Unworkable clay surrounds a patchy square lawn. The garden is small and enclosed by a shoulder high white wooden fence. The tool shed with the rusting garden tools hanging from nails on its inner walls can’t be locked. The key hasn’t been seen for years and the padlock is rusted and useless anyway. Sometimes, the shed door blows open and shut. Maria turns over in bed.
“Door’s making an awful noise, Ben. I can’t sleep.” Ben hears her but he doesn’t respond. In the morning, she tells him again. Ben knows that isn’t true. Sure I heard it a couple of times, he thinks, but it wasn’t going on all night. Maria sighs and starts getting her things on, sitting on the edge of the bed. It seems to take more effort these days and she’s not young anymore.
“This garden needs form,” says Ben. It’s said flatly. He’s standing at the window, shirtless, looking out at his estate, twenty feet by twenty. Ben only knows she’s there by the creak of her footsteps as she goes downstairs. The kitchen radio clicks on. Standing there in his own home, he thinks, I’m tense. He thinks that if he dared relax his muscles he’d collapse into a heap on the floor. He picks a shirt with a dirty collar from the floor and he means to go down for breakfast. But instead he passes the stair head and goes down the hall to the room at the end. He opens the door and breathes the stale air. He can hear the radio playing from the kitchen. He opens the window in the bedroom. He really has to push; it hasn’t been open for years, greased shut. The effort makes him feel like it is being held closed by the lost years, as if it is enclosing the past. He looks around the room at the fading pictures of forgotten pop stars on the walls. He recognizes one that had, he had read, died, destitute and suffering from muscular dystrophy, evicted from his council apartment because he could not afford the rent any longer. He has to concentrate to remember what his daughter, Jane, looks like. She’s nearly twenty now and he hasn’t seen her for a year. The house is really too big now for the two of them. He thinks that the pop star could have come and lived with them. They had plenty of space after all. In his dying days he would have been happy to see that somebody still thought about him.
He goes down to the kitchen where there is a homely smell of coffee brewing and he feels a little better. It doesn’t take much. There are some cookbooks on the bookshelf in the kitchen and his eye catches the spine of one of them as he drinks his coffee. He gets up and leafs through it. Maria watches him. The book is about how to build a stone oven. Fifteen years before, he'd promised Jane that they’d build an oven together. It was to be fun and a hell of a mess, the two of them up to their necks in clay, plugging the holes in the walls of the stone oven. Today, outside in the garden, the little foundations are still visible, where he had dug up the grass and filled it with concrete and sand for the oven base. They were going to build it up in diminishing circles, until the bricks met at the top. They started, him and his little girl, plastering on the clay and letting it dry. Then they started building so the walls leaned in. But it started to rain. Clay can’t be out in the rain before it’s fired and they ran out of the storm and watched together standing at the window as the little structure dissolved and collapsed in on itself. The rain stayed on for days. When the weather was fine again, the girl just wanted to play and Ben had no desire to get on with the task of repairing the damage done by the rain. Days went by, weeks and finally, years and it all just lay out there.
Outside now, it is grey and dry and windy. Ben leaves his coffee unfinished, gets his jacket on and goes out into the garden and stands there on the lawn. He lights a cigarette and smokes it and throws it on the ancient oven base. He goes to the shed and takes out the old sledgehammer, lifts it over his head and brings it down on the old bricks and mortar that form the oven base. And he brings it down again and again. He stops for breath and sees Maria standing at the back door. She asks him what he’s doing but he doesn’t answer her. After twenty years of his half-baked plans and unfinished projects, what is on his mind today will be met with ridicule. So he doesn’t answer her and gets backs to work. By the time he has pounded the bricks and mortar, he is shaking with fatigue and stands uneasily amid a wreckage of red brick, all smashed into many sizes and shapes. He is so tired he can hardly walk, but makes his way through the house and heads to the car parked out front.
“Where are you going?” Maria calls from the porch. Ben’s trying to get the car started but it’s not catching and that gives her enough time to get on her slippers and coat and get out into the car with him. The engine catches and they drive to a store on the outskirts of town. He buys cement, clay, sand and lime and they drive straight home again. He doesn’t even take a break to eat, he just starts mixing the sand and cement and starts re-laying the broken bricks in a circle. He uses his hands and wipes them on his shirt and pants. He steps back now and again to look at his work and then continues. During the afternoon, the oven starts to take form with an ease that mocks the latent distress caused by its needless abandonment many years before. Today he will call Jane and ask her over and he’ll ask her to bring what’s-he-called with her. They’ll bake pizza in the oven but he won’t tell her that’s what he’s planning. He tells Maria his plans and she says, “that’ll be nice.” Ben has to look for her number and he can’t find it. Finally, he asks his wife and she tells him without a second thought, as if they talk to each other on the phone every day. Do they? He wonders. Why don’t I know about it? Jane is surprised to hear him and she hesitates when he asks her to supper the following evening. Ben thinks she’s searching for an excuse so he butts in quickly,
“Please come. Will you?”
“Sure,” she says. “I’d like that.”
It’s early evening and not dark yet and he goes back out into the garden to continue. He mixes more cement and adds just enough water to make it sticky so he can hardly turn it with the wooden stick he’s using to stir it. He needs two hands. He works some more and he steps back and looks again and he feels good. He thinks he’s going to have to split some bricks because he’ll need some smaller ones, especially when the walls begin to bend over in a circular arch to enclose the beehive-shaped dome. It’s not easy to build in curves with square bricks. He mixes more in the shed for a third time and heaves it out in a great big bucket and continues to build. Maria is sitting inside. She’s flicking through all the TV channels on the remote control. She stops at a channel for a few seconds at a time, never for long enough to know what’s going on, and then continues. Then she flicks back the way, hoping to find something she’s missed. She stops at a shampoo commercial. There’s a scientist in a white coat looking at a split hair under a microscope and then the image of the damaged hair fills the screen. It looks like it’s made of peeling dirty bandages and the scientist is saying that the little balls lying in the grooves of the hair are fungal spores and that’s why you need the shampoo. Maria runs her hand through her hair and flicks to another channel. She hears the scraping sound of the trowel outside and him grunting. Sometimes she hears him stand and groan because his back’s hurting. He’s out there in the dark but she doesn’t go see what he’s doing. Sometimes, Ben looks up at the living room window hoping to see her and give her an honest hard working smile but she never shows herself until finally she opens the back door.
“Are you coming to bed?”
“I’ll soon be finished.”
“You’d better put a cover on that. If it rains. You know…” She turns and goes upstairs.
Ben’s tired but he doesn’t want to go to bed yet. He makes himself a cup of milky tea and wanders slowly around the ground floor of the house, picking up this, rearranging that. Something bothers him. It’s this. It’s the realisation that if he left this house today and never came back, nobody would be able to put together from what they found, a picture of the man who had lived there. How can a person live in a place for twenty years and make no impression on it? Even the worms out in my garden show they’ve been there, he thinks. There are a few ornaments here and there, gifts mostly, a few cheap pictures on the walls. He tries to remember what the house sounded like when Jane ran around in it but he can’t catch onto anything. This house is full of unused things, he thinks. Cookery books she got as presents twenty years ago that could still be given as presents today, they were so unused. Encyclopaedias, mail ordered and lined up like soldiers on the bookshelf. Where are all the toys? What the hell did we do with all Jane’s toys? Did Maria throw them out? When? Fifteen years ago? Did I notice? Did Jane ever have toys? She must have had toys but I can’t remember them. Ben sits down at the big kitchen table and drinks a few mouthfuls of the tea but he wants something stronger. He pours whisky into a glass. A couple of people walk by the window in the street. They’re laughing and Ben looks out but all he can see is his own reflection. The sound of laughter recedes and it’s quiet again. He drinks the whisky. His bones are beginning to ache all over his body now. Tomorrow he’s going to feel like hell, he knows that, but there’s important work to do.
“I’d better go to bed,” Ben announces to nobody, drains his glass, checks the door’s locked and puts out the lights. Maria is lying on her back as she has always done. She’s wearing a nightdress. Ben looks at her in the moonlight and thinks how beautiful she looks but nothing stirs in him. Nothing at all. When did she start wearing a nightdress, wonders Ben. He undresses, uncomfortably aware of his own body odour.
“Should have showered,” he says to nobody. He’s dirty with all the sand and the dirt and sweat from the day’s work. He goes to the window where he stood that morning and looks out at the labours of his day. When that’s white with the lime, it’s going to look real pretty, he thinks. Tools are lying around in the garden and he wishes he’d tidied up afterwards. He gets into bed and lies on his back, the back of his hand resting on Maria’s nightdress. He wishes she’d murmur something to him, to let him know she knows he’s been trying today.
“What time is it?” she says finally, very faint.
“Late.”
“You’re gonna feel dead tomorrow.” It sounds like she’s sneering, thinks Ben. But he can’t be sure. She’s right after all. But he’d give anything to hear her say The oven’ll sure look pretty when it’s done. He wants to be lying beside a lover who he can shake awake now and take to the window, stand behind her with his arms over her breasts and kiss her neck and show her what he’s done.
The next morning his arms and legs are as rigid as a bag of dried cement. To get out of bed he has to manoeuvre his legs over the edge of the bed and let their weight lever him onto his feet. The pain is a shock to him. Is this all it takes? he thinks angrily. He’s cursing his body but he’s cursing the years too.
“I’ve hardly slept.” The voice is Maria’s. She doesn’t expect an answer. Ben, his back toward her, shakes his head and tries not to let the sigh that escapes his lips betray the exasperation he feels. Why the hell do you have to tell me that, thinks Ben. Only a couple of days ago I sat on the toilet and almost turned myself inside out with the effort, I sat there thinking, piles, colorectal cancer, and I didn’t tell you a damn thing about it, you know why? ’Cos I don’t damn well care, so why the hell should you and why the hell should I care now if you couldn’t sleep? Sleep now if you’re so tired, you’re not going to do a damn thing all day anyway. Sleep now and shut up about it.
“Lie there and I’ll bring you some tea,” he says and with some effort rests his hand on her forehead. He feels the chemical substance of skin itself; its physical characteristics of living connective tissue, and not the person. It could not have disturbed him more had it been the feel of a corpse.
“When are they coming?” asks Maria. He took his hand away. She can’t say a damn thing without it sounding like it’s a chore, thinks Ben.
“Oh, six, something like that,” he says. She starts to say something about being surprised she doesn’t have a sore back too but Ben’s already hobbling downstairs in his underpants, sore and dirty, cursing his frailty. He’s coal black between his toes and is angry that he went to bed like that. He puts on the coffee and looks distractedly through the paper. He hears creaking on the stairs and looks up to see Maria coming down, carrying an enormous pile of dirt-smeared sheets and she walks straight past him and into the laundry cupboard and throws it on the floor. She starts making her own simple breakfast and the cupboard doors and cups and spoons are being clattered around in dull ill temper. Nothing is said for many minutes. She reads another section of the paper and without looking up says, “do you have anything special in mind for today?”
“No. Not apart from the oven. Why?”
“It doesn’t have to be today does it. What’s the panic?”
“No panic. I just want to do it.”
“We need things in town.” She sighs again. Well what’s stopping you for God’s sake, thinks Ben. Take the car and drive into town. Not once is a glance exchanged. Not once is there an ascending or descending tone in voices that are endlessly, endlessly flat. Neither of them expects to make any headway in this conversation except by the defeat of the other.
“I’m going to finish this today.” His voice trembles slightly when he says it. Did she notice? he wonders. She turns her head back to her paper as she mumbles, “do it then. I’m not stopping you.”
Ben gets up without another word. He thinks he hates her and that this time it is for real. He heads upstairs to dress and thinks about having his shower now, but puts it off because he’s going to be as dirty as hell in a minute anyway, when he starts working on the oven again. He wonders how much time he’ll have to spend on it today. Really it shouldn’t be used the same night, it should be fired first, but he guesses you can cook and fire at the same time. He can’t see why not. When he comes down stairs again and is about to go out to start work, Maria says, “are you never going back to work?”
“I’m still sick,” he says.
“You’re not sick. Or if you are you shouldn’t be doing that.”
“You say what it is you want me to do.”
“Do what you want. I’m not interested. I just don’t think it’s very fair to say you’re sick when you’re not.” He stares hard at her.
“I’m doing it. For once, I’m doing it. Alright?” She shrugs her shoulders and turns the page of the paper.
Out in the garden the structure looks robust. Ben realises once more that to build a curved structure with uncut bricks is a devilish hard thing to do. You can do it, it seems, but it’s a question of making the best of an impossible geometry and covering up the imperfections with mud. With dirt. He laughs out loud. He thinks, What a wonderful metaphor for life and just then, that little pile of bricks and cement before him, he respects it and he loves it more than anything he has ever seen before in his life. He says to it, “now daddy’s coming with the mud pies!” He’s thinking about when shortly, he’ll be throwing wet clay in great clods at the wall of the oven for insulation. The clay shell will give the structure a more rounded, softer, more crafted feel, one that will show that this has been done by the hands of man. That it has beauty because the hands of man have worked it and that somehow, that form will say something lasting about its creator. As the oven nears its completed shape, the closer comes the critical point at which the walls can no longer bear the leverage. When the gap is breached, if it gets that far without collapsing, the structure is as strong as nature can prescribe. But right up to that point the whole structure exponentially approaches the brink of catastrophe with each new layer. As he mixes the cement to make it as strong as possible he realises that this cannot be rushed because as the slope of the walls increases, the more the imperative that the preceding layer must have set fast. He steps back and thinks, This cannot be done in a day. He doesn’t know how long he stands alone in the garden, contemplating the absurdity of a man against a brick wall. He thinks, When I say I’m banging my head against a brick wall, I always think the wall is passive, getting in the way. But this wall has really got me in a fix. And Ben walks away from it and lays down his trowel.
He brushes the dust off his hands and feels for the rolling tobacco in his trouser pocket. Maria, he hasn’t noticed her presence, is out in the garden as well now, from curiosity or maybe from the boredom of being alone again and she has come up to his side as he rolls his cigarette with one hand. He lights it and he lets her rest her head on his arm. He likes the feeling of the weight of her head resting there as he contemplates his work. Maria says, her voice gentle, a little distant, “what are we going to eat when they come?”
“I don’t know. I’ve not made anything. Have you?” If they had had this conversation this morning, Ben thinks, the silent bitching would have started now. But something is different. Ben doesn’t know why but he feels that he’s going to laugh and he tries to repress it. Maria says “me?”
“Well why not, I’ve been out hear working all day. You know that.”
“What are we all going to eat then?” They look at each other and out of the corner of his eye, as he looks at his wife and wonders if he can possibly be feeling like that about her, Ben sees the opening of the oven door, curved in the rounded wall and it looks like a smiling mouth. The way the bricks are laid in an arch over the door, they look like teeth. Ben thinks that later, he’s going to have to paint two big eyes over the little oven door to bring it to life. It? The effigy? The good little Fire God that Ben has built? But the moment is broken by the sound from the street of an engine dying and car doors closing and approaching footsteps on gravel on a quiet evening, a sharp and civilised little sound, he thinks. Although Jane has not been home for a year, it is still her home and she enters the house through the front door without knocking. She calls out in the hallway to her parents. Ben can see them through the glass door as she leads a young man by the hand through the house toward the back garden. She puts her head round every door in the hallway and up the stairs as she passes, and she is calling quietly into every room. She cannot be heard from the garden but Ben can still hear her: she is saying Hello? Hello? because he has heard her call that a thousand times before. That’s neat, thinks Ben, that it’s someone’s home. Jane’s young man looks nervous. They are both well dressed for the evening, simply but they look sharp, and Ben can smell her perfume. He feels proud of her. How beautiful she looks. Ben whispers anxiously to his wife.
“Look at the state of us and look at them! What’s his name?” Their visitors appear in the doorway and say Hi. Ben stretches a welcoming hand to the young man. He is pleasant and there is no tension. Ben wants to show Jane what he has been doing. He wonders if she even remembers that day in the rain many years ago. Although she takes her time about it and waits until there’s a break in the chatter she finally saunters over to the oven. Ben goes over beside her and says, conscious of the sound of every word he speaks, “it’s just to finish the dome, then it’s the clay and then finally it’s the lime. Make it look prettier and keep the damp out.”
Ben and his daughter and this little creation of man are together at this hour and this place and they are a work of art. The young woman and her father both understand the sin of their isolation from each other and the fact of their redemption by this little Fire God. It is primitive and human and they understand.
“You better be careful with the lime,” she says.
“Why?” asks Ben.
“It’s toxic. Slightly. If it gets in your eyes or on your skin. That’s why we never finished it when I was a little girl. Because it was too dangerous for me.” They are statements spoken as questions to which she will permit no answer from Ben. “I’d have got it in my eyes and everything.” Ben knows he does not have to lie to her that he was never thinking of her but was just too drained of spirit to finish what he’d started.
He is hungry, terribly so. He calls to the others and asks them if they’re hungry too. They call back that they are and he has to tell them there is nothing to eat. He doesn’t say why, it’s just too long winded and it would be impolite to burden this young visitor with their history on his first visit. Ben phones for pizzas.
The delivery boy arrives promptly and approaches the table in the garden that they have carried out from the house and set with their unmatched crockery and some beer cans. Although the table is sparsely set, it is beautiful in the soft light from the house. The boy sees the oven in the dusk. He takes his money and as he leaves he looks at the oven. From the scorn on his face, Ben wonders if the boy sees something in the process of decay, not construction. An ancient, unwanted edifice inherited from the previous owners of the house.
“Good riddance to that thing, eh?” says the boy as he leaves. As the sound of his scooter disappears into the silence of the night, Ben has a powerful urge to run after him and tell him that in these few words, he has shown that he has failed to see the redeemer in his midst.
Sometimes He can take on a most curious guise.
Ben thinks with quiet pride, that it takes a real man to be modest in the possession of knowledge that big. Having said that, he thinks later as he eats together with his family, these pizzas are damn good.
RAYMOND CARVER
TOM WAITS
NORMAN MAILER
1980s - UP JUMPED THE DEVIL by Nick Cave (alternatively There is a Light
etc by The Smiths)
1990s - LOSING MY RELIGION by REM (no rival there)
