Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [46]
“I should have been there for you then, and I wasn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Paul said. “I don’t even remember.”
I think he did remember. He was giving me a pass.
Kevin was Paul’s second child and encountered the problems typical of a middle child—he’d felt that his older and younger brothers got more attention from his father, and that his two sisters got more attention than all of them. To confound the problem, turning it from something not unusual into something more troubling, Kevin had gone to live with his mother after Paul and she had broken up. He was about ten at the time, and the separation from his siblings increased his perception of being left out. He was a sensitive boy, aware of everyone’s feelings—sometimes more than his own—and he felt overlooked. Occasionally he brooded on the unfairness of it. Eventually, he moved back with Paul and his brothers and sisters, and a kind of unity was restored. But he carried an angry flame inside. Sometimes that anger surfaced with too much drinking, and when he drank he inevitably got into trouble. Kevin, who was otherwise bright and often intensely logical, had a way of putting himself exactly in the wrong place at the wrong time—like on one night of July Fourth fireworks when he got into a fight with a group of boys and ended up hitting a Portland policeman who was trying to break it up. It was assault on a police officer, and it landed him in jail. More recently, with counseling and honest self-appraisal, he had worked through his anger and was showing a more grown-up self. He had gotten a job as a mason; he liked the work, excelled at it and, though he’d recently been laid off, intended to return to it. In our long afternoon talks, I suggested he might want to open his own masonry business. His father and I would help him get started, I said.
Andrew, of course, was now a hero in the family. He had served two tours of duty in Iraq as a navy corpsman assigned to a marine combat unit. In his first deployment to Iraq, in 2006, he served with the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines in Diyala Province; in his second deployment, in 2007, he served with the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines in Anbar Province. His job on both tours was emergency medicine in combat. Andrew had always set himself apart as an individual and a bit of a loner—he was an outstanding long-distance runner, and (I’m willing to bet) one of the best deer hunters in the state of Maine. You could hardly put him in the woods when he was growing up without him finding and shooting a deer. He moved through the woods as quietly as smoke. After high school, he enrolled in a vocational school to study boat building and engine repair, and went to work at a marina in South Portland. He grew bored with the work and joined the navy to shake up his life, which he did with distinction. He had been recognized with leadership awards through his period of training and had made it a point of personal pride to attain an elite level of physical fitness. He defeated his marine brothers in push-up contests. In Iraq, he had experienced combat and had been thrown from a Humvee by a roadside explosive device.
At the hillside, I put Paul’s truck into four-wheel drive and took it partway up the driveway, which was covered with snow. Below the snow there was ice. The five of us shuffled through the powder from the truck to the cabin and hauled the generator with us. The sky was mostly blue with a few drifting gray clouds. It was cold and dry, a good day to work.
The battle plan was to first build four girders that would span the length of the cabin and rest on the concrete piers. The boys stood ready and awaited my directions. I explained the tasks, the materials and the sequence of construction. Of course Kevin had suggestions on how to arrange the materials to lay