Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [2]
I had to agree with him about that particular rafter. It was awfully ratty and might snap under a load of wet snow.
“You’re right,” I said, wanting to keep him engaged in the project.
In this experiment in mental health, building the cabin with Paul was one of the reasons I wanted to build it at all. When you get around to reassembling your life, as I was doing, it’s good to have someone at your side who remembers how the parts once fit together.
“Let’s spread the wood out on the grass and put the bad pieces in a pile,” I said. “We’ll see what we have left.”
Paul was agreeable, which is his natural disposition. His agreeableness is broken only now and again by a surfeit of suburban life. Then he gets gruff, bossy and next to impossible. He had inherited our mother’s need for a little danger to keep life interesting, and when he doesn’t get it, he turns surly. At present, he was living in a five-bedroom garrison with his wife, Laura, and their blended family of eight children, six of whom were at home, one at college, and another, Paul’s oldest son, on a tour of duty in Iraq. Even in the best of times, when he accommodated himself to the routines of mowing the lawn, painting window trim or putting out citronella candles for a backyard barbecue for his and the neighbors’ kids, Paul’s silent argument with the suburbs had a way of showing through. He was the only person in the neighborhood with a disassembled body of a stock car on blocks in the driveway.
Paul’s cantankerous bouts come two or three times a year. They are usually cured by long trips on his Harley. It is a black-and-chrome monster with studded leather saddlebags. When he drops his two hundred twenty pounds down on the leather saddle and turns the key, it sounds like a 727 accelerating for takeoff at Logan Airport. The muffler blows out a bass line that reverberates in the chest cavity of anyone standing nearby. The bike is his antidote to the suburban blues. The miles on the road with the engine roaring below him, the wind in his dense curly hair and the absence of lawn sprinklers bring him back into balance and an even temperament. After a long bike trip, he returns with stoicism and equanimity to work at his real estate company’s downtown office, to face yard chores at home and meetings of the church parish council, where he has become indispensable to the building committee and is the closest and perhaps only confidant of the church’s serious but excitable priest. Having just come home from a bike rally week in Florida, Paul was being unusually patient with me, his older brother, the professor. He wore a black Harley T-shirt with red flames that read “Ride It Like You Stole It.”
“Okay, what the hell,” Paul said. “Let’s pick through it and see what we’ve got.”
We discussed each stick of lumber as if we were putting together a football team from a field of tryouts. Yes to this one, no to that one. Some pieces clearly were rejects. We picked them up together and tossed them into the discard pile. They landed with a slap and rumble. Others were solid. We restacked them in a neat pile with lathing sticks between to keep them ventilated and dry. Many pieces fell somewhere in between: possibly usable depending on what we would ask of them. These required longer conversations. A questionable timber might work as a post where the stress would be downward compression; it wouldn’t work as a horizontal beam, where the rot would result in it snapping, toothpick-style. We took our time under the blue sky. It was a pleasant day for this kind of easy labor. I liked the weight and feel of the wood and the workout it was giving my arms and back, and it was roughing up my hands, which had grown used to paper and keyboards. Paul’s company was a tonic. It was good to be with him again after a long absence. He had a way of anchoring me in our mutual past and keeping me steady in a reliable present.
As we went through the wood, I tried to rationalize each piece. Paul was more likely to say, “What, are you kidding? Forget it.” He paused.