“What did you say?” Wonder Horse asked again, hoping that Sweetwater would change the subject, take back the complicated thing he had said, and make their lives simple again.
They were building a wheelchair ramp for my father, who was coming home from the hospital without his diabetic, gangrenous feet.
“Jesus was a carpenter,” said Sweetwater for the fifth time. Surely, it had become a kind of spell, possibly a curse.
“I don’t care,” said Wonder Horse, though he cared very much about carpenters and carpentry, about those artists whose medium was wood, and about the art of woodworking itself. Wonder Horse respected wood. He touched it like good lovers touched the skin of their loved ones. He was a Casanova with the hammer, wrench, screwdriver, and circular saw. But now, he felt clumsy and desperate.
“Harrison Ford was a carpenter, too,” said Wonder Horse. It was all that he could think to say.
“Who?” asked Sweetwater.
“Harrison Ford, the guy who played Han Solo, you know? In Star Wars, the movie?”
“Oh,” said Sweetwater. “But Jesus was, you know, a real carpenter.”
Wonder Horse stared into Sweetwater’s eyes (Blue eyes! A half-breed who had never considered himself white, or been considered white by other Spokanes!) and wondered why his best friend had decided to become a casual enemy. Wonder Horse hoped it was an impulsive and individual act and not part of a larger conspiracy.
“So, what are you saying?” asked Wonder Horse. “Are you telling me that Jesus was a good carpenter?”
“You’d think so,” said Sweetwater. “Yeah, I bet he was.”
“But does it say that, anywhere in the Bible, in those exact words, does it say Jesus was a good carpenter?”
“I don’t know. I mean, maybe, yeah, of course. He had to be.”
“Have you ever read the Bible?”
“No, not really, but I know all about it.”
“Now you sound like a Christian.”
“Hey, that’s dirty.”
“Yeah, you’re right, I’m sorry,” said Wonder Horse. He wanted to get back to work. He wanted to jump in his pickup and drive away. He swung his hammer again and again, missed the head of the nail once, twice, three times, and drove it sideways into the plywood floor, splitting the two-by-four that lay beneath.
“Damn,” said Wonder Horse and punched the wood. He studied his bloody knuckles.
“Are you okay?” asked Sweetwater.
“Always,” said Wonder Horse as he tugged at the wayward nail.
They were building a wheelchair ramp for my father, who was coming home from the hospital with no more than six months to live, according to most of his doctors, and as little as two weeks left, according to the others.
“I mean,” said Wonder Horse. “What’s with all this Bible talk?”
“Ain’t Bible talk,” said Sweetwater. “It’s just something I learned. Jesus was a carpenter.”
“Well, hell, anybody can call themselves a carpenter,” said Wonder Horse. “I mean, those Tulee boys built themselves a tree house over yonder. I guess that makes them carpenters, but it sure don’t make them good carpenters. That thing is going to roll out of that tree like a bowling ball.”
“I suppose, but the thing is, Jesus was Jesus, enit? I mean, Jesus must have been a good carpenter. I mean, he was Jesus, enit? That’s pretty powerful right there.”
“You know,” said Wonder Horse. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why is that?”
“Come on,” said Sweetwater, his voice cracking with one emotion or another. “He was Jesus. He could walk on water and, like, conjure up fish and bread and stuff.”
“Is that it? Stuff? Stuff? Is that your whole proof on this thing? All that proves is that Jesus might have been a good magician. He might have been a good fisherman. He might have been a good baker. But it absolutely does not prove that he was a good carpenter. I mean, there Jesus was, running all over the place, trying to save the world. Do you really think he had time to study carpentry? Do you really think he had the time to study his tools, to memorize them, to understand them? Do you really think he had the time to devote himself to wood?”
“He was the Son of God. I think he could multitask.”
“Multitask!” shouted Wonder Horse. “Multitask! Where do you learn that shit?”
“Television.”
“Television? Television? Is that all you have to say to me?”
“I guess,” said Sweetwater.
They were building a wheelchair ramp for my father, who was coming home because he didn’t want to die in the hospital.
Inside the house, I was looking for those things that could kill my father, for those things that had already killed him, or rather had already assigned to him an appointment with death, an appointment he would not and could not miss. Among the most dangerous or near-dangerous: two boxes of donuts buried beneath Pendleton blankets on the top shelf of his closet; a quart of chocolate milk lying flat in the refrigerator’s vegetable drawer; a six-pack of soda pop submerged in the lukewarm water of the toilet tank; hard candy stuffed deeply into the pockets of every coat he owned; and then more hard candy stuffed into the pockets of my late mother’s coats, my siblings’ long-abandoned coats, and the coats I wore when I was a child, still hanging in the closet in the bedroom where I had not slept in ten years. Together, these items represented my father’s first line of defense. He knew they would be found easily. He intended them to be found easily. Decoys. Camouflage. My father was smart. He’d sacrifice a few treasures in order to distract me from the large caches. In the garage, I poured out ten pounds of Hershey’s chocolate kisses one by one from an aluminum gas can. In the attic, I wore gloves and long sleeves when I pulled seven Payday peanut bars from between layers of fiberglass insulation. I flipped through fifty-two westerns, twelve mysteries, and nine true-crime books, and discovered one hundred and twelve fruit wraps pressed tightly between the pages. Inside the doghouse, a Tupperware container filled with Oreo cookies was duct-taped to the ceiling. I gathered all of it, all of those things that my father stupidly loved, and filled seven shopping bags. Most people would have quit searching then, assured they’d emptied the house of its dangers, but I knew my father. I could see him. I could read his mind. I found three pounds of loose sugar waiting beneath three inches of flour in the flour sack. Carefully hidden beneath a layer of frost, popsicles were frozen to the freezer walls. How could my father accomplish such a thing? What were the mechanics? I had no idea, but I found my father’s sweet treasures, proving once again that the result is more important than the process. In his bedroom, I lifted the northwest corner of the carpet and found more candy bars, moldy, apparently forgotten. But then, remembering my father’s clever mind, I pulled the carpet back a few more inches, and discovered new chocolate bars carefully wrapped in aluminum foil. I filled more shopping bags (two, nine, thirteen bags) and carried them outside, past Wonder Horse and Sweetwater pounding the last few nails into place, and tossed the bags in a pile on the road. There, with the sky clear and blue, I doused those bags with kerosene and dropped a burning match on the pile.