Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  I spent hours sketching and adding and subtracting in planning out the bookcases my father wanted. I called Mary to see if she could loan me a few of her tools.

  “You’re heading out on your own,” I could hear the smile in her voice. “Good for you.”

  “I haven’t said yes yet.”

  “Say yes! You know what you’re doing. Remember that it’s going to take longer than you think.”

  “I was guessing four days?”

  “I’m guessing more like eight.”

  “Shit.”

  “Remember when you could barely use a drill?”

  That night I dreamed about bookcases. Up on a ladder in the sand, I was building a bookcase on a beach. The shelves faced the sea and the tide was rising, waves washing in to lower shelves, soaking the books that were already filling them, making the pages swell, drawing some off the shelves and back into the ocean. I was building the bookcases higher and higher so they’d rise above the biggest waves. When I turned, I saw seagulls dive-bombing the books that had been swept away and floated on the sea. My ladder kept slipping in the sand. Dread: how will I hammer through water?

  In the morning, I called my dad and told him I was available for the project.

  It was the third day into the first real cold snap of the season, and the dry tight cold made everything seem brittle, bones and branches. The highway on the drive down, with the wood loaded into the car, seemed bleached by the cold. The sky was pale.

  I arrived late in the afternoon, pulled down the dirt driveway with spindly trees closing in on either side, tall and narrow-trunked, fuzzed with pale green lichen. The house had the feel of a cabin—woodstoves and wool blankets, a high-peaked roof. The air down there had the sweet mulchy stink of wood and dead leaves, a whisper of the sea. Coming from the city, I noticed the quiet. A chatter of birds, rustle of branches and dried dead leaves. There was no city hum, no low rumble and buzz of traffic, movement, streetlights, no static of a neighbor’s television. Here, at night, the darkness and silence collected around the house like a quilt.

  I unloaded the wood on the thin rim of back porch that faced three feet of grass and a wall of mossy forest and the river somewhere beyond. I looked at the stack of boards, the bundles of trim, and it seemed impossible that these would come together to make something real and useful. The light was fading and I stared at the wood, imagined the way each board and stick of trim would be cut, how they’d be fastened. Great steamy puffs of breath rose around my face with every exhale.

  In what little light remained of the day, I drilled the holes in the case sides where pegs would slot in to hold up the shelves. I held the drill and stared at the wood some more. I took a deep breath, knowing that this first hole was the first chance to make a mistake. To look is to keep it perfect in your mind. To take the tool to the wood is to open yourself up to error. You know how to do this, I told myself. I placed the drill and squeezed the trigger and the bit burrowed down into the wood. The noise against the quiet of the marsh almost seemed a violence. I drilled hole after hole. Ducks made noise on the river. I’d finished the holes on two boards, half done, when it started to snow. The porch lamps bathed the wood in light. And if I held my breath over the planks of wood, I could hear the sound of snow falling, a papery whisper.

  My hands ached from cold by the time I finished with the peg holes. I stacked the boards up, set the sawhorses aside, and put the drill back into its case. I shivered a bit inside. I’d be staying here until the shelves were done. Besides plotting out the shelves over and over in my mind, my thoughts kept returning to my father’s inevitable criticisms. He is a perfectionist, and quick to call out fault. I imagined him hovering over the work, in his khaki pants and leather shoes and layered shirts, clicking his tongue. You’re doing it like that? I anticipated having to remind him that he’d hired me.

  I stomped around the living room to shake off the cold and he came in and told me to sit down. The gravity of his tone caused the rise of walls, the ones that shoot up to protect against coming bad news, to guard against the things you don’t want to hear. I sat and looked at my lap, pretended to focus on thawing my fingers.

  “You are the boss,” he said. “And you have the right to kick me in the shins if I start being an asshole.”

  I laughed. This was not what I’d expected.

  He said it made him happy to have me be the one building these things, putting my stamp on this new house in this new phase. He talked about pride. He talked about how much it meant to him. How to explain the discomfort provoked by this moment of sincerity? This was not how we communicated in our family. We made jokes and talked books, and affection was understood as opposed to expressed. As he spoke, I tried telepathy: Stop, please, even this is too much. I glanced at him. Oh no please are those tears in his eyes? I felt shy and eager to rush away. So I scoffed and dismissed it with a shrug. “We’ll see how they turn out,” I said from behind the walls. But from there, I felt the significance of these shelves, too, of contributing to this new home and phase by making a home for his books. He loved to quote the Anthony Powell title: “Books do furnish a room.”

  We had soup for dinner that night, thick soup he’d made with sausage and red pepper and white beans. We ate it sitting side by side at the kitchen island. It was exactly the sort of food I wanted after standing in the cold. He warmed the bowls with hot water before serving up the soup.

  He saw me flipping through a stack of seed catalogues left on the counter, something I remembered from childhood, looking at all the colorful pictures of pansies and melons and zucchinis, and all of them and more appearing in our backyard in summer. “We’re going to clear some trees on the south side of the house and make a garden,” he said.

  As we ate, he talked of decoys. He talked of having a workshop again. He’d been unpacking his tools. The workbench in the basement had a scatter of clamps and bullet levels, paintbrushes, half-carved shore birds, pale and paintless, pieces of driftwood, files, chisels, and rasps, all those wooden-handled tools I still didn’t know the names of, all of them freed from boxes finally and ready to be used again. I bet it felt good for him to have his hands on these tools, to feel the wooden bodies of the birds, to feel the potential, to start to carve again.

  “Stay here,” he said, after we finished our soup. He went down to the basement and I heard rustling from below. “It’s amazing the stuff I’m coming across,” he said on his way back up the stairs. He returned to the kitchen with a cardboard tube under his arm and removed a scroll of crinkly delicate tracing paper, dry and faded a tea-stained yellow. He unrolled it to show a pencil drawing of a great blue heron with its S-shaped neck and stalky legs, a beautiful line drawing life-size at nearly four feet high. I’d thought he’d long forgotten his promise to make me a heron out of wood. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?” my dad said. I told him it was extremely cool. “Now I just need to translate the drawing into wood. Imagine it in three dimensions.”

  It didn’t warm up any overnight. In the morning, I made the boxes, the outer shell of the cases, and fastened on the backs. I cut the shelves, six for each case, and cut the pieces of trim to line the shelves and the cases, too. Measure, mark, cut—again and again. I attached the pieces of trim to the shelves, made the strips of poplar one-by-two flush with the top of each shelf to hide the unfinished edge of the plywood behind it.

  My father went about his day, drinking big mugs of tea and working at the computer on a marketing strategy for a Boston nonprofit. And he watched his birds at the feeder outside. “There’s a woodpecker,” he’d call from the other room, “another downy,” and I’d lean to look out the window and see its red head and black-and-white-flecked wings. Its cheerful tap of beak against wood drummed out through the forest.

  I moved on to sanding, priming, painting, which seemed to last for days. My boyfriend Jonah joined me for the last stages of the project, and it was good to have the help and company, to break the tedium and speed the sanding, priming, painting proces
s. I had nerves for the eventual installation, when errors would reveal themselves. I had sent Mary a few panicked texts. What happens when —? Do we do it this way or —? And she wrote back straightaway with simple answers.

  The floors bowed, rising and falling like low-tide waves. They required time with shims and the level in order to right the bases on which the cases would sit, raising and lowering them until the bubble in the level slipped between its lines.

  The levels with tubes almost full of yellow or chemical green liquid and an air bubble that slips back and forth inside are known as spirit levels. The alcohol in the tubes gives the spirit level its name. The laying of the level is one of the final tests of a carpenter’s work—the bubble settles itself in the middle. Perfect, yes: clamp, screw, check again; still level? Good, done. Press it against a doorframe, up and down, and the bubble finds center if all is as it should be.

  I sometimes wish a tool existed that could measure the plumbness of our spirits, a tool that would help us decide what’s right for our own lives. How helpful to have an instrument that signaled, with the silent fluid shift of a bubble, that we should shift our spirit a little to the left—just a skosh—and all would be balanced and right. It’s not like that in life, of course. If your spirit is level one minute, there’s no guarantee it will be level the next. We shift, or don’t, make adjustments, change, with the intention and the hope—and sometimes nothing so intentional—that the bubble will find center.

  Mary had a six-foot level, but we mostly used the two-footer and the bullet level, a little guy, six inches long. The levels have three tubes, one in the center and one at each end. The center tube reads for level on the horizontal: a floor, a shelf. The ones at either end measure for plumb on vertical readings, a doorframe, a wall. Two tiny lines mark each tube, and the bubble inside is exactly the size of the distance between those two marks.

  It’s a silent tool. To see that bubble land between the lines is to feel relief and satisfaction. It’s a tool that’s also brought about temporary lapses in sanity. In adjusting cabinets on the floor, for example, a thin shim in the front corner gets the side-to-side reading right, but throws off the front-to-back. More shims, more adjustments, space fragments up and down. I lose the way. It’s a similar feeling of being so close to a piece of writing that suddenly you can’t see it, the plot goes, the whole thing vanishes, there but unseeable. The same happens sometimes with leveling. The bubble shifts and settles but refuses to tell you what you want it to tell you. A shim in and out, another, and nothing’s where it should be and each move gets you further away from where you want to be. I’ve had to step away, to approach another task, empty my head, then come back to leveling, removing all my little stacks of shims and starting fresh, to try again from scratch.

  Once the bases were level, it was time to put the boxes up against the wall to see if the fit was right. I feared this moment. I feared the miscalculations that would be revealed. The first one, to the right of the fireplace, fit just right. It was the simpler one, the one that didn’t edge up against a window. I was pleased with the distance between the light switch and the side of the case, and pleased that it fit as it should against the stones of the fireplace, too. I pressed the other one into place. The outlet hole I’d made with the jigsaw slipped over the outlet right on center. The left side was flush against the piece of window trim I’d had to remove and rip to make the case fit. Oh, the seam was perfect! I marveled. This is always the moment—before it’s all finished, before the last piece has gone in and you’re tidying and on your way out—when you can really see it, when it feels the best.

  My father took a break from his work and came into the living room as I stood back and looked at the cases, hands on my hips. His smile was big and genuine. “Hey, all right,” he said. He gave me a high five. He could see it, too.

  Later that afternoon, as I tidied up the tools and stowed the paint cans for the day, buzzing with relief that the cases fit, that I’d done it right and well, my father came into the room, dark news written on his face. He’d just gotten an e-mail from my younger brother, who’d written that his girlfriend’s father was dying, and it was happening fast. In the years my brother and she had been together, she’d become a good friend. Her big laugh upped the level of joy in any room she was in. I hadn’t met her father, but knew he was a journalist, as she was. My dad shared the news, and we got quiet. In the pause, the silence felt like a bowl for what was being felt. Sadness, of course, the collision of facts and disbelief, an ache at the thought of a friend facing a changed world with someone gone, but also an appreciation of my luck, too, the recognition that here we still were right now, my father and I.

  He made his way back to his office, and I finished packing the tools, and pulled on a coat to head out for a walk. I passed by my dad, his back to me at his desk as he looked out the window at his birds. Now and then, the bullshit gets stripped away, and the accumulated anger and hurt and confusion give way for a glimpse at a different truth. And what I saw was that he was trying his best like all of us, eager and excited to share his enthusiasms about birds and fish and books, keeping the feeders stocked with sunflower seeds, fumbling like all of us to bring himself and his distracted love into focus. I was overwhelmed by a moment of crushing affection. Our friend’s father would be dead soon. My dad had looked so happy when he saw the cases in their place.

  “Bye, Dad,” I yelled as I opened the door to head out for the walk, and my voice almost cracked.

  Finally, the last pieces of trim went on, nail holes were filled, spots of paint touched up, and the cases were done. I grabbed a broom and swept. I scraped a bit of paint up off the floor. I put away the tools. The rug was rolled back, the big chair positioned again by the fireplace. The lamp went back to its home by the window, the bits of trash and scrap wood were deposited in a bin out the side door. I grabbed a beer and sat on the window seat facing the cases.

  Dizzy from a long day and a fast beer, I thought again of the transformation that had just taken place. From soil and seed to big live tree with gnarled bark, from sawmill to board, from pieces one by one put together, sanded smooth, to this object, real in the world. First one thing, then something else. I made a nod of thanks to the trees who’d given their lives for these shelves, the same way my father would say some sort of non-god prayer of thanks when he caught a fish—not in gratitude at the catch, but to the fish for giving its life. A flush of gratitude toward trees rose in me. “Thanks, trees,” I said out loud. One thing, then something else. I am not at home with change, suffer transitions the way most of us do. They’re difficult, I think, because in quiet ways, transitions remind us of the final one.

  My father was in the kitchen with his girlfriend. I called them in, and Jonah joined us, too. We sat, the four of us, on the window seat, which was too small for all of us, but we squeezed in and there were toasts and congratulations, exclamations. My father liked the shadows cast by the upper trim; his girlfriend noted how the top edge of one of the shelves lined up with the top edge of the thick wood mantel (a happy accident, as Mary would call it: total luck). I liked the seam between the case and the window trim. We clinked glasses and looked at the shelves and the shelves seemed to beam back at us.

  “To books and bookshelves, creativity, hard work, and to family,” my father said, raising his glass.

  The next morning, we packed the car and said goodbye to the birds. A note came in from my brother Sam. “Heard you just finished shelves for Dad. Want to build me a big table? For my birthday?” I told him I’d love to. I took a photo of the shelves and sent it to Mary.

  As we were walking out the door, I noticed the level had been left under the big chair. I placed it on a shelf and watched the bubble shift and settle. It wasn’t right there in the middle. But it was good enough. No books would tumble off these shelves. I waved and honked and we headed home. As we pulled away, I was glad to know that I would be back again to see the shelves filled with books, to sit again in front of
what I’d built, two bookcases to flank the fireplace.

  Back in Cambridge, I called Mary and asked when I could drop off the tools I’d borrowed.

  “Back door’s unlocked,” she said. “Come on up.”

  I drove over to Somerville, opened the gate to her backyard. She’d pulled a tarp over the trash pile to keep the snow out. The heap had gotten big again, and I marveled at how fast we were able to produce so much, about how much had to be taken apart to be put back together again. I noticed a few jagged fragments of tub that hadn’t been there before, chunks large and small, one, with clawfoot intact, that served to weight down the tarp.

  I climbed the back stairs and came in through the kitchen.

  “Is that your tub out there?” I asked.

  “Come take a look.”

  I followed Mary to the bathroom. “It took about fifty whacks with the sledgehammer before the first crack. That thing was a beast.”

  “Mary, this looks amazing,” I said of her renovation. It looked like guts, but it was the moment just before it all came together. She’d pulled up the old oak floor, taken down the walls, gotten rid of the sink, the tub, the toilet. Tufts of blown-in insulation drifted around. It was studs, joists, and pipes. “Check this out,” she said, and I stepped in and she showed me how she’d framed for a sliding pocket door with a shelf on top, “for plants maybe, I don’t know. New tub will go there.” She pointed to the corner below the windows. “Toilet over there. And I just finished framing the shower today.”

  She explained that she’d just started adding new joists under the floor, to reinforce the area under where the tub would go, to support the extra weight. A couple fresh two-by-tens were nailed up tight against the dark old wood below the floor.

  “Subway tiles?”

  “I’ve subway-tiled enough bathrooms. I just couldn’t handle it.” She picked up a cream-colored four-by-four tile. “For the walls,” she said. “Actually, I’m glad you reminded me.”