The woman I’m telling this to tells me, “But you did hear a car coming in the driveway.” “I did,” I said, surprised at her, for I could hear across twenty-five or so years the curve, the new tread on the left front of Rob’s old rebuilt 6. “You and those tires, you were a sentry, you were in a war with no one to report to.” The woman looks at her watch.
Maybe it wasn’t words at all sung by the person inside that summertime house, atheist sylph that she was. Singing she made it sound like words. How unusual for her, how alone and arrestingly mammal and limited and scented, time-bombish, and for my father, for that was how I’d link the wild, knowing tone, not any arc of performing, just little touches linked by instinct though with a terrible overall form to them, everything happening at once, inexorable to them, so that just before I heard car tires cut the driveway gravel out of nowhere I wondered if he had known how to spirit himself like a Sit-in, a Be-in, into the house a back way — by the field — past the woodpecker tree, My way I called it. Or he had never left, he was a residue left in her — as she knew how to not make words:
:till, taking a scrap of sandpaper to a still bothersome gouge to see what a finish brought up out of the grain, the old owner’s once coarse, often folded sandpaper, I was aware that she wasn’t singing now. When I had in a flash gotten used to it, like something I might ask for; and thinking what to cut a very small rudder and tiller from unless I went to a sweep oar, I saw maybe not a boat after all, this thing manufactured for many days (off and on) at a time when these lifeboats were being made out of plastic…plastic burning sticks in your throat like liquid metal fumes — and the car turning onto our driveway off the county road part hidden by dull drooping midsummer spruce boughs was of course not my father — and I needed to go in the house and tell “that woman,” as my father called her to me, or tell her music, what I had discovered in the gunwaled hull, in really the bottom, of my boat, until I heard someone or something outside my shed:
:till, hearing only an animal pressure upon the ground outside and, much further away, the house door stick shutting as if it had been left half open for a while having not been previously actively slammed by my mother—or Rob: and now, like a consequence of my thinking, Rob’s practiced, friendly singing voice damped by the house door shutting speaking with such a roundness of understanding more asking than commanding — silly, in even Rob my mentor (who was a nonpracticing minister who didn’t go to church who knew trees, clouds, wind direction, each herbal weed, bored to death with ferns, but “a passion for” local birds — that called our “pileated” woodpecker “sociable” and “frank” and “open, for all his crest”—(knows his shit, my father said) — I must answer what was nearby because I knew this animal pressure upon the ground outside.
Covering it in my mind — the whaleboat — like a kayak — an old World War II seaplane pontoon — but seeing that I hadn’t wasted time on a model boat because whatever was in it still belonged to me though I envisioned (hand-witnessed) some bent-necked lute, great African flutes or nameless anti-War zithers I saw played on the streets of Manhattan and Burlington, I heard my name called. And a dumb impression passed through me. It kept the far sound and the near one apart — about that exact watchful listening animal sound outside my tool shed, husky, firm, it was a girl against the outer wallboards of this tool shed house of mine as close as a hand on my shoulder saying my name, confident it was I inside, a waitingly modest first name but aimed devotedly by her.
“Your father was quite the speaker?” said the women listening to me.
“Public.”
The younger sister, Liz, my down-the-road or across-the-field neighbor, would I let her in? It was like good advice or my character, that closer noise outside my shed — Liz’s hands and bright, broad cheeks, a naïve lift in her walk, her devotion subtle — or some contemptible mistake I was going to make — thinking, What is it I deserve?
Working my boat, I said.
Their house with dark green tarpaper siding was weirdly incomplete, my father thought, for a guy in the construction business, and why the tarpaper? Liz and her sister and their parents lived there, slept, ate, went to the bathroom, undressed, and watched TV there, and left it empty when they went to town. Her father and uncle had added a platform pool in back. All year round Lisa and Naomi lived bodily in that house (which enabled me, for all my family, to rely on those girls, anyway Liz, who was almost my age).
I laid the hull down on the bench carefully and went to unlatch the door just as Liz’s knock came upon it.
The pig tails I was used to at her ears had joined and thickened to one great braid today, strange and of an intelligence and history that included me. I let her in and dropped the latch, the cork grip of her fishing pole swinging a little, why did she bring it in? Her chewing gum a gummy cinnamon closeness when she put her hand on the boat right away, we stood shoulder to shoulder, hand near hand, embarked on almost a project though what less than life? No need to say a thing, I was in my own place, and smelling in her hair bark or scalp or the ground between here and her house, her politeness in relation to the workbench and her taken for granted and, like schedules and habits and shared food, averagely authoritative knowledge of her older sister Naomi’s gait and sway and breasts so that, on my knees for a second before Liz came down beside me on the tool shed floor to see me sand a gunwale and spit on it, I smelled the new denim stiffness of her jeans — like sourdough bread or her body, her instinct I would now say; as if it could tell me what her older, harsh sister looked like dressing — as if that was the thing at stake — the accelerating unknown, or just a weather advisory.
Liz took the whaleboat from me and turned it over and ran her thumb across it. “It’s a whaleboat,” I said. “Who’s gonna catch a whale with this?” she said—“they had harpoons,” she said. She smelled it — unlike a country girl — and put it to her ear and made a face. I looked at her and took it back. “They use them in the Coast Guard,” I said. I could do anything on earth — no problem — or I could be here with Liz or tell her to go. She looked at this pretty amazing little hull as if she was looking at me and took it back into her hands and then gave it back to me, as if I should say something.
What? What did I know? That her dad had been looking for her and took a cello for a violin and the door creaked but I didn’t look around right away at him? I did him an injustice. It was me he came to see and Liz even that he looked for (visit his daughter at her friend’s?) — I saw she must have described my shed, my wood, my chisel work — though not my hands or their touch, my soothing height, my questions or puzzled pal’s love for her, but enough to stimulate her father; for, better than I, she must have known what you say and what you don’t, and today he’d come as an I didn’t know what, who had forgotten whatever it was he had to do and became a man with nothing to do but come over here. Interested in my mother, too. A country man, Liz’s dad could muster as much basic, staringly puzzled interest in another as any city hawk keeping in touch, pursuing a surprise conversation with an alien on the subway.