Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Friday, October 9
Dear Little Jo,
Somehow it’s not the biggest shocker that you sleep in a tent. It gave me a laugh picturing you curled up in there with your flashlight and your poetry books or whatever.
At one point my bedroom was decorated with all kinds of football stuff. But once I was off the team I took everything down and trashed it. I figured, no point dwelling on it.
So it’s bare walls, faded green carpet, an old piece-of-crap computer, a bed too short for my legs. Not exactly an Inner Sanctum. Except for this one thing I sort of like because it’s so ugly. It’s a quilt my mom and her mom, my babcia, made for her hope chest. She had a hope chest, like an actual chest made out of wood to hold her wedding stuff. Dishes and towels and silver spoons, that sort of thing. Anyway this chest came with my parents when they immigrated, and this quilt is put together from pieces of things that got too worn out or full of holes to use for anything else.
There’s something about this idea I like. Things getting used till they’re not useful anymore, and then cut up into pieces and put together into something useful again. I mean it is a horrifically ugly quilt. There are orange and pink and brown bits, and the bits that were probably white originally are all various shades of beige. I like it exactly for its ugliness though. I like how my mom, and my babcia before her, and so on, back a bunch of generations, must have been thinking one hundred percent about warmth and bed coverage and not looks.
Sincerely,
AK
Friday, October 9
Dear Kurl,
A quick note between classes, because I forgot to ask you to please not mention anything about Nelly (my bicycle) to Shayna. Lyle bought me that bike brand-new for my birthday, and Shayna spent her own money on a seat upgrade for me after the first one was stolen a month later. Honestly, I just don’t have the heart to tell my family that their effort and hard-earned money was wasted.
Also, I keep forgetting to answer your question about the word butcherboys. It’s Walt’s term, of course. One of the American “roughs” he observes as he goes about his day is the butcher boy. When I first came across it last year, something about the description reminded me of Dowell—the dullness, the meatiness, the fists. I don’t think I told you, but Dowell and I used to be friends when we were younger.
Anyhow, I paged through “Song of Myself” after you first asked, but I didn’t find the reference to the butcher boy, and I only just remembered your question now. I’ll find it eventually on one of my rereads.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Saturday, October 10, 2 a.m.
Dear Little Jo,
I get this one nightmare every couple months. Whenever it happens I know I’m not going to be able to sleep again the rest of the night. We’re doing a roof, and the rule on a roof is always lean forward, but in this dream I stand up and instead of leaning forward I lean back. The others all give me these looks like, Now you’re in for it. My whole body clenches up trying to correct it, trying to lean forward again. I mean my guts are like a fist, they’ve clenched so tight. But of course nothing works. My arms start to wheel around and my feet pedal air and I fall. You know that thing about dreams where they say that you always wake up right before you hit the ground? Not me. I hit the ground and my head bursts open. I mean I can feel hot liquid pouring over my skull and out of my ears. I feel each of my ribs stab through my chest. Lungs deflating. Leg bones pleated like accordions. Then, only after all that, do I wake up. My stomach muscles ache the whole day after one of those roof dreams, like I’ve done a thousand sit-ups the night before.
So now it’s 2:30 a.m. and I’m supposed to be ready at 5 a.m. to leave with Uncle Viktor in the truck. That’ll be about two hours total sleep tonight.
To be honest, Jo, I sort of hate roofing. Not just my uncle power-tripping on me all day long either. I hate everything about that job. I hate the grit of the shingles and the stench of tar. I hate the pounding of our hammers all day going in and out of sync so that it can never become rhythm, only noise. In summer I hate the way the heat beats down but also gets absorbed by the tarpaper and boils up from underneath. Burned shoulders, burned knees, burned hands. Drinking water all day but still feeling thirsty. In spring and fall I hate the cold wind that whips across the housetops from all directions at once.
I’m glad my dad isn’t around to hear me saying this. I mean I doubt he was crazy about the job either, but I don’t remember him ever complaining.
I was just picturing you asleep inside your army tent. Your Inner Sanctum. I have to say it made me feel a bit better, that mental picture. Thank you for giving me all those details about the records you listen to et cetera. It’s actually making me smile right now, sitting on the rug on my bedroom floor.
I guess maybe what I have is an Outer Sanctum instead of an Inner one. It’s this stretch near my house along the railway tracks. Mark and I used to go there a lot as kids, before they fenced it off and put up all those NO TRESPASSING signs. We used to ride our bikes down the middle of the tracks, between the rails. Mark got so he could ride right on the rail, but I never got the hang of it.
He made this sort of sled out of plywood that we could pull along the tracks. We would pile rocks or branches and slide it along the rails. Once we found an armchair in the ditch and put that on the sled, and he would let me sit in it and pull me along. For some reason it was the biggest thrill.
They’ve fenced it all off now so you can’t go right up to the tracks except through this one area where the chain link is rolled back. Recently they put in an asphalt path for bicycles and dog walkers et cetera. But it’s still fairly wild down there. Grasshoppers everywhere. Unmowed grass, that kind Walt Whitman says sounds like So many uttering tongues in the wind. And I don’t know. A feeling of being on the edge of things. A dividing line between the city and wherever those trains are heading.
Sincerely,
AK
Tuesday, October 13
Dear Kurl,
Well, I can say this much for the Kurlanskys: Your family certainly knows its way around a roof. Two men were tarping the front steps and shrubs when I left for school yesterday, and by the time I got home you were nearly halfway across with the new shingles already. I figured you must have been part of the crew when I didn’t see you at school. My apologies in advance for lecturing you, Kurl, but I hope you don’t make a habit of cutting school for work. It’s not very conducive to passing your courses and graduating.
Anyhow. When I walked up the driveway after school, you waved down at me and I waved back. Bron and Shayna were lying on the living room floor doing homework—or, more accurately, Bron was writing something on her laptop that might or might not have been homework, and Shayna was paging through a back issue of Rolling Stone. I went up to my room, but the hammering overhead was more intrusive on the second floor, which explained why the girls had taken over the living room.
I kept thinking about how you confessed you hate roofing, Kurl, all that noise. I could hear it exactly as you’d described it, the hammers beating out of sync, someone barking orders—I assumed this was Uncle Viktor—and lower, quieter voices murmuring that I assumed were yours and Sylvan’s. It wasn’t too hot a day, but I thought about making lemonade, maybe bringing a tray with glasses and a pitcher out to the bottom of the ladder. But we don’t have a pitcher, and I don’t know precisely how to make lemonade. More to the point, I couldn’t think of a more blatantly gay thing to do for a bunch of roofers. I try to recognize and not succumb to my internalized homophobia, as Bron would put it, but there are times when it simply freezes me in my tracks and I just give up. After trying to read in my tent for ten or fifteen minutes without success, I went back downstairs and joined Bron and Shayna.