Woodwork

Jerry Dennis

IT WAS SORT OF BEAUTIFUL

My father wasn’t patient enough to work with wood, so I had to learn from other men. Lars, for instance, an old Norwegian who told the crew at lunch one day he fought on skis against the Occupiers in World War Two and had to stay on his toes because enemy mortars kept setting off avalanches. He was a master finish carpenter with a chest full of meticulously honed tools from the Old Country that nobody else was allowed to touch. And there was Jack, our foreman, the most patient teacher I’ve ever known, who told us matter-of-factly during that same lunch break how during the Battle of the Bulge he crossed a river one night in an inflatable raft paddled by twenty GI’s while star-burst flares and tracers went off around them. It was sort of beautiful he said until his friends started dying. That afternoon I was careful to hide the wound on my hand where the chisel had slipped.

CHICKEN KILLERS

The new guy on the crew always gets stuck with the shit jobs, which is why I was crouched in the hot, cramped, dusty attic of a house near Lake Ann, Michigan, spraying loose insulation between the joists. We had removed a vent in the gable end to snake the blower hose through, and the moment my buddy on the ground below shut off the blower to reload the hopper, I peeled off my respirator and stuck my head outside and breathed in fresh air while imagining myself rich and free. Then I saw the man who owned the house running across the fenced-in yard next door with his neighbor, chasing a chicken. They were drunk. No way were they going to catch that chicken. It was too quick for them. Hell, it was too smart for them. But somehow they trapped it in a corner of the fence, and the homeowner got his arms around it and held it awkwardly against his chest while it flapped its wings in panic. He carried it to a block of wood, held it down, and his friend produced a hatchet and with surprising efficiency chopped the chicken’s head off. The homeowner released the body, and it ran in circles spraying gore with the men running in circles after it, hooting like morons. On a rafter in the attic, I wrote a poem with my carpenter’s pencil:

           A chicken killer lived here
           June 1982.
           A puff of white feathers
           in the wind.

It made me feel good to think that someday somebody would discover a poet had been in the attic. At quitting time, the homeowner showed up with a twelve-pack of beer, and we had a fine time standing in the driveway, telling stories and laughing.

JOHN HEARTS STEELHEAD

One surprise for me when I was a carpenter was discovering how passionate John Willy was about fishing for steelhead. He and I were among the younger guys on the crew, still in our twenties, but he was more obsessed with details and more critical of shabby work than even the old-school carpenters. It was unusual to see such a young guy so bitter with life and so critical of just about everything. It appeared that nothing made him happy. He would glance at a finished job, his own or anyone else’s—a stairway or a kitchen cabinet or a bearing wall—and spit the chewed-up butt of his cigarette to the ground and mutter, “That’s crap.” Then he would say it again, louder, and stomp away.

He carried the same attitude to fishing, which he pursued in solitude and with a single-mindedness so focused that, despite living in northern Michigan, a region with as much diversity of freshwater fish as any place in North America, he fished only in rivers, only with bait, and only for steelhead. Steelhead, for those who don’t know, are a race of rainbow trout native to the Pacific Northwest. They were introduced into the Great Lakes in the nineteenth century and have thrived there ever since, spending most of their lives feeding in the big lakes but running up tributaries in the fall and in larger numbers in the spring, when they spawn in gravel beds in the rivers. John fished for them with ten-foot rods he built himself from graphite blanks he ordered through the mail and with clockwork spinning reels with flawless drag systems. For bait he used Hexagenia nymphs he bought from Benny’s Bait Shop or salmon eggs he collected from ripe female coho he caught from the river in the fall. He preserved the eggs using a formula of his own devising that will undoubtedly go with him to the grave. He didn’t eat fish himself, but every steelhead he caught he killed, tossing it into the back of his truck and delivering it later to relatives or friends. On the job he rarely talked about his fishing, but when he did, he made you believe he hated steelhead. He seemed to want to exterminate them. Most of us hook fish; he “smacked” them. He didn’t give them away to his friends, he “dumped” them.

But one day I stood across from him on the Boardman River where it flows through downtown Traverse City and I saw otherwise. He didn’t know I was there. Had no idea I was watching as he hooked a steelhead so fresh from Lake Michigan that when it leaped from the water it appeared to have been hewn from a block of stainless steel.

Fresh-run steelhead are magnificent. They are sleek and powerful and gorgeous—ten or fifteen pounds of lake-buffed muscle colored silver so bright it is almost blue and with a blush of rose on the gill plates. When you hook them, they rip across the river and leap in great, side-smacking explosions. They attract elitist anglers because they’re rare enough to require dedication and because it takes skill to catch them consistently. That day on the downtown stretch of the Boardman, I saw what I already suspected: that John had greater skill than anyone on the river. Every cast was considered and precise; he wasted no motion. He knew the water he was fishing, the current, the bottom, and he knew the exact drift required to carry his bait to the slot where the fish were holding.

The Boardman is not very wide, so I could see his face as he fought the fish. He stood casually on the wall, his cigarette between his teeth, holding his rod with one hand while the fish set off on three or four sizzling runs across the river and back. John seemed almost disdainful, as if the fish was interrupting more important business.

But from where I stood, I saw otherwise. His eyes were bright. You had to know him to recognize it, but a sort of aura of pleasure hung over him. I had worked with him every day for five years and had never seen him express any sign of approval. But here it was and it was unmistakable. John loved these fish. They were the best thing in his life. He fished for steelhead because the world was filled with shoddiness and was certain to be disappointing, but here he had found a creature, and a moment, that lived up to his expectations. This was one thing, at least, that didn’t disappoint him.

Jerry Dennis‘s many books, including The Living Great Lake, Up North in Michigan, and most recently, Mornings at Jackpine: Poems, have been widely translated and have won numerous awards. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, PANK, New World Writing, Abandon Journal, National Geographic, and many other places. He lives in northern Michigan.

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