House by Tracy Kidder

Author:Tracy Kidder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The carpenters spend a long time kneeling on the floor, worrying about the way in which they’ll apply the trim to the eaves.

“There’s the rake board. Then comes the seven-foot-four soffit board, which is seven-four but gives us a quarter inch to push in and out,” says Richard.

“And we’ve got three-quarters of an inch for a fascia,” says Alex.

“In your fascia,” says Jim.

“And actually, we’ve got the ridge board here,” says Richard.

“This is great, though,” Richard explains. “Once you got it drawn and you know it’s right, you don’t have to go and cut seventy rafters hoping they’ll fit.” Richard stops and recalls a day on his first job. An old-time carpenter said to the boss, “Hey, remember that time we cut forty rafters and none of ‘em fit?” Richard’s boss said nothing. He just turned away. “It still hurt,” says Richard. “But this old guy proceeded to tell us all about it.”

At lunch, a pair of barn swallows appears inside. They hover in the kitchen, up near the ceiling, over the diagram of the roof. The ancients might have made something of this visit. Sitting with their lunches, the carpenters pay no attention to the birds, although Alex does look up and offer them a smile.

Jim drives to a nearby lumberyard and selects a load of thick, rough-cut planks. He paws through the pile, rejecting this plank because it’s a little twisty, that because it’s waney. This is rough-cut staging lumber, not wood for finish work. An imperfection doesn’t matter, does it? “Twenty-five feet up in the air it does,” says Jim.

Hanging off their ladders, they bolt sidewall brackets made of oak through the plywood walls and into the studs behind. Onto the brackets they heave new planks, making a walkway, an open parapet ringing the top of the house’s walls. Each plank spans the distance between two brackets, and at each intersection, the end of one plank rests on the top of the end of another, making for a small, two-inch-deep step. Working on this scaffold, feeling their way along it without looking down, the carpenters encounter these small steps again and again. Always, the step comes unexpectedly. It’s a momentary free fall, of two inches. They flinch and grimace and go on.

They set up ladders side by side, between ground and scaffold. Two men ascend in unison, each on a separate ladder, each holding an end of a piece of lumber. Two men up top on the scaffold take each board from them. A chant begins: “Pain!” “Gimme more pain!”

“Ned and I got a system,” says Richard to Alex, as Alex reaches the scaffold once again.

“I am glad,” says Alex.

“Part of it’s hollerin’,” says Richard.

They trade roles. Those who play the ladder men request greater diligence in bending down, from the catchers up top. The catchers demand improvements in speed from the ladder men, and every so often one of them asks, “You couldn’t get a hoist, eh, Jim?” In this way, piece by piece, the huge lumber pile ascends.

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