Chapter 2 - The Sound of Green Timber
The cab of my 2014 Ford F-150 was cold. The heater core had a slow leak that gave off a faint, sweet smell of ethylene glycol whenever the blower motor kicked onto high, so I kept the fan on the lowest setting, letting the warmth bleed slowly through the dash vents while the windshield wipers cleared the light crust of sleet that had begun to fall along Highway 60.
Nobody spoke for eight miles.
Eli sat in the center of the bench seat, squeezed between Matt’s right thigh and my left hip. His knees were pulled up toward his chest, his hands tucked deep inside the pockets of his canvas coat. Between his boots, resting on the floorboard atop an old rubber floor mat speckled with dried yellow pine sawdust, was the birdhouse.
Every time the truck hit a frost heave on the asphalt, the little silver-wire porch swing gave off a tiny, metallic tick-tick-tick against the miniature yellow siding.
Matt drove with both hands on the wheel, ten and two, his posture upright, his eyes fixed on the gray ribbon of road winding between the bare cornfields. He had his work face on—the same flat, impassive expression he wore when an operating-room nurse called down at three in the morning to report that the central suction line had lost negative pressure during an emergency bowel resection. It was the face of a man who was already cataloging the tools he would need to repair a total system failure.
We crossed the bridge over Canoe Creek before Eli spoke.
"Did I measure the hole wrong, Mom?"
His voice was so small the heater fan nearly drowned it out.
I reached across the seat and placed my right hand over both of his. They were still cold through his coat pockets.
"No, buddy," I said. "One and one-eighth inches. Exactly right for a chickadee or a downy woodpecker. If you make it any bigger, the starlings get in and run them out. You followed the specification sheet to the sixteenth."
"Then why did she say it was clutter?"
The question hung in the cab, heavier than the smell of the antifreeze.
How do you explain to an eight-year-old child that some people are born with a spirit like an unvented chimney? That no matter how dry the oak you feed them, no matter how carefully you lay the kindling, they will only ever produce smoke that stings your eyes, because their flues were choked with soot before you were even born?
"She didn't look at the swing," Eli whispered, his chin trembling against his collar. "She didn't even push it with her finger to see if the wire worked."
"She didn't deserve to see it, El," Matt said. His voice was rough, like two stones grinding together at the bottom of a creek bed. "Your grandfather built that actual swing out of white oak he salvaged from the old livery stable down on Second Street. He spent four days mortising the slats with a hand chisel because he didn't have a plunge router back then. He knew what a swing was worth."
"Grandma didn't like the swing either," Eli said.
I looked down at the top of his head, at the soft whorl of light-brown hair that matched my father’s down to the cowlick that refused to stay flat behind his left ear.
"What do you mean, buddy?" I asked.
"Grandpa told me," Eli said, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, singsong cadence children use when quoting the dead. "When I was little. We were sitting on the porch while you were fixing the lawnmower carb. He said Grandma wanted him to take the swing down and buy one of those white plastic benches from Lowe's because the oak made the porch look like an old farm. But he told her some things are supposed to look like they've been worked on."
I closed my eyes for two seconds, letting my forehead rest against the cold side glass of the truck.
Warren Collins had been dead six years, but standing in that memory, I could see his hands—broad, flat-nailed, with a crescent-shaped scar across the left thumb where a ten-inch radial arm saw had caught him back in the summer of seventy-eight. He had spent forty-two years taking the rough edges off this world so his daughters wouldn't have to scrape their shins against them, and my mother had spent those same forty-two years wishing he were a man who wore neckties and worked in an office with carpet on the floor.
We pulled into our driveway at twenty minutes past five.
We lived on an acre and a half out on Green River Road, in a drafty, cedar-sided saltbox that Matt and I had spent twelve years renovating room by room. The yard was littered with the practical residue of our lives: an orderly stack of seasoned ash drying under black plastic behind the garden shed, a rack of steel pipe clamps leaning against the workshop door, and an old cast-iron dinner bell mounted to an eight-by-eight post near the back steps.
Eli didn't wait for us to unlock the tailgate. He unbuckled his belt, slid across the vinyl bench, and jumped down into the gravel, grabbing the birdhouse by its pine roof.
"Eli," Matt called out through the open window. "Leave your boots on the porch."
The boy didn't answer. He ran across the frost-silvered grass, his small coat flapping, straight toward the dark silhouette of my workshop.
The shop was a twenty-four-by-thirty pole barn we’d built the summer after Dad died. It had twelve-foot ceilings, three rows of eight-foot fluorescent fixtures that hummed for forty seconds before flickering into a cold, brilliant white, and an ancient cast-iron barrel stove that could turn four split hickory logs into eighty degrees of dry heat in half an hour. It smelled of yellow pine, paste wax, mineral spirits, and the faint, burnt-sugar odor of dull saw blades cutting through cherry.
By the time Matt and I stepped through the service door, Eli was standing in front of my primary assembly bench.
He hadn't turned on the overhead lights. He stood in the gray twilight filtering through the high clerestory windows, holding a twenty-ounce framing hammer he’d pulled from my low wall rack.
His small hands were wrapped around the rubberized grip, the heavy steel head wavering in the air as he tried to balance its weight.
The birdhouse sat on the edge of the maple butcher-block bench directly in front of him.
"Eli!" I dropped my keys onto the concrete floor with an explosive clatter.
Matt was faster. He didn't shout. He took two long, gliding strides across the sawdust-dusted floor, dropped to one knee, and caught the shaft of the hammer just below the head, his large fingers closing over Eli’s small ones with gentle, immovable mass.
"Whoa, partner," Matt murmured, his voice soft as flannel. "Easy. Easy on the iron."
Eli’s face was contorted into a tight, furious knot. The tears had finally broken through, hot and thick, running down his cheeks and dripping off the point of his chin onto his navy sweater.
"It’s stupid," Eli sobbed, his small arms shaking as he tried to pull the hammer down against Matt’s grip. "The chimney's crooked, Dad! The green paint on the shutters isn't straight! Nicole’s kids have those plastic things from the store that do real games, and I brought her a piece of junk from the garage!"
"Stop it," Matt said. He didn't let go of the hammer. He pulled the boy forward until Eli’s forehead pressed into the wool shoulder of his coat. "You listen to me, Eli Warren. You listen to me right now."
I stood three feet away, my Carhartt jacket half-unzipped, my knuckles pressed against my teeth to stop the trembling in my own jaw.
"Your mother and I spent two months watching you build that," Matt said, his voice dropping into that deep, rhythmic rumble that had calmed Eli through croup, through three broken collarbones, and through the night the tornado took the top out of the red oak by the driveway. "You measured those rafters with a sliding T-bevel. You cut those tiny little window muntins with a jeweler's saw that made your fingers cramp until you couldn't hold your fork at supper. There isn't an eighth-grader in your mother's vocational shop who could have fit that hip rafter with a hand rasp the way you did."
"She didn't want it," Eli wailed into his father's coat. "She told Mom to give it to somebody who wants it!"
"Then that’s what we’re going to do," Matt said.
He released his grip on the hammer, slipped the tool from Eli’s fingers, and laid it gently on the workbench beside an open can of finishing wax. Then he turned the boy around until they were both looking at the birdhouse.
In the dim November light, the little yellow house looked brave and small. The silver wire on the porch swing caught the last orange sliver of sun coming through the west window, glinting like an old watch chain.
"We’re going to find someone who knows what a hand-cut joint is worth," Matt said. "And until we do, it stays right here on the master bench. Not under a rag. Not in a scrap box. Right next to the Lie-Nielsen planes."
Eli wiped his nose on his sleeve, his chest hitching with those ragged, after-crying gasps that leave a child’s ribs sore. "Can we light the stove, Dad?"
"Yeah," Matt said, ruffling his hair until the cowlick stood straight up. "Go get the kindling crate from behind the radial arm. Take the dry cedar scraps from the bottom."
Eli sniffled once, dragged the sleeve of his coat across his eyes again, and disappeared into the shadowed corner where we kept the offcut barrels.
I walked over to the bench. I picked up the birdhouse.
The wood was cool to the touch. Eli had used six-penny galvanized finish nails to pin the corner boards, but he had countersunk every single head with a nail set and filled the holes with homemade wood putty—pine dust mixed with yellow carpenter’s glue—just like my father had taught me in his garage thirty years ago. If you ran your thumb along the corner, you couldn't feel where the pine ended and the filler began.
"You meant what you said?" Matt asked, his voice low as he watched our son rummaging through the wood scraps twenty feet away.
"I’ve never meant anything more in my life," I said.
Matt nodded once. He reached out, his thick thumb tracing the curve of the miniature roof. "Nicole's going to call before nine o'clock. She’ll have Mom in the background sounding like she’s on her deathbed."
"Let her call," I said. "The ringer’s off on the landline, and my cell phone is staying in the glove box of the truck until Monday morning."
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We stayed in the shop until nine. We burned three sticks of dry red oak, split two dozen cedar shingles for an upcoming doghouse project, and let Eli drink hot cocoa out of a stained thermos lid while he practiced cutting dovetails in a scrap piece of two-by-four.
He didn't mention Beverly again that night. But when we went inside, he carried the little yellow house up the stairs to his bedroom, set it on the nightstand beside his brass compass and his rock collection, and turned the front porch toward his pillow so he could see the swing in the light from the hallway.
