CHAPTER 38
THE LAST LIFT
Matias
I chalked nine on the door frame before it was light, which is a stupid time to count a thing you already know the size of, but my hands had learned to want the chalk the way they used to want a phone, and nine is not a number you argue with, nine is a number you get up in the dark for, so I got up in the dark, and I made coffee I did not taste, and I stood in the yard with the cup going cold in my hand and watched the crew come up the track in the blue almost-nothing before the sun, the van and then the flatbed with the timber on it under a tarp roped down like something you were afraid would wake, and I thought, the way I think everything, in a currency: this is the most expensive morning of the whole autumn and none of it has a price I am allowed to pay.
Because I could not pay for it. That was the joke that had stopped being funny somewhere back in September.
I owned the house — the paper in the drawer said so, in a language I could not read past the numbers — and I could not lift one board of it, could not carry, could not hold a rope, could not do the one thing a man does with a house, which is put his back into it, so I did what I was allowed to do, which is nothing, beautifully, all day, with a thermos, out of the way.
The thing they were going to do was lift the first truss.
Not put it up. It took me most of the autumn to hold the difference in my head, and the way I finally held it was not from being told, it was from watching hands that already knew: the roof does not go on.
Not this year. The paper for it was sitting in an office two hours north waiting for a stamp that would not come before the cold did, and lime will not set in frost, and you do not put a roof on a wall whose mortar has not cured, you lose the whole wall if you do, so what today was — what the flatbed and the hoist and the four extra men were for — was a proving.
Lift the first truss into its seat. Hold it there.
See that the timber was true, that the joints married, that the wall took the weight where it was meant to.
And then take it down again and lay it on the ground under a sheet and leave it there until spring.
They rigged the hoist to the gable and I watched him check every knot on it himself, the cracked knuckles moving over the rope, the nails cut to nothing with the grey worked in under them, and when the truss came up off the flatbed it came up slow, turning a little, a big pale triangle of new wood swinging in the cold air over a four-hundred-year-old wall, and every man in the yard had a hand up or a line in his fist, and nobody spoke, and it went into its seat on the wall head like a key into a lock somebody had cut for it in 1690 and been patient about, and it sat, and it was true, and the sun came over the ridge right about then and put a long yellow light down the length of it, and I stood there with my cold coffee and my useless hands and felt something go up the back of my throat that I did not have a word for and did not try to find one.
They held it an hour. That was the whole of it.
An hour, a truss in its seat, a man on the wall with a level and his flat thumb laid along the timber reading it the way he read everything, and me on the ground doing the thing I did, which is fill the silence, and I went and stood by the carpenter — the older one, the one with the good saw and the bad knee — and I asked him, because I cannot not ask, what it would cost to leave it up.
Just this one. Just the first one, over the winter, so there was something up there, so it was not all on the ground.
He laughed. Not at me — he was kind about it, he was a kind man — he laughed the way you laugh at a child who has offered to buy the moon because he has the coins for it in his hand, and he did not answer me, he did not tell me a number, there was no number, that was the whole thing I could not get through my head, that here was a thing I wanted and the coins in my hand were the one part of me that did not matter to it at all, and he put his glove back on and reached up and started undoing the strop, and I stood there with my hands empty for it and watched him do the work I had asked to keep.
So they took it down. It came down slower than it went up, and they laid it on the trestles and put the sheet over it, and then the men went into the house and sheeted the vault — the cracked barrel of it standing on itself now, the crown seam running the length and going nowhere — great sheets of hessian dropped over the curve of it and lapped and weighted, wet where they had wet it, and the smell of that, of damp cloth going over old stone for the winter, is a smell I will have in my nose until I die.
Somebody dropped the paranco. Somebody went up to the pasture and covered the pit, the lime pit, boards and a tarp and a course of stone on the edges to hold it, put to bed.
And that was it. Nobody said we lost. Nobody said anything.
The year just stopped, the way a machine stops, and the ear keeps reaching for the noise of it and there is nothing there.
We had saved the wall. We had lost the house.
Both of those were true and neither of them was a sentence anyone in that yard was going to say out loud, and the light went long and orange and then grey, and the men shook hands and got in the van, and it was over.
* * *
We were the last two, and we were filthy, and we stayed filthy.
I want to be honest about the state of us, because it matters, because it is the whole of it.
We had been on a wall since before light.
There was mortar dried grey up both my forearms and cracked across my knuckles now too, the way his always were, and it was in my hair, and in the creases of my hands, and there was a smear of it down one side of his face where he had dragged the back of a wrist across a cheek hours ago, and neither of us had washed, neither of us was going to wash, there was no hot water worth the name and there was nowhere to go and no one left to be clean for, and the chalk on the door frame said nine, and neither of us looked at it, and the dog's prints were still there in the metre of set lime by the arch where they had been since August and neither of us looked at those either.
He came at me first. He always did, but every other time there had been a cost in his face when he said it, a man putting his hand under something that could fall, and this time there was not.
This time he crossed the swept floor in the last of the light and put his grey-cracked hand flat on my chest, over the mortar and the shirt, and he said, "Now.
You. Here," three words a tourist would have, and there was nothing frightened in it, nothing weighed, no cost being counted behind his eyes, just a man asking for the one thing that was free, easy, in a small plain voice, the way I ask for things, and it took the legs out from under me more than any hand ever had.
"Yeah," I said. "God. Yeah — come here," and I got a fist in his shirt and pulled and it was not soft.
His mouth was gritty. There was mortar between our teeth and dust on his lips and I did not care, I got the taste of the whole day off him, lime and sweat and the cold, the stubble of his jaw dragging rough under my thumb, and I put my filthy hands up into his filthy hair and held his head and kissed him like I had somewhere to be and this was on the way, and he made a low sound into it and pushed me back against the wall that had stood four hundred years and did not notice us, and I felt the cold stone through my shirt and his weight against the front of me and I said something, fuck or yes or nothing, and got my hands down between us to his belt.
We did not undress like men with a bed. We undressed like men with an hour and a wall, half of it, enough of it, and I got his shirt open and put my grey hand flat on his skin and left a print of the day there, mortar in the shape of my palm on him, and I did not wipe it off, I looked at it, one hand's worth of the work I was not allowed to do, printed on the one part of the house that was mine to touch.
He got my belt and then his own and I heard the buckle hit the swept floor and I laughed, once, no sound in it, because a belt on a stone floor in an empty house is the loudest thing in the world and because I was happy, stupid with it, past careful.
I went down. I wanted to and there was no reason on earth not to and I got my knees on the folded canvas and my mouth on him and he put his cracked hand flat on the back of my head, not pulling, just laid there, the whole flat weight of it, still, and I felt his breath go and heard him say, low, "there, yeah, there," small words, no cleverness in them, and I gave him everything I had, and his breath broke over the top of my head and his flat thumb pressed white into the side of my neck, and his knees were not made for the hard floor, the folded canvas gone thin under them, and he did not care tonight, he stayed down there in it with me.
Then he had me up and turned and my hands were flat on the cold wall and his mouth was at the back of my neck and I said, "yes, do it, come on," because I am at ease in my own skin, I have been my whole life, and I gave it to him plain, out loud, no argument attached, and he was slow at first with his forearm across my chest, the old lime burns of it against my skin, and then he was not slow, and I put my forehead to the cold stone and said something into it that had no words in it, only breath and grit and the wall against my mouth, and it got fast then, and hard in the good way, in the hurry way, two men wasting the last of a light we did not have, the wall gritty and cold under my palms and my breath fogging on the stone once and gone, and I could feel the cracked hand splayed on my hip and the flat thumb and the burns and none of it was a picture to me, none of it was a thing to look at, it was only him, the whole particular weight of him at my back with nothing left over him and nothing owed.
I got a hand back and held the back of his head.
He got a hand around me. We did not talk after that except the small stupid words, more and there and yes and once just a breath that was going to be a name and did not make it, and the wall held us the way it had held everything, and I went first, over my own grey knuckles and his hand, saying nothing true, saying nothing at all, and he followed me a breath after with his forehead down between my shoulder blades and his whole weight come loose against me, and for a second there was nothing in the shut room but the two of us — his forehead down between my shoulder blades, his whole loose weight, my breath going ragged and then slowing under it, the wet cloth and the lime and the sweat, the cold coming up slow through the floor — and nothing in me reaching to fill it.
* * *
We slid down the wall and sat on the pile of canvas and coats with our backs to the cold stone and did not move for a while.
Nobody had cleaned anything. There was mortar drying on both of us and pulling the skin as it went, tightening across the backs of my hands and along my forearms, and the handprint I had left on him had smeared into nothing, and outside the last grey was going out of the yard, and we were wasting a daylight that was already gone, sitting in the dark of a house neither of us could keep warm, and it was not consolation, and I know how it looks, two men on the floor after a day that beat them, but the day had been a loss and this was not medicine for it and I did not pretend to myself that it was.
It was only that there was, for once, nothing else in the room — nothing owed in either direction — and I sat in this one and put nothing, and did not chalk the day that was left, and did not price the dark, and let it just be the dark, and he let me, and neither of us moved, and the cold came up slow through the floor and we did not go and find the light.
We took the truss back down and sheeted the vault and went inside filthy, and neither of us said one true thing all night.