The Workbench Nobody Was Allowed to Touch

The other end of the board

I did not know what to say, so I said the true thing, which is not always what comes first.

“I was wrong about the mallet.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. It was a mallet and you were thirteen, and you put it back exactly where it came from. That’s what I couldn’t stand about it. You were more careful with his tools than I was with you.”

On the end of the bench, the lid of the chest lay in its clamps, a panel of glued oak, twenty-six inches by eleven, with a long edge Jonas had been bringing down with a plane. It wanted a second pair of hands. It had been waiting for them.

You hold the other end of the board.

I had spent four years afraid to touch anything on that bench, and I put my hands on the oak without thinking about it.

“Show me,” I said.

“Dad. You’ll hate it. It takes forever.”

“Show me anyway.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he unclasped the apron, took it off, and held it out, and I put it on over my work shirt. It smelled like cutting oil and old cedar, and I thought I might have to leave the room.

I stayed.

He had me hold the lid steady, one hand on each end, while he took long, clean passes down the edge. The shaving came up pale and thin and curled over the plane’s mouth and fell on the maple.

We worked until nearly one in the morning, and I never said a word about the time, and neither did he.

Saturdays

The first Saturday, Jonas set me to cutting practice joints in a piece of pine, the same as my father had done with him. I laid out the lines wrong twice. I sawed on the wrong side of a line, which I am told is a mistake you only make once, and then made it again.

Around ten in the morning I took the wooden mallet to a chisel, missed the handle, and brought it down square on my left thumb.

It was the same thumb. I swear it was the same thumb.

I said a word my mother would have washed out of my mouth. I stood there holding my hand in my fist, and I felt the whole garage tip back forty-eight years, the cold concrete and the radio and the smell, and I waited for someone to say it.

Jonas set down his plane. He came around the bench and looked at the thumb. It was already going purple at the base of the nail.

He did not look like a man watching a part come off the press with a flaw in it. He looked like my boy.

“Run it under cold water,” he said. “Then come back out. We’ve still got that pine to get through.”

I went into the kitchen and held my thumb under the tap, and I was in there longer than the thumb required. Then I dried it, and I walked back across the grass, and I came back out.

After that, the Saturdays settled into something. I would come in from the elevator by noon, and Jonas would be at the bench with the radio going, and I would put on the apron and ask what he needed.