Free Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter by Nina MacLaughlin

hundreds and hundreds of times.”
    “If the blows be violent at first, the nail will be bent or sent astray, as this time it derives very little support from the wood into which it is being hammered.” So begins instructions on how to drive a nail from a woodworking handbook written in 1866. Practice, patience, power, and even then, no guarantee of success. “Sometimes the greatest care will fail to ensure the straight driving of a nail.”
    I watched as Mary hammered. She held the hammer lower than I did; I lowered my grip. Her wind-up came from the shoulder instead of the elbow, where I had been pounding from; I altered my swing. Her hits started gentler and built force; I switched from full power straightaway and built strength with each swing.
    I counted Mary’s strokes. I counted mine. Bang, bang, bang . Her nail was in and she was on to the next. Double those bangs, add stutters— ba-bang , add coaxing language ( come on now, no bending, glide right in there, pal ), and such was the sound of my own hammering.
    Mary is a small woman. I have two inches and probably twenty pounds on her. Maybe twenty-five. Her wrists are slender, her shoulders narrow. When she started smoking again, and got a big dog named Red that she walked every morning, her pants started to slip off her waist. She used an extension cord as a belt one day. Petite would be a word for her if she didn’t carry herself with the force and presence of someone much larger, if she weren’t able to hoist eighty-pound bags of cement onto her shoulder as though she were lifting a sack of pine needles. Though she does have the girliest sneeze of anyone I’ve ever met—a squeaking atchoo that makes me smile every time it happens.
    When we finished framing the wall in the café early that afternoon, it looked like a wooden cage you could walk through. Once the studs were in place, hammered and nailed, we screwed sheets of drywall to them. We covered the screw holes and the seams between the drywall sheets with mesh tape and Mary mudded over it with drywall compound that actually did look like toothpaste, pale and thick. Finish trim work included: baseboard and base cap (the decorative ridge or curved piece that sits atop the baseboard and looks like it’s part of the same piece of wood), and crown molding, uniting wall with ceiling. A couple coats of paint after that, and then, something solid and lasting: a new room.
    I couldn’t believe it. When we broke for lunch on the second day, eating food from the café, I gushed. First there was no wall, and now there is, I said, like some stoned teenager, baffled and amazed by the truth of something basic. It seems like magic, but it’s so simple. This is what all these rooms are made up of? I can’t believe it!
    “You could build a house,” I said to Mary.
    “I’ve never framed an exterior wall.”
    “Is it that different?”
    “Not really.”
    “Do you ever think about it?”
    Mary twisted a forkful of pasta. “I think about going to Alaska.” She talked of taking her dog and living in the wilderness. “I could do without all the people.”
    A fter work that afternoon, I walked down my old street in the neighborhood, indulging the urge to see how it felt to walk past my old place without a key in my pocket that would open the front door. It hadn’t changed, and fond memories flowed on a strong current. I felt full of myself, too. Walking past a former neighbor’s house, I thought of the guy who lived there, a corn-fed blondie who rollerbladed everywhere in too-tight khaki pants. My roommate and I would run into him in the neighborhood and he’d say things like, “I’m always seeing you guys coming in or out of bars,” in which he could not disguise his judgment. He doesn’t know how to build a wall , I thought, passing by his apartment, with a self-satisfied pat on my back and toot of my horn despite bending half a dozen nails beyond recognition that day.
    A few houses down, another old