Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [47]
The floor of the main part of the cabin, the long rectangle, was fully framed by about four p.m., and a cold winter dusk settled over our work. The sun was behind the trees, and dark blue-black streaks formed in the sky. We had only the floor frame of the ell left to complete. It was a very respectable day’s work, and I was satisfied with our achievement.
“Shall we call it a day, boys?” I asked. “We got a lot done.”
“No,” Kevin immediately said. “Let’s get it all done. I say we finish it.”
I looked to the others, and they shrugged in agreement, carried away by Kevin’s enthusiasm.
I admired our work in the dying light and praised my crew. “Son of a bitch if it doesn’t look like a cabin is going up,” I said.
On the way home, Paulie, Kevin and his friend fell asleep in the backseat of the truck. Andrew rode with me in the front, and we talked of this and that. He missed Maine, he said, and he was eager to get home. He was counting the days until his discharge. Too much bullshit in the military, he said. He had declined an offer of more money to reenlist for a third tour in Iraq. His plans were vague: maybe he would use his emergency medical training as a civilian; maybe he would start a business.
“I think I’d like to build a cabin too someday,” he said. “When I get the money.”
“We can do that,” I said, pleased he was drawn to the project. “We can practice on this one and build yours right.”
Two weeks later, after Christmas, Kevin, Paulie and I returned and put plywood over the girders and joists to make a deck, which would be the cabin’s subfloor. Paul said he was having trouble getting away—commitments at home and the church again. My nephews hauled the plywood up the hillside with a sled and snowmobile, and together we nailed the four-by-eight-foot sheets into place, using countless handfuls of nails, each of which required about four strokes of the heavy framing hammer. The hammer blows resounded in the frozen woods. By the end of December, my shoulder was sore and my right forearm was a knot, but we had a platform, something to walk on. The snow was getting deeper, but my work surface had risen too. The race was tightening. Now we were moving into the deeper and colder part of winter. My lead had diminished to a nose.
The next step would be the one I enjoyed the most: building the timber frame. It would be Kevin and I together, getting it done as a two-man team.
CHAPTER 5
BROTHERS
One day while I was working on the hillside, it occurred to me that the cabin, in a way, would be the embodiment of our mutual biographies, Paul’s and mine, blended into a single 640-square-foot structure sitting on concrete piers. Here we were, two brothers who had managed to remain close despite the passage of years and periods of separation. We had the same parents, had grown up in the same household, eaten the same food and drunk the same water, yet we had different temperaments and sensibilities. Outwardly we had led different lives, but inwardly we had similar values and impulses, which had come out of our strong shared experiences as children and young men: blood loyalty and the resourcefulness that children learn from having to wash out their underwear and socks in the bathroom sink each night before school or lift an alcoholic stepfather out of the bushes and clean him up in the house. All of this, the similarities and the differences, was playing out, and would further play out, as the cabin