Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  I sent that off, closed my computer, and took a walk in the rain.

  Four days after applying for the carpentry job, four days after sweeping the thought of it out of my head, I got an e-mail back from an anonymous Craigslist-generated number. It was a woman named Mary writing to say that she was contacting forty of us who’d applied for the job, out of more than three hundred responses she’d gotten in the first eighteen hours of posting her ad. (“Sign of the times,” she wrote.) This was hopeful. I’d made the short list. I let that settle for a moment before I realized that forty people was still a lot of people, and I still only had enthusiasm and a work ethic as quasi-qualifications. I kept reading.

  She explained a bit more about herself, about the job, and what she was looking for, straightforward as a two-by-four to the side of the head. “I’m a 43-year-old married lesbian with a 10-year-old daughter,” she wrote. She’d worked for herself for a few years and before that had worked for another contractor. “I like to think of myself as a journeyman-level carpenter and a slightly better tiler.” I didn’t know what this meant, but I liked the sound of journeyman. It brought to mind a wandering carpenter, tools slung over her shoulder, traveling place to place, building and fixing, humming away in worn-in workpants, a smile on her face.

  It got better. She described the traits she was looking for: “Common sense is the most important thing. Next is lugging crap, you must be able to!” I gripped my left bicep and felt the muscle swell as I flexed. I can lug crap, I thought. I can absolutely lug crap. I thought of moving couches and tables out of various apartments, hauling boxes and boxes of books up and down flights of stairs. “Tools, supplies, whatever,” she wrote of what we’d lug. And common sense: sure, my judgment was sound enough in practical matters. I’m not the most practical-minded, but I’m a good parallel parker, I can follow a recipe, sometimes I know what I’m going to wear the day before I wear it. Skills used will vary from job to job, she explained, and jobs range from a day to several months, usually averaging about two weeks. And then came a list of the sorts of work that the jobs entailed in a language mostly unfamiliar. “Go in patch walls and paint.” (Clear enough, I could paint, but who knew what patching meant?) “Put in a wood or tile floor. Add trim.” (Sounded doable.) “Larger jobs: kitchen and bathroom renovations, structural work.” (This sounded serious and intimidating.) “Demo, framing, insulating, fire stopping, boarding, mudding, installing windows, finish trim work, install cabs, porch rebuilds. Pretty much everything except additions and roofs.” What did these words mean? Demo? I thought first of demonstrations. Framing? Framing pictures, I imagined, and that’d be cool to learn. Boarding? I pictured boarding houses and torture techniques, and figured it was neither. Mudding. Mudding? All of it sounded mysterious and appealing.

  She asked that we explain a little more about ourselves and why we wanted the job. In my response, I tried to be as direct and honest as she’d been. I’m thirty years old, I wrote. I spent the past bunch of years working at a newspaper. In terms of carpentry, I wrote: “I’ll be honest: I don’t have much experience. That said, I’m strong (lugging crap is no problem at all).” I claimed a good sensible head on my shoulders and emphasized again how curious I was to learn this stuff. I wrote about the satisfaction of putting together a good sentence, but that something more immediate, more physical, more practical and tangible appealed to me, and had for some time.

  “This is work I want to learn and do,” I wrote. “You would have to teach me, but I would learn fast and don’t mind doing hard work. I can start immediately.”

  How acute is your internal clock? If someone were to ask you to mark a minute without counting out the second ticks, how close would you come? And if someone asked you to mark three and seven-sixteenths inches without a rule, how close would you be? A quarter inch off? Three-quarters? How well does your brain know space?

  The earliest systems of measurement were based on the body. A cubit was the distance from the crook of the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. A half-cubit, or a span, equaled the spread between thumb and pinky tip. What we now call an inch was the width of a man’s thumb, or the distance from the tip of the forefinger to the first knuckle. A foot: the foot. In ancient Egypt, monuments were built based on the Sacred Cubit, the standard cubit plus an extra span. Two strides equaled a pace, or five feet in the Roman standard. A thousand paces made a mile. The line between King Henry I’s thumb and nose measured a yard. Two yards made a fathom, or the distance of both arms outstretched. In the thirteenth century, King Edward I’s Iron Ulna, named after the long bone in the forearm, set the measure for the standard yardstick. A foot was a third of the yard, and an inch was one thirty-sixth of it. Edward I’s flamboyant son Edward II decreed it otherwise in 1324. Three round, dry barleycorns made an inch in his book. But nature is fickle, and the size of seeds, like fingers and feet, can’t be counted on. (What power kings wielded, when the length of their bones—or fondness for barleycorns—could become the basis of standard measure.)

  Forearms and pace lengths in the west, it was otherwise in ancient India, though the scale of measure there still found its distances in the natural world. A yojana measured the distance an oxcart could cover in one day. A length, we can suppose, that depended on how energetic your ox felt, how arthritic its joints were, how muddy the road it trod upon was, or even how greased were the wheels of the cart. A krosa measured the distance at which the lowing of a cow could be heard, a distance that depends on which way the wind blows. A finger was divided into barleycorns, barleycorns into lice, lice into nits, nits into cow’s hair, into sheep’s hair, into rabbit fuzz, down, down, to the grain of dust kicked up by a chariot that cannot be divided. And though a cow’s low isn’t fixed, a distance emerges in our minds, inexact but imaginable—that melancholy bellow over pastures, gentle, warm-eyed beasts over there on the hill.

  Things changed in Napoleonic France when the meter was adopted. It turned away from the human skeleton to a different sort of scale. A meter measured one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the North Pole following a straight line through Paris. This proves a trickier distance to contend with. What does one ten-millionth of that distance look like? I see ice floes and rain forests, a stick that shrinks to that tiny fraction of that big distance. I see a globe on a shelf and a small hand spinning it around.

  It’s changed again since then. No longer a fraction of the earth’s surface, the meter is the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,588 of a second. I can’t conjure a rain forest, or spread my fingers out in front of my face to gauge a span, or look at my forearm to know a cubit, or hear the sound of that cow in the distance, or tip Oliver Smoot end over end. My mind can’t make sense of light and vacuums and that sliver span of time. A day’s worth of oxcart travel is one thing. For my feeble brain, light speed and second fragments are impossible to conceive.

  In the thirteenth century, the word journey meant the distance traveled in one day, and later came to mean a day’s work. The base of the word is jour, the French word for day. A journeyman is someone at a stage in between apprentice and master, someone competent to do a day’s work. Distance traveled, work done, this was something I could comprehend.

  Two days after the carpenter’s note about who she was and what she was looking for, I got another message, this time to twelve of us, asking these dozen people to pick a date to spend half a day of work with her. “Call this tryouts,” she wrote. “Pay you cash for your time and treat you to coffee, too. Now that’s an interview, albeit long.”

  I stood up out of my chair and smiled and the heat of excitement rose in my cheeks, and mingled quickly with nerves. What should I wear? Should I bring my own hammer? Should I bring my own tape measure? Did I own my own tape measure?

  I forgot about Adonis.

  The April morning of my audition day was rainy and raw. I walked up the carpenter’s block wondering if she expected me to have a tool belt.
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  She lived on a short side street in Somerville’s Winter Hill neighborhood. It won’t be long until the old beauty parlors, takeout Thai spots, and the check-cashing depot shut down to make way for dark bars feigning vintage and boutiques selling handmade bags and local honey. A big brick church dominated the south corner of the street. Men in funeral suits, shoulders hunched under umbrellas, stood waiting for people to arrive. Across the street in a corner deli, people at the counter leaned over egg sandwiches and read the Boston Herald. A woman said her goodbyes to the lady behind the counter by name, raising her cup of coffee as she moved through the door. When she saw the funeral men, she bowed her head. Large vinyl-sided triple-deckers, the kind you see all over Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, lined the rest of the block. A moldering Victorian stood like an aging queen at the other end of the street, all turrets, bay windows, and spiraling trim. The carpenter’s house was large and tall, the color of lemon pudding, with chocolate shutters, multifamily by the look of it. On a tarmac playground across the street, hundreds of elementary-school kids ran and screamed and shot hoops and avoided puddles before being hustled inside with the jangle of the first bell to start the day of school.

  The carpenter stood at the end of the driveway across the street from the schoolyard, hands in the pockets of khaki cargo pants. I’d expected a larger woman, muscled and broad. She was a couple inches shorter than me, narrow shouldered, small framed. Her ragg wool sweater had holes in the elbows, and when she reached out her hand to shake mine, she smiled wide, revealing crooked teeth, the front two with a wide gap, the right one stained and snaggled at an angle. Her dark eyes shined kind. Her shoulders were set forward, the not-quite-hunched posture of a thirteen-year-old boy, confused and hiding new broadness, or of a woman not in the habit of throwing her shoulders back to emphasize her breasts. The gray-and-blue-striped woolen cap she wore over short coarse hair, salt and pepper, lent her an elfish quality, and her voice, when she greeted me—“So you’re the journalist”—was higher than what looked like would come from her face. “Mary,” she said as we shook hands. “Nice weather.”

  As we climbed into her white minivan, a rusting roaring tank of a vehicle, she explained that we’d be tiling a bathroom floor in a house in Cambridge. The seatless back of the van was loaded with tools for the day’s work. Tool buckets, saws, a drill, sponges, levels, and trowels made chaotic piles in the back. A ripped sack of sandy gray powder slumped in the corner near the back door, and from the bag’s leak, the powder piled on the floor like sand in an hourglass. Pieces of pale wood of various lengths were scattered like pick-up sticks. The front seat was a scramble of orange peels, a browning apple core, a chunky tape measure, a jar of salted nuts, water bottles, a tampon, a paintbrush with bristles crusted tough, a utility knife, and bags and bags of Drum tobacco, crumpled and mostly empty. Shreds of tobacco nested in cup holders, in the seams of seats, in the crease where dashboard met windshield.

  When we arrived at the house, a stately old home not far from Harvard Square, it was clear we wouldn’t be the only ones at work on this place. A stallion of a pick-up truck parked out front leaked testosterone out of the gas cap, and we shared the driveway with two other work trucks. A painters’ truck had ladders strapped to the roof and drop cloths and paint cans in the back. The plumbers’ truck had greasy toolboxes full of wrenches and white tubes and fragments of metal pipes. Nerves began again to beat their electric wings in my stomach, and my mouth dried up. It was one thing to have this one woman witness my incompetence; but a whole work crew of masters, experts, professionals? It was like having a team of hotshot race-car drivers in the backseat during your first time behind the wheel.

  Inside, the workers hustled and clomped. The place had just been bought, Mary explained, by an architect named Connie and her husband. They were due to move in six days from now; an under-the-gun energy filled the rooms and halls as men with tools did their work. “No way it’s all getting done in time,” Mary whispered to me. Hammerbangs echoed off the blank walls and hardwood floors and high ceilings. The scream of a power saw came from somewhere upstairs. Men’s voices, a radio playing NPR, a thump of wood against wood as something dropped to the floor, the blur and bang of sound followed us as we moved room to room. These were familiar noises; I’d heard them coming from inside other people’s homes a hundred times, the type of disturbance that registers and just as soon disappears against the rest of the aural landscape. A saw scream from somewhere down the block, that clean teakettle cry, brings the image of blade and dust spray. The ring of a hammer strike, gunshot sharp, rips down the sidewalk from a second floor somewhere, and the mind—for a second—registers an arm raised and a pounding down. Just as fast, it’s back to buses, car horns, the chatter of someone on a cellphone, the noise inside your own busy brain. But hammerbangs sounded different inside a house—louder, more deliberate, yes. But in its proximity, the sound made the fact of work unavoidable—something was getting done here, something concrete and specific. What that concrete and specific thing was, I had no idea, but the sounds were urgent, and that I was going to be part of the chorus that day made them louder and more real than I’d ever registered before.

  In the front hall, a wide staircase swept up and took a hard left upward. The kitchen, so large it could’ve contained most of my apartment, had the bright and welcoming feel of a summerhouse. It was crammed with fixtures and appliances—handsome dark-wood cabinets lined two of the walls; a trough-size sink was big enough to bathe several toddlers at once, and I counted not one or two ovens, but three. How could you fill all those cabinets? And what do you do with three ovens? “That one’s not an oven,” Mary said. “It’s a refrigerator for wine.” The formal living room had tall, wide French doors that opened out onto a garden area. Hedged in, it was a magic sort of yard that felt like a fort. The first yellowing daffodil blooms were still cocooned in a green-yellow husk and the forsythia bush in the corner would explode into yellow any day. Heavy traffic ribboned along the busy street out front, but the garden felt miles away from any sort of commuter pathway.

  “So. Nice place,” Mary said.

  We went back to the van for the tools.

  “Grab the tile saw.” I stared into the back, eyes scanning the scatter of tools, no idea where to put my hands. “There on the left,” Mary said, gesturing with her chin. “The beat-to-shit-looking one with the tile dust all over it.”

  I leaned in and lifted. A well-used machine, it was caked with dried tile dust, the way dried clay coats a potter’s wheel. A shallow tray slotted in underneath the blade and came loose in my hands.

  “You handle some more?”

  “Sure,” I said, wanting to make good on my claim that I was strong.

  She placed a drill bag on top of the platform of the saw, an orange canvas bag that held her drill and screws of various length, some black and dull, some shiny silver. Drill bits nestled next to a few short saw blades the size of steak knives. The smell from the bag, which rested right under my face, was metallic, that blood tang, mixed with dust; it was the gentle background scent of attics and exposed wood. The muscles in my arms flexed under the weight. I followed Mary, who carried a big orange bucket full of tools and another smaller pail with a fat yellow sponge like the ones we used to wash my father’s car years ago, as well as a wide spatula-looking thing made of shiny metal and a cardboard carton like a much bigger milk box. Lugging crap, you must be able to, I remembered as we climbed the wide stairs up to the second floor, then a narrower, steeper set up to the third. I liked the word lug. It sounds like what it is.

  The third floor was open, carpeted a light purple-gray, with slanted ceilings. It would be a play zone for the kids, Mary said. Lucky for them. Dormer windows lined the front of the room and looked out over the street. Windows on the wall opposite overlooked that garden and other pretty yards of neighbors. A tiny kitchen with a small fridge, stove, and sink was tucked into the corner by the top of the stairs. What a hideaway, what a dream world, so fa
r from the grown-ups below.

  The bathroom, L-shaped, had slanted ceilings, too, a big window opposite the door, a tub, a toilet, a sink. The subfloor, as Mary called it, was a pale stone color with screws in it. It made the room feel half naked, as though it had forgotten to put on its pants. We laid plastic on the floor just outside the bathroom and set up the tile saw in the doorway. Boxes of large tiles made a knee-high tower to the right of the door. We had the space to ourselves. The noises from the work going on below sounded far away.

  “You’ll cut. I’ll lay,” Mary said. I’d been relieved that we weren’t sharing the floor with a crew of painters giving the walls up here another coat, that the electricians had elsewhere to work their wires. It didn’t last. “You’ll cut” brought the same sort of nerves I’d felt approaching an automated train-ticket machine in an unfamiliar city a minute before boarding. I gave her a look that I hoped telegraphed the message I’ve never cut a tile before. I’ve never used a tile saw. I shrugged and said “Okay” with a tone of here-we-go.

  I stood in the doorway facing the bathroom, the tile saw on the stand in front of me. Mary, on the floor underneath the window, which was splattered with rain, stretched her tape measure across the width of the room, from the corner behind the toilet to the other side of the wall where the sink was. She made a pencil mark on the floor at the center point. She shifted toward me, stretched the tape in front of the threshold. I moved left, noticing that I was in her light. My father, engaged in projects of various scope, was forever telling my two brothers and me that we were in his light. He’d huff, head bent over fishing lures or sketches for decoys he’d carve, and say with impatience, “You’re in my light,” as though we were blocking out the very sun. We’d all jump to a place where we weren’t casting shadows and continue to clamor. I’d been trained, I realized, to notice if my body eclipsed the light of someone else’s work. I hoped this would signal to Mary that I was thoughtful and had common sense, knew about the importance of light and when to get out of the way.