HAMMER IN HAND, still perched on that chair, I stood and admired my all-white thermometer, now properly mounted beside the kitchen window. It was sticky, as everyone says in New England—pre-summer muggy, before the trees break out and turn on their fountains. The insides of my elbows felt damp. On Twist Run Road, around the front of the house, a car pulled up. I listened for its engine to cut.
The thermometer—an instrument of benign domestication—looked official yet cozy against the dull brown siding. My feelings of pride were severely out of whack with the magnitude of the task, of course. I stepped off the chair. My hand still held the hammer, so I slid it in my belt; its claw helped to keep it there.
Claw. I pictured the word in my mind; it felt dangerous and evil. It sounded and looked exactly like its meaning, and seemed forged in those flattened spikes on the hammer, made for bloody digging. I thought of two-toed sloths and saber-toothed tigers emerging from the swirling primeval butter, of young mindless power stretching its limbs, hard and amoral. It doesn’t take much to become a Neanderthal. Soft-spoken novelist goes cowboy apeshit with skull-crunching claw-headed hammer in his belt.
The car door slammed. What to do with the chair? I wanted the house to look halfway presentable, so I flung it in some bushes below—it was on its last legs anyway—and rounded the corner to meet Jerry, the agent.
The appraiser appointed by the probate court after Paul’s death had recommended Jerry and given me his card. His father owned the local Coldwell Banker agency. Small towns, I thought—go with the network. Big smile on his face, arm extended, he crossed the wilderness of front yard to greet me. “Doing some work?” He’d spotted the hammer.
“Nothing much.”
Jerry was the sort who looked as if he’d never wilt. He carried a leather portfolio in one hand. White shirt, floral tie, no coat. Short and bull-necked, he was fresh out of college and had the jaw of a nutcracker, but only a noselet. I trusted his smile; it seemed genuine enough.
We went in through the basement, as I still couldn’t get the back door to work. “This could be a problem,” he said. We were climbing the open basement stairs past blackened cobwebs, heating ducts, and wires. The place smelled of rust and wet, sandy soil. Behind me, Jerry asked, “What about the front door?”
“No steps.”
Upstairs, the door into the kitchen hung open at an angle, one hinge ripped off. The smell inside the house was overwhelming. The humidity made it worse, I realized. I had to breathe through my mouth. “Looks like you got it cleaned up pretty good,” said Jerry.
“It was a hell of a job.”
“Who’d you finally get to do it?”
“Some guys up the road. The kid who runs the Mobil station got a crew together. I called something like six cleaning companies. Three showed up and two walked away. The one who actually gave me an estimate, for six thousand dollars, called back and said he’d changed his mind, he didn’t want the job. So I asked around town. The gas station guy knew someone, he said, then he thought for a minute and said maybe he and his buddies could do it. I told him he better take a look at it first.” We were trolling the house, breathing through our mouths. I hoped he wouldn’t ask about the scratch marks on the walls, made by desperate claws. The doorjambs too were splintered and ripped. None of this had been noticeable before.
“Floors look tight.”
“That was a surprise. We got the rugs up and found hardwood floors.”
“They’re in pretty good shape.”
I’d made sure that each room had at least one working light, if only a bare bulb. The rooms still looked filthy, despite the shop vac I’d used to finish the cleaning. Two bedrooms, a small formal dining room with a fake pewter light fixture, a kitchen, and a living room. What they call snug. The rooms echoed our footsteps.
“What happened to all that ham radio equipment?”
“I sold it.” I’m not sure why I lied.
“Probably worth a lot, all that stuff.”
“Actually, Jud, the guy from the gas station, he sold a lot of it. He sold quite a few things. I told him they could have whatever they found. He knew everyone, that guy—every scavenger in town, every salvage and scrap man, every ham, you name it. Appliances, junk. They came out of the woodwork. He made a killing off this place. We had words about it.”
“Wadeedo?”
“Pardon me?”
“What did he do?”
“Who?”
“Your brother.”
I looked at him. We were standing in the living room. I walked across the room, to lead him away from the cold-air return; its grate was back on. Around the perimeter of the room, scummy bits of rug and backing still clung to small nails in rows on the floor. Most of the windows on this end of the house weren’t boarded up. “What do you mean, what did he do?”
“For a living.”
“Oh. Retired.”
“I mean before that.”
“Electronics. Raytheon.”
“Engineer?”
“No. Assembly. Amateur engineer, though, I guess. I found lots of notes and drawings for inventions. They looked like inventions.” Jerry’s eyes widened and he faced me smiling, feigning interest in my brother. I found myself clamming up and drifted off the subject. I didn’t really understand Paul’s inventions, not being familiar with electronics and microwaves. He’d told me a few years before his death that he was on to something that would make a lot of money, and intended to give the profits to our parents, to ease their old age.
I thought of his airplanes hung on wires in Grandma’s house. As a teenager, he’d built a replica P-47N Thunderbolt that really flew—I’d seen photographs of him grinning like a proud father, this specimen in his arms. My mother enjoyed mentioning in company his ability to use a slide rule. When he moved in with us after Grandma’s death, he built CB radios, two- and ten-meter-band transmitters and receivers, the oscilloscope. Yet he’d barely finished high school and never learned how to spell. His handwriting consisted of carefully constructed block letters. In my box of his effects in the van were his notes on “Reinventing the Notch Filter”—his “possible new marketing item,” as he’d written across the top of the page—his moneymaking device that would buy Mom and Dad a lifetime supply of vacations in Hawaii. I’d found the notes packed in a Tupperware container after his death:
A FEW MONTHS AGO, DUE TO CURCOMSTANCES AT WORK, I WAS ABLE TO TRY OUT SOME OF MI IDEAS ON NOTCH FILTERS, AND THE RESULTS SO FAR, SEEM TO HAVE BEEN WORTH THE EFFERT! TO SIMPLIFY THINGS, ALL I HAVE DON IS TAKEN A GIVEN PASS BAND CAVITY, WITH A GIVEN LOOP DISIGN, AND MODIFIED THE LOOP TO GIVE A NOTCH. THIS WAS DON BY OPENING UP THE GROUND SIDE OF THE LOOP, AND ADDING GOOD QUALITY VARIABEL CAP’S. BY THE SIMPLE ADDITION OF TWO JOHANSON VARIABAL CAP’S, (AT A COST OF APPROXIMATLY $12) AND TWO TYPE “N” CONNECTOR’S, (AT THE COST OF $15, ONE OF OUR HIGH Q CAVITYS CAN BE MADE INTO A PASS/NOTCH CONFIGURATION THAT WILL GIVE THE USOR A PASS BAND BETWEEN 400 TO 500 MHZ WITH AN INSERTION LOSS OF .5 TO 1.0 DB, AND A NOTCH OF UP TO 70 DB THAT IS TUNABEL PLUS OR MINUS 50 MHZ FROM THE PASS BAND FREQUENCY.
This had something to do with filtering interference from radio transmissions, I knew, but mostly it sounded like gibberish. It frightened me a little, as runes in a cave might. It went on for several pages, and had been rewritten and painfully recopied a dozen or more times, then typed with the spelling cleaned up and the exclamation points taken out—by someone else, I assumed—and apparently circulated as an interoffice memo, dated a few years before his retirement. Also in the plastic box were test reports on these “reentrant notch cavities,” and blueprints and pictures of what appeared to be the standard bandpass cavity filters—steel cylinders with knobs and a sprinkling of other gadgets on top, about the size of beer kegs.
It occurred to me to wonder how much of what I’d written in my life would be gibberish to Paul, from poetry to literary criticism to novels about failed visionaries. In his house, I’d found a copy of my first novel with a bookmark on page 8. I’d also found five or six homemade cavity filters in one of the junk cars he’d left behind the house. I piled them outside when I was emptying the car, only to discover the following day that Jud from the Mobil station had sold them when his crew cleaned out the place. So I’ll never know if they were worth anything.
I did find a letter from Paul’s employers, commending him in vague terms; it didn’t mention notch filters.
Suddenly I was full of questions for Jerry. “The agency takes what, six percent?”
“That’s standard,” he said.
“How long’s our contract for? You brought it with you?”
He patted the portfolio. “That’s something—” he started. “Standard is nine months. I’m okay with—whatever—”
“You think fifty-six thousand is a fair price?”
“That’s the appraisal. I think you need wiggle room.”
“I don’t see how we can sell it with this smell. Does it seem worse to you?”
“I think when it’s warm—”
“Can we do anything about it?”
“It’s not that bad, really. What this place is, is a handyman’s special. The market’s hot now, this location is good, and the price, you could set a price in the sixties. That’s rock bottom. Someone comes in and rips out the walls and puts up new Sheetrock, there goes the smell.”
“I was thinking about some industrial-strength cleanser or deodorant. I don’t know. The guys who cleaned it out said a smell like that gets into the studs and joists, even. You can never get it out.”
“It’s not that bad, really.”
“A friend of mine got skunked one time and used vinegar and tomato juice.”
“The hell you say! It’s not as bad as a skunk.”
“It’s inconceivably worse.”
“Horseradish. Can I try the front door?”
We were standing in the little entryway between the living and dining room. Jerry opened the door and looked out. Instinctively, we both inhaled deeply.
“Door works fine,” he said. “Lock works fine.”
What’s your point? I thought. To exit the house, he had to get down on his hands and knees then back out with his weight on his forearms. It was three or four feet to the ground. I followed.
“He must have had stairs here once,” he said.
“You think we need some now?”
“It’s up to you. I can’t see taking people in through the cellar. And the back door won’t open, and even if it did, the back porch is caving in and it constitutes a safety hazard. The floor boards are rotten.”
“I was hoping to start home after we signed the papers.”
“Go ahead. It’s not all that bad. We’ll go through the cellar.”
“You just said you couldn’t.”
“It really doesn’t matter. It’s psychological. If you go in the front door, that makes a better statement. But with this being a handyman’s special, it probably don’t make any difference anyway.”
By now we’d begun to walk around the house. I’d gotten rid of three junk cars outside, but Paul’s rusting ride-around mower, on four flat tires, still sat in the back. The man I’d sold it to, for fifty dollars cash, hadn’t picked it up yet. “You know someone who could do it?” I asked. “Build some steps?”
“Don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Completely up to you. Heck, it’s your house. What’s that?” We were walking down the slope behind the house, past a tangle of bushes.
“Chair. They must have missed it.”
Jerry turned to face me. We’d reached the dirt road that ran behind the house whose named I’d never learned; there was no street sign. Across this road were remnants of a stone wall, and arthritic apple trees in the thorny field behind it. They looked ready to burst into blossom right now. “You could call a pre-cast,” he said.
“You mean pre-cast concrete?”
“I know a place in Haverhill that delivers.”
Half an hour later I was driving to the Home Depot in Salem, having signed on with Jerry and Coldwell Banker, having phoned his pre-cast people from the Mobil station. Steps for Paul’s house would cost $530, not including delivery.
Too much. I felt chained to my duties, and didn’t like someone younger than me rattling the chain, and didn’t care about the house, but knew it needed front steps. At red lights I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, feeling cheap, then feeling proud I felt cheap. I found myself honking slow starters when the light changed; why not flip them the bird too? Also, I was cultivating a minor irritation regarding Jerry’s failure to notice the thermometer, and every few minutes poked it a little to see if it was there, like a loose tooth.
I’d have to phone the Red Roof Inn if I stayed another night, since I’d checked out that morning. I mentally ran down a list of have-tos. Call home. Get money. Enough irritants existed to supply me for days. Then, walking through the Home Depot, I felt some sort of grit on my soles, and longed for a rug to wipe my feet. Whenever I shopped at this store, it seemed, I found myself wiping my hands on my pants.
Home Depot, the Wal-Mart of do-it-yourselfers. Sheetrock, lumber, glass, furring strips, trim, doors, cinder blocks, shop vacs, hoses . . . electric trucks and forklifts beeping madly through the aisles. Wal-Mart equals blue, Home Depot orange. The shelves on which all these goods sit—items for sale at ground level, inventory above—fit nicely under warehouse-metal roofs a good thirty feet high and are made of a distinctive construction-strength steel, painted orange and bolted to uprights. Adult Erector sets. In the lumber department, large enough to house a drive-in movie, T beams and girders, instead of shelves, hold stacks of wallboard or plywood or doors. Here the help seemed especially busy. I found someone to ask if they sold pre-made steps, though I suspected the answer.
“Pre-made? No. We got pre-cut stringers.”
“What’s that?”
He looked at me and smiled. His face seemed to soften and harden simultaneously, as though wanting to help me but lacking the time. Yet he took the time. His beard and cloudy eyes appeared flaked with ashes, but he looked somewhat distinguished, save for some raw red patches of skin. He could have been a doctor—thin lips, gray hair—but one arm, I noticed, was bulkier than the other, a sure sign of a carpenter of the old school, one who uses a handsaw. “I take it you never built no steps. It’s pretty simple. What’s the total rise?” Voice soft and flaky.
“I’m not sure.”
“What’s this for, anyway?”
“Front steps to my brother’s house, which I’m selling. I just want to get people in and get them out. I mean prospective buyers. It’s a handyman’s special. Whoever buys it, of course, will put in something permanent.”
“Like pre-cast?”
“Sure..”
Back at the house, I laid out my supplies and equipment. I already had a hammer and saw, I’d assured the clerk. To go with them, I’d purchased a norm, but no one calls them norms anymore, they’re carpenter’s squares. And nails, plus stringers and one-by-fives for treads, but nothing for risers—the steps would be open. We’d taken the time to talk about the project, and the Home Depot clerk had suggested that I buy some posts too. Since the stairs had rotted off, the sill was probably also rotten, hence I couldn’t attach the stringers to the house. Instead, I’d have to box out the steps.
The stringers cost only $7.49, and the rest of the wood plus the norm and nails brought the total to just under $50. So I should have been happy. But the saw was dull from misuse, and making just one cut through a four-by-four post took a good ten minutes. Also, I didn’t have a level; I had to eyeball everything. If I worked fast enough, I told myself, I still might be able to drive home today. Home to Hannah and our children. It was already mid-afternoon, though. I was hungry too, having skipped lunch. And it was hot; on this side of the house I had to work in the sun.
Every second of every day, the sun loses four million tons of its mass in the process of sustaining its huge production of energy. Of that mass, 4.3 pounds of light hits the earth each second. And the light is hot, especially if you’re working. Am I my brother’s keeper?
I cleared out some weeds and brush first. Then scraped at the dirt with the hammer’s claws to level the paving stones I’d found in the basement, on which to set the stairs. The clerk was right: below the closed door, the exposed sill was rotten. In fact, a gap had opened up between the bottom of the door and the interior floor, large enough to vent the house’s smell as I worked.
I took out my frustration by banging nails hard. I’d bought nails, not screws—the obvious choice, the clerk had assured me. And I did not just stare at the hammer-Thing, as Martin Heidegger calls it. I’m sure the English is more charming than the German: “The less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become.” Cool.
The all-purpose nail—our universal hyphen—is also primordial, nails being stark and simple. The nail is blue-collar, the screw white-collar, even though “screw” comes from the Latin scrobs, meaning the hole a pig makes with its snout. “A nail is heroic and exciting,” says the Mexican essayist Fabio Morábito. “In a screw the brusque commands of the nail have been transmuted into dialogue and negotiation.”
Nails and screws both go back to Roman times. The ancient Chinese also made nails. The Romans had claw hammers, also folding carpenter’s rules, as did the Egyptians. A first-century A.D. Roman nail-heading anvil was discovered in Bavaria in the nineteenth century, and the author of a book that reports it—Ancient Carpenters’ Took—assures us that a junk dealer named Faust, in Pennsylvania, had witnessed a blacksmith named Emory, in Philadelphia, around 1877, making nails and rivets on a similar anvil. Before the Industrial Revolution, England’s center for making nails by hand was the country near Birmingham; there, nail masters kept women and children, who worked in filthy sheds attached to their houses, in effective slavery by paying them for piecework on the truck system, or so my Britannica reports.
America pioneered the machine-made nail, in 1790. Forty years later, Stendhal’s famous description of a nail factory opened his novel The Red and the Black: “No sooner has one entered the town than one is startled by the din of a noisy machine of terrifying aspect. A score of weighty hammers, falling with a clang which makes the pavement tremble, are raised aloft by a wheel which the water of the torrent sets in motion. Each of these hammers turns out, daily, I cannot say how many thousands of nails. A bevy of fresh, pretty girls subjects to the blows of these enormous hammers, the little scraps of iron which are rapidly transformed into nails.” In the nineteenth century, nail factories set the standard for noise; even Lewis and Clark, complaining of the noise at an Indian village, compared it to that of a nail factory.
Hammer and nails. Bedrock. Manhood. I’d practiced as a boy on scraps of two-by-fours, but choked up on the hammer too much, my father said. He told me nails should be driven in two or three blows, and joints should be square. As I built my brother’s steps, I remembered Dad building similar steps for my uncle’s house in Worcester, when I was young. Uncle John’s emphysema was so bad by then he could barely walk to the bathroom; he hadn’t been to the second floor of his house in two or three years. My father has it now, emphysema. Paul had it too, though he died of an aneurysm.
Dad’s work seemed effortless—his stairs built themselves. This was not the case with mine. I resented every cut, every blow of the hammer. What good did it do to check each joint repeatedly with my norm if I couldn’t correct it? I’d seen a carpenter once, after framing a closet, wallop the uprights with a sledgehammer to force it into square. Me, I can never get anything square—I lack patience and skill—and this feels like a shameful flaw in my character. All my life I’ve misused tools. I used a crosscut saw to trim brush, a hammer’s claws to clear away debris and level the ground. At home, my few tools sit in judgment on a shelf in a corner of my basement. Tools are profoundly conservative. They dictate a right way. Building Paul’s steps, I realized too late I should have bought a tape measure. Why hadn’t I thought of it?
At least the rhythmic motion of sawing calmed me down. It was just as primordial as swinging a hammer. I sawed and sawed. My shoulder grew sore, but I sawed through the soreness. Both Dad and Paul had been good with tools; maybe I was the odd one, not my brother. In the army during World War II, Dad worked as an auto mechanic at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, being too old for the fighting overseas. Later, when I was growing up, he tinkered with our car on the street in South Boston, often after supper while I held a flashlight. Leaning into the engine, he never bothered to explain all the fabricated viscera—those wheels, cylinders, hoses, belts, and bars, those hooks, teeth, needles, wires, rotors, and blades—that smell of gasoline, burning oil, and rubber, that sound of the motor clicking and bubbling—not that I demonstrated any urgent curiosity. Instead he whistled, to convince others of his happiness, occasionally breaking off to recall me to my duties. Shine it right there! My attention always wandered.
Paul was a more meticulous tool user and worked at a bench. After Grandma’s death, and after his own stint in the army, he moved in with us and arranged with our landlord to set up a workshop in the basement. We lived on the top floor of an old duplex, and the owner lived down. At a bench in our half of the basement, Paul gradually progressed from making airplanes and miniature balsa-wood houses (for model train sets) to piecing together—beginning with the circuit boards—radios, transmitters, and finally the oscilloscope, an instrument whose purpose seemed quasi-religious to me. It was profoundly mysterious yet strangely dumb and repetitive, stuck on one operation: the manufacture of glowing lines that looped across the screen. Yet its grids and its sine and sawtooth waves, its flickering green porthole, possessed a power to hypnotize, and most evenings I found myself wandering down to the basement to watch the oscilloscope over Paul’s shoulder.
The floor of our basement was solid concrete. Above the oscilloscope on my brother’s bench—above the pegboard attached to the wall behind it—a half window revealed the feet and calves of neighbors walking past on the sidewalk outside. I often visited this spot after school as well, when Paul was off at work, having discovered his magazines cached in the chassis of a radio on the bench. Even now, the smell of a soldering iron suggests white teeth, full breasts, and dangled G-strings.
Like my father, Paul was short on explanations regarding his machinery. Oscilloscopes operate through a sweep circuit, he said. They’re just tools, he pointed out, but I thought of the instrument he’d built more as a shrine. He did explain that the line on the screen was an electric signal, and electric signals were everywhere—and this screen was how you saw them.
Later, my brother learned Morse code and obtained his ham license. He built a rotating antenna and installed it in the attic, with controls in our bathroom, then set up his transmitters and receivers on a thick plywood board across the bathroom tub. The bathroom was where I’d been doing my homework on a folding tray; once my family had a television set, it was our apartment’s only quiet room. Now I was banished to the kitchen with earplugs, while the TV blared the Texaco Star Theater and Paul, in the bathroom, held cheerfully redundant conversations with strangers on the two- and ten-meter bands. For the convenience of my father and me, he took to leaving a coffee can outside the bathroom door, so that only my mother had the power to evict him when she had “an emergency.”
Saturday mornings, he dismantled the machinery and removed the board for those who wished to bathe. To save hot water, after his bath Paul left the plug in so I could use his water. The habits of thrift taught us by our parents had been learned in the Depression. This was how I cleaned myself: by lowering my body into Paul’s gray opacity rimmed with a sort of soapy pond scum—and by staying there forever. By launching blankets of water down my legs with my palms, then waiting for them to crash and roll back, choked with Paul’s dirt, while at the same time ignoring my family’s repeated knocks and shouts to be allowed into the bathroom.
At last my posts were cut to size. I propped them on the house and leaned the stringers against them, distractedly calculating how to stabilize the framework. I could cut more four-by-fours as crosspieces, I thought. But I might have to notch them to nail it all together.
It suddenly occurred to me that Paul was never odd. At least he wasn’t then. When had I learned to see him as different? I realized I’d spent my life fleeing his example—first to college, then graduate school, then academia, by means of which I slipped into the middle class, as though into a room one could only enter sideways. The middle class, I thought, where tools were meant for other people’s hands. I was wrong, of course.