Part Eighteen
Sam, 1922-1925
Chapter 48

Gavin, the newest employee in the carpentry workshop where Sam taught shell-shocked veterans, threw his jig and hammer across the room. “I’m pure scunnurt mitering this fucking butt joint!”

Sam calmly handed the hammer back to Gavin. “Outside with you, then, and go pound nails in the blooter board.”

“Are you gowk, man, sending him to skelp nails in this weather? It’s peltin doon not even fit for a fannybawbag.” Tavis threw down his tools too, followed by Brody and Eilig.

Sam looked through the open door at the sheeting rain, sympathetic to their frustration. For six years, he’d been teaching these damaged men to make furniture for young families eager to start households now that the war was over. They built beds and tables for people who took for granted the kinds of normal lives his fragile crew could never hope to have themselves.

“The fucking pine boards leave splinters in my blighty fingers,” Gavin whined. “When can I get my hands on some braw oak?” The men were impatient to work with oak, but Sam started them on pine. Mistakes mattered less on cheaper wood, and even these were costly. All the lumber was imported from England because the Orkney Islands, where Sam had stayed after the war, had few trees of their own. The braying winds that swept across fertile fields, dense with ripening grains and grazing sheep, made it impossible for anything to grow taller than a child.

Ian piped up next. “Haud yer wheesht, silly twally. Your balls will freeze in hell before Mr. Lord lets you make an oak bookcase for some minted dobber. We’re lucky to make chairs for poor numpties to park their arses on.” Sam smiled at the colourful language his men used to show their envy for the rich. Dev would have loved it. Class resentment here was the same as in America.

Gavin pouted and sucked his thumb. Like toddlers after a tumble, his battle-scarred men needed a cuddle from their mums, but made do getting tight at the pub every night and pitching tantrums by day. The rhythmic sound of sawing often smoothed their rough edges, and while hammering sometimes jarred them, like bullets flying over the trenches, it could also calm them. Sam would send them outside to pound nails into what they soon called the “blooter” or “drunk” board. For this he sacrificed a piece of hard oak each week, which absorbed their rages better than the squishy pine. They’d whack at it and come inside ready to pick up their tools and go back to work, until a day or two later, when they would detonate again and repeat the cycle.

That’s not how the furniture workshop was supposed to function. Lord Cameron, the philanthropist who created it, wanted to give traumatized soldiers a place to heal before sending them back into society, becalmed and employable. Since the treeless Orkneys had no tradition of woodworking, it would be a new industry for the war weary islands as well as a fresh start for its shattered vets. Sam heard about the workshop from Hamble Weir, who he’d run into at the docks a year after he met up with Mikovski at Scapa Flow. Hamble had escaped the Spanish flu and spent the rest of the war helping U.S. ships navigate the mine-infested waters en route to Europe.

“Wish I’d been there with you to see the sinking of the German fleet,” Hamble told Sam. “It would have warmed me chilblains better than a hot toddy to see the Friedrich der Grosse go down. She was the flagship of the Jutland Fleet that attacked us early in the war.” Hamble’s story of the men in the Lutzow’s boiler room being burned alive continued to haunt Sam, especially on days when he wandered the beach questioning why he’d been spared in the schoolhouse fire.

Sam shook his head, remembering the unsuspecting German sailors scrambling for their lives as one by one the German fleet sank under the assault upon itself. “I still can’t fathom why commanders would sacrifice their own crew rather than turning their ships over to the British.”

Hamble didn’t think it was strange. “Power goes to men’s heads. Mikovski wasn’t above sacrificing American boys to prove his superiority. I always wondered if you’d grow the guts to stand up to him.” He chuckled. “Tomasio wasn’t afraid to scuttle the bastard by mocking him.”

Sam laughed ruefully. Hearing Tomasio’s name, he felt obligated to confess how he’d saved Mikovski while being powerless to rescue his friend. It was the first time he’d spoken of the death and was afraid he’d choke on the words, but his lungs felt clearer than they had since getting the Spanish flu. Jews confessed only once a year, on Yom Kippur, whereas Catholics admitted their sins weekly. Their way was better, Sam decided. Holding onto guilt was suffocating.

“The wrong man died,” Hamble said, launching a torpedo of spit. “Tomasio was the hero. He joked rings around his enemies. Mikovski confused bullying with bravery. He was useless.”

Sam disagreed, but kept quiet. Mikovski, for all his flaws as a human being, was a good teacher. He made men angry enough to spite him by surviving. Only after the war did he find himself useless. Sam felt useless too. As if reading his thoughts, that’s when Hamble told Sam about the carpentry workshop. In the same way that Hamble had escorted ships through mined oceans, the Veterans’ Service had enlisted him to accompany men to woodworking training before they too blew up. Hearing that Sam spent the final months of the war building coffins, Hamble suggested he apply for a job with the program. There was an opening for a specialist in joinery.

Sam’s carpentry skills were rudimentary, but with mail-order manuals, he taught himself the different kinds of joins: mitered butt, tongue and groove. It was like learning sailors’ knots in boot camp. His hands, practiced at twisting yarn and tying fringes on the tallit he’d discarded eight years ago, were equally agile cutting wood. He built himself a dresser, working Saturdays as well as weekdays, letting the pleasure of executing half-blind and sliding dovetail joints override the guilt that still tugged him about working on Shabbas. When the dresser was finished, he got the job and felt it was a small step forward. He quickly learned, however, that rather than getting on with their lives, the men he taught were as locked in place as the joins they fastened.

There was one exception, Laird, who claimed that finding religion had helped him get better. Others called the Church havering hogwash, their faith destroyed by the smell of feet rotting in flooded trenches while cannons boomed overhead. Laird, whose upbringing was least dogmatic, discovered solace in simple rituals. “My parents were take-it-or-leave it Christians,” he told Sam. “As a wee bugger and after the war, I left it. But coming here, I thought I’d give it another try.”

Sam asked Laird what made him change his mind.

“I dunno. Sniffing glue?” He inhaled the drawer he’d just cut. “Or maybe it was the smell of clean wood when the router sliced through it.” Laird smiled. “Are you a church man?”

Like everyone else Sam had met since the war, Laird had assumed he was Christian. It was easy to pass as one. Away from the ship, his skin had turned pale again and his red hair was sun bleached. Sam wore it long to hide the strawberry mark. With no mirror in his cottage, he barely thought of it. Only when he prowled the beach, and the relentless Orkney wind blew his hair back straight as a board, did Sam instinctively hold his hand below his right ear to cover up the stain.

“My parents were non-denominational,” Sam told Laird, the succinct answer he usually gave, but Laird’s interest prompted him to say more. What he said was technically true, if not forthright. “My father was strict, though, quick to label unorthodox thoughts and behaviours as sinful. He judged me and others as unworthy if we weren’t devoted to extolling the Almighty.”

“Not my old man,” said Laird. “He liked to say, ‘We’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns,’ by which he meant no one is better than anyone else. Genesis says that God created man in His own image. If you believe in our Lord’s beauty and goodness, you believe it to be true of all men.”

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” Sam responded.

Laird smiled. “Galatians. Your father taught you at least one important truth.”

It was actually Tomasio who’d taught Sam the New Testament quote to convince him that not all Christians were Jew haters. “Unlike Mikovski,” his friend had added, “who hates everyone, even other Catholics. Although he’d torture you worse if he knew he was being bested by a Jew.” Sam agreed.

“Maybe someday you’ll give religion another try, like me,” Laird said, admiring the joins on the finished drawer. “You might find a way back to your faith that works for you.”

“Not likely,” Sam said. “My father spoiled it for me for good.” He watched Laird select a fresh board. “Your father gave you a choice. That’s why you were able to change your mind.”

Laird looked at two veterans skelping nails in the nearly full blooter board. “Be thankful you’re not radge-brained like them. Whatever you lost during the war, it wasn’t your marbles.” He measured twice before cutting the wood. “Religion isn’t as precise as carpentry, but just like a drawer gives you a place to keep your things, religion gives you a box to store your thoughts.”

“You pull out what you need, when you need it?” Sam asked.

Laird sanded the edges. “That’s the ticket.”

“What do you do when whatever you pulled out gets dirty?”

Laird shrugged. “You wash it and put it back until you need it again.”

In the three years since Laird had left the workshop, he occasionally wrote to Sam. He soon got a job with a high-end woodworking firm in London, and then met a nurse who shared his beliefs. After they got married, Laird filled their house with the furniture he built. His faith made him happy and secure, but he never proselytized. Sam sometimes regretted that he hadn’t been more honest with Laird about his own religious upbringing. At the time, he thought it was his instinct for self-protection. Later he wondered if he was trying to protect Judaism itself. Although Jews had lived in Scotland since the Middle Ages, no one on the islands appeared to have known one. Sam didn’t want them to think all Jews were as rigid as his father. Just because he no longer called himself Jewish didn’t mean he was willing to cast a bad light on his people.

In a way, it was too bad there were no Jews among the worst-off survivors of the war. Hebrews saw suffering as a privilege God had chosen for them. Pain was their goad to improve the world, even if they never expected to succeed. Maybe Sam had inadvertently transferred his own low expectations to his men. Teaching them to work with their hands muted their demons, but he wasn’t taking care of their souls. Aboard ship, when his mates were facing death, the facts and knots Sam taught them bolstered their confidence in their chances of survival. Here, trying to help men who’d survived the horrors of war, he’d failed to make them believe they weren’t as good as dead already. How could he help others heal when his own spiritual drawer was empty?