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By Root 437 0

the week before Christmas, I drove to Paul’s house for the night to break up the drive to the cabin. Now, with his house emptying itself of children as they grew up and moved out, he always had a spare bedroom for me. I slept in one of his girls’ rooms, with high school photos and posters of boy movie stars on the walls, and woke early. Andrew was still on leave, and he said he would join me for the day’s work. I knocked on his bedroom door at six a.m., and together we loaded Paul’s truck with tools and a generator for powering a saw. The sun was rising and it was cold—fourteen degrees in Portland. No doubt it was colder in the hills. Paul could not join us, but he was letting me use his truck; I left my car for him. Andrew called Kevin, who lived downtown with his girlfriend and her mother, to see if he wanted to come along for the day’s work. I hit the jackpot: Kevin said yes, and both one of his friends and Paulie wanted to come along too. That would make five of us to frame the floor. It gave me a good shot at getting it done.

I was especially glad to have Kevin along. He had demonstrated his willingness to work during the foundation fiasco. But I also saw in him an uncanny strategic sense. He liked to plan a job. He shared this trait with his father: he had a very well-developed sense of spatial relationships, and he was always looking ahead to the next step and around the corner for a hidden problem. Except that Kevin would look ahead three or four steps. He would say something like this: “You know, Uncle Louie, I think if we put this there first, and then follow it with that, we can avoid having to carry that as far, and we will be able to just lift that over there with a lot less effort.” Huh? I was astonished at these insights, and they proved more and more useful as the cabin took shape.

I also liked to have him with me because his mind was constantly turning things over. He chattered through the day about this and that—interesting programs he had seen on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel, newspaper stories reporting government waste, as well as a stream of personal observations on the world’s ineptitude. The list was long: taxes, war, the prices of various products at the supermarket, certain motor vehicle laws, people who cut in line, pet owners who didn’t walk their dogs often enough, inaccurate weather forecasts, the cost of meals at some restaurants, global warming. He was constantly evaluating the scene around him and trying to fit the pieces together. The process seemed to require that he put all of his incipient thoughts into spoken language. I was his audience as we worked.

Kevin’s life had had a rough beginning. Less than twelve hours after his birth, a nurse noticed he was spitting up dark bile. She alerted the doctor, who quickly diagnosed the cause: his large intestine had ruptured. The doctor took Paul aside: “I can remove the ruptured intestine, but I don’t know if he can survive the operation. Without it, I’m certain he will die. The decision on what to do is yours.” Paul’s response: “There is no choice. Operate.” The doctor removed Kevin’s large intestine and some of his small intestine, and he spent the next six months in the hospital.

It was during this period that I had in a sense betrayed Paul. I had not gone to see Kevin in the hospital then and was only remotely aware at the time of the problems Kevin and Paul were facing. My mother, who had moved to Portland to be near her sons, was the intermediary. I was absorbed in my job and my own life and was seeing Paul only intermittently. Life was going well for me then: my children were young and happy, my marriage seemed to be sound and I was busy and rising fast at the newspaper. I was beginning to accumulate a few extra dollars. Paul was in Portland working construction at the time and coping with a very sick child. I should have been there at his side, but I was not. It was a failure I could not take back. This period of disconnection between us lasted nearly five years, the time during which Paul’s other children were born. One day,