Wood calms.
My sister at camp, perhaps I’m not like the people at this summer place—my parents—their mysterious routines: I was like the place itself I now think—that was what I was like—this close little toolshed and nine-and-a-half acres around the house to do with what we wanted.
And I was getting somewhere, because for some reason I didn’t have much time.
It was quiet there, said the woman I was telling this to; but that’s going to end. I touched her hand. It had no effect on her.
I worked the oval length of the thing deeper. I created a barrelly roominess. Gunwales flaring emerged from the inside out—and I had even carved (I can’t believe it today years later) a miniature cradle of passable gunwale ribs. Till one day (floorplanks maybe to come) I had nowhere to go almost yet kept faithfully sanding and finely shaving. Wanting to show the boat to Liz, the neighbor’s younger daughter whom I loved; and happy as a “free man” not to be interrupted by her, prizing the dark, plum vein straight through the block unplanable and of a natural weight. Quiet around here? Not always, as even the neighbors know. My father’s a famous talker, a public speaker, and he and my mother have a way of speaking to each other that’s very audible.
The toolshed, though, is conceded to me. At almost twelve I’m not your skilled woodworker. But I am taken for thirteen. Secret and determined—for I go into what I don’t know. I know enough to try, and am cruelly inspired some days, tall for my age, proud of the papery-tiered gray-plastered-cone hornet nest just outside the door up under the overhang of my shed roof, a generation of long brown wasps, a power I lived with and thought I could arouse from this nest to do some bidding I was not fiendish enough to yet know. I’m somebody. That was it.
Till one day, to music, the unwavering, final sound of a cello, taking you would swear something from my humming (or coming in on it) the rough-cut, gouged and gunwaled and resanded hull of my whaleboat with a tiny, carved, not-glued-on keel and stem and stern post, when I held it by the gunwales rose almost from my fingers it was now comparatively so light—though hardwood maple as I had learned from my mother appropriately, whose cello far away inside the house it was. It was a particular day, expectant, unwise; I knew this piece of wood, and we were expecting an important friend of my father’s in the late afternoon and my father had left for an appointment in town but was coming back, an embarrassment of riches as I saw it and saw it then, and I was not a person with ever nothing to do, though my father had an opinion on that score who himself thought being holed up in a tool shed or finding a weasel’s, probably a marten’s, little S-curved scat on the far side of the river was OK for a kid or some other types but not greatly thrilling. Or a question like my humming, sometimes loud, stood next to me if I could identify its appointment with me, this question. Which was, What did I know was going on, if anything?
My mother, doubtless alone but don’t assume anything around here, was not doing something silent but was practicing somewhere inside our land-embedded, landscape-lost cottage today, private in that wooded, stony-spined, hilly province of Vermont. Audible strangely in memory too, the faraway, heart-breaking throat-gripping authority of that instrument’s tone said, Listen, listen, bring the boat inside and test it in the bathtub. I saw it manned and rocking, I saw it passengered, did I hear music coming from it?—I was strung myself enough to concentrate so hard I might not hear tires on the driveway.
I ask as of a not quite real nightmare: and who was the woman under the bed telling a long, almost but I have to say not funny, frighteningly unrememberable story, and who were the much-decorated twin Marines adrift in slow-motion orbit about the Moon? Yet I kept scraping, and 80- and 150- and 220-sandpapering down to the rubbed-pale, somehow distinguished paper that had been coarse- and fine-sand. Now sounding an eerie thinness of bottom that I would rap proudly, and wishing my mother or someone would come here by chance and only for a minute and look at what I had to show. It was her college cello she was playing this July day we found ourselves apparently alone, she with a touch, a lostness and sweep of elbow enough to make you smile (I could see her), it was comical, a fineness of face I could see in the wood I worked never imagining that I was being watched; and “not a musician,” she said, for she “never” played her cello; dragged it up here (in the car) along with her high school clarinet, “the easiest reed to know” (though a weakie next to piano and sax), plus her plastic recorder from primary school. Why does she play only when she “has time”? I am told I said, because I would say things.
To my father this summer of 1966: If you could find a war you liked would you go fight in it?
Grownups laughed, so my sister I believe laughed too but didn’t like it. So what has changed? (For this has not.) Say things and people will hate you. Go to your enemies for the truth, for justice. Say things and many people will pretty much love you. My father with much political chatter both about American police state and freedom I recall didn’t seem to expect much of me. I am finding the words; they, really, me. He was for freedom. He saw you as being set for life with your abilities. I mean that you couldn’t do much, you were pretty ordinary but the struggle for freedom would make it OK. But what has changed?
From that time, that day? I add.
My mother had a policy of more or less not going into town, whereas I had two friends there, one with a Buck air rifle that shot .177 BBs who had plans for us, and one with a real bow who fletched his own arrows, and a thick red blue and white target with a stand. My mother’s wariness became mine, I weighed her words. (Why don’t I think of the house as ours? Feeling like a lodge as you went foreignly through the front door—and who knew where you would wind up, is there an undiscovered annex? What was unfixed about it, if anything? We had bought the place after renting it one summer, and I was nearly twelve and believed in ownership down to the faintly harsh or peppery peppermint smell of my mother in the hall, “extremely independent” (my father described her but it didn’t sound right).
Until, this morning, on my knees on the shed floor, tapping the flat bottom of my boat, fighting it, pampering it, blowing on it, caressing it, and fine-sanding the inside, so that with proud unconcern I heard the ajar door creak and knew someone was in the doorway of this tool shed behind me (did I need a sweep-oar instead of a tiller?), I heard the faraway inside-the-house cello and turned with my sandpaper block in my hand to see a man in green perfectly familiar to me but unexpected, ambushed (both of us), so that I looked at his dark green workshirt, a tiny American flag pin in the pocket button-hole, and turned back to my work as if he visited me often or weren’t there, or I had contempt for him or respect.
I recall because perhaps from just about that time (because it came from this very man), I had learned that no one could touch me.
It was my friend’s, my playmate’s, father, our neighbor, and he asked me if I had seen Liz. (But why was he over here?) He came and stood. “Sand and varnish, varnish and sand,” he said. “Makin’ a boat?” he said. What can you say to that? “Where’d ya find the wood?” he asked, as if he knew. Right here on the floor he was standing on, I told him and he said my toolshed looked just like when the owner his friend had lived here. Former owner, I said. “Too bad he had to sell.” I didn’t mind, I said. “You don’t mind,” this man said methodically. “He was a nice fella. Not enough work around here, it’s gone down statewide.”
Continuing with my own work, I asked what work his friend, our last summer’s landlord, did. “Whatever needed doing,” Liz’s father said. “Somebody’s playin’ the violin,” he said. I looked up at him and I nodded, and in some way new to me smiled and continued my work. But I heard the distant cello’s throat-gripping, wide, biting, caressing (I believe), string-rubbing stroke of tune deep-drawn by the bow and hung along the layers of flattened day and absorbed midsummer color.
But succeeded suddenly this time by my mother’s voice, the way the cello gives itself over to
the winds, for she was singing way inside that house, and I wondered if Rob was there, her bosom buddy—could I have missed the cutting sound of his tires in the driveway coming to keep her company? I looked up at Liz’s father—his name was Whelan—who had turned toward the door hearing the singer now. Was this why he had come, though I had never heard her do just this?
Women—I thought of her as women for the first time I believe—had a bodily distance from us that we are to accept; hence, to be importantly apart from: which gives you the distance to understand them and what they and you have to lose.
The woman listening to me laughs vulgarly.
Or, to bear this after all bodily reasoning still further, that this Vermont man (though Vermonters are more intelligent, my father had said) could not tell a cello from a violin because he was not from the city; and so he did things more slowly and painstakingly; that my father did not change the oil in our car himself like this man flat on his back; that city people controlled large things they did not need to understand.
I thought I did Liz’s father an injustice. But what?
Or that we were having a visitor from a foreign country today though he was American, and that the man with me in this tool shed had had a flag July 4th which would have been fun to fly, that they had a cousin whose son had come home wounded and sick—one was like a cut, the other was like a disease inside: country people sent more men to the war than city people because country people could do things but the things they could do kept them from seeing that the war was, according to my father and mother and their friends, wrong; and this morning Liz’s father (though he said, Don’t tell her I was looking for her, he squinched up his nose in a friendly look) had really come to see or scout out my mother whom he hardly knew, or the place, because my father was not here. Though now he asked if I was going over to Montpelier with my father, burn some cloth (it sticks in my hearing much more than Whelan’s ugly, interesting face)—and I said my dad had already gone—Oh, Liz’s father knew that—and it wasn’t Montpelier, it was into town. “Oh, we know all about that too,” said my visitor, as if I were a free citizen—he was a builder, a local contractor, and there were some who disagreed with him about the war but not about flag burning, and my father was taking the briefest time out from a heavy schedule of rallies and raising money. He had been written up.
Yet this man, for some reason in my tool shed, was the father of Liz whose mother mine could never be. I leaned back on my heels and held up my boat, turned it over, ran my finger all over it, and I know the man with the much-too-pink face and positively golden pale crewcut said, “Taking justice into your own hands.” “Wartime,” I said. “How’d you know it was a boat?” I said.
“Keel.”
I said I had some work to do. I meant Still to do. “Varnishing, sanding,” I said.
“You just do your work,” said the man. He was not favorably disposed toward my father and was said to include him among flag burners. “You like to go fishing?” he said. I said we had fished the brook. He knew I meant with Liz. I bore down on my hunk of maple, which was how I suddenly saw it. “We go over t’the lake one night, got the outboard.” Liz’s father meant they would take me. I wondered how many in the boat. Liz’s older sister Naomi who was fourteen who I was sometimes preoccupied with. The mother…My country neighbors who knew all about my father having a little brush with another car in the covered bridge the other night that was not his fault.
My mother Claire’s elbow and shoulder bending across for the far A string, her wrist, the station of her knees, the amber-varnished belly of the cello inside which was a spruce patch she’d had me feel with my fingers—I witness her though I’m not there—and who cares about these little things that come with an entire day and night in one long blink of someone’s eyelids, these signs of Nothing? (I’m no musician!) but I have a reason to recall because the cellist broke off playing and for a second, as I stopped too at my woodwork (called that by my great-uncle who wrote me letters on USCG stationery) nothing came next. Yet now without missing a beat she was singing, but with no real, no fleshly severing from the long-drawn pressure across the string which hadn’t reached the end of the bow but passed it on to her voice. Funny or something, except it wasn’t—I heard it on my knees like sound meant for me, or someone. Mexican or what my dad called “south-of-the-border,” her song was inviting—not like the deep and aggravated solo I could hum that she’d been practicing so you couldn’t tell if the patient practicer were going back to get it right or Bach had written it like that. But now that I heard it, both voices against the presence of Liz’s father’s slightly threatening presence, I think the Mexican-sounding serenade was a lot like the Bach—who am I to say?—the way Caribbean Spanish from the Korean grocery or on the taxi radio follows syllable upon syllable so steadily, Liz’s father with me in my tool shed, then gone. Had I been rude? Yet having latched my door and turning the whaleboat over and over, I knew I could have approached my mother even with company if I had thought fit, my mother and her way of speaking.
I think it stimulates the woman I’m telling this to (it stopped her in the middle of a sentence she had to give it some thought, this natural relay from string to voice not missing a beat by someone inside a house unseen by me working outside—though inside my own tool shed). “I see, you sort of take off from one to the other—she was playing and suddenly she saw you—” “It wasn’t me she saw,” I said, “if it was anyone,” for the woman was almost flirting with me like a palmist, while I had been in the first place reminded of the cello-voice by something in her story.
“Your sister—she liked camp?” inquired the woman listening to me. Not especially.
Launched by its own lightness, my model my old boat for a second got fusilaged and decked kayak-like like smart materials responding to emergency signals, earthquake or ticking bomb, yet a second later wasn’t a boat any more. Varnished mellow under the layers of inland silence in which that person on vacation would make music: and so did the one bird out at that late morning hour extract such comfortable hollowness and morality from a tree trunk. It makes the tree a building, me inside coated with a mold of intrigue, boy inertia, flesh, hearing historically again and again a car on the ground, my dad an hour ago departing (as if he’d taken something)—the need for a plan.
But when she left off playing to sing and her hooded voice more true than the cello reached me, bending over my fingerprint gouges, boat-carver feeling the wood’s commanding depth that as there was less and less of it seemed less and less shallow, she was singing in the late-morning stillness crowded with small sounds in fact or the inner hum of that summertime day of 1966 to him—my father I felt—in my shoulders, at the root of my tongue, or literally my heart wanted it so—though he had gone to town. And Rob might be there with her visiting. In my palms I was making more than a boat. I think now, What could be more than a boat or more than me? I felt what I was making must be more than a boat. Or must turn into more. I was stuck, and responsible, and doomed, but excellent, no more than I deserved.
Sliding in behind the wheel, my father had said out the window, “The boat, now.” I didn’t know if it was a boat or what it was, I said, in despair. “You don’t?” my dad said; “well, if it’s something else, stay open, you owe it to yourself.” “I’ll keep it open,” it came to me to say, meaning the work I was finishing, and wondered if it was an open solution I was thinking about.
He knew how to look at me: that’s fairly stupid, his mystery look had said, or that’s incredible or dumb, you’re a fool—not a kid, a fool—I must have found in the wide thin lips of a rich face—or that’s a genius remark, go your way. How could you owe a thing to yourself? was in my mind to ask him. But I was the tooled, eight-to-five genius of the place and of departure; darkly separate and free and you’re free to kill me if you think I need it.
My father had had to show up at the town office that morning to explain a car-on-car meeting three nights ago in the covered bridge: you had t
o laugh seeing them disappear—one set of headlights off maybe (probably), the approach on one side straight, on the other looped like a hairpin—the collision muffled and comic stars shooting out of the bridge the middle of the night: which car had entered first? But the other driver was someone we knew well. I saw two cars disappear at opposite ends into the bridge and heard the rest, the overall, large structural impact in my mind. My dad hadn’t let me come along this morning, I had rested my elbow on the roof, it was nothing. Maybe it was being at his side. He thanked me, I was taking responsibility, he said, practically twelve and looked fourteen. It was only the town office, but they had a jail cell in the basement with a bunk. Car window rolled down to speak to me, “Should have seen the other guy,” my dad said, flipped the key: ignition, confirmation, blast-off Going Into Town.
“Never explain,” he said. Advice of high quality I have not been able to take. The other car, I imagined its front fender scraped with our “California Cream”—the grille maimed, door wouldn’t open, important leak underneath. My father said we would see. He widened his eyes out of their sockets almost, winked (more like a full facial squint or tic to close his eyes), blew out his cheeks—no problem. “Hey, you’re getting big”—as if he hadn’t been keeping an eye on me, “Haven’t seen you in weeks,” he goofed, he squeezed shut his eyelids and gunned the motor.
My mother had taken a her-side-of-the-family view of this, intrigued only by the chance that my father might get charged, an old story “coming true.”
“A risk of arrest?” asked the woman listening to me.
Only demonstrations.
The sweet song was to her absent husband or me or a friend. I couldn’t make out many words in the melody in this land-embedded, heat-hushed place softly grinding with subconscious insect existence, their soft parts, their hard parts, sharing supposedly with us their sanctuary wild life. It was some wit in the fathom and touch, the string note freeing the voice, I would say now. Though also a specialized risk all over me of my parents, and one between them that fixed my fair value alongside that of my currently absent sister—me, in the sense that in some way I couldn’t do anything about my existing, a pitch of light understanding between my parents. There was nothing much I needed to do—to fail or excel. It was all right. A value estimated swiftly—or destined—between them, those two intimate aliens; a level I was at, equality—but to what? I had a parent at all times. I took my own advice.