No sound of hammers (2018)
That farewell visit to his hospital room was planned by my parents. They designed it together, down to the idea of playing chess. That consideration for me and forethought about the rest of my life was the standard they set for themselves. They didn’t always meet the standard, of course, but I admire the aspiration and have many memories of moments like the one here.
Mandy’s doll is in my father’s hand. She still looks angry and I look unrepentant. Captured by one of my older cousins at a wedding, before our youngest sister was born, you can see their focus on listening and explaining. You can also see how this was a partnership. Every conversation contributed to who we would become, and they trusted each other to have the right conversation separately, which isn’t true of many parents.
Their other partnership was an old farm in a narrow, wooded valley in western Massachusetts. A white farmhouse sat against one steep hill. A red barn stood against the other. A stream divided the field between them, and a wooden bridge crossed the stream. They bought it with their friends Marc and Anne in 1964.
The house had no electricity. Just kerosene lamps. My parents would unlock the door late on Friday night, holding flashlights and striking matches, while we still slept in the car.
“Is the water running?” one of them would ask.
With lamps lit, the other would check. “No.”
Running water came from a spring on the hill across the valley, above the barn. It dribbled out of the rocks and trickled into an ancient brass pipe, buried below the frostline, which carried the water down the hill, across the field, and into the house. Except when it didn’t.
First thing in the morning, my father would hike across the field, past the barn, and up among the hemlock trees to fix the water. When he thought it was fixed, he would shout across the valley. “Shirley! Shirley! Is the water running?”
Inside with three children, my mother wouldn’t hear him.
He would gather all the force of his lungs. “SHIRLEY! IS THE WATER RUNNING?”
“Kids. Quiet!” Then she would bang out of the screen door and stand on the porch, hands to both side of her mouth. “WHAT?”
“IS THE WATER RUNNING?”
“NO!”
“WHAT?”
Stepping off the porch, she would take some steps toward the stream and bellow, “NO!”
A few minutes would go by in silence. Or an hour. “SHIRLEY! IS THE WATER RUNNING NOW?”
Banging screen door. Footsteps on the porch. “NO!”
Sometimes it went on like this for an entire Saturday.
The place was constant work, but they packed the car and locked the door reluctantly late on Sunday. These weekends took them far from their Monday-to-Friday life, their doctor-and-his-wife life, in New Haven. Not everyone shared their mode of rest and relaxation—work hard all day and then sit on the porch in the evening and admire what you had accomplished. Or in my mother’s case, stand on the porch. After a few years, we started making maple syrup. Here was a moment when my mother stopped moving, and they stood together next to a maple tree which we still tap.
For years after he died, while I was in high school and college, a list of projects still hung in the kitchen—on a graying piece of paper ripped out of a spiral notebook and tacked to the side of a cabinet. The list started at maintenance (mow lawn, cut brush along stream). Then it ranged from simple goals (make more than five gallons of maple syrup) to stretch goals (refloor the front porch, build a new bridge) to ideas meant to get a laugh (dam stream to create ten acre lake, exterminate forest monsters). These projects were how my parents mapped their future. What can we do this summer? What can we do next year?
He refloored the front porch in the summer of 1970. I remember waking up to the sound of his hammer. I would go out and sit at the edge of what he had finished, holding the next plank for him. He had learned flooring from his father. They once built a new floor together at a church where my grandfather was pastor.
In the summer of 1971, my parents built a new bridge over the stream. My father redid the footing, building the forms himself, and cut four trees on our property to mill the beams. He and I built the floor together. I remember how much my shoulder hurt from swinging a hammer. He posed on the finished bridge as the leaves started to change.
I was joining my parents more often now. I once had a picture of the three of us from about this time but I have lost it. We were standing together in deep snow, each kicking up one snowshoe and carrying the tools to start tapping trees. I looked so happy to be part of it and they looked so happy to have me with them.
But there were no projects in the summer of 1972. In July, we drove south to a family reunion outside Spartanburg, South Carolina. Looking at photographs now, he was obviously sick. There he stands, rail thin, between his brothers’ pot bellies. I can see the tight belt, the extra folds in the waist of his pants, the shirt flapping from his shoulders. In August, we spent a week or two at the farm. But no sound of hammers in the early morning. No trees falling in the woods. He was coughing. One morning he coughed up blood. My mother was thirty seven. They had been together for more than half their lives.
He came back to the farm only once more before he died. We arrived midday on a Saturday. No Friday night flashlights and matches. He dragged a rocking chair down the porch he had rebuilt, away from the kitchen and the family noise. He sat there with a blanket over his knees, staring across the valley, until the sun went down. He didn’t seem to see us as we walked or ran past. We didn’t speak to him. I imagined him then thinking about all the work he had done. But now I know he was thinking about what he would never do.
