Open Class

He could not sleep, and at eleven he went to the barn.

He had not been in it. None of them had. Mrs Sixkiller had not said they could not, and had not said they could, and it had stood at the side of the yard all week with its big doors shut and the windmill beside it turning once a night and stopping, like a building that was waiting for something. He went across the yard in the dark in his shorts and trainers, past the trailer with its blind down and its air conditioning humming, and lifted the wooden bar off the small door at the side of the big ones, and went in.

It was dark. It smelled of dust and old hay and oil and something sweet, like apples, though there were no apples. He stood inside the door and let his eyes get used to it, and the dark turned slowly into shapes: a tractor, small and old and red, under a sheet that had slipped; a cart with no wheels; bales, three of them, grey with age; a ladder going up into a loft; and along the wall on his left, a bench. A workbench, long and heavy, with a vice at one end; and above it, on a board fixed to the wall, in the shapes of themselves, tools.

He found the lantern by touching it. It was hanging from a nail by the door, and there was a box of matches on a shelf beside it, which he found by knocking it off; and he lit the lantern with the fourth match, the way he had seen it done once at Solliden, and turned up the wick, and the barn came out of the dark around him, gold.

The tools on the board were in the shapes of themselves. Somebody had drawn round each of them, once, a long time ago, in black paint, on the board, so that you could see where each one went and which one was missing: saws, three of them, large and middle-sized and small; hammers; chisels in a row, from wide to narrow, like the pipes of an organ; a brace and bits; a square; a plane, two planes; pliers; a mallet of wood; a coil of wire; and all of them were there, every shape filled, every tool hung on its nails with its handle dark and smooth from somebody’s hands; and they had not been touched, he thought, looking at the dust along the top of the board, for a long time.

On the end of the bench, in the dust, there was a pencil, flat, the kind carpenters use, sharpened with a knife.

He picked it up.

Anything you made, Mr Baggett had said. With your own hands.

---

He did not know how to make anything.

He knew that, standing at the bench with the carpenter’s pencil in his hand. He had made things at school, in the workshop, in the seventh grade, a box with a lid, under a teacher who stood at his shoulder and told him where to cut; and the box had been all right, and the lid had not fitted, and he had given it to his mother, who kept it on her dressing table at Solliden with her rings in it and said it was the most beautiful box in Sweden, which it was not. That was all. He had never made a thing on his own, with nobody at his shoulder, out of nothing, because he had wanted to.

He thought about what he could make.

He thought about Felix’s pie, which Felix was going to make at the blue door tomorrow under Mrs Sixkiller’s eye and which was, by every account, going to be a disaster. He thought about Theo, who was going to enter a photograph, which he had not yet taken. He thought about Mrs Sixkiller’s peaches with their red ribbon, beaten by Darlene’s; and June Mayfield’s star, with its purple rosette, turning slowly under the fans.

He thought about Kimura, with her binoculars, at the corner of the square at Vinita, looking at a pigeon on a soldier’s head.

Birds, he thought.

---

There was a pile of boards in the corner behind the tractor.

They were old, and grey, and weathered silver on one side and brown on the other, and some of them had nails still in them, bent over, rusted, and some had paint on them, white, flaking; and they were the right size. Not long. A foot or two, most of them. As if they had been something once, something small, and been taken apart carefully, and stacked, and kept, the way everything on this place was kept.

He took four of them to the bench.

He did not have a plan. He knew roughly what a birdhouse was: a box, with a roof, and a hole in the front, and a place to hang it. He had seen them. There was one at Solliden, on the birch by the kitchen garden, that the gardener had made, painted red with white edges, like the house. He drew it on the back of one of the boards, with the carpenter’s pencil, by lantern light: a box, a roof, a hole. It looked like a child’s drawing of a house. It was a child’s drawing of a house.

He took the middle saw off its nails.

---

The saw went where it wanted.

He had not known that a saw had opinions. He had thought that you drew a line and the saw went along it. But he clamped the first board in the vice at the end of the bench and set the saw on the line and pushed, and the saw jumped, and skidded, and bit into the wood half an inch to the left of the line, and went on, from there, cheerfully, in its own direction, a little more to the left with every stroke, so that by the time he was through the board the cut was a curve, and the piece that fell off was a sort of wedge.

He looked at it.

He drew another line. He tried again. Slower. The saw went to the left again, but less.

He was on the fourth try, at about midnight, with sweat running into his eyes and the lantern hissing on the nail above the bench and the moths that had found it going round and round it in the gold light, when he became aware that he was not alone in the barn.

He looked round.

Kimura was standing inside the small door. She was in a T-shirt and shorts and bare feet, with her hair down, which he had never seen; and she had come in without the door making a sound, which was not possible, because it was a barn door and it had made a sound when he opened it; and she was looking at him, and at the saw, and at the wedges on the floor of the barn round his feet, four of them, of decreasing curve.

“Sir,” she said.

“Sergeant.”

“It’s midnight.”

“I know.”

“There’s a light in the barn.”

“I know. I lit it.” He looked at the saw. “I’m making something.”

Kimura looked at the wedges.

“What, sir?”

“A birdhouse.”

There was a pause.

Kimura did not say anything. She looked at him for a long moment in the lantern light, with her hair down and her bare feet on the dusty floor of the barn, and her face did nothing at all, the way it did nothing when she was looking at a bird; and then she came across the barn, and reached up, and took the lantern off its nail above the bench, where it had been hanging behind him so that his own shadow had been falling across the board, and held it up, on the other side of him, at his shoulder, so that the light fell on the line.

“Your shadow was on it, sir,” she said.

He looked at the board. The line was clear, now, in the gold light, the whole length of it, with no shadow anywhere.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not helping, sir,” said Kimura. “I’m holding a light. I’d hold a light for anybody.” She looked at the saw. “Don’t push it. Let it go back and forth. It knows the way, if you let it. It’s when you push that it goes off.”

He did not push it. He let it go back and forth.

It went along the line.

---

She held the lantern for three hours.

She did not touch anything. She did not tell him anything else, after the saw. She stood at his shoulder, on whichever side he needed the light, and moved when he moved, without being asked, so that the light was always where his hands were and his shadow was always behind him; and he cut the pieces, the floor and the front and the back and the two sides and the two halves of the roof, slowly, one at a time, letting the saw go back and forth, and the pieces were not straight, not quite, but they were nearly straight, and they were the right size, more or less, which was the thing.

He found the nails in a tin on the shelf, a coffee tin full of them, every size, sorted, by somebody, years ago, into little paper packets with the sizes written on them in the carpenter’s pencil. He found that a nail, too, went where it wanted, and bent, and that you pulled it out with the claw of the hammer and started again, and that you held the next one closer to the head; and he hit his thumb twice, the second time hard enough that he had to put the hammer down and walk round the tractor, holding it, and come back, and Kimura did not say anything at all, either time, and did not move the light.

The hole was the hardest. He did not know how big a hole should be. He thought it should be big enough for a bird, and he did not know how big a bird was, exactly, having never measured one; and in the end he took the brace off the board, and the bits, and chose a bit that looked like it would make a hole the size of a bird, and drilled it, through the front, which took a quarter of an hour, turning the brace round and round with his whole weight on it, and came through the other side with a crack; and held the front up to the lantern and looked through the hole at Kimura’s face, on the other side of it, round, in the gold light, looking back at him through it.

“Is that big enough?” he said.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Kimura. “It depends what bird.”

---

At three o’clock it was done.

It sat on the bench in the lantern light. It was a box with a roof and a hole. The roof was crooked, a little; one half of it came further down than the other. The front was nearly square. There were two nails in the back that had gone in at an angle and come out through the side, and he had hammered their points flat, and you could see them. The grey weathered silver side of the old boards was on the outside, and the brown on the inside, and on one of the sides, low down, there was a patch of the old white paint, flaking, in the shape of nothing; and he had put a nail through the top of the back board, sticking up, bent over into a hook, to hang it by.

It looked like a child’s drawing of a house. It looked exactly like the drawing on the back of the board.

He stood and looked at it, with his thumb throbbing and the sweat drying on him in the cooler air that had come into the barn at last, very faintly, through the cracks between the boards of the walls; and he did not know if it was good. He had no idea. He had never in his life looked at a thing and not known whether it was good, because everything he had ever been shown had come to him already judged, by somebody, and he had been told what to think of it before he saw it, or had been able to tell, from the faces round him, what he was meant to.

Kimura held the lantern up and looked at it too.

“Sir,” she said.

“Yes?”

“It’s a birdhouse,” said Kimura.

She hung the lantern back on its nail. She turned down the wick, until the light was a small blue bead in the glass; and in the near-dark, in the barn, with the tools on their board in the shapes of themselves, and the old red tractor under its sheet, and the birdhouse on the bench, he could not see her face at all.

“Eight out of ten,” said Kimura, from the dark. “Nine. For the hole.”

---

Mrs Sixkiller came at seven.

She came for Felix. She came up the gravel road in the blue car at the speed limit, to take him to the blue door for the first pie, and stopped by the oak, and got out, and stood in the yard in her gardening hat; and she did not look at the house, or at the screen door, or at the well. She looked at the porch steps.

The birdhouse was on the top step.

He had put it there at half past three, when he came out of the barn, so that he would see it when he came down in the morning and know it had happened; and he had come down at a quarter to seven, after three hours’ sleep, and seen it, and known; and he was sitting on the step beside it now in his red T-shirt with STAFF on the back, with a cup of coffee, waiting for Castellanos and the car and the bathrooms; and Mrs Sixkiller came across the yard and up the steps and stood over it, and looked down at it, and did not say anything for a long time.

“Those boards,” she said at last.

He stood up.

“They were in the barn. In the corner. Behind the tractor. I’m sorry. I should have asked. I didn’t think…”

“Those boards,” said Mrs Sixkiller, “were the henhouse.”

He did not say anything.

“My husband’s father built it in 1923, the same summer as the well and the house. Out of what was left over from the house. It stood by the fence over there,” she pointed, across the yard, at a bare patch by the wire, where the grass was a different green, “for seventy-one years, with hens in it. Then a storm took the roof off in 1994, and my husband took it down, board by board, and pulled the nails, and stacked it in the barn, and said he’d build something with it.” She looked at the birdhouse. “He didn’t. He died in 2011. And the boards have been behind that tractor ever since.”

He stood on the porch step with his coffee and wanted the ground to open.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m very sorry. I didn’t know. I’ll…”

“You’ll what?”

He did not know.

Mrs Sixkiller bent down. She was seventy and she bent down easily, the way Mrs Ledbetter did not, from the waist, with her hands on her knees; and she looked at the birdhouse, close. At the crooked roof. At the two nails that had come out through the side, hammered flat. At the patch of old white paint, flaking, low down, on the left side, in the shape of nothing, which had been, he understood now, the paint of a henhouse in 1923, put on by a man who had built a well and a house and then made a henhouse out of what was left over.

She ran her thumb along the joint where the front met the side. Slowly. All the way up, and over the edge of the roof, and down the other side.

Then she looked at the hole.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she held up her hand in front of it, with her thumb and her first finger making a circle, and measured it, the circle against the hole, and her thumb and finger were very nearly exactly the size of it.

“An inch and a half,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “Near enough.”

“Is that right?”

“It depends what for.” She straightened up. “For a wren, it’s too big. A wren wants an inch and an eighth, or the sparrows get in and kill the babies. For a chickadee, it’s too big. For a starling, it’s too small, which is good, because nobody wants a starling.” She looked down at it. “An inch and a half is a bluebird.”

“A bluebird.”

“Eastern bluebird. Blue on the back and red on the front. They were nearly gone, here, when I was a girl, because the starlings took all their holes. People put up houses for them with an inch and a half, so the bluebirds could get in and the starlings couldn’t. They came back.” She looked at him. “You made a bluebird house.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t.” Mrs Sixkiller looked at the birdhouse once more, at the crooked roof, and the corner of her mouth did the small thing it did, and kept doing it. “That’s the best way to make anything.”

She turned to the screen door and opened it and put her head in.

“Felix,” she said. “Pastry.”

---

He filled in the entry card at the kitchen table at half past seven, before Castellanos and the car, with the bait-shop pen warmed in his fist.

Felix had brought the cards back from the fair office on Saturday, a stack of them, small, buff, like library cards, with a hole at one end for a string; and the card said CRAIG COUNTY FREE FAIR - OPEN CLASS ENTRY at the top, and then the lines.

EXHIBITOR’S NAME.

Hanover, F.

ADDRESS.

Mrs Sixkiller’s, Ketchum.

SECTION.

He looked at the sheet, which Felix had left on the table, unfolded, with a fingerprint of flour on it. Section D, woodwork and handicraft.

D.

CLASS.

Class 6, birdhouse or feeder, any material.

6.

DESCRIPTION OF ENTRY (OPTIONAL).

He held the pen. He thought about the henhouse, and 1923, and the boards behind the tractor, and the man who had said he would build something with them and had died first.

Bluebird house, he wrote. Henhouse boards, 1923.

He looked at it. Then he crossed out 1923, with a single line, the way Deputy Tidwell had crossed out what he had written on Friday, and did not write anything above it. It was not his to put on a card. It was Mrs Sixkiller’s.

He tied the card to the hook on the back of the birdhouse with a piece of orange baler twine from the barn, and gave it to Theo.

---

Theo took it to Vinita on Earl’s van.

Frederick did not go. He could not go. He was at the bathrooms at nine fifty-two, and the towels, and the skimmer, and at a quarter to one, at the till in the snack hut, he counted change into Tucker’s hand, one seventy-five, two, five, and Tucker said good without looking up, and he felt it like a medal. And all day, at the back of his mind, there was the birdhouse, going away down the gravel road at nine o’clock on Theo’s knees in the second row of the van, with the card on its baler twine, and Earl at the wheel, and the man on the radio singing about the beautiful shore.

He heard it all that night. Theo told it at the kitchen table, at half past seven, standing up, because he could not sit down.

“Earl read the card,” said Theo. “On the van. I had it on my knees and he looked at it in the mirror at the stop sign by the church and said what you got there, son, and I said a birdhouse, for the fair, and he said let’s see, and I held it up, and he read the card in the mirror.” Theo shut his eyes. “He said, Hanover. Like the King. And then he said, Any relation? And I said distant. And he said, Well, it’s a good birdhouse. And then Mrs Ledbetter…”

“Mrs Ledbetter was on it?”

“Mrs Ledbetter was on it. Eye doctor. Drops.” Theo opened his eyes. “Mrs Ledbetter laughed so much she had to take her glasses off.”

“And the fair office?”

“There was a woman at the desk with a box of numbers. She took the card and wrote a number on it and wrote the same number in a book and gave me a ticket with the same number on it and told me to tell my friend that if he loses the ticket he loses the birdhouse.” Theo dug in his pocket and brought it out and put it on the oilcloth in front of Frederick. A small pink ticket, like a raffle ticket, with a number on it in black.

412.

“I did mine as well. A card for a photograph. Section G. She said I’ve got till Thursday to bring the actual photograph, mounted, and I said I hadn’t taken it yet, and she said that was what Thursday was for.” He looked at the ticket. “She didn’t look at the name,” said Theo. “She didn’t look at it at all. She looked at the class, and the section, and wrote the number. And then a man came and took the birdhouse and carried it into the hall and put it on a table with all the other birdhouses.” He sat down at last. “There were nineteen. I counted. One of them’s a castle. One of them’s got a little porch with a little swing. One of them’s made out of a cowboy boot.”

“A cowboy boot.”

“With a hole in the toe,” said Theo. “It’s very good, actually.” He looked at the ticket. “Yours is on the end. Next to the boot. With the card turned round so you can only see the number.”

Frederick picked up the pink ticket and looked at it.

412.

He had never in his life been a number. He had been a name, and a title, and fourteen titles, and a cipher on a red box, and a face on a stamp. He had never been a number on a pink ticket, on a table at the end of a row, next to a boot, with his name turned to the wall.

He unzipped the brown wallet and put the ticket in the little window for the photograph, in front of the yellow card from Earl’s van, so that the 412 showed through the plastic.

---

Felix’s pie had gone to the chickens.

Felix told it himself, at the table, after Theo, sitting down, with the flour still on his arms to the elbows and in his hair and in one eyebrow, in a voice of the deepest tragedy.

“She made me do it by hand,” said Felix. “The pastry. No machine. No bowl, even, at first, on the table, on the actual table, with a knife and my fingers. Butter and flour and lard. She keeps lard. In a tin. She says you can’t make pastry without lard and anybody who says you can is from Kansas.” He looked at his hands. “You rub it in with your fingertips. Only your fingertips. Because the palms are too warm and they melt the fat. She said my palms were the warmest palms she had ever seen in forty-one years of teaching. She said I had the palms of a furnace.”

“What happened?”

“It went tough,” said Felix. “She said I’d worked it. She said you don’t work pastry, you persuade it, and I’d worked it like a man digging a ditch. She said it was the kind of pastry you could re-shoe a horse with.” He put his face in his floury hands. “And then she took it out to the yard, the whole pie, peach, it looked beautiful, and she gave it to her chickens. She’s got chickens. Behind the blue door. Seven. They ate it in four minutes.” He looked up through his fingers. “They ate the filling. They left the crust.”

There was a silence at the table.

“I go back tomorrow,” said Felix. “At six. Before it’s hot. She says the kitchen has to be cold for pastry and the only time her kitchen is cold in July is at six in the morning, and even then it isn’t.” He looked at the refrigerator, at the list held up on it by the magnet shaped like the State. “I’ve got till Friday at eight.”

---

Theo took his photograph at half past nine.

He took it from the porch, through the screen door, into the lit kitchen, on Mrs Sixkiller’s camera, which she had lent him that morning in a leather case with a strap and a film in it, a real film, which you could not see until it was printed at the pharmacy in Vinita, and which you therefore had one chance at; and he made them turn on the lamp on the kitchen table, and turn off every other light in the house, and go out onto the porch with him and stand very still, all three of them, out of the way; and then he waited.

The moths came. They always came. They came out of the dark to the lamp and found the screen door and hung on the mesh, dozens of them, small and brown and grey and white like flakes of paper, with the lamp behind them making each one a small dark shape against the gold, and the shadows of their wings on the mesh, very faint, opening and closing.

Theo knelt on the porch boards with the camera to his eye, close to the mesh, and did not move for a long time.

Frederick watched him. He stood with Marcus and Felix at the end of the porch, by the swing, in the dark, and watched Theo kneel at the screen door with the gold light on his face and the camera to his eye, waiting, for the right moth, or the right moment, or for something Frederick could not see; and he thought that he had never seen Theo wait for anything before. Theo did not wait. Theo did things, all at once, and found out afterwards whether they had worked. But he was waiting now, perfectly still, for so long that Felix shifted his feet, and Marcus said Theo, and Theo said shh, without moving.

Then the camera clicked.

Theo lowered it. He looked at the screen door for a moment longer, at the moths on the mesh in the gold light.

“Got it,” he said.

“How do you know?”

Theo thought about it.

“I don’t,” he said. “That’s the point.” He put the camera back in its leather case and did up the strap. “You don’t know till it’s printed. And then it’s too late to do it again.” He looked at Frederick. “It’s like your birdhouse. You don’t know if it’s any good till somebody who doesn’t know who made it looks at it.”

He went in through the screen door, and let it bang.

---

At ten o’clock, on the refrigerator door, under the list, held up by the corner of the magnet shaped like the State, so that it hung down over the top of page fourteen, there was a pink ticket. Frederick had taken it out of the wallet again, and put it there, because he wanted to see it from the table.

412.

He sat at the table with the box fan roaring and his thumb throbbing where he had hit it, twice, and looked at it, and at the list above it with its four ticks and a half, and thought about nineteen birdhouses on a table in the exhibit hall at Vinita, in the dark, with the fans going round over them; a castle, and one with a porch and a little swing, and a cowboy boot with a hole in the toe; and at the end, beside the boot, with its card turned to the wall, a box with a crooked roof and a hole an inch and a half across, made out of a henhouse, waiting for a bluebird, or a judge, whichever came first.