The first of January is our first day back in South Carolina
having visited with family in Indiana. For me it is a day to get back to the work
at the mill. For wife, it is a day to purge and start new. While I head off to
the mill to complete the orders made since we left town for our holiday, wife
reclaims, reorganizes, reconstitutes. There will be new food for the
refrigerator, new gifts for the house and its occupants, new resolutions for
work, home, and family, new color samples for the multifarious painting chores
to which I will be assigned.
When I return from the mill in the evening it will be to new
rules regarding the home. No longer will it be permitted that I stack my catalogs,
reference books, and news articles of note on the dining room table. I will be banished to the small alcove in the
study where I built a bookcase of Indiana ash, where I placed a small bureau of
golden quartersawn oak that sits neatly in this cold dark space, where I will
sit and write.
My days are often days of ritual beginning with coffee—this
is the first coffee I have been able to prepare for myself since returning,
having drunk watered-down coffee at the old people’s houses, and motor oil from
the gas stations along our route.
Though a square pecan cant in the drive remains where it was
placed to discourage any would-be trailer thieves, the mill is not as it was
left. Branches lay in the yard, whipped from the boughs of the red oak trees. Long
channels of washout run down the hillside and into the yard where the water then
pooled, then dissipated, leaving contours of gravel and sand that play in the
mud among the white oak and cherry logs.
Meanwhile, the kiln smells of wet red oak boards—likened by many a
customer to cat piss. The kiln dehumidifier is broken, and as a result, in the
back right corner a deep reservoir has formed. It is black, putrid water,
reminding me that I cut corners on the foundation.
It is cold inside the shop. I start a fire in the stove
first with the curly shavings I pull from my spoke shave, then with the long
thin strips of ash that are made when I run the blank through the bandsaw, and
finally with the various scrap I consistently produce: the offcuts determined
by the length of the hurley, or the long white rectangles bordered on a lone
side by rough bark that are removed to make the shaft, and the long, graceful,
inverse arc cut away to form the bas of the hurley.
I mark and cut the day’s hurleys from the blanks, shave them
down with my planer and spoke shave—and it is at this step, having been absent
from the shop for two weeks, that I am reminded of my skill and my injuries—the
skill to shape this blank with a sharp plane and the pain this repetition
manifest. In the spring when the orders are rampant, my shoulder will bruise
from overuse and I will numb it with painkillers. At the sander, I shape the
wood much in the same way a potter works the clay on a wheel. I wear a mask and
ear protection, and this, coupled with the motor and the friction of the belt
and the hum of the dust collector cancel my sense of sound and smell, leaving
only my touch and my eyes—and in this isolation I find a concentration for my
work that is both intense and lonely. A hurleymaker’s hands and fingers are
most beautiful at this moment, like a fiddler dancing a bow with one hand and
running his fingers up and down the strings with the other.
The work finishes with a stamp, a driving of nails into the
tin band, and then I let the hurleys stand upright to dry.
I return home where wife has prepared a meal and reorganized
home and husband. The meal is fresh greens, a roasted whole chicken with a
sweet plum sauce, steamed green beans, and New Year’s cabbage. The home will be
kept tidier. When home, husband will keep office in the cold alcove of the
study, and when not keeping office he will be kept busy spreading the New
Year’s paint.
No comments:
Post a Comment