Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  Looking at the deck and the skeleton of the stairs, I was grateful that Mary would be the one to do the math to figure out rise versus run. The phrase alone raised ghosts from school geometry class, my sullen self chanting in my brain I’ll never need this the whole way through—a rationalization for my lack of effort and ability. Mary determined the height of the rise between the steps and depth of tread, and how many steps we’d need to get from the platform at the height of the back door down to the ground. I cut planks for treads and risers and couldn’t believe what was happening. Three days ago, if the man who owned the house had walked out his back door, he would’ve fallen out and maybe knocked his skull on a deck post. Now there was a platform and seven stairs down to the ground. We hadn’t built the pyramids or the Parthenon, but this was something. When we’d fastened the final post cap to the deck, I climbed the stairs, grinning, going from ground up to the landing by the door, up those seven steps. I clomped on them, tested their strength.

  “Can I jump on it?” I asked Mary.

  “Knock yourself out.” So I jumped hard on the platform. Solid. Nothing shook. It took my weight. Mary reached up from the ground and hopped to grip the side of the deck and did a pull-up. “Pretty sturdy.”

  We’d built a way to get from a door down to the ground, a passage and a place to pause, to pile groceries, to stomp snow off boots on the way inside. What a thing!

  From there, we bounced to the next job and the next. Each one, over some months, aided in lifting the curtain that had obscured the physical world closest to me. Now, there were doorways, shelves, and walls. Wood, glass, plaster, paint. The awareness, this new noticing, had an intense effect on my sense of my own body and place in the world. I wasn’t just my own human sack of flesh, inhabiting mental space. There were walls around me, and thresholds. There were windows that let in light and sound, traffic noise, rain; panes that showed the shifting shadows as the sun described its curve across the sky. I knew now how many pieces of wood framed those windows and doorways, how they were put together. None of this stuff had occurred to me, I’d had no occasion to consider it, and now, with every day at work, with each new task and practiced act, it was being hammered home.

  It’s a truth of travel that we see so much more when we are away from what we know. Removed from home, we notice: shadows and birds and sirens, the shifting color of the sky, the peak of a certain roof, the way a set of stairs descends toward a river bank. We notice: the color of squirrels scattling up a tree; the sound of chickens squawking in the road; the smell of burning garbage, of low tide, of baked bread. We’re blinded by the familiar. The sirens, smells, roofs, and sky, they’re all there, too, in the place you know the best. At home, awareness, open-eyedness, requires the effort of attention. The carpentry work, in these first stages, was like being in a foreign city. All this newness, it was a defamiliarizing of the most familiar: my kitchen cabinets, the doorway to my bedroom, the bathroom tiles.

  When we had a lull in work, a few days between jobs, we sometimes spent the day working at Mary’s house. It was in a steady state of half-done projects and mile-long to-do lists. One or another room was always in a state of renovation and change. One morning involved the demolition of her chimney.

  The demo men showed up at nine fifteen.

  “These guys are something else,” Mary said as they pulled into her driveway.

  Rain threatened and the wind was strong. The guys thumped down out of their huge dump truck. The three of them, two young guys and the boss, surveyed the chimney with heads back, looking up at the roof. It needed to go away, from the third-story roof on down into the basement. Inside, one wall needed ripping out, three others needed to be stripped to the studs, and a ceiling needed to come down. These men were here to do it.

  “All right boys, head on up,” said the leader, a legend in the trade, a refuse collector and disposer, a demo-god. He had curly hair and a handlebar mustache. His big belly looked hard to the touch and his fingers were thick and dirty. Scars, gashes, and scabs, some pink, others red-black, marked and cratered the skin of his calves and shins like dark dried fruit. He talked quickly, and when he laughed, often and out of nowhere, he wheezed and his eyes darted.

  His two sons worked with him. Son One, in his early twenties, looked nothing like his father. He was lean to the point of scrawny, narrow of shoulder and back. His pants fell low off his non-ass. Mary mentioned the time he had finished an all-day demo job for her and then done one-armed pull-ups off the side of the truck. His large eyes were blue, and blonde curls hung over his face and beard. He looked like a folk singer or a cult leader. And when he climbed out onto the roof, sledgehammer over his shoulder, he looked like some kind of thunder god, a thinner Thor. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  Son Two, a little older, looked more of this earth, like a street tough in all the high-school movies. Built like his father with a softer tummy, his face was smeared with dirt. Chubby cheeks made his eyes small. He wore a Scally cap and purple sweatpants. Mary relayed a story about how he had once drunk a case of Molson and accidentally shot himself in the hand.

  They didn’t wear masks when they worked. They didn’t wear gloves. I worried for their safety. The shit they smashed and tossed, the dust that plumed, the fragments of brick and old mortar, the particles of insulation, old plaster, the rust and mold, it went into their lungs, into their blood when they were cut. I could imagine the percussion of coughing at their house at night.

  Son One and Son Two walked light-footed on the shingles up above, taking turns bashing bricks with sledgehammers. They tossed debris down off the roof into the bed of the truck. Bricks flew down with comet tails of rubble. And the sound of the bricks hitting the bed of the truck, a clanging rock-and-metal thud, echoed up and down the block.

  The father, the boss, spoke about other jobs he’d had while his sons worked. In the winter, like a lot of tradesmen, he fixed a plow to the front of his pick-up and cleared driveways of snow. He had seventy houses on his roster, places he’d been plowing for twenty years, a hundred bucks a driveway. That’s $7,000 a storm, with an average of ten storms a winter. Big money for ten long nights. He talked of a demo job he’d had the month before, a six-family place in Cambridge. The three of them took down the inside of the place, hauled seven tons of stuff away each day for ten days. It earned them $15,000.

  “None of it’s as hard as fishing,” he said, and talked about the year he spent in the early eighties on a fishing boat out of Scituate, a seaside town twenty-five miles south of Boston. They caught sand sharks to sell to England for fish-and-chips. The nets ran the length of thirty football fields, he explained, and were dragged three hundred twenty-five feet deep in the sea. “You never knew what was going to come up in those nets,” he said. “Old anchors, bits of ships, eels with human teeth, and fish this big”—those leathered hands held apart three feet—“every two feet of the net. Every two feet for thirty football fields!” he repeated with a rasping laugh, eyes wide.

  He talked of driving delivery trucks, delivering Pepsi, bananas. He talked about his pig, how he had to kill it that past November. It got frostbite and one hoof blew up like a basketball. He ate some of the pig and burned most of it in a bonfire at the edge of his property. Three times a year he held a giant yard sale, he explained. He’d set up tables and tables full of the treasures he collected in his years of demo work. “You never know what you’re going to find!”

  So far, behind walls and under floors, Mary and I had excavated some marbles, a New York license plate, newspapers from the first years of the twentieth century, green plastic soldiers, a girl’s white ice skate, laces tied in a tidy bow. They seemed strange things to find inside the walls and under floorboards. A little ghost girl appears, one foot skateless, half gliding, half padding sock-footed across an icy pond. Or ghost kids sitting at the top of the stairs, letting marbles bounce down into part of the new wall to make room for another brother or sister.

  In a rare lull in his torren
t of talk, I asked the demo man if he had kids besides his two sons. He talked of a youngest son, “a genius, won an award from the mayor,” who hit high school and something went wrong, ended up spending time in an institution. “Like I said, you never know what you’re going to get.” And he laughed again, but it wasn’t really a laugh.

  His words echoed ones I’ve heard from my mother. Intending to share her wisdom, she’s cautioned me since I was eighteen about having children. “You never know what you’re going to get,” she’s said, again and again over these years. The demo man said it in reference to trash and treasure behind the wall, eels with human teeth, a son in an asylum. My mother has said, “You might end up with a monster.”

  The boys made short work of the chimney. The whole of it, a structure that had been there for a century, was gone in less than an hour. Now it was a hollow column of space through the core of the house, as though someone had reached down its throat and pulled out its esophagus.

  They moved on to the wall and the ceiling of the dining room on the first floor. Cracks and thuds, sledgehammers into walls, crowbars between plaster and stud, and parts of the house fell to the floor. A thick dust began to drift out the window and up into the sky. The thin arms of Son One reached out now and then, letting parts of the room drop to the mulch below the window, disembodied arm limbs dropping the house out the window. He braced his hips on the windowsill and leaned his body out to drop a particularly heavy bag. He looked over at me, in my direction anyway, with those blank eyes. I gave a small wave and he pulled himself back in the window without a smile. Garbage bags of plaster and lath followed, bagged separately, the lath in neat bundles, the jagged corners of heavy plaster fragments pushing at the plastic like aliens trying to exit some weird black womb.

  The pile of wood and bags grew fast outside the window. The boys’ arms, when they reached out to drop a load, were brown with dust. The crashes got louder inside when they reached the ceiling.

  It was unsettling, the noise and the dust and parts of the house coming out of the window. The dismantling happened fast. Time and moisture chew in a way that’s too slow to see, as powerful as sledgehammers, but so much slower. It shouldn’t be so quick to take a house apart. It should take more than two brothers and four tools and a roll of trash bags. The fact is, not even that much is required. The room as it had existed, as rooms exist, with four walls and a ceiling, no longer did. The esophagus went first, then a chamber of the heart. Where once a wall was, now a few thick posts and two rooms were one, kitchen bleeding into what was once the dining room. The rest of the room was all studs and hollows, dark wood, nothing smooth, little piles of cottony gray insulation collecting in corners of the floor. A skeleton space, and it happened so fast. Something real and lasting, undone before noon. Such is the mutability of a room. Such is the strength of a big hammer.

  “I got hammered in Haines, Alaska,” read the T-shirts from the Hammer Museum, a small house ninety miles north of Juneau that displays over fifteen hundred hammers. Cigar-box hammers, medical hammers, paving hammers, around-the-corner hammers. Hammers that look like axes. Hammers for testing the quality of cheese. Founder Dave Pahl left Cleveland for Alaska in 1973, just out of high school, with a pioneer drive and a longing for a back-to-the-land lifestyle. He’d spent time as a kid tinkering in his grandfather’s basement shop. “The man could make or fix anything,” Pahl told me. But besides his own messing around in the basement, Pahl had little building experience.

  He made do. In 1980, he and his wife won a five-acre home site in the state land lottery at Mosquito Lake. They built a cabin together, and lived without electricity “until I built my own hydroelectric plant,” he said. A life without plugs meant a life without power tools, and Pahl learned blacksmithing and forged over a hundred different hammers for himself. But that’s not what stoked his hammer passion.

  A trip with his two sons to the lower forty-eight introduced him to antique shops and flea markets.

  “I bought a hammer I knew I would never use—a medical hammer, the kind they bang on your knee—and that’s when the collecting started.”

  Cruise ships float into Haines during the summer months and Pahl works as a longshoreman. He drives thirty miles from his home, ties up the boat, and waits around town to cast off at the end of the day when the tourists have herded back on the ship. In 2001, a dilapidated house in Haines went up for sale on Main Street. Pahl knew it’d be the perfect place to show off his collection and pass the time while the cruise groups walked on land. Plus, his wife Carol had recently imposed a hundred-hammer limit in their home.

  “It had to do with timing,” he said. “It wasn’t something that I’d really planned. It just evolved.”

  It took some time to get the house into shape. To put in a foundation, they used hand shovels, a wheelbarrow, and a sled. During the excavation, Pahl unearthed a Tlingit warrior’s pick, also called a “slave killer.” He’s got it on display at the museum. It’s smooth and phallic shaped, pale stone. As the accompanying description in the display case notes, the pick is “believed to be around 800 years old. It would have had an elaborately carved handle and would have been used ceremonially for sacrificing one or more slaves to be buried under the cornerpost when a new longhouse was being built.”

  “Finding that was an omen,” Pahl said. “It made me think I was on the right track.”

  What is it about hammers that appeals so much? “They’re so simple and so diverse. For being a piece of iron stuck on the end of a stick, they’re so varied,” Pahl explained. The Beggar’s Chicken Hammer, for example, comes from China, where it’s used to crack open the shell of clay or dough that’s cooked around the chicken. The Almond Tree Knocker, used to knock the trunk of the almond tree so the nuts fall onto canvas tarps, has a rubber end that looks a little like a toilet plunger without the concave plunging part.

  “The stories need to be told,” Pahl said. “Just to make shoes required a huge variety of types of hammers. Nowadays people can’t relate to that.” When he’s asked about a lack of hands-on awareness these days, Pahl falters a bit. “There are benefits to this way of life,” he said of raising his sons without electricity. “The world is changing,” he went on. He paused, started a sentence, started another. “I don’t know if I’d advocate others to do the same.” Another long pause. And he went back to museum-tour mode. “If you want to talk about carpentry, probably the most important hammer is the claw hammer.”

  I would come to know it well.

  The café in Inman Square does a brisk business in panini, pasta, and pizza. A loyal rank of regulars lines up for takeout to keep out of the way of the waitstaff as they weave and skirt in the narrow spaces between the few small tables. Mary and I were called on to build a wall to divide the kitchen—a tight squeeze of a hallway—from the area where people eat, a wall to take the place of a low refrigerator case with slices of carrot cake, bottles of Peroni, and cans of orange San Pellegrino.

  The big window at the front of the café looks out on the square. A small dark bar called the Druid across the street is an ideal place for Sunday afternoon pints in winter. Up the way is a used bookstore with creaking floors, the best ice cream shop in the city, a seafood-barbecue joint, a jazz bar with a popular brunch, and a lefty-weirdo coffee shop. Methadone patients from a clinic nearby linger outside the coffee shop with wristbands and hollow eyes. The father-and-son team behind Inman Hardware runs tabs for regulars, and the old woman who worked at the convenience store used to give Swedish Fish to people she liked. It’s a good neighborhood. I lived there for four years, roommates with an old, close friend, and every Monday night we’d head to the old B-Side Lounge and fall in love with the bartenders. I’d had sandwiches from this café before, and now I was here to work. This was my first wall.

  Humankind’s first wall? Made of cave. Or, possibly, of flesh, as Ovid has it: “We dwelled within our mother’s womb until . . . nature willed that we not lie so cramped in narrow walls . . . she drew us
out into the open air from our first house.” After womb and cave, pelts were dried, strung up, and turned to tents. In medieval times, space for eating and sleeping went undivided. Families slept in the same room for safety and for warmth. The rise of bedrooms, of more than one big household room where families heaped together by the hearth, coincided with the rise of reading. Walls protect. They keep out (bugs, thieves, neighbors, annoying brothers, bears, wind). They keep in (heat, secrets, your family safe at night). In New England, stone walls, as old as the first colonizers, wind through fields and forests, home to chipmunks, garter snakes, dividing meadows and farmland property. A U.S. Department of Agriculture report in 1872 estimated that some 240,000 miles of stone walls crossed the contours of the New England landscape like winding spines. No official tally of mileage exists right now; it’s estimated that half of all those miles of stone remain. These walls impart an austerity to the landscape. They signal the presence and stone-by-stone effort of humans before. Each rock was hefted by hand or lugged by oxen and placed one by one, to clear fields and mark land, to pen beasts or rim a family graveyard.

  Walking paths through woods, forests thick with pine and oak and birch, sunlight speckling the path between the lace of needles and leaves, I’ve come across stone walls through the trees, away from the path, miles from the road. There’s something haunted in them. Long-gone farmers deposited these rocks here, held them, placed them, and in that effort, in the solid thing that remains, their human presence is felt, and their goneness. These walls serve as a chain backward through time. Dividing space—whether it’s cow pens or countries—is a powerful thing.

  Walls speak to an emotional need as much as a structural one. They protect us from wind and rain and strangers. They protect our private acts and parts. They protect us from our shortcomings and our fears. A wall broadcasts: I am vulnerable.