The rain grew to a downpour. No wind just marble sized drops whacking the tent roof, seeking entry. For an hour it kept raining harder and harder 'til the air would have been solid white had it been daylight. Fell asleep thinking of what the morning'd bring. Emil wasn't one to forego work unless he was forced. My luck the rain would slow to a drizzle and we'd be framing the lower roof in rain gear. Couldn't for the life of me conceive of anyone being crazy enough to sheathe the upper roof under these conditions. But with my uncle I wasn't sure. My ears awoke in the middle of the night and said the rain was over. Good.
Morning arrived dressed in deep blue with a tent snapping wind out of the northwest. Popcorn clouds scudded by on their way to Florida. Emil figured they'd be over Okeechobee by lunchtime. Once my body crawled out of the bag it knew immediately a jacket would be in order for breakfast.
"Kite flying weather for sure. Archie me lad, this'll prove a fine day to work. That rain last night told me in no uncertain terms to get this roof on as fast as possible. Rain makes plywood sad, just tears it apart. We'll start by sweeping some of the pools off the floor then let the wind finish the drying."
I grown to love the feeling construction gave me. Physical, creative and exacting. That a project might take a long time made it all the better. There's a feeling of comfort in knowing what the morning will bring. And since we were jack-of-all-trading it, what the morning brought was a little different each day. Emil treated me as an equal in his project and the subject of who's boss never came up. When it came to work we gave it some thought then plowed ahead. Usually Emil knew a better way to do something but not always. When a difficulty was in the offing we'd talk it over. Should I have a better approach, that's what we'd do.
We'd put our talk under the Sentinels behind us. Nothing more to say on the subject. And what was said did me a world of good. I'd gotten angry and gotten over it. No reason to be mad at Emil since I was the one who'd screwed up. My next step was action but I didn't see that happening for a while. I'd grown comfortable with my guilt. Knew it'd come back on me in the quiet moments and knew it'd go away after it'd slapped me around for a while. Guilt's an ugly little beast that likes to be heard. Kind of an anti-ego problem I suppose. Me and feeling bad had us a relationship. Call it a bad marriage. Still I'd just as soon it wasn't there and there was only one way to do that. But, like I said, not now.
Sheathing the lookout roof's last three sides took nearly two days. It was a bear. A hip roof called for a lot of sawing. We'd move a sheet from the floor to the roof, mark it, return to the floor to trim it, haul it back up and nail 'er down. Up and down, up and down, over and over. When a side was complete, it was time to move the scaffolding. Mid-afternoon on Friday we rolled out and tacked down the roofing felt.
"Doesn't look like I thought it would," Emil commented, "but it does look like it does. Those things happen. Guess the picture in my head was too elegant. Oh well, what can you expect from someone as elegant as I? When we nail down the shingles, the roof'll be done. 'Done' is good. If it rains we'll have a dry spot to tuck under. Tomorrow we'll head to town for laundry and food. Order the shingles. We'll be needing them within a week."
At the mill it came as no surprise to Mr. Berglund that Emil would want cedar shingles. Could be he'd mentioned them earlier. Could be he just looked like a cedar kind of guy. Seeing as how wood shingles were pricey, Roy Berglund had no intention of jumping the gun and being stuck with an order he couldn't move. Once Emil said cedar, Roy simply asked, "sawn or hand-split, what grade, how much, how long and when?"
Emil responded, "sawn, B if they look good otherwise As, twenty-two squares, eighteen inch and as soon as you can get 'em. And Roy, better throw in enough two inch, galvanized siding nails to do the job."
"Twenty-two squares of cedar's no problem. Probably have to truck some up from Two Harbors and there's no way I'd do that for a small load without having you pay for gas and wages. Don't like to do that but money talks. How does the end of the week sound?"
Emil wrote a check and we were out the door. My uncle believed in cash on the barrel, even when the cash was a check and he seemed to have had a lot of it. Didn't bat an eye at plunking down enough bucks to have bought a decent used car. For shingles. Little pieces of wood he happened to think were handsome. Thousands of shingles we were going to have to nail down, one at a time, on our knees, twenty feet in the air.
" Just you and me on the roof, for hours and hours, days and days. Yup, sounds like a good time to me Uncle Emil."
"Archie me lad, you don't know the half of it. By the time we're done your knees will hurt and your butt'll hurt worse. Have to sleep on your back and stand for dinner. But the roof'll sure look pretty and smell good when we're done."
Besides food and laundry we picked up a few new books at the library. Wasn't so much Emil was cheap but said he'd be a fool not to use a resource he was already paying for, "Besides, most of what's on the paperback rack is pure crap. Words on a page. Pretty much a waste of ink and trees. In a library there's a fair amount of decent literature going back all the way to Cervantes. Hell, they even have the Bible and the Koran."
"Archie me lad, ever read Huck Finn? It's not a kid's book as most people think. Let me grab you a copy. Would've suggested The Catcher in the Rye but it appears they don't stock it. Probably the language. Seems some of the words are a tad too demanding for delicate ears."
After finishing the laundry and lunch at the Dairy Queen - my choice - we headed back to the woods. There we began to frame the lower roof. It'd come to be our work was fun and our fun was work. It's what we did. Not quite the same as fishing but close. The sun burned our necks and arms the same as fishing. The air smelled the same. Same sounds filtered through the brush and trees. Ate and slept outdoors. No one to answer to but ourselves. Yeah, we'd grown to love what we were doing. At the end of each day we'd stop and look at the space that'd not long before been a patch of forest and think to ourselves, "Damnation, look what we've done." Some evenings it was all we could do to not head back to work but Emil was as much a task master as to rest as he was concerning work. Evenings were for talk, reading or fishing.
The rafters were a piece of cake once we got the angles right. We began by cutting the cripples we'd nail at the base of each stud to support the short rafters. I marked the two by four stock, Emil sawed off the cripples and I nailed them to the Lookout studs. We had us a regular two man production line. Every so often we'd stop and stretch. Watch the world go by then switch jobs. By dinner they were up and ready to support the two by six rafters.
Working above was a pleasure. It was nice to be on top of things when we were the reason for the thing we stood and knelt upon. Wasn't like we were in the treetops but the elevation us a feeling of freedom. Could be the sensation came from not being in touch with the ground. Definitely added an extra dimension to our world. On the ground there's no such direction as down. Your feet are already as down as they can be. Sounds are similar. Up top your ears catch tones at an new angle and they don't seem as muffled. Air even smells better. Makes a man want to be a bird.
Our vinegar was up in the evening. We were done with dinner by six-thirty and had nearly three hours of light left. Nothing to do about it except hike downstream to see what we would see. I packed a rod just in case the urge came upon us.
The Aspen has two separate personalities. We'd seen enough of it to have an idea but two miles told us more. There were quarter mile stretches of fast water with their share of plunge pools, riffles and boulder fields. Once we'd passed onto new water it was the pools that'd hold us for a few casts. Might have been any number of trout there but the first hookup would usually spook the pool. Since we weren't there for the fishing anyhow, after one we'd move on.
On the lazy bends the brook'd slow and the shores bog up. Emil'd pull out the map and compass, shoot us a course and we'd bushwhack to what looked like good holding water. Once we'd covered a mile the only paths we found had been made by deer. The land of innocent fish. Dumb and unsuspecting. Seemed their idea of a good time was meeting up with spinning steel and hook. We'd alternate pools, then move on.
Finally we came on a pair of beavers doing their best to stave the flow of the stream one branch at a time. Hard to tell if they were having much luck but didn't seem to be bothered. Just kept floating new timbers down to where the Aspen narrowed. We sat and watched for a few minutes in silence 'til Emil couldn't take it anymore,
"Those beavers'll change the nature of this valley, turn it into a pond. Probably won't last forever but for a couple of years it'll make for some good fishing. 'Spose you could say the same for the cabin. That it won't last forever. But I'll pass on that notion as it's way too simple an analogy. Scary simple like a romance novel. Not that I don't care for romance, just not in novel form. Though some forms of romance are more novel than others."
"Yeah, things come and go. The hills surrounding us are many millions of years old. They're some of the oldest exposed rocks on the planet and even they're well on their way out the door. Most of the animals and plants that ever existed are long gone. The dinosaurs? Phht! Gone in a relative flash. But it's the dinosaurs that got me thinking of someone I once saw back in nineteen and sixteen down in the cities."
"This was back in the days long before the Twins. Long before Metropolitan Stadium. Back when the American Association was almost a major league. Yeah, that year the Minneapolis Millers had a ball club that could've held its own with any of the big leaguers. It was late september when a couple of my uncles, Edwin and Wilhelm and ten year old me hopped the train down to Nicollet Park to see the final game of the Little World Series between the Millers and the Buffalo Bisons. Now you won't find any reference to these games anywhere as they weren't official in any way or form but the series did happen. I know, I was there."
"Back then the Millers had a manager, went by the name of 'Pongo Joe' Cantillon. Feisty little bugger who was known to do whatever came to mind with his lineup and didn't much care what anybody or the press thought about it. On the day in question, that being the deciding ninth game - yeah they played best of nine in those days - Pongo Joe added Casimir Broncewski to the lineup. Casimir'd come up in the spring as the latest in a long line of phenoms who were to take the baseball world by storm but he turned out to be more or less a cold drizzle with only the occasional bolt of lightning. According to the Independent most everyone called him Bronto, as in short for brontosaurus. Like his namesake Casimir was a big boy but that wasn't the reason for the moniker. Wide spread rumor had it that on off days Broncewski, just like his namesake from another era, could be found down in south Minneapolis wadin' the Minnehaha Creek uprootin' and chowing down on arrowroot."
"As for power, he had it in spades. When he'd catch hold of a pitch, which wasn't all that often, fair or foul the pellet would come down on rooftops across Lake Street from the ball park. And this was in the days of the dead ball when homers weren't all that common. Problem was Bronto had a problem with a few pitches. Couldn't hit a curve ball for the life of him. Change ups baffled him. But a fast ball? Yeah, if there was a falling barometer between 29.73 and 29.51 then it was bye-bye baseball. Five hundred or more feet."
"Odd thing was Bronto could pummel the heck out of anything illegal. Grease ball, spitball or snotter, didn't matter. Pongo said it was due to those pitches not bein' on the level, much the same as Bronto's swing. 'Bout the time the pitch was falling off the table, Bronto's upper-cut swing was roarin' off the deck. Whammo! Hello Lake Street."
"The night before the big game Pongo'd had himself a visitation of sorts. Whether it was in a dream or some other form of unconsciousness he wouldn't, or couldn't, say. Didn't matter. Whatever it was told him that startin' Bronto would be the key to victory and Pongo's ticket to the majors."
"As it turned out our hero fanned four times that day on thirteen pitches. Came down to the twelfth inning of a one to one ball game. The Millers had the bases loaded, two outs and Bronto comin' to bat. Pongo wasn't having anything to do with what he knew for sure would happen. Pulled Bruno and grabbed a nun at random from the crowd to pinch hit. Pongo later said she'd caught his eye on that sunny afternoon as the nun was the only fan in a pool of shadow on that brilliantly sunny day. And as luck would have it she'd been sitting right next to me. Never saw anyone finger the beads as fast as that woman. Like the trooper all nuns are Sister Mary Margaret, that's what the Independent said her name was, took a high, inside, hard one on the bean for the team and the winning run scored. Crowd went nuts, hoisted the nun's unresponsive body on its shoulders and paraded around the field for half an hour."
"Years later the Millers tried to get Mary Margaret canonized a saint. Mother Church said no way as there had to be at least three confirmed miracles in her life. The Millers rebutted and said for sure there were at least three: 1) Pongo's vision, 2) the shadow sign from above and 3) the fact a hundred mile an hour fastball didn't kill her, only changed her allegiance to the St. Paul Saints across the river. No comment from Rome. Didn't matter, to Millers' fans the lady was a saint. Had a life-sized bronze statue of her erected in front of the main gate. When Nicollet Park was leveled a decade ago the statute disappeared. Rumor has it the archbishop of the diocese had snuck it out of town and these days it's stored in the basement of the Vatican. Whether true or not they ain't sayin'."
"Bronto slowly sank from sight, back down through the minors. Last anyone heard of him he was down in South America playin' for the La Paz Tinhorns. Rock bottom at thirteen thousand feet."
Through it all I sat there numb. Pummeled into silence by the hammering of Emil's reminisce. The beavers below seemed to not care a whit. Just continued moving limb and patting mud.
No comments:
Post a Comment