by Robert Inman
“Why are you so picky?” Bright asked, impatient to get on with it. He reminded her of an old woman, fussing over her needlepoint.
Dorsey, kneeling next to the pier, straightened from his work, massaging his lower back. “If the foundation’s not right, the whole business is wrong. If I’m off an eighth of an inch down here, it gets worse as we go up. Then first thing you know, the whole house is catty-whompus.”
Catty-whompus she knew. It was one of Hosanna’s favorite words, alongside damnation—catty-whompus generally standing for anything that was physically out of kilter. Bright supposed that when the house was finished, they would bring Hosanna out here to see it, and if Hosanna stood in the yard with her fists on her hips and looked at it and said it was catty-whompus, that was the worst condemnation she could give it. Except, perhaps, for Big-Ikey, and this camp house would definitely not be Big-Ikey. It already felt cozy and comfortable, like a favorite corner of your own room or the space below her father’s desk at the lumberyard or the burrow you made down under the covers of your bed when it was cold.
It took them a month of Saturdays to finish the brickwork, and by then spring was in full explosion, the woods around the clearing green and alive, insects busily at work in the grass, new growth poking up through the sandy soil, the river singing just beyond where they worked. They arrived one Saturday in April to find a heron standing in the middle of the clearing, as if waiting for them with a message. Dorsey stopped the car at the edge of the clearing and they all watched each other for a moment, the heron tall and gangly on his stilt legs, head turned in profile, his large round unblinking eye fixed on the automobile. Then he took two lurching steps and was airborne in a magnificent slow-motion swoop of his blue-tinged wings, flying directly over them as he gained altitude, the ungainly body now a graceful curve of blue-gray. Dorsey and Bright sat for a moment longer, spellbound, then looked at each other and smiled and climbed out of the car without speaking.
There were three huge timbers now laid across the sets of brick piers, added during the past week. Bright was disappointed. “You’ve been out here working without me,” she said accusingly.
Dorsey nodded. “It takes four grown men to lift one of those timbers,” he said. “They’re eight by eight, solid heart pine. They’ll be there long after you and I are gone.”
She tried to imagine that, being gone. She thought about it all day, as they began to lay the floor joists for the house, big two-by-eights that Dorsey notched with a handsaw and hoisted crossways onto the timbers, fastening them with long silver twenty-penny nails that he drove through the joists and into the timbers with sure, powerful blows of his hammer. She watched the way he moved, the grace of his body, the smooth ripple of muscles in his arms after he had taken off his shirt and hung it on a tree branch, working in his ribbed cotton undershirt. He seemed very permanent, she thought. She could imagine her mother being gone, because her mother seemed wispy and impermanent, with a tenuous hold on life. She could even imagine herself aged and shriveled like Miss Eugenia Putnam at the Study Club, passing slowly out of this life like a yellowing flower after first frost. But she was quite sure that Dorsey Bascombe was here to stay. He was so very sure of himself.
As summer began, the work went quickly. They went to the clearing by the river every Saturday and usually an afternoon or two during the week, leaving the lumberyard after Dorsey had checked things over following the noon break to make sure everything was running smoothly. They would stay through the long afternoon, losing themselves in the work, arriving back home in the warm twilight just before supper. Bright drifted off to sleep at night with the house taking shape in her mind, a fascinating puzzle you put together with every piece going just so. It was only a matter of time until she spilled the beans.
It happened as she sat at the piano with Elise on a late June morning for her weekly piano lesson. Her mind was not on the business at hand. She played poorly, her fingers fumbling absently with the keys, Elise patiently correcting her errors until finally she asked, “Where on earth are you this morning?”
And before Bright could catch herself, she said, “At the camp house.”
“The what?”
Bright froze, appalled. It was their secret—hers and her father’s—and she had spoiled it. Her heart sank.
“What did you say?” Elise asked again, and there was a bit of an edge in her voice, and something else—perhaps a tinge of satisfaction, as if she had stumbled upon something she had been searching for.
Bright took a deep breath. All right, get it over with. Face the music. “Papa and I are building a camp house. On the river.”
“What kind of a camp house?”
“Just a little house with a porch.”
“For what?”
For what? Because … well, because it’s ours. Mine and Papa’s. But I can’t tell you that. Instead she said, “To go camping.” She squirmed with discomfort under her mother’s cold stare. She had never seen Elise quite this way.
“And how long has this little project been going on?”
“Just a little while.”
“I see.” She reached up, closed the music book they had been working from. “A secret.”
“We wanted to surprise you,” Bright said quietly.
Elise took one of Bright’s hands in her own, turned it over, looked closely at the rough skin, released it. “You and Papa. Building a camp house. My, what ladylike work.” There was ice in her voice.
Bright felt small and grubby, and at once ashamed of feeling that way, and in turn resentful. But she said nothing.
Elise got up from the piano bench. “Well,” she said, “if you’re that busy with Papa, I don’t suppose you’ll have time for the piano.” And she walked out, leaving Bright speechless.
Bright sat through supper that evening in a dread gloom, wondering when her mother would reveal that she had spoiled the secret. She tried to eat, but her food lay in a dead lump in her stomach. At the end of the table, Dorsey had a second helping of everything. He talked idly about the affairs of his day—a tract of timberland he had bought in the next county, the town council’s plan for a street lamp outside City Hall—oblivious to Bright’s discomfort. Elise did not look at her, not even a glance, until the meal was over. And then she wiped her mouth daintily, put her napkin aside, and looked straight across the table at Bright. “Bright tells me you two have quite a project going,” Elise said.
Dorsey looked up, his gaze sweeping from one to the other, and then he put his fork down on the edge of the plate. He sat quietly, considering the matter. He nodded and looked at Bright and said, “It’s well nigh impossible for an eight-year-old to keep a secret.” Bright wished he would smile, just a little, but he didn’t. He didn’t look angry, but he didn’t smile, either. And she could hear the faint echo of disappointment in his voice.
“A camp house,” Elise said.
“That’s right. We were going to surprise you when it was all finished. But now that the cat is out of the bag, you can come out and see it any time you like. And when it’s finished, we’ll take you camping.”
“I’ve never been camping in my life.”
Dorsey gave her a long look. “No,” he said, “I suppose you haven’t.”
Elise sat there for a moment with her hands in her lap and then she said, “Building a camp house is not an appropriate activity for a child, especially a young lady.”
“Oh? And what is?”
Elise looked him in the eye, unflinching. “Music. Playing with children her age. The things little girls do.” Her voice began to rise. “Not spending all day at a dirty, dangerous lumberyard with all those Nigras and all that machinery. And not a construction project, for goodness’ sake.”
Dorsey’s jaw tightened and Bright could see the color rising in his neck. He struggled to keep his voice under control. “Bright can be anything she wants to be, Elise. I see nothing wrong with exposing her to the real world.”
He said it with finality,
the way he ended discussions. But Bright stared at her mother and saw that Elise was not wilting now, not this time. There was a glint in her eyes, something hard there, something almost desperately angry. “Your idea of the real world and mine are quite different.” She bit off the words.
Dorsey’s face went pale and he sat for a moment, very still except for the tiny ripples along his jaw. Finally he nodded. “They are that. Quite different.”
Bright huddled in her chair, caught between them now, afraid that everything would be spoiled on both sides—the music, the camp house project, everything else. The air in the room was electric and frightening. She wanted to leave them, but she was frozen in place and she dared not speak, for fear it would be a spark that caused something even worse. She had done quite enough damage for one day, she thought. Just now, she must be very quiet and still.
Blessedly, Hosanna intervened. The doorway from the kitchen opened with a creak of its hinges and Hosanna stuck her head through the opening. She looked at each of them in turn, black and impassive, and then she asked, “Y’all want some apple pie for dessert?”
“No,” Elise said. “I think we’re quite finished here.”
Hosanna surveyed the table. “Miss Big Britches here don’t look like she ate enough to keep a bird in the air. You sick, young’un.”
“No,” Bright said. “Yes. I don’t feel so well, I guess.”
“Then you may go to your room and lie down,” Elise said.
Hosanna withdrew, easing the kitchen door slowly shut behind her, and Bright got up and left her parents at the table, staring at their plates in stony silence.
She slept wretchedly, waking once in the night to hear voices down the hall. She couldn’t make out the words, but she could feel the anger, the frustration, the sounds beating against her door like waves lapping at the riverbank. Finally they fell silent, leaving a chill emptiness.
She woke with the touch of her father’s big, gentle hand on her forehead and she looked up at him, sitting there on the side of her bed, a dim figure in the early light peeking around the edges of her window shade. He looked very tired and drawn, the lines and shadows deep in his face. But he smiled down at her. “Early bird gets the worm,” he said, and she could hear the great sadness in his voice that belied his smile. “Let’s go build us a camp house.”
Bright’s eyes felt scratchy and she blinked, struggling awake. “I’m sorry I spilled the beans,” she said, and felt tears spring to her eyes.
He lifted her up, cradled her in his arms, and stroked her hair for a long time. She nestled against him, letting his strength envelop her like a warm cloud. Finally he said, “Don’t worry, sugar. I’ll make it all right.”
But for the first time in her life, she heard doubt in his voice.
It was not all right. There was a pall over the house, the air sucked dry by the oppressive heat of summer and her parents’ silent conflict. There were no more late-night voices. Through the rest of June and into July, they spoke little to each other at all. Elise spent a good deal of the day in her room. She said nothing about music lessons, leaving Bright to muddle idly at the keyboard with the rudimentary material she had already learned. There didn’t seem to be much point in it, and she left it off altogether after a week or so. Dorsey arrived home late in the evenings, drained and weary, barely capable of conversation. He made no further mention of the camp house to Elise. They all went to bed early and Bright slept fitfully in the heat that clung to the upstairs bedrooms, purpling her dreams. She waited, holding her breath, hunkered in her own silence, caught between these two people in their profound unhappiness with each other, fearful of making things worse. Hosanna’s kitchen provided her only safe haven, the one place in the house where no one passed judgment. But there was not much Hosanna could do.
Finally, in early July, Elise went to New Orleans. It was a regular thing with her each summer, and she usually took Bright with her. But this time she mentioned nothing about the trip to Bright. Dorsey took her to the train in Columbus and she spent three weeks with her parents—a week longer than usual—leaving behind a household limp with relief at the respite from trouble.
While she was gone, Dorsey and Bright threw themselves anew into the building project, and Dorsey said nothing about Elise’s opposition. Bright felt the tiniest bit guilty about it at first, but then she decided that she would not let the lurking sense of her mother’s disapproval spoil things.
First the floor—tongue-and-groove pine planking laid across the joists, so that when it was finished, they could stand on it and say, This is a house, and the rooms go just thus and so. Next, they began to frame the walls, leaving spaces for the doors and windows, Bright measuring and marking, Dorsey cutting the two-by-fours with his handsaw, Bright passing the boards up to him as he nailed them into place, forming the exterior skeleton of the house. Then the hardest part, with Dorsey balancing on the top of the skeletal walls while he labored over the roof joists. It would have been easier with two men, she knew. But it was their house.
It was exhausting work, especially in the fierce heat, and Dorsey was careful to take frequent breaks for rest and water. But he expected her to shoulder her share of the load, and she did, fetching and lifting until the muscles in her legs and arms and shoulders cried out. She felt herself, as the days passed, growing stronger. She learned to use the saw and hammer herself, to drive a nail straight and true, to follow a carefully measured pencil line as she cut a board, standing on a little platform next to two sawhorses to give her a good cutting angle. “Measure twice, cut once,” Dorsey said. Her hands became roughened and callused, and when she looked at them in her bath at night, she thought to herself, No, these are not a lady’s hands. And that’s just fine, because I don’t want to be a lady. I’d rather sweat and build a camp house, no matter what Mama says.
She began to feel Dorsey Bascombe’s sense of creation—the goodness of building something, of doing it with your own hands and bathing it in your own sweat, of watching something take shape because you made it. The boards with which they built the house were rough and they would send wicked splinters deep into your flesh, but she began to feel the strength in the wood, flowing out into her own body as she handled it, like the warmth of the new sun. There were secrets locked inside the wood, ready to be revealed if you knew just where to put your hands. The big secret was that a house, a grand little house, could rise up out of the wood at their bidding and stand tall and sturdy and proud at the edge of their clearing with its own special kind of music making—the rhythm of hammer and saw, the gurgle of the river nearby. Everything fit. It belonged there because they had picked the right spot and built carefully and well and put the best of themselves into it. You couldn’t ask for much more.
On a late afternoon toward the end of July, they stood back from the house and looked at it, the framing finished so that it was beginning, finally, to look like a real house, even if you could see clear through to the other side. And they had a little toast, apple juice in tin cups that they clinked together before drinking.
“It’s rather nice, don’t you think,” Bright said.
“Rather nice?” Dorsey cried. “I should say it’s a bit more than that. I’d call it downright magnificent! Fit for a king and his princess.”
“When can we stay in it?” she asked.
“Oh,” he laughed, “we’ve got a lot to do yet. Sides, roof, interior walls, all that. One thing about a house, it’s not finished until it’s finished.”
“Is it going to have a bathroom?”
“Of course. In a little house behind the house.” Bright gave him an arch look. “Goodness knows,” he said, “you don’t have indoor plumbing in a camp house. We’ll get a well drilled here in the side yard with a hand pump for water, and we’ll build a privy right over there.” He pointed to a spot near the woods, a few paces from the house. “You’ll smell the honeysuckle as you take care of your business.”
Bright turned up her nose. “Mama won’t like
going to the privy.”
She wished instantly she had not said it. Dorsey’s face clouded.
“Or,” Bright said hastily, “maybe she’ll think it’s quaint.” It was a word Elise used frequently to describe something she found a trifle odd and unfamiliar. Much about their town she found quaint. It was such a far cry from New Orleans with its trolley cars running down tree-shaded St. Charles Street and gay laughter from the parlors of the great old houses. “How quaint,” she would say, speaking of something like the way Pegram Gibbons, the banker, kept a cow in his backyard. This—this two-room cabin with no indoor plumbing—well, she could imagine Elise standing at the edge of the clearing, giving it a long, slow look, and saying, “How quaint.” But that wouldn’t mean she didn’t like it. Just that she didn’t know quite what to do with it.
Standing here now, studying her father’s troubled face, she was torn between hoping Elise would come to like the house and hoping that she would not like it at all. It was their house—hers and her father’s. But perhaps it would be worth giving up some of that to make peace.
“Mama will come here,” Dorsey said, as if reading her mind. “It’ll be all right. You’ll see. I’ll make it all right.” He said it resolutely, and then he gave her a big smile. He sounded more hopeful than positive.
Elise returned a few days later, and Bright could instantly see the change that New Orleans had wrought. Her eyes sparkled, her face was alive and clear, and she seemed to move with a light grace. There was still a reserve, a coolness there. But she did not mention the camp house and there was none of the cold anger of before. Bright understood that she didn’t want to spoil the magic of her visit. There was a tacit truce, and for Bright, that was quite enough.
Dorsey remarked at dinner her first night back, “The trip seems to have done you a world of good.”
She looked at him for a moment before she said, “New Orleans will always be my home.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I understand that.”
As the summer waned, they began to finish the house, and though Bright longed to stretch the days out and make them last, they sped by. The boards seemed to leap from their hands onto the walls, entire sections going up in a day. Some of the work was too much for the two of them, and they reluctantly brought in help—two men from the sawmill to help put on the tin roof, and a brickmason who came during a week in August to build the fireplace and chimney with old bricks, their edges rounded with age. Dorsey and Bright finished up the walls inside and out—pine boards that would be left to weather naturally—and finally the windows and doors.
