Every power tool I’ve ever owned has quit on me, that’s just how they are. Today it was a finish sander, one of my first tools, thirty years old and a style that’s no longer made. It was acquired several turns removed from the life I lead today, if my life could be thought of as a tree, felled and sawn into rounds and each round shaped as a totem of an era’s concerns and relationships. I knew by the sound the gears were gone, and the cost of replacement gears would far exceed the cost of a new sander, leaving today another in a line of days best forgotten, between the sander and my trip up the valley to Early Morrison’s.
I’d promised Early I’d come in August with the materials for new cabinets, but my summer jobs ran over and the car needed work. So it was September when I finally loaded the cherry and hardware we’d agreed on and got ready to go. I called to say I was leaving but Early didn’t pick up and his answering machine was full. There was a time that would have worried me but not any longer, the friends I have left are like that, scufflers and unsteady citizens, with lives as unreliable as the weather.
***
My name is Eric Wright. Friends call me Handsome—Handsome Wright or Right Handsome, or just Right or Hand. The nickname comes from the days when I accumulated tools like the finish sander and crisscrossed the country in a two toned Oldsmobile. My memories of that time are a haze, more impressions than images I can conjure in my mind, and long evanesced into the daily mystery where I squint in the mirror and strain to recognize the face that’s squinting back.
There’s very little I trust these days, not appearances, or power tools, and certainly not the balky Ford and trailer I coax from job to job. Appearances are shells, no more the essence of something than a planer is a drill, or a Ford is an Oldsmobile. And trust is like faith, it makes it easier to get up and press on but it won’t stand scrutiny.
***
My valley is shaped like a crooked finger, three segments, each curving in the same direction. A two-lane highway snakes the length of it before climbing past Early’s and continuing to the west. On both sides of the road the hills meander, sometimes down to the blacktop and other times backed away and cut by hollows that disappear into the trees.
This morning, even before the sun lit the ridge trees like candles and the gray, beaded fog began to thin, there were cars stacked behind me on the road. Their headlights bobbing into and out of my mirrors stoked a headache and triggered my petulance. I slowed even more than the Ford and trailer required, thinking, if you mess with me you’re mess with yourself. For a time it was fun and distracting and I smiled and leaned further into the wheel.
***
When I first came to this valley, it was more wooded and less peopled, dotted with hardscrabble shacks and trailers like Morris and Eva Bennett’s, the tan trailer up the road from mine, additions sprouting like burls and three sidings—some T111, some shakes and a side of bare particle board. Flanking their mailbox is a tiered sign summarizing the web of products and services that sustains them: Auto Body, Beauty Shop, Welding, Maple Syrup, Chair Caning, Car Repair, Eggs. Morris doesn’t remember what the argument was from the night he shot up two of the signs, but he can repeat exactly what Eva was saying the night she shot up the third.
These days most of the valley’s homes are the soaring, timber and glass getaways of those who make or have made their livings elsewhere. I once aspired to join this group, believing I was clever enough to stand with one foot here and one there—to embrace what I was and still assume the mantle of something else. But now I camp with Morris and Eva and their world, and only brush against the other when I go exploring, picking in the litter of an overgrown cellar hole and wondering who lived there, for how long, when they decamped, and with which illusions intact and which imploded? Then I wonder this as well: will the differences among the current homes still be distinguishable when they’re also abandoned, their skeletons gone and their foundations overgrown?
***
It wasn’t long today before the snake of drivers behind me extended farther than I could see and I relented and pulled off at Cubby’s for gas, coffee, and aspirin. A stake-bodied pickup was in front of me at the pump. The driver was a young woman in a skirt and jacket and bone-colored blouse, and dangly, glinting ear-rings and fashionable boots. I smiled and nodded and she scowled, climbed into her truck and drove away.
I dawdled at Cubby’s, relieved to no longer be leading the unhappy posse, and gave the aspirin and coffee time to work their wonders.
***
I was newly married when I came to this valley. Mary Ellen and I parked the Oldsmobile on a plateau surrounded by spruce, hemlock, and fir-covered hills. We pitched a tent and dug a fire pit. It was a warm, drowsy summer and we dreamed ourselves into the tableau, joined to the deer and beavers, and the round, wobbling porcupines.
Our days and nights felt like heaven and we decided to stay. I found work with a house-building crew which meant an early alarm and leaving Mary Ellen on her own. She filled her time with a private dreaming so intense that it left me uncomfortable, and as part of coping, I learned to rise before the alarm and leave in order to spend less time engaging it. Unfortunately, a habit of uneven sleep continues to plague me, and I come alert multiple times each night and check the clock.
But Mary Ellen and I nurtured a common dreaming as well—of building and planting, of having three children, Micah and Ezra and Danielle, whose childhoods we would inscribe with echoes of the times when mythic things happened in ways no one could agree on afterwards.
That fall we bought a farmhouse and a barn with a flapping metal roof and an ominous, sagging wall. The realtor warned us about flooding and indicated the jumble of boulders by the road, but those borders appeared to us too massive to ever be moved by anything any time.
My building crew changed locations and my daily drive lengthened from minutes to hours. On the hillsides the hardwoods were transformed into a mat of gold, scarlet, russet, and amber. I remember it as spectacular but blurred, as though the miracle of the foliage was rushing past a windscreen of cataracts.
The week before Thanksgiving there was an ice-storm, sleet mixed with rain slung by an angry wind. Most of the day I worked outdoors and on the drive home I was numb and mindless. There was a veneer of snow covering the ice on the roads. The sky had cleared. There was no moon, only the pinprick light of the stars and the trace of my headlights over the monotonous tundra. A mile from home, I lost control of the Olds and slithered it into a ditch. In the morning we retrieved the car, but we never did fix the crumpled rear panel or the jagged scars on the driver’s side door.
December brought record cold and the insufficiently insulated pipes of our farmhouse froze. For the remainder of the winter our water came from carboys that we filled at a roadside spring.
On three consecutive mornings in January the Oldsmobile wouldn’t start and I was placed on notice at work. Mary Ellen said I should quit and look for something in town but I told her no, we’d known dreams could be like that and so dreamers needed to be as well, resilient and strong.
In February the temperature moderated and it began to snow. Snow fell heavily some days, piling up six or seven inches in a few hours. Other days it snowed in sun-showery bursts that sparkled in the air and took all day to make an inch. By the time it stopped, three feet of snow had collected, drifting in the yard and crowning the buildings. The temperature pushed up, hovering a few days near freezing, and then higher. In t-shirts and jeans Mary Ellen and I filled the yard with snow creatures. We made a snow Handsome and a snow Mary Ellen, a snow Micah, a snow Ezra, and a snow Danielle. We sculpted snow horses in a snow corral watched over by a family of snow dogs. We worked until dark and the air began to bite.
Overnight there was an icy rain and in the morning our snow ménage was crusted with ice. That afternoon a section of the barn roof collapsed. It was after dark when I got home but I went out and perched on a ladder, by the light of a headlamp, I raked as much snow as I could reach off the barn roof; it was cold, futile, dangerous work.
That night, for the first time, I questioned our choices. But Mary Ellen wouldn’t hear of it. She focused me instead on the comforts of the moment: we were warm, we were dry, we had food and shelter, we had each other. She had a way of dismissing the past as unavoidable, and avoiding the future, as indeterminate. There’s nothing shadowing the moment, so why worry about things neither of us can guess, she said. And for the moment, she was right. The sun returned, the snow softened and slid off the roofs.
Mary Ellen rescued a loom that had been discarded in the barn. She converted a room of the farmhouse into a workshop and said we should get sheep and she would learn to spin wool and weave. In the spring we added some Rambouillet to populate that dream.
By then I’d quit my job and taken on a house restoration project, and had hired a second carpenter to help. Mary Ellen enrolled in an accounting program and was too busy to spin wool, so she bought yarn for weaving. Her workshop was cluttered with sketches and wooden racks with prototypes of scarves and shawls. We were both very busy and tired, and we were arguing more, especially about money. And though we still had the cloak of our shared dreams to wrap around us, I was feeling something new, a gnawing, subconscious knowing that the parts of our dreaming we’d done didn’t match my expectations, and a fear that in continuing, things would only get worse.
In September my house clients asked if they could accelerate their timeline and move in by New Year’s. I told them it wasn’t possible, but they asked the other carpenter and he told them sure. So I added an hour to my work day and began working half-days on Saturdays. The other carpenter began working 10 hour days, 7 days a week and soon the couple was approaching him with any questions rather than me.
Mary Ellen was absorbed in her weaving and her classes. She was focused and upbeat and I felt like I dulled her enthusiasm. I was brooding—sifting, sorting, my thoughts had a way of turning from work to home to Mary Ellen without improving. I was embarrassed to admit the feeling, but I was lonely. It was something I noticed each time I went to be with Mary Ellen and found her occupied in her studio or studying at her desk.
In December Mary Ellen sold a first weaving. She was ecstatic and we celebrated, each of us turning from what had focused us separately. It was like breathing again after an age of inhaling dust. The feeling was so sweet I ached to feel it, and we marked the date on our calendar and transferred it for celebration to every calendar we ever kept. But it was a long time before there was another sale or anything else we marked for celebration.
My house project had fallen behind schedule and we hired another carpenter to help. There was no pretense any longer I was in charge. I arrived after the day’s work had started and left before it was done, and when the plans changed I was the last to know.
In January something went wrong with the car. Mary Ellen urged me to drive it and see for myself. It feels dangerous, she said, but I told her it didn’t matter, that there wasn’t enough money—to fix the car and pay for her classes and pay for the sheep. And anyway it was probably just the cold and spring would make everything alright again.
I was stuck. My house project had finished and I wasn’t working, and too much had changed from the days when I would just pack the Oldsmobile and drive. Every day, I would mark the help wanteds, circling and starring the page into a patchwork that imprinted on my dreams, but I never did apply for anything. Instead I’d wait by the stove for Mary Ellen to get home and light up the house with her exuberance, hoping she would draw me out and draw me in.
In February two of the Rambouillet went missing. Mary Ellen was at school. Tracks crisscrossed the yard and I walked the fence line looking for a trail leading away. It was sunny but there was no heat. I moved as quickly as the snow would allow but it wasn’t quickly enough to build any warmth. Mid-morning, I gave up and returned to my spot by the stove.
Mary Ellen started to sob when I told her. She insisted we go back out and search again but together we found nothing more than I had alone. After supper she went to the bedroom and closed the door. I stood at the window staring at my reflection, wondering what could lure a sheep out, away from food, from shelter, from the company of other sheep.
***
In the spring, the thaw melted our dirt road into a pudding of spaniel-colored mud. The transmission on the Olds gave out and Mary Ellen was home for a week while it was being repaired. I stirred myself to bid on jobs and several of my bids became contracts. Mary Ellen seemed rejuvenated by the time she spent weaving and our time together was nourishing. Tentatively, we began to unfurl our dreams again, and despite the car, it was a good week. We always thought it was the week she got pregnant with Micah.
***
When I think about our children, I’m filled with regrets. Micah and Ezra are grown and gone and I wish we were closer, and Danielle is dead, killed in a car accident. I blame myself for that, believing things would have been different if Mary Ellen and I had stayed together, that Danielle would have had different friends or not had a car. But by the time it happened, we were no longer one family.
I blame myself for that and I blame Mary Ellen, but the truth is I don’t know. If there is any purpose or meaning or destiny to life, I once believed I was firmly latched to it, but I no longer do. I wish things had turned out differently, but with the coming of our children—at a time when our separate wants and needs were already wedging us apart—everything changed—not so much our immediate lives, but the lives we would come to lead. Because at just that moment—when, if Mary Ellen and I were to have had any chance at sustaining our common dreaming, when our relationship most needed renewal and recommitment—we stopped living at all for ourselves and started living for them.
***
Baby Micah was fussy. He was beautiful and thrilling, but more than a little strange and scary with his blotchy complexion and pitiful wailing. I had no experience with babies. I was awkward and tentative, but Mary Ellen seemed to take to motherhood instinctively. After a few days at home, I went back to work. Mary Ellen didn’t seem to mind and Micah certainly didn’t need me around. Money was tight and I thought it was the right thing to do, but that wasn’t what I heard later, in the stories that came back to me at the end.
Mary Ellen seemed content. She would rest during the day, and at night there was no rest for either of us. Baby Micah began wailing at suppertime and continued off and on all night. I took every other feeding, although Micah was rarely content with my efforts. It was months before he slept through the night, months were I worked days and slept only in fits and drabs at night. Mary Ellen appeared radiant. She said she missed her weaving and her classes, but motherhood seemed to fulfill her. But again, that wasn’t what I heard, in the accusations at the end.
Eventually, our lives did improve. Micah fussed less and Mary Ellen got stronger. She talked about returning to school, we talked about building a greenhouse. It almost felt like we were dreaming again.
In October I started the greenhouse. I poured footings and framed walls and by the second afternoon I’d cut through the side of the house into the studio. Mary Ellen was exuberant. She swaddled Baby Micah and danced him in and out through the opening. We spent the evening talking about the things we might be able to grow year round.
But the quote for the greenhouse glass came in at twice what we’d expected, and we decided to postpone finishing the greenhouse. Then, in the way that bad luck seems to multiply, I hurt my back. There was a stabbing locus of pain and it felt like I was being branded. The doctor prescribed ice and heat and extended rest.
Looking back, it doesn’t seem like it should have been that big of a deal, but it was. A friend had helped seal the greenhouse, but Mary Ellen complained that the studio felt cold and the gashed-up wall depressed her. With my back out I was powerless to do anything to change that. We argued for weeks before I finally gave in and agreed we should move to town for the winter. We signed a lease for a trailer in the mobile park in the flats by the river.
The trailer was cheap and ugly and we were crowded there. But being in town was convenient, especially for Mary Ellen’s school. As my back improved, I took on more of Micah’s care, and by spring I was back at work and Mary Ellen was pregnant with Ezra. As her pregnancy grew, she talked about wanting her loom so she could stay busy. I suggested we give notice on the trailer and return home but Mary Ellen said we should sell the farmhouse and buy a house in town. It was a different type of argument for us. It wasn’t about timing or scope, instead we were at a crossroads and disagreeing about the direction. I asked Mary Ellen to go with me to the country house. I thought seeing her flowers in bloom and the life we’d started together would stir her dreaming again. But she said no, so I went alone.
At the farmhouse, I was surprised how depressing it felt. There was so much left to do compared with what was already done. I spent the afternoon but did little except re-attach the plastic and blankets over the greenhouse and retrieve a few things to take back to town. Mostly I replayed scenes in my mind, running them forwards and backwards as if in review I might capture something I’d overlooked before.
Mary Ellen and I decided to buy the trailer we were renting, and build an addition for the loom and another for a bedroom. We put off deciding whether to rent or sell the farmhouse because we couldn’t agree. Mary Ellen took a job as a bookkeeper for a church. Baby Ezra arrived and we were amazed to find there were also quiet, peaceful, sleepy newborns. Like a gyroscope, life came upright and stabilized. But stability is no substitute for joy.
***
The coffee and aspirin at Cubbies had served me well and I made good time when I set out again. I was just beginning to battle the glare from the afternoon sun when the highway lifted and the hills were there to protect me. I began to think about seeing Early again.
I first met Early at Mary Ellen’s church. He was staying with a daughter while he put in ductwork for a new furnace and I’d been hired to remodel the space after he finished. Early was unreliable even then. He drank and missed days on account of his drinking. His humor was loud and off-color and it kept people away, including the minister and the board members. But his ductwork was perfect, and he finished jobs on budget and on time.
***
The church was the thing that finally pushed Mary Ellen and I apart. It seemed our only friends were her church friends and our calendar was the church calendar. She and the kids started attending service regularly and she wanted me to attend as well. I came to dread Sundays, feeling like a captive in a fog of music I didn’t enjoy, awash in prayers I didn’t believe in. I’d spend the service fidgeting and pulling on my collar to get comfortable, and after worship there would be punch and cookies and conversation, more fettering agony until the gesture and the nod and I was told I could leave.
It seemed all the laughter and joy in our house was coming from Mary Ellen and the kids, and the more I felt excluded, the more I was miserable. Eventually, Mary Ellen said we couldn’t continue the way we were and she thought we’d be happier if we lived apart.
Outside it was the season between winter and spring. The sunny days were warm and radiant with promise but the days without sun were raw and bleak with squalls of snow. Most days were a little of each.
There was no big emotion in Mary Ellen’s voice and no explanation, just a simple declaration. I think we’d be happier if we lived apart. When I objected, she told me she’d decided, and if I wouldn’t move out then she and the kids would.
By then the country house was sold so I rented an apartment. Through March and April I kept up appearances. We went to church as a family and celebrated Easter together. Most nights I joined Mary Ellen and the kids for dinner and sometimes it even seemed Mary Ellen and I were talking in the ways we always had. But when I broached the subject of moving back in, Mary Ellen said no, she wanted a divorce.
The next few weeks were a blur. I’d go to work then come home and eat supper alone and get in my car and drive. I’d start before sundown and drive until after midnight, the whole time looking to recover a feeling, the thrill of driving all night to meet the sunrise, the belief that a new day would be different, and better. And if it wasn’t, there could be more driving and another day, that there was no limit to the driving and possibility.
But eventually I’d wear down. I’d find myself yawning, and lose the thread of the luminescent driving, startle alert to find I was miles from home and exhausted, and the driving was no longer filled with the heady rush of promise, it was just driving. I’d return home and sleep until it was time for work, and soon enough I’d crept back to keeping up appearances, easing myself into routines as if by keeping docile and quiet I could make the subject of divorce go away.
But the spring had different plans. It had been a snowy winter and the streams were filled with snowmelt when it started to rain. By the third day, inches of rain had fallen and it was still raining hard. When I left Mary Ellen and the kids after dinner the stream behind the trailer was an angry, swollen tumult, but it hadn’t yet spilled out of its banks.
That changed overnight. The rain continued and the ground beneath the addition that housed the loom gave way, and the loom and the addition tumbled into the torrent. Danielle described it as sounding like thunder. Her bedroom was in the adjacent addition and she scrambled out and into the main section of the trailer before her room was also ripped away. Mary Ellen hurried the kids into raincoats and boots and they pushed out into the night.
In the end the trailer was spared. It shifted and spun and one end tipped toward the water, but only the additions were lost.
I don’t know why it made such a difference to me that Mary Ellen called her friends from church instead of me. I could understand the emergency, that she was in shock, with three cold, terrified kids and her church friends were nearby and capable. I understood that, but I never really understood. But it ended up being the last of any togetherness I could believe.
Mary Ellen and I split the insurance settlement from the storm. I repaired the trailer and had it towed to where I live today. We finalized our divorce. She and the kids moved away. Micah and Ezra grew up and Danielle died. Her funeral was the last time we were together as a family.
***
The daylight was almost gone by the time I turned in at Early’s. The twilight was warm and inviting. Early had painted his mailbox and planted flowers. There were rounds of cherry and beech lining the driveway ready to split for firewood. The yard looked sober and groomed in a way that seemed entirely unlike Early.
When I got to the house it was apparent why. I was met by a young couple who were remodeling the house. The woman wore a scarf over her hair the way that Mary Ellen did when she was weaving and the man was bent over a power planer. Other power tools lay nearby on a snake of extension cords.
The woman saw me first and attracted the man’s attention. The silence seemed to echo as the whine of the planer stopped. The man removed his earplugs. I introduced myself and explained why I was there. They offered me coffee. They were cordial and apologetic. They’d bought the house from Early in July and didn’t know where he’d gone, maybe to a daughter’s out of state. He hadn’t mentioned me or the cabinets, but they offered to buy the materials from me. The woman began to set out food. They asked how I knew Early and invited me to join them for supper.
I declined but I did tour the house. There were places where I knew that someday they’d wish they’d chosen differently, but I kept the thoughts to myself. They were bubbling over with excitement, interrupting and talking over each other. Before they’d finished showing me one thing, they were sketching with their hands and explaining what came next. Their enthusiasm was radiant and celebratory.
They offered to let me stay the night, but I declined again, thanking them and shedding compliments as I backed away. I did ask if I could take one of the tree rounds by the driveway. They watched as I swung the Ford and trailer around and waved as I drove past. In the mirror I saw them embrace before returning to work.
It was a moonless night and the stars were just beginning to show through a wispy trellis of clouds. A fragrant breeze lapped through the car windows. I felt peaceful and alive. I pulled off the driveway next to the rounds of firewood and unhitched the trailer. They could have the lumber and power tools, my hand tools were all in the backseat. I put a round of beech into the trunk. At the end of the driveway, I toed the brake, waiting for a car that was climbing the hill to pass. I looked right, toward home, back the way I’d spent the whole day driving. Then I signaled left and released the brake to go.
Ric Nudell lives in rural Western Massachusetts. His stories have appeared in Modern Fiction, Lunch Ticket, The San Antonio Review and other journals. His story “The Cartoonist” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Website: ricnudell.com
