Hector didn’t disagree.
“Good. I want to say now, too, that in my view everything is conditional. My hope is that from this point on I’ll be persuaded otherwise. You’re a very young man, with your entire life ahead of you. I don’t know what happened to you before or during the war, or what you think this life now holds for you. But I would say you have the posture of someone awaiting the inevitable. Or even inviting it. I am sure that there is no worse sin than the one a man can perpetrate on himself.”
For the next few weeks Hector kept fast to his work. It wasn’t to try to impress Tanner or alter any of his views. He didn’t like the last thing the reverend had said about him, but there, too, he couldn’t quite do anything but agree: indeed, he was waiting for the inevitable. He was looking for something to befall him, to strike him down; he was a man clambering to the top of a hill in a lightning storm, waving an iron rod. But for Hector the skies blew always empty, broke open vast and blue. So he threw himself into the labor. He wanted the rack of heavy toil, not as discipline or punishment but as cover, a way to erase himself. He patched the older roofs in the afternoons. Only the small schoolhouse roof was solid and sturdy, having been constructed by an army ordinance battalion a year earlier, at the end of the war, but the rest of the buildings dated from the 1920s and were converted farming structures, rickety swaybacked buildings meant for housing livestock and chickens. He spent the hottest part of the day on the clay tiles, clearing everyone out from beneath the roof he was working on, in case of collapse. In the intense late-August heat the orphanage grounds were deserted, the rest of the populace staying inside for their studies, or else resting or doing chores under the tent or the meager tree shade on the edges of the compound. The sun was relentless, its rays like sheets of fiery glass cascading down to shred him, but he welcomed the burn on his shoulders and back as he stepped about on the creaky structure. He felt nimble and insignificant, an ant at labor, but an ant alone, drifted far off from its brethren.
At meals he took his bowl of rice and soup back to his quarters, drinking his PX whiskey in private as well. He had stopped going into Seoul. He mostly avoided the children. With the excuse of what had happened to Min he disbanded the firewood detail, doing the gathering himself. It was not that he felt chastised or shamed by what Tanner had said so much as alerted to an idea about himself that had begun to haunt him: that he was a bane on otherwise decent people, somehow instantly embodying the exact cast of their most profane weakness. He inspired only homely acts of Eros. Hadn’t it been that way with Patricia Cahill, voracious for his physicality as she was going mad over the lost corpse of her husband? And with his good-hearted but ever-needful father, Jackie, whose sodden drift down the Erie Canal found its source from the same? And so in regard to the children Tanner was of course right: there was no good reason to allow a figure like him within their view. Each one had surely witnessed enough depravity and death to last all their days. And while most of them were now gleeful and antic like any other children, kidding with him more easily than he did with them, he sensed that a few of the quieter ones, like June, the girl who had followed him here from the road, could see through his surface to the potential disaster lodged in every cell of him.
At the army base he was able to find an old stove and collect enough boards and plywood to make four benches for the space between the dorm rooms. He would have to wait to make the four others they would need. It was too narrow for a middle aisle, so the benches would have to stretch almost to the side walls to be able to seat all the children. Unlike the roof work, it was more meticulous than strenuous, but he found himself drawn to it anyway, saving the very end of each day for the job. With a hacksaw he cut out from the plywood sheets that would form the ends, at first plain square supports for the long boards of the benches. But after the first one, he decided to cut a simple curve along the top edge; the squared-off ones, veneered in a light-hued pine, looked too much like the ends of little coffin boxes for his comfort. Because it was plywood it was difficult to plane the edge without badly splintering the sheet, so he used a sanding block instead to null the roughness. He would sit outside his quarters working the edges in the twilight, the smell of the wood a little miracle of freshness, of released former life, and he didn’t care if some of its dust drifted into his tin mug of whiskey. Even though all this was due to Reverend Tanner’s wishes, and he could never care in the least about anyone’s worship or God, Hector didn’t like the idea of the children having to sit outside in the cold during services, which were far lengthier with Tanner than with Reverend Hong. He knew the cold in Korea, at least in the mountains in the far north, how it seeped into you and then resided with an unrelenting grip so that you felt colder than even the frigid air of the foxhole or dugout, like a chunk of ice at the bottom. During a slow retreat the first winter of the war he had seen two girls curled up and nested by the side of the road, their unblemished faces and bare hands and feet the color of ash. No doubt someone had taken their shoes. He’d waved another GI from the Graves Unit over and they had to pry them up from the frozen mud with shovels, bearing them in one piece to a spot behind some sagebrush like museum workers moving a sculpture. But the ground was rock hard, and so instead of a burial they draped them with a blanket, the edges pinned with stones. Of course it was useless-the blanket would soon be taken, the bodies scavenged by birds and animals-but he thought they ought to be covered and allowed, at least for a while, to sleep a dignified measure in private, undisturbed.
After he finished all the end pieces, he cut out notches for the long boards, which he had sanded as well, and then nailed two-by-fours underneath for the cross-bracing to support blocks in the middle. The back-less benches were somewhat crude, for he was no artisan, but he had skill enough from a summer job as a carpenter’s assistant to construct them to sit sturdily and in balance. He had intended to stain them, but he could get only free paint (no primer) from the base quartermaster and the paint came only in gray, flat, mute gray, and after the first swath the lifeless hue stopped his hand.
“It looks all right to me,” he heard behind him. It was Sylvie Tanner. She wore a billowy cotton dress, the points of her shoulders shiny in the sun. Like everyone else, she had seen him outside building the pews but until now was one of the few people at the orphanage who had yet to come up and make some comment about his work. “I think it’s a good color.”
“You must like rain clouds,” he mumbled. “Or battleships.”
“Maybe rain clouds,” she said, taking the wide brush from him. She dipped it into the can and dabbed the excess from both sides on the inside rim and added three strokes to his, painting a section the width of the board. Her motions were lengthy, voluminous, almost flamboyant. “There. You see, it’s not so bad.”
“I doubt your husband will like it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s not a fan of me. I don’t care, but I’m just saying.”
“I know you don’t care,” she said, surprising him. Her eyes, which she visored with her hand, were remarkably large and dark, even in the daylight, her pupils seeming to push out nearly all the sea green around them. He was trying not to look at her, but he kept failing. “Besides, I wouldn’t be so sure. He admires all the work you’ve been doing, this project especially. As do I.”
“You want to paint some more?”
“Would you mind?”
He told her to keep the brush. He went to find another in the storeroom, and when he finally returned with one she was nearly finished with a first coat. They moved on to the others, and soon they were done and ready to go back to the first bench she’d painted. But it wasn’t yet dry enough for its second coat, so she asked if she could see the work he’d done so far in the vestibule. He had already brought in the salvaged stove, now situated in the rear corner, and shifted and reframed the facing doors of the girls’ and boys’ rooms to be closer to the main entrance so that they wouldn’t be impeded by the benches once they were installed. He had taken apart a pair of broom closets to make as much room as possible and the space was starkly bare. The wooden walls, formerly the exterior of the separate structures, had been long weathered to a dark, silvery sheen.