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

worked her way around the rim of the window, exposing what was underneath. Two-by-fours rose along the side of the window, framing it, running from the window base into the header, the heavy beam that extended across the rough opening. Mary’s lean forearms flexed as she pried.
    She knocked on the header with the crowbar and glanced over her shoulder back at me.
    “This keeps the weight of the wall from resting on the actual window frame.”
    I collected the pieces of house that Mary tossed down on the grass. The cavity around the window looked like a wound.
    At the lower left corner she paused and shook her head.
    “Not good.”
    “What’s up?” I said.
    “This is not good.”
    I did not like the way the house looked gouged, and Mary’s voice spoke something ominous.
    “Bugs.”
    Behind the paint and drywall, wood is rotting. Slowly, maybe. Bugs gnaw at the beams that hold up a house, moisture gets in, fungi make feasts, softening the cellulose and lignin of the wood. The skeleton of a room unsettles because we cannot peel back our own skin. Time and moisture stalk. We’re all of us decaying, every moment less of what we were before. We can’t pry open a section of ourselves to look for leaks and rot. Seeing what’s behind a wall proves a stark and immediate reminder of this fact. Doctors opened up my uncle, diagnosed with lung cancer, to remove half of one lung. When they peeled back his flesh and looked inside, they found the cancer had spread in and around both lungs: inoperable . So they sewed him closed again—nothing to be done. Epicurus wrote: “It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.” You can build a coffin. You cannot build a wall against death.
    Carpenter ants had made their meal of part of the window frame. I couldn’t see how bad it was, but I could see the wound in this woman’s house, and Mary stood on the ladder, shaking her head.
    “It’s pulp,” she said. She grabbed a fistful and let it drop to the ground like wet snow.
    I looked at the hole around the window and thought, What have we done? Let’s patch it up, seal it closed, and run away. How will we ever fix this before nightfall? How will we close this up so that at night raccoons don’t climb in and kidnap that grayish boy, or wolves, or spiders? What if it rains?
    Mary shouted measurements and I cut pieces of two-by-fours for her to slot in, to support the wood that was already there and to replace the part of the frame that had been gnawed away. I jogged between the backyard and the driveway where the saws were set up on their stands. Sawdust spewed and dusted down onto the pavement, resting in craters in the cement, and the smell of pine moved with it, bright and clean, the smell of Christmas, renewal. The miter saw screamed through the wood, and I hoped the little boy wasn’t napping. Mary, on the ladder, leaned into the hole she’d made and sprayed a heavy toxin to annihilate the wood chewers. I held my breath and hoped she had, too.
    The words for measurement were fluid, when we weren’t talking exact numbers. Take a blade off this , she’d say, passing me a piece of two-by-four. The kerf of the miter-saw blade—the width of the groove made while cutting—is an eighth of an inch. Half a blade means a sixteenth, but it’s an eyeball job: leave the tape clipped to your pants. Less than half a blade means almost sanding as opposed to slicing, using just a fraction of the teeth to chew off the wood. Skosh is the measurement she used most of all. Just a skosh more , she’d say. I usually took that to mean not quite a full blade, but more than half. When Mary wanted the scantest part removed, she narrowed her eyes and held up her thumb and index finger so that almost no light got through the space between and she’d say, “a millisecond, take a millisecond off this.” I loved it when she talked about distance in terms of time. A