Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [101]
But I wasn’t just going back for my brother and two sisters. As much as I’d loved all that reading and essay-writing and test-taking, there was the instinct to walk away from it for a while, to do some kind of physical work. I could take a year before I went back to school for that Ph.D., then maybe I’d become someone with the credentials to do good, the kind of person to whom people really listened.
BY LATE fall, Jeb and I were building things together again. Our boss was Trevor D., a lanky British man who wanted to be a millionaire before he turned thirty. He had long dark hair and expected punctuality and efficiency and the consistent execution of our tasks. These were words he used regularly. He also said “excellence” a lot, and once or twice a week he had to unhitch his leather carpenter’s apron and lie down on the ground, his eyes closed tight as one of his migraines passed through his head like a silent storm.
There was the lead carpenter, Doug, and Jeb, the carpenter’s helper, and Randy the laborer, and me, who’d been demoted from carpenter to laborer once Trevor D. saw I knew very little and could do less. I’d lied to get the job, told him I had all kinds of experience when all I’d done was build forts with Jeb when we were kids.
We were renovating a three-story house Trevor D. had bought down by the water. It was in a neighborhood of two-hundred-year-old houses, paint flaking off their clapboards, rot in their sills and doors and window frames. There was a barroom a block away called the Hole in the Wall, a few boarded-up shops, but from the roof of Trevor D.’s house you could see the ocean, a gray sliver of it beyond utility poles and shingled gables. His plan was to gut the entire structure down to its frame then rebuild it as three condominiums, the top one a luxury unit because of the “water-view.” He said he hoped to triple or quadruple his investment.
I saw him as a tawdry capitalist.
The five of us ripped off all the clapboards, pulled out the windows and any sheathing that may have rotted, wide pine boards nailed to studs by men decades and decades before any of us was born. A lot of the sheathing had to go, the roof too, including the rafters because Trevor D. needed a flat roof for the deck we were going to build up there. It took over a week to strip the house down to its naked frame, a week when we all worked together doing the same thing, but now the long steel dumpster we’d filled was gone and stacks of new lumber sat in the lot, lumber Randy and I constantly hauled to Trevor and Doug and Jeb, the men who knew what they were doing and spoke about it in a language I did not know.
I kept thinking Jeb shouldn’t know it either. He’d spent his teenage years in his room, practicing guitar and fucking a grown woman and making art; then he found himself at Bradford College, drunk at a party with a cute girl and now he was a father, and the teacher was finally gone and how did he understand what these men were talking about? What did he know about building walls and floors and stairs to rooms with windows that worked? But somehow he did. And if he wasn’t sure, he’d pretend he knew, then go learn on his own what seemed to be already there inside him, an innate