BERG CUT DOWN HIS hours at Fernwood. He worked there only two days a week now and spent the rest of his time at Alejandro’s. Even if there was nothing to do in the shop, Berg would hang out in the farmhouse and talk to Alejandro, or whoever was around. At first Berg felt like he was intruding, but Alejandro made him feel welcome.
“Do you want to stay for dinner, Berg?” he’d ask, eyes twinkling.
Alejandro and his wife, Rebecca, lived in the main farmhouse with their two teenage sons, Hal and Sandy. Their daughters, who were older, lived on different parts of the property. Lizzie was married to a Dutch man named Jens, and she had given birth to Alejandro’s only grandchild, Tess. They lived in a cabin down by the water. Marie, Alejandro’s other daughter, lived by herself, baked sourdough bread, and on occasion helped out her father in the boat shop. Alejandro never would have said it, but Berg could tell she was his favorite child.
Berg guessed that Alejandro was around sixty-five years old. Every morning, he woke at sunrise and took a walk through the woods. When he returned from his walk, he had toast, eggs, and cowboy coffee, and read the paper all the way through. Uffa, Rebecca, and his children rose around this time, and joined him in the kitchen for breakfast. There was a jovial atmosphere to the farmhouse in the mornings, with Rebecca and all of the children discussing the farm-related work that needed to be done that day. On any given morning, the generator needed to be fixed, the irrigation in the tomato patch repaired, the animals fed, the goats’ toenails clipped, the bread made, the cheese made, the sausage made, the cows milked, the fence by the chicken run mended, the pear trees pruned and inspected for blight, the soil temperature recorded, and someone needed to go into town to buy a five-gallon bucket.
Alejandro said he was part Chilean, part Hawaiian, and part “something else.” He’d grown up in Tahiti and California and his father had made his living chartering tourists back and forth from the West Coast to Tahiti on a schooner named Hoku Lewa. There was a large black-and-white photo of this boat in the shop. It hung above the workbench, next to a photo of Uffa and Alejandro from many years ago. In that photo, the two men were standing in front of the ribcage of some small boat, both of them in overalls. Uffa looked very young in the photo. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old.
The boat shop was a large, airy place. It was not entirely disordered but you could not say it was orderly, either. There were miscellaneous cans of turpentine and linseed oil, stacks of black locust and pepperwood and cedar, old paper coffee cups full of fasteners and bolts, and hundreds of tools, some of them in better shape than others. Several dogs came in and out of the shop, and Berg’s favorite dog was named Swallow. She was a black-grey mutt with long eyelashes and a runny snout. During the first week of his apprenticeship, she ate a dead squirrel and it made her horribly sick. Berg found her behind the shop vomiting, but she seemed to be in good spirits. In between each heave she would look up at Berg, entirely unrepentant.
I’d do it again, she seemed to be saying. I loved eating the squirrel and I’d do it all again.
Berg learned that many people in Talinas believed Alejandro to be mentally ill. One day he ran into Joe Leggett in town, for example, and told him he was apprenticing with Alejandro. He hadn’t seen Leggett since he stopped going to the Tavern.
“Good luck with that,” Leggett said. “That guy’s a quack.”
It was true that Alejandro was strange. His mind was borderless and kinetic. He’d sit down and talk to his six-year-old granddaughter for two hours and become entirely absorbed in the child’s world. His yard was littered with broken-down cars and other detritus. Shortly after Berg met him, he became interested in pasteurizers, and designed and built his own portable pasteurizer for Rebecca to use in the field. After that he began carving Elizabethan lutes. He would stay in the shop after hours, working on these lutes that he didn’t know how to play.
But Berg never doubted Alejandro’s sanity because the first thing he’d seen was his work: his first experiences with Alejandro revolved around building, and everything Alejandro did matched, everything fit. He was a master with hand tools and his intellectual horsepower was astonishing. He would stay up late into the night, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking coffee and looking at lines. Berg would try to keep up with him for a few hours but then he’d fatigue.
“The lines of American fishing boats are high art,” Alejandro said. “Americans are strange. We do certain things that are unfathomable, like sit in traffic. To me this is evidence of mass psychosis, all of these people sitting in traffic. But the lines of American boats are both beautiful and practical.”
As much as Berg liked spending time with Alejandro, he felt inferior in his company. Alejandro was so confident and intelligent, his daily existence so full of life, that Berg felt intimidated. Alejandro never stopped investigating and questioning, and Berg, unfamiliar with even the basics of some of the issues Alejandro was exploring, struggled to keep up. About 30 percent of the time he didn’t understand what Alejandro was talking about, but he just kept hanging on, kept listening, like a foreigner trying to learn a new language.
Much of Alejandro’s work relied on sensory intelligence. He was able, for example, to determine the exact moisture content of a piece of wood by smelling it. This was important because wood changed shape as it dried. If you did not accurately determine moisture content, you might end up with a boat that, after a couple of years, had large gaps between its planks. Various species of wood had widely different structural properties and dried at different rates.
“You see,” Alejandro would say, holding a cut of white oak to Berg’s nose. “You must know the smells for each wood.”
The way the wood was cut mattered, too. Most lumber was flat-sawn, but Alejandro would quarter-saw his lumber because it gave him more pieces of wood with vertical grain. This type of wood was less likely to shrink or develop checks.
“When a tree dries,” Alejandro said, “it is opening from the pith. Its rings are trying to flatten out. So a piece of wood with highly curved rings, a piece with horizontal grain, is going to move more than a piece of wood with flat rings, or vertical grain. You must anticipate this. You must always be thinking about how the wood will change with time.”
Alejandro’s professorial style was highly improvisational. After discussing the differences between vertical and horizontal grains, he might point to the floorboards of the shop, show Berg how they were horizontal grain and how they had checked. From there he might explain how there was adobe under the floor of the shop, which would lead to a discussion of California’s geology, which would segue into a commentary on the exceptionally hot lava of Kilauea, and move from there to a story about hula, the slow form of hula that his mother had practiced in Tahiti, which was distinct from the more common, touristic version of the dance—all of this concluding, somehow, with a contemplation of the cello as an instrument, its merits and deficiencies. It was dizzying, but it was always interesting.
One day, when Berg was caulking the Alma, a reporter came into the shop. He said he was looking for Alejandro and Berg told him that Alejandro was out by the mouth fishing for herring. It was November and the herring run stretched from one end of the bay to the other, a forty-foot-wide river of shimmering silver.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“I don’t.”
“No idea at all?”
Berg yelled over to Uffa, who was at the other end of the shop, cutting blocks for the Alma and soaking them in linseed oil. He said he didn’t know either.
“I’m sorry,” Berg said to the reporter. “We don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“I want to ask him about Szerbiak,” the reporter said. “I drove all the way out here.” He was wearing a dress shirt and glasses and he had a sweater tied around his neck.
“The novelist?” Berg asked.
“Yes, of course the novelist,” the man said, irritated.
“I’m sorry,” Berg said. “If you leave your name and number, I’ll pass it to him.”
When Alejandro came home, Berg told him about the man who had stopped by. Alejandro seemed disturbed, wanted to know what the man looked like. Berg described him, and then he asked Alejandro if he’d known Szerbiak.
“I went to college with him,” Alejandro replied.
“That’s so cool. His work is amazing.”
“It was cool for a while but I’m done with that scene. It was a dead end. The whole scene was a dead end.” He picked up a wooden mallet and began to caulk alongside Berg. “If that man comes back,” he said, “tell him I don’t live here.”