The Carpenter's Daughter

A narrative

As a child, I often lived in houses with holes in the wall. They weren’t put there by a man who couldn’t control his anger, but by a man who started a project and then moved on to another before finishing the first.

Daddy.

He was a carpenter and general laborer. He could build anything and did so…for other people. Like the car mechanic whose car is always out of commission and the electrician who never replaces his own old electrical box.

Daddy built custom wood cabinets for folks who could afford to splurge on things like that, but our houses were never anything to look at. There was always drywall mud everywhere and drywall tape poking out of walls and that metal screening that was meant to close up the holes he had made and just didn’t get around to finishing.

Drywall tools. Photo by: Blackday on ESub.

There were paint swatches painted in little squares in most rooms. We had hardwood floors that were always begging to be refinished…we also had a few of those huge metal grates in the floors that provided heat in the winter and also a nasty burn if I didn’t clear them when I jumped over. Of course, I could have walked around the grates in the floor, but what fun would that be?

My sister and I had a bunk bed set-up when we lived in Kansas City. There was a hole in the wall in our room that my dad had started to fix, but forgot about— it was right above my bunk.

I vividly remember a cat coming through the hole in my wall one night. We didn’t have a cat so that was interesting. I told Daddy about the cat the next morning before he left for work and he reassured me that I was just dreaming.

I wasn’t.

I tried to entice the cat into staying in my room, but it was wild and hissed at me while desperately trying to find its way back to the hole from whence it came.

My mom and dad divorced by the time I was three. Daddy had remarried a young woman who had a baby boy. Her family lived just up the street, and I didn’t know it at the time, but they were some of the coolest people I would ever meet.

It was a huge family. Every member of the family had a first name that started with the letter “R.” They had an old two-story decorated with hand-painted art that started on the porch and continued all over the house. I remember walking up the stairs to the second story and looking at the walls…they were absolutely covered with graffiti and poetry and signatures and limericks. Written in pencil and pen. The kids also used paints to decorate the stairway with art.

I was surprised to know that not only were they not punished for writing on the walls, they were actively encouraged to do so. They were artists and each had their own medium.

My stepmom was an artist and she was also very active in politics. I remember her dragging us kids to rallies in Kansas City. We rode the city bus downtown and we protested something that for the life of me I can’t remember.

She loved the Rocky Horror Picture Show and I know she must have been a progressive because my grandpa couldn’t stand her. She also listened to rock music — and let us listen to rock music — and that sent grandpa over the edge.

Depeche Mode and Culture Club. The horror.

Daddy and my stepmom didn’t work out, and the marriage was over pretty quickly, though we did keep in touch for years. It was a friendly divorce, but it did cause us to move again.

My dad moved from his artist phase to his mountain man phase and he bought land a few years later. He decided to build his own cabin from the ground up. The problem was he had a full-time job building other people’s houses so his own took a back seat.

I was twelve years old when I spent the summer with him in his cabin.

There were no holes in the walls but that’s because he had no walls. The cabin was framed and he did have blankets up to create privacy…the bathroom had a door and I was grateful for that. The kitchen had running water and a refrigerator and an oven — he left that oven door open all winter long.

If you know, you know.

Daddy told me not to wander from the cabin and I did as I was asked. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have gone far because I was scared out there by myself. My dad went to work by 6 am and didn’t return until 6 pm. There was no TV but he had a boombox. It ran out of batteries fairly quickly, and Daddy said the D batteries were too expensive, so I didn’t have any entertainment except for his books. His library.

The good part is that I had access to dozens of books. The bad part is that my dad had an obsession with Stephen King. I read “Salem’s Lot” and “Carrie” within the first week in the cabin.

And then I started working my way through “The Stand.” It was 1200 pages of pure horror to my 12-year-old mind.

I read out in the sun on a towel or sat under a tree and to continue the horror story in the light of day so I wouldn’t have to read it at night. When Daddy came home in the evening, I was always excited to tell him about the novel — he would tell me that I really shouldn’t be reading King if he scared me.

I didn’t listen and it didn’t matter because the only other books he had were on religion.

I once read that my generation, Gen X, is so feral because we were allowed to read whatever we wanted and we all read Stephen King too young.

Daddy spent his weekends hanging drywall or installing a bathroom sink or laying flooring in the cabin. I spent a few weeks with him that summer and then went back to Oklahoma where I lived full-time with my mom.

My dad ended up finishing the cabin, and right before I was to return the next summer, someone pulled up in his drive and spent the day removing all of his copper and refrigerator and stove and sinks and every single one of his tools.

The thieves had all of the time in the world to steal everything he had. Daddy had no neighbors and there were no patrols out that far. He also didn’t lock his doors. Not that it would have mattered.

My dad met another woman a few months later and proposed to her. He sold the cabin and moved to another small Missouri town and bought an old farmhouse that predated the Civil War.

I visited him there once…I slept in an upstairs room with no holes in the wall, but a few haunts in the attic.

The front porch ceiling was painted haint blue, but it didn’t seem to work.

Daddy spent a year or so renovating that huge old home, but he never finished it. His relationship ended and it was time to pull up and start over again. In another town, in another fixer.

He continued to enlarge his library and I read his books each summer. He continued to live in fixers. He continued to knock down walls.

Holes everywhere.

~Jess