World Made by Hand

Fifty-four

Loren left directly to prepare the jail. Brother Jobe said he was welcome to “borrow” Brother Judah from down at the barbershop if he needed any help with the task. He asked me to “stick around.” There was something he wanted to show me, he said. He put his sermon aside and I followed him in his brisk, waddling walk deeper into the interior of the old school. The classrooms had been converted into workshops, several with walls knocked down between them to make larger spaces. There was a woodworking shop where a half-dozen brothers were using hand tools to fabricate what looked like window and door sashes. There was an equally large sewing shop where five sisters cut patterns on big tables and worked at ancient footpowered sewing machines. There was a harness shop and a metal shop attached to a new forge built out from the exterior wall as an addition, but with a dirt floor. Two brothers were smithing horseshoes while a boy about fourteen worked a six-foot bellows by the hearth. The heat was unbearable.

At the end of the long hall was the old gymnasium. I was not quite prepared for what he was about to show me. Brother Jobe held the door open. Within, they had begun a colossal construction operation, framing the hundred-foot by seventy-five-foot room, with its fifty-foot-high ceiling, into a matrix of tiny rooms, deployed in three decks, with stairways zigzagging at diagonal corners.

“What do you think?” Brother Jobe said.

“What is this? A giant three-D tic-tac-toe stadium?”

“Naw. Heart of the hive, so to speak.”

“Heart of the hive?”

I counted seven brothers working in there. The interior rang with their hammer blows and the chuffing of handsaws as they completed what was in effect a gigantic balloon frame. They were hanging joists way up on the top deck that day. Hundreds of board feet of scavenged lumber stood neatly stacked in piles on the old hardwood gym floor: two-by-fours, two-by-sixes, one-by in various widths.

“She look safe to you?” Brother Jobe said.

“I suppose.”

“We don’t have no master builder type among us.”

“It looks like they’ve got it pinned into the walls and ceiling trusses pretty well.”

“Is that your seal of approval?”

“I don’t know as it would pass code,” I said, “but the good news is there isn’t anymore code enforcement.”

That seemed to please him.

“Come here,” he said. “Lookit: what I want to show you.”

We went up one of the corner stairways. It felt solid enough. At the absolute center of the whole structure, on the middle deck, was a framed cube of a room that would have corridors on two sides but apparently no windows opening to light. Nothing was up yet but stud wall and a floor.

“This here’s the royal chamber,” Brother Jobe said.

“Is this where the queen bee lives?”

“She passes a great deal of time here, yes. In what will be her winter quarters.”

“Then you have a queen bee?”

“We got something like that,” he said. “You want to meet her?”

I hesitated. It was hard with Brother Jobe to tell where metaphor left off and something uncomfortably like hyperreality began.

“She won’t sting you to death,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“This is an actual person you’re talking about?”

“Hell yes. Mary Beth Ivanhoe of Lynchburg, Virginia. That actual enough for you?”

“I guess.”

“Anyways, I was kind of hoping you’d help us out with this here room. It’s a very special room. Mary Beth will be spending most of her time here, and she is not always feeling tip-top. She ain’t sick, but she gets… indisposed. It has to be a very beautiful room, like a jewel box. I got in mind wood paneling, inlay and such. Nice woods, finished finely. It requires first-class workmanship, and I know you can do it. Course, I was thinking you could educate some of our brothers in the process. You’d have to work up a ventilation scheme because she generates a lot of heat. What do you say?”

“I may have to work it in around other commitments.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“I can probably do it.”

“That’s good. Very good,” he said fervidly. “However you can make it happen, you won’t be sorry. I promise. Now let’s go drop in on the old girl.”