Return to Oakpin(7)
It was understood this was all done over Mr. Brand’s objection. Mr. Brand did not want Jimmy back, wouldn’t have him in the house. But when his wife stood before him and said that Jimmy would stay in the garage, that none of it would cost her husband a nickel, not one nickel, he relented. She was confused and heartbroken by this turn of events. Her grief in its layers had settled, she’d thought, and now it was blazing anew. She would take her son in. “He’s our son,” she said to her husband. He looked at her, a stony look that invoked all the past and the hard emptiness of the days around them, and he did not answer, not even with the dark rejoinder that he’d used so many years before, the year Jimmy Brand had finally left their house.
Larry, a strong boy and the promise of Oakpine High’s fall football season, and his father drew the boat down the driveway and then pushed it back onto the lawn parallel on one side of the garage. All the boxes and gear on the Brands’ back lawn had quickened the interest in a neighborhood that wasn’t used to any change, and the appearance of this boat emerging from a building drew a little crowd under the high canopy of tree shade. A handful of kids, a couple of young mothers, and the Terry boys, who had been working in their yard, as well as Ed Hannah, who delivered for the Sears catalog store. They stood in a little crescent near the sidewalk and watched the two men struggle with the trailer. The original pale green canvas over the boat was rotted through in several places, and Craig cut it off, revealing the bright red and white craft, pretty as a toy. The life preservers and two wooden paddles were like new. He threw Larry his keys and told him to run down to the hardware for one of the extra large blue tarps, so they could wrap the boat against the weather.
Craig saw Mr. Brand on the porch in the overalls that he had worn forever, working at the railroad, around town, and at home. Underneath was a plaid flannel shirt, and Craig saw him there and thought, Either he’s got an endless supply of those shirts, or that one is thirty-five years old. Craig raised a hand in greeting as he moved around the boat, making sure it was square on the trailer and checking the fittings. The gesture startled Mr. Brand, who moved down the steps for the first time in all of this.
“Okay, everybody,” he said. “You can go on.” He waved them back. “You’ve seen a boat before.”
Carol Terry, who was almost his age, called out, “We’ve never seen that boat before. I didn’t even know you had a boat, Edgar.”
The little crowd dispersed slowly, some of them, while the kids hung around to watch Craig work, the way they’d been watching the changes all month. Mr. Brand came out across to the boat and put his hand on the bow.
“Sure is pretty,” Craig said.
Mr. Brand looked at him.
There are a thousand things, a thousand stories, and their parts that never get said, Craig thought, looking at the old man. It’s just a boat and just a garage, but they’ve choked him all this time. I’m no better. Words don’t weigh an ounce, and I can’t haul them. “We’ll cover her right and tight,” Craig said to the older man, who without a nod or a word went back into his house.
• • •
While Larry stapled insulation in the plank walls of the old garage, Craig refitted the little bathroom that Mr. Brand had installed so long ago. Sweating in the early September days, the two worked without speaking. At quarter to five every day, Larry set his tools in a milk crate, folded his tool belt on top, and drove off to football practice. His forearms were dusted with chalk from the sheetrock. Craig stayed on an hour and prepared for the next day, making a materials list. He stood at the little sink, the porcelain bowl crazed with the web of faint cracks from all the winters. He’d seal it, but he didn’t have stand-alone hot and cold faucets of this type at the hardware store; he’d have to take them apart and fit them with new gaskets. He turned each, and the water bubbled and then ran clear, but they both leaked from under their silver letters: H and C.
These were funny days for Craig, which was his word, funny, because he felt something working in him, something that had been sparked by being back in the old neighborhood, the light through the mammoth cottonwoods and poplars on Berry Street, the smell of the Brands’ garage, the turning year. He’d been ten or twelve years old when the structure was erected in a weekend, and he could still remember hearing the old gas-driven cement mixer churning, and watching the way the men shoveled and troweled the heavy wet concrete into the waiting floor forms. His initials were in some corner under a wall brace. The event had the feeling of picnic; there must have been coolers with beer. Craig remembered the bright wood of the framed walls lying on the ground and then being lifted by groups of neighbors, helping Mr. Brand. The yellow two-by-fours were swung up to vertical and nailed at the corners, and then the building stood where no building had been. When he thought of Jimmy Brand coming home, it seemed just strange, like a visit from a lost world. They’d been friends, close friends, a million years ago. The last time he’d seen Jimmy Brand was at the party at the reservoir two days after graduation.