A young woman writes:
The carpenter is at my house replacing the frames and glass panes of some windows. She (it is a woman, a round, fair woman who looks more like a cook than like a carpenter, but she is a good carpenter, as I soon see) has around her strips of wood, panes of glass, a glass cutter, a large portable electric saw, nails, hammers, and something called a caulk gun. She measures, she saws, she cuts, she sighs: it is a much more complicated job than she at first thought, the house being a very old and crooked house. The work is taking place in a bedroom, and I sit on the edge of a bed all the time, watching her. There are many things for me to do around the house; I should also go out and run some errands. But I cannot leave the carpenter’s presence. Perhaps I will be able to assist in some way; perhaps she will say something to me.
My father was a carpenter, and a cabinetmaker, too. In the world (and it was a small world: a hundred and eight square
miles, a population of sixty thousand, no deep-water harbor, so large ships had to anchor way offshore), my father was the second-best carpenter and cabinetmaker. The best carpenter was Mr. Walters, to whom my father had been apprenticed as a boy and for whom he had worked when he was a young man. Mr. Walters had been dead for a long time, even before I was born, but he was still the best carpenter and cabinetmaker. My father was so devoted to this man that he did everything just the way Mr. Walters would have done it. If, for instance, in 1955 you asked my father to build you a house and make you some simple chair to sit on in it, he would build you a house and make you a chair exactly like the house and the chair Mr. Walters would have built in 1915.
My father left our house for work every weekday morning at seven o‘clock, by the striking of the Anglican church bell. If it was his first day on a new job, one of his apprentices would come by a little before seven o’clock to pick up my father’s toolbox. If it was one of the older apprentices, he could walk along with my father, and they might talk. If it was one of the younger boys, he would have to walk a few steps behind. At around four o’clock in the afternoon, my father returned home. If he saw me then, he would say, “Well, we got everything in place today.” And I would say, in reply, “Oh, sir, that’s very good.” After that, he would disappear into his shop, where he made furniture.
In my father’s shop, everything was some shade of brown. First, there was the color of his skin; and he wore khaki trousers and khaki shirts, brown shoes, and a brown felt hat.
He smoked cigarettes (Lucky Strikes) one after another, and he smoked so much that the thumb and the index and middle fingers of his right hand were stained brown. His hands were stained another shade of brown from handling stained wood, wood oils, and glues. Everything was brown, that is, except the red, flat carpenter’s pencil (such an unusual, distinctive shape for a pencil, I thought, and I was sadly disappointed when I discovered that it was not a good writing pencil) that he carried perched always behind his right ear. Sometimes when I went to watch him work, he would tell me little things about himself when he was a young man. He would talk about himself as if he were someone he used to know very well, someone he thought really an admirable person, someone he would like very much. Mostly, they were stories about himself as a cricketer. He never told me that he was good at playing cricket; I already knew that.
My father made very beautiful furniture. Everybody said so—especially my mother, who would then point out that unfortunately none of this furniture was in our own house. I think almost every time she saw my father make something she would say to him that it would be nice to have one like that, and he would then promise to make another one, for her specially. But he never did. Finally, one day, he told her that the reason he was reluctant to make us up lots of furniture was that the furniture in Mrs. Walters’ house (the widow of the man to whom he had been apprenticed) was really his: that he had made it up for himself when he was a very young man; that he had lent it to Mrs. Walters after her husband
died and she had moved into a smaller house, the house she still lived in; that he had always meant to ask for it back one day; and that he would ask her for it soon. He never, of course, asked for the furniture—I don’t think he could bring himself to. My mother could not believe that we were never to have that beautiful furniture; that at Christmastime, when our friends stopped by to have a glass of rum, if too many of them came by at once some of them would always have to sit on the floor. My father would visit Mrs. Walters quite often, and every once in a while my mother would go along with him. Afterward, she would always be furious that she had had to leave what she began calling “my furniture” behind, and she would have a big row with herself, for my father never quarrelled with anyone—not even his wife. Once, my father took me with him on one of the visits. I got a good look at the furniture, and I began to understand my mother’s point of view. There was a dining table with six matching cane-bottomed chairs (my father did all his own caning); there was a little round table the edge of which was scalloped; there was a table with fancy decorative carvings on its sides and, above it, a mirror in a frame with decorative carvings that matched the ones on the table; and there was a sofa, a cabinet with delicate woodworking on the glass front, and two Morris chairs. (At the time, I did not know—nor, for that matter, do I think anyone else knew—that there was someone named Morris who had made chairs of which these two were replicas.) We had nothing like any of this in our house.
Once, my father got sick, and the doctor said that it was
his heart, and gave him some medicine and told him to stay home and rest. My mother, looking up heart diseases in one of her numerous medical books, said that the sickness was from all the cigarettes he smoked. At the same time, I took sick with a case of hookworm, and my mother, looking up hookworm in one of her numerous medical books, said that it was because I had walked around barefoot behind her back, and it was true that I did that. (I was disappointed when it was discovered that I had hookworm, and not beriberi. I would have liked to say to my friends when they asked why I wasn’t in school, “Oh, I have beriberi.”) Since my father couldn’t go to work and I couldn’t go to school, we spent all day together. In the mornings, I would go and lie with him in my parents’ bed. We would lie on our backs, our hands clasped behind our necks (me imitating him), and our feet up on the windowsill in the sun. We would lie there without saying a word to each other, the only sound being pttt, pttt from my father as he forced small pieces of tobacco from his mouth. He continued to smoke, though not as much as before. At midmorning, my mother would come in to look at us. As soon as she came into the room, she would always ask us to take our feet off the windowsill, and we would do it right away, but as soon as she left we would put them back. When she came, she would bring with her little things to eat. Sometimes it was barley water and a special porridge, made from seaweed; sometimes it was a beaten egg-yolks-and-milk drink, sweetened with powdered sugar; sometimes it was a custard of some kind. Whatever it was, she would say that it would
help to build us up. Before she left, she would kiss us on our foreheads and say that we were her two invalids, the big one and the little one. In the afternoons, after our lunch, my father and I would go off to look for a wild elderberry bush and pick elderberries. He was sure that a draught prepared from the elderberries would make his heart get better faster than the medicine the doctor had prescribed. In fact, I think he took the medicine the doctor gave him only because he thought my mother might perhaps die herself if he didn’t. After we had picked the elderberries, we would go and sit in the Botanical Gardens under a rubber tree. Then he would tell me stories about his own father. He had not known his father very well at all, since his father was always going off somewhere—usually somewhere in South America—to work, but he never said anything that showed he found his father at fault. Once, he said, his father had taken a boat to Panama to build the Panama Canal. The boat got caught in a storm and sank. His father was in the sea for eleven days, just barely hanging on to a raft. He was rescued by a passing ship, which took him on to Panama, where he built the Panama Canal. For a long time, I thought that my father’s father had built the Panama Canal single-handed except perhaps with the help of one or two people, the way my father himself built things single-handed except with the help of one or two people.
—January 13, 1983