Chapter 4
Sawdust
Three weeks became four, and then nobody mentioned weeks at all.
Mama Grace's tests came back on a Friday in the second week of April. A mild thickening of the heart wall, a prescription for tablets she described as "pink and insulting," and an instruction to avoid stairs when she was angry. The cardiologist at Entebbe Hospital told her she had the constitution of a woman twenty years younger. Grace repeated this at lunch with such satisfaction that Daniel, across the table, looked up from his plate and said, "So there's no reason for me to stay."
"Of course not," said his mother, passing him the salt. "You must go whenever you like."
Daniel did not go. He said the boatyard could manage without him for another fortnight. He said there was something about the boathouse roof. He said, at the end of that week, to no one in particular, that it would be a shame to leave the fascia half done, and went out onto the veranda with his flat bar and was not seen again until dark.
Ruth, who had been sitting two feet away with her laptop, did not look up. She was aware of a small, shaming sense of relief, and she put it away in the back of her mind with all the other things she had decided not to think about.
The shutters were her idea.
There were forty-two windows in the Kasozi house, and every one of them had once worn louvred mvule shutters, hand-hung on iron pins, painted a green so dark it looked black. By the time she arrived, nineteen had survived. Of those, eleven were fit to be repaired, and the rest were dust and nails. The previous owners, or rather the family's well-meaning cousins in the nineties, had replaced the missing ones with ugly aluminium panels that rattled in the wind. When she had mentioned this to Timothy, he had said that new shutters would be easy and she should order whatever looked good from a catalogue. She had said it was not about what looked good. He had kissed her and said he trusted her completely.
It was Daniel who said, from the doorway of the sitting room, without being asked: "Kibuuka can make them."
"Mzee Kibuuka is seventy-four."
"He'd tell you it's the prime of life." He folded his arms against the frame. "He built the originals with my grandfather's carpenters. He'll know the pattern. And if his hands aren't equal to the job, I'll do the heavy cutting. I'd like to."
She had looked at him then, really looked, and understood that he was not offering because it was useful. He was offering because it was the only form in which he could ask to stay.
"All right," she said.
"All right?"
"I'll need drawings. And a bench. And somebody who can tell me what I'm doing wrong."
"I believe," said Daniel, and there was the faint, rare crooked movement of the mouth, "that's a position I could fill."
Mzee Kibuuka returned on Monday, in a battered green pickup, with a toolbox the size of a coffin and a face like a walnut. He climbed out slowly, in sections, planted a stick in the gravel, looked up at the house, and shook his head.
"They've let it go," he said. "Eh. Look at it. Like a dog nobody walks."
Then he saw Daniel on the veranda, and the stick fell out of his hand.
Ruth, watching from the lawn, thought she had never seen a grown man cross twenty yards of gravel at that speed. Daniel went down the steps to meet him. The old man took him by the shoulders and said something short and furious in Luganda, and Daniel said something back, lower, and then Mzee Kibuuka slapped him, once, hard, on the back of the head, and pulled him into his chest.
"You didn't say goodbye to the mvule," he said, in English, in a voice like gravel in a bucket. "Eight years. Not a word. Not one postcard."
"I'm sorry, Mzee."
"You're a fool. You were always a fool. Your father was a fool and you're another, only quieter." He pulled back and held Daniel at arm's length, and his old eyes ran over the lean face, the grey in the hair, the burn on the arm. "Eh. Too thin. Who feeds you?"
"Everyone asks me that."
"Because it's true." The old man let go. He turned, with some effort, and noticed Ruth standing a polite distance away, and the whole walnut of his face rearranged itself into something shrewd. "And this is the architect."
"This is Ruth Nakitende, Mzee."
"Ah." Kibuuka looked her up and down. "You are very small."
"So I've been told."
"Good. Small people are careful. Big ones break things." He came forward, with his stick retrieved, and gave a short formal bow from the waist. "I have worked on this house for fifty-one years. If you do anything stupid to it, I will curse your children."
"I haven't got any," said Ruth.
"Then I will curse your grandchildren."
"That seems fair."
He laughed, a dry bark, and clapped her on the shoulder with a hand so hard and brown it might have been carved from the shutters themselves. And Daniel, standing a little behind him, looked at her with a lightness in his face that she had not seen before, as though a weight had been put down for a moment on the gravel and he had forgotten to pick it up again.
The workshop was an old iron-roofed shed behind the kitchen garden, smelling of linseed and rust and a century of cut timber. Light came through the gaps in the corrugated sheets in long dusty blades. There was a bench at the centre, a slab of wood as long as a car, pitted with the scars of every job anyone had ever done there. Hand tools hung on the wall in the order of use, each in the outline of its own absence, painted there long ago in white.
Daniel put a plane into her hands.
It was heavier than she had expected. The wooden body was dark with years of palm-oil and the iron sole had a sheen like a river stone. She turned it over. There was a name stamped on the bed, in letters worn almost smooth: Stanley. Underneath, scratched in with a nail, the initials S.K.
"My father's," said Daniel. "He made things when he was young. Before the hospital took everything."
"Should I be holding it?"
"Yes. It's been waiting twenty years to be held by someone who doesn't want to hurt it." He moved her hand a fraction on the handle. "Don't grip so hard. You're not strangling it."
"I'm not strangling it."
"You're strangling it a little."
"I'm firm."
"You're firm," said Daniel gravely. "Come here."
He had a board clamped on the bench, a length of pale new mvule, and he stepped behind her and reached around her without quite touching and set his own hands lightly over hers. She felt the whole length of him at her back, not pressed, not close enough to be improper, but close enough that the warmth of his chest came through her shirt in a slow, even tide. His breath stirred the hair at her temple. She did not move. She did not, she found, seem able to.
"Weight on the front foot," he said, low, near her ear. "Start from the far end. Don't push the plane. Let it travel. All you do is carry it."
"That sounds easier than it is."
"It's harder. It's the hardest thing about the work, not forcing it." His thumb adjusted hers on the knob. "Now. Long and slow. Don't think about it."
She leaned, and drew the plane forward, and the iron sang. A curl of wood came up off the board in a single, pale, perfect ribbon, as thin as paper, smelling of cut sap and something warm like cinnamon. It spun up in front of her and fell on her wrist.
"There," said Daniel.
She laughed. She couldn't help it; the sound came out of her like a girl's, delighted, astonished. "I did that."
"You did."
"It's beautiful."
"It's a shaving."
"It's beautiful, Daniel."
She had turned her head to say it, and he was very close. His face was a hand's breadth from hers, his eyes lit amber by the slanting light, and there was sawdust caught in his lashes and a small, startled stillness in his expression that she recognised, quite suddenly, as the look of someone who had forgotten for a moment how to be careful.
Neither of them breathed.
Then Mzee Kibuuka, from the far end of the shed, said loudly, "Eh! The grain. The grain, don't go against it!" and Daniel stepped back as though he had been burned, and Ruth looked down very hard at the board.
"The grain," she said, unsteadily. "Right."
"Yes."
"Against it is bad."
"Very," said Daniel. His voice had a roughness she had not heard before. He went to the other end of the bench and took up a chisel, and she saw his hand shake once, slightly, before he mastered it.
They worked there for most of April, in the late afternoons, when Ruth had finished with her surveys and Brian had gone home and the light turned the colour of tea. It was not planned. It was only that every day around four she would find herself walking across the garden toward the sound of Mzee Kibuuka's radio, and the smell of cut mvule, and the rhythmic sigh of the plane. Daniel taught her to mark out a mortise, to feel a tenon seat with her thumb, to listen to a saw for the moment it began to bind. She was clumsy, and he never once pretended otherwise, and she discovered that she liked being corrected by him. There was no condescension in it. When she got something right, he said nothing at all, merely nodded, and she felt the nod all the way to her heels.
She came home each night with sawdust in her hair and the ridges of callus beginning to form at the base of her fingers, and Esther, over the phone, said, "You sound different."
"I sound tired."
"You sound happy. It's disgusting." There was the clatter of a child's toy on a tiled floor and Esther's muffled shout of Moses, the twins are in the bin again. "Tell me about the brother."
"There's nothing to tell."
"I didn't ask if there was anything to tell. I asked you to tell me about the brother." Esther Nalubega was an advocate, and she spoke to her oldest friend in the same tone she used on hostile witnesses. "You've said his name eleven times in this conversation."
"I have not."
"Twelve."
"He's helping with the shutters, Esther. He's a boat-builder. He's quiet and he's good at what he does and he's going back to Mombasa in a few weeks. That's all."
"Mm," said Esther. And then, more gently: "Is Timothy all right?"
"Timothy's fine."
"That's not what I asked."
Ruth looked at the dark window. In it she could see her own reflection: a woman in an old shirt with her hair coming loose, a ring on her left hand. She did not, she realised, have an answer, and that was strange, because three months ago she would have said he's wonderful without a pause and meant it.
"He's very kind," she said at last. "He's very good to me."
"Kind," said Esther.
"What's wrong with kind?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all." A pause. "I just don't remember you using it about anyone you were in love with."
On the last Friday of April, Daniel found her sitting alone in the workshop after the others had left, a half-finished louvre in her lap, not working.
"You've stopped," he said from the door.
"I was thinking."
"Dangerous."
"I know." She turned the louvre over in her hands. It was a thin slat of wood, shaped to tilt against the sun. "My mother says I think too much and do too little. She says that's why I'm not married."
"You are engaged."
"She says that's not the same."
He came in and sat on an upturned crate across from her, with the bench between them. Outside the sky had gone a deep burning orange behind the mango tree. A single hornbill clattered across the lawn.
"Why do you do this?" Daniel asked. "The houses. It isn't an obvious choice."
"My father left us when I was twelve."
The words came out so abruptly that she nearly took them back. She had told this to Timothy once, in a restaurant, in a clean, careful paragraph, the way you recite a summary for a doctor. She had never said it like this, in a shed, to a man holding a chisel, as one drops a stone down a well to hear how deep it goes.
Daniel said nothing. He waited. She was beginning to learn that this was his great talent, the thing he did that other people did not: he could leave a silence open long enough that you would walk into it of your own accord.
"He was a surveyor," she said. "He used to take me out on weekends to see old buildings. He'd put his hand on a wall and say, Ruth, this house is telling you a story, listen. And I believed him. I believed that things had a way of staying." She turned the louvre. "He left with a woman from his office. He took the car and a suitcase, on a Sunday, and my mother stood at the kitchen window and watched him load the boot. She didn't shout. She didn't cry. She dried the same plate for forty minutes."
"Ruth."
"She stood at that window every evening for a year. I used to watch her from the door and think, I will never be a woman who stands at a window." She breathed out, a small unsteady laugh. "And then I grew up, and I became a woman who rebuilds other people's houses. Which is, I suppose, standing at a window with a very good set of tools."
"I think that's unfair to the window."
"Is it?"
"I think," said Daniel slowly, "that your father was wrong. About houses telling stories. They don't. They just stay. And staying is the whole of it. Not the story. Whether someone's still there when the light goes."
She looked up. He was looking at his hands. There was no pity on his face, and she was more grateful for that than she could say.
"Is that why you left?" she asked quietly. "Because you didn't want to be the one who stayed?"
He did not answer for so long that she thought she had gone too far.
Then he said, "I left because staying would have cost someone else something I couldn't let them pay." He stood up. "That's all I can tell you. I'm sorry. It isn't enough."
"It's enough."
"It isn't." And he smiled, for the first time since she had known him, with real sadness, as at a gift he could not accept. "But you're kind to say so."
He moved to the door. She rose too, without thinking, and a long curl of mvule shaving slid from her hair and fell to the floor between them, and he stopped, and bent and picked it up. For a moment he held it in his palm. Then, very gently, as if she were a thing that might break, he reached out and drew a second shaving from just above her ear.
His knuckle grazed her cheek.
It was no more than that. A single, slow brush of skin along the line of her jaw, so light it could have been an accident. But neither of them moved afterward. The shaving curled between his fingers, pale and trembling. Her pulse was beating in her throat so hard that she thought he must see it.
"You've got wood in your hair," said Daniel, barely audible.
"I always do."
"I know." His eyes were on her mouth. Then, with a visible effort, they lifted. "Goodnight, Ruth."
He walked out into the dusk without looking back.
She stayed where she was for a long time. Eventually she went to the bench and picked up the second shaving, which he had left lying on the wood, and held it against her palm. It was nothing. A curl of wood. She put it in her pocket anyway.
Her phone rang as she crossed the lawn. She expected Timothy. It was her mother, calling from Masaka, as she did every Friday, to ask whether Ruth had eaten.
"Yes, Mama."
"Properly?"
"Properly."
"And how is the young man?"
"Which young man?"
"The one you're marrying, Ruth. Is he good to you?"
She stopped under the mango tree, in the dusk, with the little wooden curl pressing against her thigh through the cloth of her pocket.
"He's very good to me," she said.
"Then you're lucky." Her mother's voice was dry and tired. "A good man is safe. And safe is not nothing, Ruth. I would have liked a little more of it."
"I know, Mama."
"I'm only saying. Women who wait for fireworks usually end up with burns."
"Yes, Mama."
"Eat something," said her mother, and rang off.
Ruth stood for a long moment in the gathering dark. She felt the weight of the wedding ring on her hand and the small curl of wood against her leg, two tiny objects, both almost nothing, pulling at her in opposite directions with a quiet and terrible patience. Then she walked to her car and drove home, and did not take the shaving out of her pocket until she was alone in her flat, where she put it in a drawer, under a notebook, and closed it.