CHAPTER 7
THE PROPS GO UP
Malick
The timber came at first light, cut green, still weeping at the ends, stacked on the flatbed in the order I had asked for.
The yard had listened this once. Fir for the props, oak for the wedges, and the long curved sections for the former laid on top under a strap, each end grain marked in pencil, mine, from the week before.
I ran a hand down the strap and felt the load settle where it wanted to.
Good wood. Heavy. It would want two of us to a length and it would not thank us.
The house sat over the yard the way it always sits at that hour, the east range with its half of old tile going gold at the ridge and the north side still black with the night in it, cold coming off the stone before the sun had found it.
There was dew on the sheet over the open half of the roof.
A fig had put a shoot out of the wall head above the door in the years the place stood empty and nobody had cut it and it moved a little in the first air.
The cicadas had not started. They would start.
For now there was the flatbed ticking as it cooled and the smell of green pine off the load, sharp and wet, the best smell there is on a site and gone by noon.
The men came behind it in a van and on a scooter.
Five and the carpenter, and the boy, who had no business on a scaffold and would be on it by nine.
The carpenter I had worked with a long time.
We did not shake hands. He looked at the house, and at the sheeted half of the roof lifting a little in the morning air, and then at me, and that was the whole conversation.
The rest of it was where the timber went.
The American came out into the yard with a tray.
Six cups on it, and the little pot, and he had made too much and was going to make it work by force.
He had done the same the first day and the day after that, coffee for men who take it standing up in ninety seconds and were already gone, and he did not seem to learn it, or did not want to.
He said good morning to each of them by a name he had for them, half right.
He was in a clean shirt at six in the morning on a building site.
I had decided in the yard on the first evening what this man was, and nothing since had changed the decision.
Then the man with the clipboard came round the van, and the line got drawn.
He was young, and polite, and buried, the way they all are now.
He had a folder and a lanyard and a job that meant that from the moment he signed the sheet, every body inside the tape was somebody's to answer for.
The firm carried the men. The firm carried me, on a paper that had my elenco number on it and a date.
The notice had gone in weeks ago, before any of this, with names on it, and the American's name was on it in one place only, at the top, as the man who was paying, and that word does not let you past the tape.
He was the owner and the owner was the one person on the ground that morning who was on nobody's book.
He came to me with the tape in his hand and asked where the working line should run, and I walked it with him to the fig and back and told him, and he paid it out along the ground and pinned it where I had said.
Then he folded the chair open for the American, in the shade, on the far side of it.
Neither thing took him a thought. He wrote my number on his sheet and the owner's number in the box at the top and he did not put them near each other.
The coordinator explained it to him kindly.
I did not hear all of it. I was looking at the timber and working the first prop in my head, where its foot would land on the slab and whether the slab would take it, and I heard the shape of the thing without the words — the apology in it, the you understand, the place he was being put.
A folding chair, in the end, by the old fig, outside the tape, in the shade.
The American said of course, of course, and meant it, and asked twice if there was anything he could do and was told, kindly, no.
I did not go over. It was not mine to soften and I would have softened it wrong. I got the first prop off the flatbed with the carpenter and we carried it in.
* * *
You take the weight of a vault. You do not lift it.
That is the whole of it and it is the thing the day was for.
A vault stands because every stone in it is pushing on the stones beside it and the whole ring of them is leaning on the two haunches, and it has found, over three hundred years, the exact shape it wants to be.
You do not argue with that shape. You build a timber former to the underside of it, curve for curve, and you carry the former up on props, and you bring it up on wedges until it is just — just — kissing the plaster.
Not holding. Kissing. If you drive the wedges a finger too far you have lifted the crown, and a vault that is lifted at the crown is opening at the haunches, and you have not saved it, you have broken it somewhere you will not find until spring.
My maestro said it every time and he is a long time dead and he is still right: you are not lifting it.
You are catching it in case it falls. It has stood longer than the men who turned it have been in the ground.
You are only there in case today is the day.
So it is a day of wedges. Two taps and stop. Look. Two taps and stop, all the way round the ring, and the sound of the whole morning is two taps and a silence, two taps and a silence, and the dust standing up in the bar of light that comes through the open half of the roof and never quite settling.
We propped the vault first, castles of fir under the crown crack, wedged and checked and wedged again.
We propped the arch of the oratorio door, the two crown stones sitting in it squared and true, better cut than any rubble in that wall, and I put a hand flat on the near one out of habit and it was cold and it was sound and I left it.
The surviving half of the roof over the east range we shored from underneath and it stayed where it was, tiles and all — you do not take a roof off a house you are trying to keep dry, you keep every metre of it you were left.
The gone half we sheeted again and it stayed gone.
Then the former, in its numbered lengths, carried up piece by piece and pinned, and eased down onto the wedges, and I went round it once and did not like the fourth prop and we struck it and re-set it and I liked it, and we began.
The carpenter, at the springing, low, not looking up: he going to stand there all day, that one?
I said green oak takes a while to seat and you do not hurry it and you do not walk away from it either. He said nothing back to that, because it was the answer, and we brought the next wedge up together.
You get into the round of it and the round of it takes the day.
Prop, wedge, check. Round the ring and back.
A man learns where his own hands are by the middle of a morning like that and stops looking at them, and the tapping goes into the arms and the shoulders and out again, and the plaster overhead comes down close enough to lay a flat palm on it, which I did, once at each quarter, not for luck and not for anything I could have said, but because a wall tells you more through the hand than through the eye, and I have never once trusted the eye alone.
The stone was cool. The crack at the crown was where I had left it in the spring.
I did not write anything on it that day.
There was no need. It was propped now, and a propped crack does not travel.
Once, at the haunch, a wedge went a hair too far.
The whole ring said something — not a crack, a note, a small hard word passing round the stone over our heads — and every man on that floor went still without being told.
Nobody spoke. I backed the wedge off, a hair, the exact hair.
The note stopped. We went on. Four sentences of the day, and the only four that mattered, and the American six metres off outside the tape would not have known what he heard, if he heard it at all.
He was still there. That was the thing I noticed and did not do anything with.
I had put him gone by ten in my head — bored, on his phone, into the car and down the valley to buy something — and by eleven he had not gone, and by the middle of the day he had not gone, and he had moved the folding chair once, into the last of the shade, and that was all.
At eleven somebody's mother sent bread up the track wrapped in a cloth, warm still, with oil, the way it is done, and the whole site put its tools down where it stood and ate.
This is not a break you take. It is a break that takes you.
The boy ate three and got roared at by three men at once, cheerfully, for reaching across the good end of the cloth, and took it the way an eighteen-year-old takes anything, which is not at all.
He had been on the scaffold since nine, careless with his hands the way he is careless with everything, going straight for the fine work because the fine work looks like the work, and I had taken a bar off him twice and handed it back twice and said the second time only where to put his feet.
He thought I was a hundred years old. He is not wrong and I did not tell him so.
Palla was asleep under a prop castle, in the one patch of shade a man would want, dead in everyone's way, and nobody moved her.
She had come up in the van with the timber and got down and come to my leg and put her head against it and then gone and found the shade and given up on all of us.
She eats at four houses and sleeps at whichever site is loudest. She had chosen us for the noise.
The American called a question across the tape in the afternoon.
Something about the former — whether it would mark the plaster, coming off, whether we would have to cut back into the wall to get it out.
It was a fair question and it was wrong.
I told him, across the six metres, the whole of it: that the former never touches the plaster, that a facing goes on first, that when the wedges come down in the spring the former comes down with them a hair at a time and the vault takes its own weight back and if it is done right you cannot tell, after, that anyone was ever there.
I told him all of it and I told it well, because when I am telling how a thing is done I forget to be careful, and the sentences get away from me and go long and clean and I hear myself and cannot stop.
He stood at the tape with his coffee gone cold in his hand and did not say anything back.
He was easy in himself, that man, always, loose in the shoulders in a way I am not and have not been since I was nineteen and knelt to a wall the first time.
He listened the way he did everything, with his whole body, leaning into it.
I did not come over. I finished the sentence and turned back to the ring.
* * *
The light went the way it goes in August, all at once at the end after standing still all day.
We were near done. One wedge left at the last haunch and the ring humming quiet and true under the former, every prop taking a share and no prop taking more than its share, which is the only thing I had wanted out of the whole day and now had.
My shoulder had gone. It goes, after a day with the hands up over the head — there is a place it will not pass and it found the place by four and I worked around it after that, the way you work around a thing you have had a long time and will have longer.
I set the last wedge with the left because the right would not lift again, and I tapped it, twice, and stopped, and looked, and tapped it once more, and it was in.
I came down off the boards slow, a rung at a time, the way you come down at the end and not the way you go up at the start.
The men were coiling straps and stacking the offcuts against the north side out of the weather and the carpenter was already writing on the back of his hand what we would need in the morning.
Somebody had swept the floor without being told, which is how you know a good crew, and the sweepings were in a heap by the door with a trowel standing up in them.
The boy was gone already, off on the scooter the second the last strap was down, and had said something to me on his way that I did not catch and did not call him back for.
The light was the colour the stone goes at that hour, which is no colour, only warm, and then not even warm.
The house stood over all of it holding its own breath in timber, the vault caught, the roof-half shored, the arch propped with its two good stones, the sheet over the gone side lifting and falling in the last of the wind like something breathing in its sleep.
On the door frame, going in, there was a number chalked in the American's hand, lower than yesterday's, one of a row of them going down, and I did not know what he thought he was counting to and it was not mine to ask.
The last wedge went in, and I came down and found the American standing exactly where the coordinator had put him, in the folding chair by the fig, in the dark now, the tray on his knees, watching, and he had been there the whole of the day.