I’d had other kits that required no cutting to speak of. Old friend bass wood, for a Union Pacific locomotive, a Patton tank with treads that moved. But not to be compared to what I found on the floor of the toolshed, our toolshed now (for we had bought this place cheap after renting it the previous summer. Now what was that like?). I was almost twelve. In that instant, balsa seemed soft as styrofoam, the crust of a loaf, as flesh, I didn’t know what, an avocado, but I would try my hand upon this ill-advised hardwood maple — my knife and the dented chisel that I had come upon by chance striking it with my rake in a pile of rotten leaves. It said — this chisel, but more this curious dent or uncannily retooled minute trough in it, no more than a wicked little groove in the middle of the blade — Get started, get going.
You see my mood, humming all the time in fact.
Instead of breathing.
Remembering little things the way you can’t not remember some larger ones — now that’s confusing, the way I put it. Animal smell of the sun on the earth at the exposed root of an outstanding sweet white oak that now belonged to us; or on the other hand my mother and father’s parallel love of life, I suppose.
The woman I’m telling this to more clearly than it could have been told or thought twenty-five years before narrows her eyes, she has a look of attention and polite impatience, she wants to hear what’s coming, understanding that this isn’t a story maybe. How could there be passion in her interest, impertinence?
Kneeling among shingles, splintered shims, and hard rice grains and kernels of horse corn and preferring the bottom of a yellow milk crate to rest the block of maple on, I took the handsaw to its corners, and soon had a crude oval, kerosene-smelling because of the saw.
But not an oval. God! a many-sided mess on my hands to take me until I had to go back to school — the rest of the damn summer to finish the boat, the wood implacable — or until my sister got home from camp.
But not a mess, when I blinked and saw my crude cuts now as one sweep of gunwale either side and found my pencil in the clanking can of nails. This thing I made would be a model of an old double-ender whaleboat, not quite the flared, sea-steep prow and stern of a Portuguese fisherman’s “half-moon” but steadier and stronger. But maple?
Next morning I began to shape the gunwales and hollow out the hull on the ground outside. Holding my breath, and with awful slips and stops, holding the mad tool down one-handed with the whole half of me bearing down on the damnably minerally resistant block.
My gouge-marks looked like fingertips working another matter trying to get somewhere and there was a war on and I’m right here ensconced in a summertime state with no coastline. Jazz in my throat, my unconscious humming a frequency set to a secret future that was my own, and hoping to take up the saxophone. But ruining my fingers on the wood. Cutting myself on the blade. Muttering “Deeyum!” bringing to life this piece of a petrified forest which maybe remembered in my gougings the leafy tree it came from. By this time they were casting hulls out of cement, so here was hope for me, hollowing out my hull, holding (my great-uncle said) the line (for the Coast Guard had turned to steel and fiberglass).
Wood calms.
My sister at camp, perhaps I’m not like the people at this summer place — my parents — their mysterious routines: I was like the place itself I now think—that was what I was like — this close little toolshed and nine-and-a-half acres around the house to do with what we wanted.
And I was getting somewhere, because for some reason I didn’t have much time.
It was quiet there, said the woman I was telling this to; but that’s going to end. I touched her hand. It had no effect on her.
I worked the oval length of the thing deeper. I created a barrelly roominess. Gunwales flaring emerged from the inside out — and I had even carved (I can’t believe it today years later) a miniature cradle of passable gunwale ribs. Till one day (floorplanks maybe to come) I had nowhere to go almost yet kept faithfully sanding and finely shaving. Wanting to show the boat to Liz, the neighbor’s younger daughter whom I loved; and happy as a “free man” not to be interrupted by her, prizing the dark, plum vein straight through the block unplanable and of a natural weight. Quiet around here? Not always, as even the neighbors know. My father’s a famous talker, a public speaker, and he and my mother have a way of speaking to each other that’s very audible.
The toolshed, though, is conceded to me. At almost twelve I’m not your skilled woodworker. But I am taken for thirteen. Secret and determined — for I go into what I don’t know. I know enough to try, and am cruelly inspired some days, tall for my age, proud of the papery-tiered gray-plastered-cone hornet nest just outside the door up under the overhang of my shed roof, a generation of long brown wasps, a power I lived with and thought I could arouse from this nest to do some bidding I was not fiendish enough to yet know. I’m somebody. That was it.
Till one day, to music, the unwavering, final sound of a cello, taking you would swear something from my humming (or coming in on it) the rough-cut, gouged and gunwaled and resanded hull of my whaleboat with a tiny, carved, not-glued-on keel and stem and stern post, when I held it by the gunwales rose almost from my fingers it was now comparatively so light — though hardwood maple as I had learned from my mother appropriately, whose cello far away inside the house it was. It was a particular day, expectant, unwise; I knew this piece of wood, and we were expecting an important friend of my father’s in the late afternoon and my father had left for an appointment in town but was coming back, an embarrassment of riches as I saw it and saw it then, and I was not a person with ever nothing to do, though my father had an opinion on that score who himself thought being holed up in a tool shed or finding a weasel’s, probably a marten’s, little S-curved scat on the far side of the river was OK for a kid or some other types but not greatly thrilling. Or a question like my humming, sometimes loud, stood next to me if I could identify its appointment with me, this question. Which was, What did I know was going on, if anything?
My mother, doubtless alone but don’t assume anything around here, was not doing something silent but was practicing somewhere inside our land-embedded, landscape-lost cottage today, private in that wooded, stony-spined, hilly province of Vermont. Audible strangely in memory too, the faraway, heart-breaking throat-gripping authority of that instrument’s tone said, Listen, listen, bring the boat inside and test it in the bathtub. I saw it manned and rocking, I saw it passengered, did I hear music coming from it? — I was strung myself enough to concentrate so hard I might not hear tires on the driveway.