Caribou Island

36

The door frame didn’t fit. Gary held it against the gap in the back wall. White-painted pine over rough bark, an unlikely marriage of materials. He had cut the gap narrow so he could adjust later, a decision made when he had imagined more time, believed in more time. Now he needed to cut away almost two inches of cabin wall.

He looked around, a quick glance behind, as if Irene might appear. He hadn’t seen her yet today. She’d left early, before he woke.

Gary centered the frame so that it overlapped both sides. A door set on the outside of the wall, projecting four inches. And why not? He wasn’t building this cabin for anyone else.

So Gary grabbed his hammer and nails, aligned the frame, and propped it with two-by-four cutoffs. If Irene were here, she could hold it in place, much faster, but she wasn’t going to help now.

And the truth was, he did feel bad. He felt guilty. Wanted to apologize, even, and if she’d been here when he awoke, he would have tried. He shouldn’t have called her a mean old bitch. He didn’t like to think of it. Didn’t like to think he had said that. But he knew he had. He had said it twice.

Gary sighed. His breath fogging. A good day again for working, cold and overcast, but he didn’t feel any motivation at all. He hated not getting along with Irene. He wanted everything to be clear between them.

He braced his shoulder against the frame and set a nail at an angle, tapped it carefully. Then a harder hit, but it bent and he felt the frame move, no longer aligned.

Gary closed his eyes then, slumped against the frame, and tried to calm. He wasn’t good at anything. He knew that now. The cabin a failure, the most recent in a series of failures. So fine. He still needed to get this frame attached. He’d spent the night in the cabin, and it had been cold, desperately cold. Not a way they could live through the winter.

Gary set the frame in place again, leaned against it, and tried another nail. Got it in most the way and then cracked the frame. So he stepped back about ten feet and threw his hammer into the wall. A slight echo from the trees and hill behind, then a muffled thud from the ground.

Gary stepped forward and picked up the hammer, tried again to align and fix a nail. It sank but felt light, and when he examined the back, he saw he had caught only a small bit of the cabin wall. No firm purchase because of the angle. Maybe a quarter inch of meat. Nothing that would hold. And the point was sticking out now.

Gary walked over to Irene’s tent for a granola bar. On his knees, reaching in, his face close enough to her pillow he could smell her. So he lay down a moment, head on her pillow, and rested. Curled his knees so they were inside the tent. He would tell her he was sorry. The early cold weather a setback, but they were close to having the cabin ready, and maybe spending the winter together would help them return to who they had been.

But he didn’t want her to find him like this. He would seem weak. So he got up, ate the granola bar while he looked at the door and frame.

To hell with it, he finally said. He hammered a dozen nails around the edges, all shallow, many of them bent or opening up cracks, but together they might hold. Sharp points projecting out the back. Then he grabbed the door, simple white pine, and placed it in the frame. Not sure how to line up the hinges, especially without anyone helping.

The part he didn’t understand was how he had felt excited. She’d helped him all day — no food, in the cold, the pain in her head — and he’d been impatient, too, and she’d put up with that, and they had accomplished a lot, more than any other day. They put the roof on, the entire roof. But then she wouldn’t do the last little bit, just tacking the window on. It might have taken fifteen minutes. And suddenly he was saying everything he’d wanted to say for weeks, for years. And enjoying it. A thrill. A physical thrill, a pleasure, even though she was crying. And how could that be? How could he enjoy that?

Gary propped the door on shims and nailed the hinges. He could feel the frame shift with the blows, rickety. He’d have to buy brackets in town, but hopefully it would hold for now. You have to think you’re a good person. That was the thing. And how was he a good person if he enjoyed making her cry? Something wrong with him, something that needed looking at. Their marriage somehow had brought out the worst in him.

The window was next. He didn’t feel like waiting for Irene. The frame thin, and aluminum, so it wouldn’t crack and he wouldn’t have to nail at an angle. They really could have done this last night in ten or fifteen minutes.

Alone building the cabin. That was the truth. Marriage only another form of being alone. He set the stool in place, held the window up, leaned against it, pinning it to the wall, and hammered a nail. Held the other nails in his teeth. Pounded one on each side and then could let go. Pounded in the rest, all the way around. That’s not going anywhere, he said.

Gary stepped back and looked at his cabin. The outward shape of a man’s mind, he had thought before. A reflection. But he could see now that was not true. You could find an outward shape only if you entered the right field, the right profession, if you followed your calling. If you took the wrong path, all you could shape was monstrosity. This was without doubt the ugliest cabin he had ever seen, a thing misunderstood and badly constructed from beginning to end. The outward shape of how he had lived his life, but not the outward shape of who he could have been. That truer form had been lost, had never happened, but he didn’t feel sad any longer, or angry, really. He understood now that it just was.

Gary walked around back. He had meant for the door to open outward, but it opened inward. So he pushed in and propped it with a rock, the first time entering his finished cabin, a cabin with a roof, window, and door, and he set a stool in front of the window. This was not what he had imagined. In his visions and daydreams, the inside of the cabin had been warm, and he’d sat in a comfortable chair, smoking a pipe. There’d been a wood stove, the hides of bear and mountain goat, Dall sheep and moose, wolf. He hadn’t seen what the floor looked like, but it had not been unfinished ply. And the walls had not let in air. The cabin of his visions had been small but had extended outward infinitely in that dreamtime of belonging. Its walls traveled outward into wilderness. This lake and the mountains became him. No voids, no distance. And there was no Irene. In all the times he had dreamed of the cabin, he had never seen Irene. He hadn’t realized that until now. She was not sitting in a chair beside him, not standing at the wood stove. No place for her in Gary’s dream. He was smoking his pipe, sitting here by the window, looking out at the water, and he was alone in the wilderness. That was what he wanted. That was what he had always wanted.