And so it began. We spent the afternoon setting things up. We mostly worked outside. He found the bench-press equipment and set it under one of the trees in the front yard that gave us lots of shade. He found his barbell and his weights and stacked them near the bench. He fixed two ten-pound weights, one on each end of the barbell and set it aside. I watched all this, then out of curiosity, picked it up. Except I didn’t think about balance at all and grabbed the bar not quite in the middle. As it came off the ground, it was heavier than I expected, and one end tipped down and hit the ground, causing me to lose my grip and then the whole thing crashed down, the weights missing my toes by only a couple of inches.
Briar was setting up a stepladder over by one of the other trees and turned quickly. He walked back over to me. I thought he’d be pissed. I’d fucked up again. I always did.
“Dustin,” he said, “this was probably a good thing. You learned something, and so did I. You’ll be working with a lot of stuff while we’re here, and you really need to be respectful of it all. Safety is really important. I don’t want you to get hurt, and it’s easy to do that when you’re not familiar with the tools or activities. You just got an example of that. Most tools are pretty safe if you use them correctly and know what the dangers are. I’d really appreciate it if when you’re doing something you haven’t done before, you’d let me explain it first. Do you think you can do that?”
He was doing it again. Instead of being mad at me for being such a klutz, he was trying to take care of me and teach me. How could I stay mad, or sulk?
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try to remember, but some things, like picking this up, are just sort of automatic, and I didn’t see any danger.”
“And that’s the worry. They don’t look dangerous, but they are. Look at what I’m doing over here.” He led me to the tree and stepladder. Lying on the ground was a thick round canvas tube, about two feet or a bit more in diameter and maybe four feet long. One end was sewn closed and seemed to bulge out a little, and the other had several ropes attached to what I’d learn were called grommets in the cloth around the perimeter of that end, all tied together. I had no idea what it was.
He had a fairly heavy piece of rope and climbed the ladder with it. He flung it over a thick branch about ten feet off the ground, caught the end of it and came down the ladder. He strung the heavy rope through a thinner rope which was laced through the grommets, then tied it to itself.
“Okay,” he said, “you can help. We have to pull on the rope so the bag lifts up and is hanging from that branch.” He grabbed the rope, I did, too, and we pulled.
It was heavy. I’m not sure how much help I was, but we pulled it so it was hanging with the bottom a couple of feet off the ground. Then, not releasing the tension on the rope, he walked to the tree and wrapped it around the trunk three or four times, then tied it off.
“Done,” he said. “What you’re looking at, in case you don’t know, is a heavy bag. It’s used to train boxers. It’s for me to play with, not you. Your muscle and bone development aren’t ready for this yet, at least the way it’s meant to be used. It doesn’t look dangerous, does it? Just looks like a sack of something.”
I nodded.
“Well, watch.” He picked up an unusual-looking pair of gloves that had been next to the bag and put them on. They just covered his fingers and knuckles and a little of the backs of his hands. Then he stood by the bag and began hitting it. He danced around it, very light on his feet for such a large man, hitting it in what looked to me like different ways, overhand blows, straight punches, short hits up into the middle of it, punches where he used both hands and struck quickly several times. The bag just hung there, apparently not terribly impressed by Briar’s attack on it.
“I’m just showing you,” he said. “Not really working on anything. The reason for that is, I’m not warmed up. You need to warm up before beginning any strenuous physical activity. If I’d really let go here, I could tear a muscle. Or hurt a wrist or elbow. The bag looks entirely innocuous, but if you don’t know what you’re doing and how to do it, you’re looking for a quick visit to the emergency room.”
He stopped and took the gloves off. “Same with everything we’ll be doing. Power tools, especially, but all tools. A hammer or a saw or even a screwdriver—they’re all dangerous if you don’t use them correctly. But that’s my job. To show you how. Your job is to learn and not become too frustrated when they feel unnatural in your hands, which they will be when you first begin to use them and they don’t work well at all.”
He asked me to go turn all the water on inside, and I did. I could do that job without supervision, I guessed. Okay, so I did still have some attitude. I wasn’t used to being told what to do and how to do it—what I was used to was being totally ignored—and while I recognized that what he was saying was all for my benefit, that didn’t make it any easier to stomach. It still rankled.
The water all ran brown, but then started clearing up. After about five minutes, it was coming clear from all taps. I told Briar, who was still sorting things out outside, and he said to let the water run another five minutes, then shut it all off.
I did that and then came back outside. “What about electricity?” I asked.
“I called the utility company. They’ll have someone out to turn it back on at the transformer tomorrow.”
“So what about tonight?”
He chuckled. “We’ll do without. Cave men just had fires, eventually. Before that, I guess they could only read their books and TV schedules on nights when there was a full moon.”
I couldn’t help myself. When he laughed, I did, too.
Dinner turned out to be fun. The gas had been turned off at the meter beside the house, but Briar turned it back on so he could use the stove. I saw that he had food in an ice chest. He pulled out a couple of boned chicken breasts, cut them up into bite-sized pieces, then seasoned them with salt, pepper and garlic powder and set them aside. I watched him pour two cups of water into a saucepan, add a cup of dry rice and set it on the stove to boil. “It’ll take about 25 minutes, once it’s boiling and I’ve reduced it to a simmer. We’ll do everything else in that time.”
When he said we, he wasn’t kidding. Everything that needed doing, he showed me how to do, did some of it himself, then had me do it.
I sucked at it all. Cutting carrots for the salad was a good example. Briar showed me how, but his way wasn’t instinctive. I knew I could do it better. I just took the knife and pressed it down on the round carrot. He grabbed me, but the knife had already started to twist in my hand. Without him there, I could easily have cut myself badly. He didn’t yell, though. He just showed me again how to put the point of the knife on the cutting board, one hand on the knife’s handle and the other on the back of the blade near the carrot but with my fingers and thumb well away from the action in case anything slipped. Then I pressed down like I was using a paper cutter. I actually listened this time when he told me not to force it, and it worked like magic. He was right: doing things correctly worked so much better—at least when it came to cutting carrots.
He put a couple of strips of bacon in a frying pan, crisped them almost to overdone, then removed them and threw in the chicken pieces along with some green and red pepper chunks he’d shown me how to prepare. He’d shown me how to dice onion and smash, peel and dice garlic cloves, too, and when I’d stopped crying from the onion, I’d finished both those jobs. They went into the pan as well. Then he threw some mushrooms on top of that and sort of stirred things around in the pan occasionally for about five or six minutes while he had me tearing lettuce into two salad bowls and, ta-da, after he’d crumbled the bacon on the chicken, mushroom, peppers and onion mix, said dinner was ready.
Maybe it was because I’d helped make it that it tasted as good as anything I’d ever eaten.
It was a warm evening and we had no electricity. It had been moving from twilight towards dark while we’d been eating. We did the dishes straining to see, and after putting them away, we went outside to sit on the porch and just watched the day turn from twilight to night, gray to black.
We talked, and we sat in silence, and it was comfortable both ways. I’d done a days work, and that was something I could never have said before. There was a very strange feeling in me, sitting there with him. I felt I deserved to be there, that I’d earned my place. Very strange indeed.
We didn’t talk about anything important. I was tired from such a busy day. I was trying to remember when I’d just once sat down. There hadn’t been much of that at all.
We talked about nothing, really. Things like how many stars there were up above. Out here, with no lights, the sky had so many stars it was unbelievable. We even talked a little about God. Briar wasn’t impressed with most people’s concept of him. I’d have to talk to him more about that when I wasn’t too tired to concentrate.
We just talked, not really saying much, just being together on the porch on a warm summer night. Well, what we said mostly wasn’t much. I got sort of lulled into a reflective mood by the soft air, the fireflies, the noises you don’t hear in the city, like owls and such, and I forgot to be self-protective and found myself relating one of my insecurities in a sort of offhand manner, saying that I didn’t like sports and that I wasn’t any good at them. He nodded, didn’t say anything for a moment or two, then asked me if I was any good at cutting up carrots. Damn, Briar could be sneaky when he wanted to be.
When we were ready to go in, he told me he had some old-fashioned kerosene lanterns and went and got them. He kept one for himself and gave one to me. Without them, the house was pitch black inside. I’d read a phrase like that somewhere—black as pitch. I wondered what pitch was.
The shower wasn’t very good. Not much water came out and what there was wasn’t heated. I’d really been looking forward to a good, long hot shower. He said we’d have to look into that, that we’d both need to clean up every day. He finished that by saying that cleanliness was next to godliness, and while he was already godly, I stunk a little. Hah! Like he didn’t!
He had a foot-pedal contraption that made blowing up our air mattresses easy. He said we could sleep in the same room, or separately. He looked at me and said, “Young men need their privacy; you haven’t had much recently.” I looked back and didn’t see any teasing there at all. It had been obvious he’d been joking when he spoke of me stinking. Maybe I did stink, but he was letting me know it was of no concern to him, I could smell however I pleased. I had no idea how he knew when to be funny and when not to be. When he spoke of privacy, it wasn’t stinking he was talking about. This was something different, something I was sensitive about. I hadn’t been doing what he meant all that many months, and with all the kidding the boys at school did about it, I just didn’t think it was something anyone should talk or think about, ever. He must have known how I felt.
When I was in my room with the door closed after my shower, he knocked on it softly. I went and opened it, my towel still wrapped around me.
“We’ll be out of here early. I’ll get you up. Here. I meant to give these to you earlier. Put them on when you get up tomorrow.” He handed me a pair of new shoes—sneakers that weren’t like any others I’d owned—a pair of shorts and a tee shirt. “This is all running stuff,” he said. “It’ll make it easier. Better get to sleep right away if you can. Morning will come fast.”
He left then, and I shut the door. It occurred to me that neither of my parents had ever bothered to knock on m door before opening it.
I’d been too busy to even think about being horny, and I was certainly tired and ready to sleep, but as I’d dragged my mattress into what I’d started thinking of as my room, or would be when the house was done, I couldn’t get it off my mind. The shower, cold as it was, wasn’t very conducive for doing anything like what I was thinking about. Now, by myself in my room, there was no holding back.
I had no trouble at all falling asleep that night.