It is metal, the handle brass, the clawed business end steel. It is eight inches long and good for hammering I don’t know what. What makes it special is that the handle unscrews to become a flat-head screwdriver. The end of that screwdriver also unscrews, revealing a second screwdriver (flat-head again) whose end likewise unscrews to reveal a third (ditto), in the handle of which is a fourth, tiny screwdriver ideal for tightening the screws in eyeglasses. I borrowed this utilitarian matryoshka doll perhaps forty years ago. It belonged to my father, and I never gave it back, even though one can be purchased to this day for $22. Perhaps for a while he looked for it, then gave up—one more thing lost in the disaster that is his basement. I keep it in my toolbox although there isn’t room for the tools I use all the time. This, I never use. I would say that I don’t need it, but that wouldn’t be true.
oil can
It’s made of copper. Its reservoir holds perhaps half a pint. It belonged to grandfather, and the oil it still holds has been in there at least thirty years. Beneath it, a slow stain darkens a corner of my workbench, and the screw-on spout needs oiling; it won’t come off, though I can’t say I’ve ever tried very hard. I never use the thing, keep it for sentimental reasons, a leaky memento mori. I suppose he used it to oil his lathe, drill press, to loosen recalcitrant nuts. I recall us in his driveway, oiling my bicycle. I remember standing in his basement while he took from the window sill above the belt sander the 19¢ bottle of iodine with the skull and crossbones on the label, smarting the cut I got fooling with the kickstand. Palpating the bottom of the can had made a small thumpa thumpa sound, like a heart briefly beating.
This I’ve had since square was the last thing I wanted to be. It looks just like a Mohawk Shelburne 12” for sale on ebay and described as “vintage.” Mine, however, is probably older and was made by L.S. Starrett of Athol, Massachusetts. Starrett, I learn, is a company whose “products are well known among machinists and tool and die makers,” which grandfather was. The ruler is inscribed with the company’s logo and marked “Hardened No. 4.” Don’t ask me what that means. I have used it to cut mat boards, to get a straight line started when cutting drywall. The bubble level lost its bubble long ago. Grandfather lost the whole damn thing long ago. I am still adjusting—to loss, to living life on the square, to going straight. It is not for nothing the level doesn’t work. These days, I keep it in the bottom of the tool box, buried beneath some old rags, which I stupidly think will keep it from ever getting bent.
pry bar
Another tool from grandfather by way of my father. I used it to tear up two layers of linoleum and a subfloor in my kitchen, to lift the large slabs of granite edging the patio, so I could dump gravel under them to raise each a couple inches and stop the flower beds from flushing dirt onto the brick in heavy rains. It’s short but heavy and was originally a battleship gray, but that has largely worn away. It has a pleasant, functional shape, hooking at one end—the end notched and excellent for coaxing loose well-pounded nails—bending slightly outward at the other, away from the hooked end. Like a baseball, it feels good to hold, to joggle. It was made to be abused. No manufacturer put his name on it, disowning both it and the work it would do. Still, it is worthy of being painted by Jim Dine or bequeathed to the Whitney to be hung just as it is. If I lived in a more dangerous town, I might keep it by my bed to brain intruders. Instead, it hangs out in the basement on a hook in the pegboard. Were one to pry into its private life, about what might it be dreaming? Of all the nails whose heads it has mangled and torn off, and the delight therein? Of how attractive the cross saw looks at evening in the dimming light coming through the grimy windows? Of the night it spent in the uncut grass, too heavy for any rain to wash it home?
miter box
It’s old, made by my grandfather I don’t know when and inherited by my father when grandpa died. I know from old photographs that he and father used in when, beginning in 1953, they built the house I grew up in. For the past several years, I’ve borrowed it whenever I had trim to cut. The last time I came to fetch it home, father told me to keep it, he didn’t need it back. Which was to say that he was old and wouldn’t be doing any more sawing in this life. The box was made of scrap wood and is plenty gouged and beat up. Its sides wobble a bit, and the saw is dull as hell. I imagine grandfather making this box. I think about the things he made using it, the things my father made. I recollect what has happened to those things, and when I do, I grow a mite wobbly and think this saw may be dull, but it still can cut.
hand drill
It looks like something the Amish might use. It looks like it belongs in a tool museum. A crank or brace with handle, at one end the head or knob, at the other cam ring, pawl, ratchet, chuck. Nothing special. In the Cape Cod divorce was causing me to vacate, the previous owner had finished off the upstairs all by himself, and every move he’d made was rinky-dink, one closet doorless, the frame of no standard size. To keep busy, I was taking care of some deferred repairs and improvements and drove a door to my father’s to cut it down on his table saw. He volunteered to return with me to help hang the door, which would prove, he promised, trickier than I might think. We chiseled the hinge and latch slots, then I measured the doorknob, father locked a bit in the chuck, and I cut the hole, which proved too small. Father apologized . . . he must have inserted the wrong bit. “Have I become that pathetic to you?” I asked, cranking the drill in slow, jerky revolutions, the empty chuck pressed against my chest. It was time to take father and his drill back home. It was time for both of us to leave.
claw hammer
This one means business. Heavy, deadly. My initials on the ash handle. It’s one of thirty or so hammers distributed chaotically about father’s basement and garage—ball pein, tack, sledge, straight pein, brass, watchmaker’s, rawhide and rubber mallets, pin, club, claws of all shapes and sizes—his and the ones he inherited from his father. Despite being so numerous, the one wanted can rarely be found. This one, I appropriated long ago. It reminds me of a story—about a couple in their sixties who lived down the street from my parents, the husband coming up from his basement one day to beat his wife to death with a hammer. Visiting my parents soon afterward, I listened to mother say how, at church, someone had jokingly asked if she were worried dad might do the same. She’d said she wasn’t. “Because you know how much I love you,” dad jumped in. “No,” I said, “because she knows you could never find a hammer in that basement.” Ball pein, tack, pin, club, joke.
If I had any brains, I’d call a plumber. Using this, I am Procrustes on his bed, Phalaris in his bull. Surely, it was passed along by father as a joke. After wrestling the wrench into place, invariably I find its jaws clamped to turn in the wrong direction. Of course it is dark under the sink, and the propped flashlight of course keeps falling over. If my current faucet problems continue, one day you will soon find me wedged between the drain pipe and garbage disposal, a can of Comet, bottle of Windex, piles of empty plastic bags scattered about my now-lifeless feet, still clutching the shaft and T-bar. I will have assumed a position usually reserved for torture victims and sexual deviants. Check your Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger: not one good word directed toward the basin wrench in the entire history of philosophy. Check Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe: again, not one affirming reference. Even Dr. Seuss, that usually affable soul, gave vent to this:
I hate this tool in every way!
I hate it every single day!
Fuck its T-bar, fuck its handle,
Fuck it with a roman candle!
Let the basin wrench try to unscrew that.
cross-cut saw
A Disston Keystone K-6 Challenger. The darling of the pry bar’s eye (the pry bar likes ’em dull; the pry bar likes a challenge). Into the apple handle three sprigs of what might be honey locust have been carved, or maybe grass gone to seed. Although I’ve used it countless times, I suspect the geniuses on CSI: Miami could still find on it somewhere grandfather’s fingerprints. It’s there in the old photographs of our house being built, odalisque of the tool set, lying languorously here and there, brazenly riding the saw horses, giggling with the hex wrench. Naked, seductive (albeit tarnished) steel heel to toe and front to back; insolent come-hold-me handle. Although I cannot “play” the saw, it sings an ancient call-and-response each time I use it, a song of 2 x 4s and give-and-take, sawdust and grandfathers.