Scratch. Steve Himmer
wood. He sees families moved in, assembling for ballgames and barbecues, neighbors who are friends with their neighbors. When Martin builds, he sees into the future, and that’s why he’s done well for himself—his buildings are meant to have lives lived within, not to be spaces complete in themselves.
The houses here aren’t even holes yet, just marks on the mud in the shapes of foundations to come. Ground will be broken tomorrow, but men in orange vests and yellow hard hats have swung shrieking chainsaws for days, and have toppled tall trees from the high cabs of heavy equipment. The forest was cleared in swathes to make room for thoughtfully located Japanese maples or a single mimosa to punctuate each sculpted yard when the lots have become more than mud.
Trunks were bundled and dragged in chains to the road, where they were piled on more trucks and hauled off to mills, swallowed by bellows, chewed up by mechanical teeth. Stumps were torn out. Acre after acre of oak, ash, and birch, of maple, hemlock, and beech, all ground into pulp and pressed into molds by machines, shaped into the components of bureaus and chairs and pressed into paper for printing assembly instructions that make only half-sense. That furniture and those instructions will be boxed up and shipped off to stores or else sold online and those wandering trees will make their ways home to clutter the rooms of these houses yet to be built. Those signals, those sales, will slip through the forest along wires and masts and thin air—buzzing in my ears like the loudest of bees, because you are all like me now, like this forest, waiting for all the world offers to come your way without leaving your homeplace to find it. You’ve made your world fast enough that you can sit still, and can keep the rest of us moving.
Time was when trees put up more of a fight, snapping sawteeth and breaking arms. They took as many of your kind as you took of theirs, and furniture never traveled so far. Now houses go up in days, one after the other, identical stalks in a field full of corn, and decades-tall trunks can come down without being touched once by hands, only by engines and blades. You can eat at a table, palms flat on the wood, without remembering it was a tree.
Things took longer, a long time ago. Even telling my stories was slow, when I could unwind them out across years because I knew their parts would stay put. But we’ve had to adapt, we’ve had to catch up, as the world has grown faster around us. It’s the way of things. Glaciers crept in and crept out, leaving these woods with only a lake almost too small for the word. Stones crawled up through the ground, winter after winter, freeze after freeze, and a new group of people drove out the ones who were already here so they might carve the woods into farms for a few generations and pile those stones into walls, then pack up again to raise new walls somewhere else. And now you’re trickling back in, with the starlings and loosestrife and empty beer cans. One layer laps over another. Everything is devoured as soon as it’s born.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Martin’s houses here aren’t even built yet. These homes of the future began with a sheet of white paper, then black lines demarcating driveways and gardens and pools. He had never heard of this town when he started, when all he knew was he wanted some acres that weren’t too expensive or too remote for potential commuters. It’s a half hour drive to the highway, then a short trip to Portsmouth or Portland or Boston and to New York a few hours on. The other way, to Montreal. To a city more or less like any other, with restaurants and offices and tiny apartments housing people who dream of escaping to places like this one he’s found. People he’s hoping will move into the houses he’s going to build, who are deep enough in their own dreams that a sagging economy and an uncertain era aren’t enough to deter them, who put away money to buy these homes years ago, locked it in for the purpose as he did with the money to build them. People whose most secret dreams are too big to fail.
Speculators and risky borrowers aren’t his demographic. That’s not who these houses are for, though they’ve been kind to him in the past—he built the houses he was asked to build, for whoever could pay or get someone else to, and all that money he made is now paying for this, for these houses he’ll build for deep-dreamers.
“Now?” his business partner asked, months ago, when Martin said this project would move ahead, never mind the downturn. It’s a bet on the future, not the present, Martin explained. These would be houses for people who only look forward. And the money was his own, not their partnership’s, so the risk would be his alone, too.
“But why not wait?” his partner asked the next time they talked on the phone, and again over drinks one of the rare times they spoke face-to-face. And again Martin told him he’d already waited and now was moving ahead.
And so here he is, moving but barely away from the trailer when a booming voice calls, “G’morning, Marty!” There’s a house across the road from the construction site, a house that began life as two rooms, up and down, but over time and across generations grew rambling additions: new bedrooms and gray shingles and indoor plumbing, a sugar shack and a mudroom and a covered porch off the front. On that porch sits Gil Rose, the only neighbor Martin has for the moment, in the folding lawn chair that seems to be his permanent perch. He was sitting there when Martin returned to his trailer in the small hours of morning, and doesn’t look to have left the spot since. He’s still wearing the same dark green work pants and white T-shirt, his face red as always despite the shade of an orange hunting cap that may well be affixed to his head. The beer cans the two men drained together last night still litter the porch and the brown yard around it, spilling toward the driveway where Martin’s own black sedan sits beside Gil’s mammoth, multihued pickup. It’s an arrangement they reached after a few days of rain left Martin’s car stuck in the mud, its city-sleek shape too close to the ground to roll free without a tow from Gil’s truck. Empty chairs cluster in various states of collapse, and Gil reaches out to pull one of the less ramshackle ones close to his own. He holds aloft a battered steel jug and says, “Come on up. I got coffee.”
Martin takes a few steps across the cracked, cratered asphalt between them but stops at the dashed line in the center. “That’s all right. I thought I’d take a walk this morning. To see some of the woods.”
“Woods won’t go anywhere. It’s Sunday. I’ll cook us some eggs.”
Martin advances to the foot of Gil’s stairs. “I need the exercise. I haven’t done any hiking since I got here.”
“Gave up exercise when I retired. Can’t blame you, though. Mild day like this, I would’ve been in the woods before dawn, a few years ago.” Gil takes a drag on his cigarette then coughs through a closed mouth so the glowing ember dips toward his chin. “Course, I would’ve been paid for it instead of tramping around for free. This late in the summer, weekend warriors are desperate to shoot something before their vacations run out.” Smoke unwinds from Gil’s rosaceous nose, and he smiles. “Preferably something big.”
Martin slides his palms up and down either side of his waterproof jacket, and notices a hole worn through one sleeve where, he supposes, it rides over the metal band of his watch. “I, uh, I should start walking before it gets hot.”
Gil squints at the hazy sky as if his eyes are following something. “Won’t get hot today.” He grips the chair meant for Martin and pushes it toward the stairs. “We’ll get the grill going and make a day of it. You breaking ground over there tomorrow?”
It takes Martin a second to grasp the new thread of conversation before he nods.
“Well. You’ll have those houses of yours up in no time.”
“I’m hoping to get people moved in after school ends next spring. Onto the first few lots, at least.”
“Be nice, kids running around.” Gil takes a mouthful of coffee from the jug. “You oughta keep one of those houses yourself, Marty.”
“Maybe,” Martin mumbles. He leans his weight away from the porch, away from his neighbor, but doesn’t take a whole step. He tries to remember the whole night behind him, how much he drank and if he told Gil of his plans to settle in town. To move into one of the houses. All through the planning stages of this development he imagined himself walking from room to room, his mind lifting each house from the paper into three dimensions as he tried to decide which of them would someday be his. But he’s sure he hasn’t said so