometimes he would talk, too, self-consciously at first, urging the wood to dry, checking the stacks, moving spacers at the first sign of anything close to warping. Inattention, he thought, would not spoil this.

  He built the boxes of the cabinet backs first, and hung them in the kitchen on a night when Bev was out, so there was no one to help him lift the awkward rectangles into place on the wall, no one to hold the level or watch the wandering little bubble inside the light green glass tube. No one to watch the crucial plumb line he had chalked along the wall to mark where the edge of the first cabinet should go, that one straight line upon which everything else depends. It was a warm September evening, and he had the windows open, the first strong winds of the fall swirling the dust on the kitchen floor. It was curriculum night, and Bev was meeting with the parents of her grade three students, everyone crammed into the tight little chairs in her classroom.

  “You should see them in there,” Bev said before she left. “Get them in the door, and the conditioning kicks in. You can see they have to fight putting their hands up before they even ask a question.” She told him about the discipline problems, and about a boy named Mike who vomited whenever he got picked on. She talked about the new teachers that year, and how more and more were women. “Male teachers are almost a rarity now,” she said. But she didn’t ask about the cabinets.

  So John held the cabinets as best he could against the wall, one-handed, the tendons poking out along his arm in long lines, and with his other hand he used the stud-finder to try and find the two-by-fours inside the wall.

  He thought of the stud-finder as wood-yard alchemy: no batteries or lights or power cords, just a small magnetic tumbler that wavered straight when the device was pulled across a stud hidden behind the gyprock. A magic wand to tell him the right place to set the screws so that the cupboards would stay solid and fast and true.

  Even after the doors were varnished on the outside, he could open any one and notice the smell of trees amongst the canned goods and dishes, as green and fresh as if the sap might just at that moment have started to run.

  Once the cabinets were in place, he thought they hung as if they had always been there, the styles cut and curved to match the molding in the kitchen, each run of the router as even and long and straight as the doors themselves.

  “They’re nice,” Bev said when the cabinets were finally finished. John had to admit he’d hoped for more than that, but he’d brought her into the kitchen right after she got home from work.

  “You’re tired,” he said, looking across at her while they ate dinner. “Want me to run you a bath?”

  “That would be nice,” Bev said, smiling ruefully and putting down her fork. “But I’ve got marking and lesson plans for tomorrow. Not enough hours in the day.” That evening, she worked at the kitchen table – he drew up new plans, paper unrolled on the living room floor, hardly a word between them.

  The cabinets were the first – the first project he did alone. The work was both satisfying, and unnervingly different. They had painted rooms together, newly married and still able to laugh about paint spattering on their faces when they were doing the ceilings.

  They had fought bitterly with wallpaper, joking that it was the next best thing to divorce when the paper soaked too long and stretched, leaving the edges never quite an exact match. And they had made love on the floor, urgent and wild among the paint cans and plastic drop clothes, then bathed in the tub where the black-and-white ceramic tiles hadn’t been grouted yet, laughing and trying to keep the water from splashing.

  In the empty rooms, even before furniture, he could remember looking at her pro file against the glass, her tongue stuck slightly out between her lips as she concentrated on painting the window trim, and he had felt an ache he couldn’t describe, a piercing ache that felt for an instant as if it might be the last thing he would ever feel.

  But they both were busier now, so they worked together less and lived more like two planets inhabiting the same wobbly, misaligned orbit – and sometimes he worked late and fast and careless, the cuts on his hands deep and slow to heal. While his hands paid the price, the work was as flawless as he could make it – each line measured two or three times, his tools sharp and clean, all details planned carefully ahead of every cut or nail.

  After the cupboards, the pine floor – wide boards that he edge-nailed through the groove, watching the straight lines multiply as he moved slowly across the room from the windows. Fresh, dry pine, white now in its first unbarked exposure to the light, and the room had the close and rich smell of resin. Already, he could picture how the boards would deepen and yellow in the sunlight, how the colour would grow rich with age.

  And Bev went off to a Saturday teacher’s in-service, smiling and waving a loose, limber-fingered wave as she walked easily down the long gravel driveway to the car. She held the car keys ringed around her index finger, the silver bright in the morning light.

  “It just doesn’t get easier,” she said. ‘You understand, don’t you? It’ll be better when I’m used to the school, when they’re used to me. When I’m on staff instead of on contract, and when things are going better for you.”

  “You mean when I get a job?”

  “No, just when there’s more work, that’s all.”

  He watched her go, the morning foggy with warming mist rising up off the road, and then he threaded another long strip of nails into the power-nailer, started it up and listened to the familiar bulldog chuff of the compressor.

  Alone with his cross-hatched stacks of pine boards, he took the wood one piece at a time and used the miter saw to cut out the worst of the knots, the fat, ringed black knots that spoke about how old and huge the pine trees had been. They had grown fast, the g
rain wide and healthy, whispering now about hot summers past and plenty of rain, about long, sharp, deep-green needles and stretches of New Brunswick forest where the ends of branches meet for miles.

  Looking at the ends of the boards, watching the rings curve and cup, sighting his way down the length of each one, he could imagine the sawmill, the planers, the spinning sharp blades.

  One by one, the boards marched in a flat regiment across the floor; soon they reached almost from wall to wall. Bev was still not home – but there were complex angled cuts to be made around the base of the stairs, and he lost himself suddenly, falling into making pencil notes on scraps of brown kraft paper, trying to find the intersection between the abstracts of geography and the fixed orbit of grain and length.

  He had the windows closed, worrying about the humidity, worrying that the boards would gap apart if the room dried too fast, and he was in his sock feet, humming and dancing at the ends of the handles of the huge rented floor sander, when Bev came in. There was no way to hear each other over the roar of the sander, and it had to keep moving, back and forth, to keep the sandpaper from chewing into the soft, pitchy wood, so he waved to her, and she waved back, stepping over the sander’s cord. With everything overlaid by the noise of the sander, it was as if she floated up the stairs sound-lessly, every motion precise but out of reach. He wanted to go upstairs too, and talk to her in the bathtub – just to sit on the closed toilet and see the soft brown of her shoulders against the tiles – but he stayed downstairs instead and sanded until he was sure the tub would have filled and the water had been turned off.

  Sometimes, they managed to say “good night” before he fell asleep, exhausted, or she turned away.

  Cherry, then, dif ficult to find in such large pieces, hard to the touch and brutally unforgiving, but he had a long, over-heavy board that could be cut and pieced together like two side-to-side halves. Even when it was dry, the sawdust had a smell that was foreign and bitter, a tang that spoke to him of wet, fresh green trees, like a memory of that first feral smell of spring. Bev was going to be out of town for the entire weekend, so it was a good time to cut the board and glue it together, letting the glue dry before planing the great wide board flat. It was a wood that had to be caressed, had to be worked gently, and he saw in the wide, assembled board the seat of a chair, waiting to come out. He laid his chisels out all in a row, yellow handles pointing towards him, the frighteningly sharp blades that swept through the wood pointed away and resting on soft flannel.

  His eye followed the grain easily, his hands knowing instinctively when to press down, when to let the chisels flow along their found arcs, and when to stop. The weekend fled, swept up in shavings and dusted with sawdust from fine-grained sandpaper. When Bev came back, he showed her the beginnings of the chair, while she leaned against the counter next to the sink and slowly drank a tall glass of cold water, her body a long, straight line angled from the floor to the front of the cupboards.

  He told her about finding the curve of the seat, and she nodded, bottled up in her own thoughts, he guessed. He told her about the sweep of the chisels along and through the wood, but the tools were already rolled up in their flannel and put away in the toolbox, and he had a feeling that she didn’t really understand what it was he was talking about, as if he had suddenly learned a foreign language and couldn’t help speaking in it. He thought that she was nodding politely, but finding no sense in his words.

  “So what’s next?” she asked, but he thought she was humouring him, and he was sure she didn’t listen to his answer because she looked away towards the window as soon as he started speaking.

  In November, he found four great long pieces of maple, the grain tight and whorled like the thin brown skin on the outside of a horse chestnut on that first day when you peel it out of the spiky green casing, fresh from the autumn tree. Boards you only find once, honey-brown and complex inside, telling a long and complicated story about the nature of the sun, about scraps of nutrients drawn up through small and questing roots, about the cold stasis of winter and the eager rush of the thaw. Run smooth through the planer, he thought he could hear voices there in the wood, that if he pressed his ear tight against the grain, he would hear a single ringing tale from shoot to stump. Sanded fine and polished, the wood had a curious depth, so that looking at it was also looking into it, the colour and flecks of grain creating their own small and balanced universe.

  Bev was away for two more weekends, an in-service for math and another for the new religion textbook, and in the quiet of the house, he decided to use the wood in a tabletop, knitting the boards together into a flat and heavy panel that he cut into a long oval. The wood was so hard that it took a finish like glass, the polish making the wood seem even deeper. The tabletop was like a pool of golden water in the sun: looking down into it, all sorts of life seemed caught in mid-movement, a sheet of fractured and lined amber. Every time he looked at it, it seemed different, more involved – and he found it completely impossible to explain. Especially to her – Bev would watch him sometimes, offhandedly, and he thought she was watching the way you might look at a construction project you drove past every few days, as if the building were springing up almost magically by itself.

  It wasn’t until the table was finished, the maple flat and singing in the dining room sun, that she told him.

  There had been no weekend meetings, there had been almost no meetings at all.

  “I’ve met someone – Kevin Squires. He teaches grade four – we’ve been seeing each other since September.” She looked at the floor, and then back up again. “I’m leaving at the end of the week.”

  The words came out in a particular order – set in place: later, he would remember that – as if they had been practiced over and over, as if they had already been said repeatedly to the cupboards, to the furniture, to the floor. Thoughts hurled through his head faster than he could say them: “You couldn’t do any better than someone else in the staff room?” he wanted to shout, but then he looked at his rough hands, the criss-crossed tool marks and broken nails, and his eyes centered on a splinter driven in deep under his right thumbnail. It was surrounded by a plum halo of blood, somehow making him realize that he was standing there still grained with workshop sawdust, scarred with the futility of it all. And he spread his arms out like branches, as if to say that he was all around her, built into the walls and the floors.

  “You keep what you like, okay? Keep whatever you like,” she said. “You decide.”

  “I want to keep you,” he said stupidly, already feeling how heavy and wooden the words were.

  “Well, that’s not happening. You’ve got … whatever it is you’ve got here, and we’ll just go our separate ways,” she said. “A clean break.”

  John couldn’t say anything. Stuck in one spot, he watched her head for the stairs, watched her turn towards him, her heels hard against the floor, angry.

  “You’re dumb when you’re in love, okay?” she shouted at him as he stood there. “Just dumb.”

  And John realized that he should have known already. He realized that he should have known for weeks, that he should have seen the pattern, watched it rise practically in front of his eyes. That he had watched the fugitive grain, without ever knowing what he was looking at.

  Wood-yard alchemy.

  Later that night, there was a high silver moon, and he stood up late by the bedroom window. The trees stood still and growing and quiet, lighted silver-grey all along the sides towards the moon, pencilled as black as coal along the sides away. The curtains hung still and straight, and the moon traversed a gentle, lazy curve through the night, while the branches stood reaching, their grasp turning with every inch of the moon’s glide. All of that made sense to him, order, line and even shadow, while nothing about her now made any sense at all. He knew that it had made sense before, it had been so simple that he could feel her in his hands without even touching her, without a thought.

  And then, even later, as she lay sleeping, when
he was sure she was sleeping, he ran a finger slowly across her back in the dark, looking for a plumb line, the one straight line upon which everything else depends.

  I want…

  THOSE ARE THE BLINDS I WANT, THE WHITE-painted wooden-slat ones, the ones that always hang so straight and even and close out the brightest sunlight, leaving straight, thread-thin lines of light on your skin when you lie still on the bed. And I want that note of wood smoke; the fine, high tone of birch logs burning that you smell outside on a cool fall day, the air sharp against your cheeks.

  Driving endlessly by at night, I can see through the window that your house has a cup-rail high along the living room walls with small-framed pictures on it, and that the room is painted a dark red – maybe burgundy, maybe even deeper. It might be too dark, really, but in summer it must make the space feel cooler, as if it were permanently in the shade. And I can see the plants, piling over themselves, lush and rich and obviously well cared for, hanging down over the edges of the pots in loose green dangle. There’s too much to them, a richness that over flows. The pictures are too small to make out, and I drive by far too fast, but I can imagine they are like small Scottish landscapes, dark and dour and pursed-lipped, punctuation more than illustration.

  At night the windows are all in reverse, transmitting instead of receiving. If only your house was the one for sale, that’s what I think. I don’t know you, really, but there are things that are clear, that I know from just looking.

  I’ve seen your husband – I guess he’s your husband – and I’ve seen you and your little boy. I’ve seen you laughing, and I’ve seen the way your face falls into an easy, calm, familiar pattern when there’s no one else around, when you’re out digging in the flower garden along the foundation.

  Sometimes I want to stop and yell, “Don’t you think anyone else has ever thrown a damned ball?” but I realize it would be wasted on you, that I’d just seem like a disturbed old man in a silver truck. That you’d be frightened and call the police, when all I really want to do is to warn you. Sometimes I just want you to know that other people know the happiness you’re feeling, too, and that sometimes it rattles around inside them and keens like the winter wind. I want to stop and warn you that it won’t get any easier, that the angles will always grow sharper, the disappointments more distinct.