How Things Hurt

When I was eighteen years old my cousin got me a job as a mason’s helper with a guy named Don Cullen. It was grueling torturous labor. Used brick and cinderblock will shred any kind of work gloves within hours and the limestone and cement suck the oils and moisture from the skin of your hands and abrade the callous like pumice, leading to checking, lengthwise fissures the length of your fingers that bleed and wake you up in the middle of the night with their throbbing and burning. Every morning was a nightmare of stiff fingers, cracking scabs and blood. The first tool, brick, block, bag of cement or shovel-full of sand one lifted unleashed a living hell of misery and curses. Unsurprisingly masons are notorious drinkers. The drinking would not begin every day before we were finished work; at least not the beer drinking. The surreptitious drinking that was done from pint-sized bottles in a tool bag was nobody’s business but the mason’s. Often enough after lunch, the six packs would magically appear, anesthetic for the cracked and bloody hands that endured day after day what no glove could survive for more than an hour.

One such day the two masons, the men who actually spread the mortar and position the bricks, were atop six levels of scaffolding capping an external chimney of used brick as the day was reaching its end. I heard my name from the top of the scaffolding and hurried to the bottom looking up, trying to read an expression, and waiting to do as I was bid. His trowel leapt from his right hand to his left as he reached behind him to grab the collar of the grizzled old man still slapping down bricks from the stack at his side, without ever taking his eyes off me and with no perceptible change of expression until the old man was verifiably looking at me too. Their faces cracked open like the fissures in their fingers, sun burnt grins of utter bemusement at my upturned face. Don said, “She looks like I am about to tell her the secret of the universe.” They roared with laughter, the old man’s trowel slipped from his grip and tumbled to the ground at the base of the scaffolding. Don doubled over, his forearms across his belly until he sat uncertainly on the stack of brick behind him. Their laughter began to subside after a moment or two until Don looked down at me again, my head tilted to the side, hands on hips, still waiting to hear what I had been summoned for. Don said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t remember what the fuck I wanted” They both erupted with hyena-like yelping all over again. I stepped under the scaffold and retrieved the old man’s trowel and tossed it high, the old man reached out and snatched it from the air at the moment of its apogee when it became motionless, neither rising or falling. “Thank you, baby” he said to my retreating butt as I walked back to the cement mixer. Another helper coughed beer through his nose as I looked from face to face, bewildered. What, I thought, am I doing in this world of stone faced, tearless men whose sole emotion is ridicule for all that is in me that I cherish and treasure?