Jed Wolf

In the summer of 1985, I was hired as a laborer to help build a church in Burlington, Vermont. I knew nothing about commercial construction and was struggling with my sexuality, but my father was an architect and the proposed house of God’s hexagonal design intrigued me.

Normally, carpenters, masons, and roofers would be too intimidating to work with, but I’d been living with a woman and her kids for years and could trot them out if need be. After digging graves, facing wolves, Indians, and sobriety, by my mind-bending mid-twenties I thought I could handle anything.

Karen didn’t ask and seem to care who I was attracted to. Her husband had been shot in a hunting accident, and she’d been raising her two little girls on her own for a year when we met. Practically a kid myself at nineteen, I was a charming diversion, if not a great lover. Caring for her toddlers distracted my self-loathing with purpose, stability, and joy. Our symbiotic arrangement met our most glaring needs and overnight we became a united little family.

I worked while attending college where I was taking courses for a music degree. Throughout my life, overachievement and creativity competed with guilt, shame and an emerging interest in religion. The struggle kept me subliminally depressed but as a family man, though my ennui passed for brooding masculinity, when people began to call me “artistic,” which had dubious connotations in the rugged north, I quit college and devoted myself to manual labor worthy of absolution by God.

After being raised by alcoholics and working for addiction-prone Abenaki Indians one summer, I quit drinking and smoking pot. With nothing left to obscure my heavy heart, I began performing what I called “random acts of kindness” with a vengeance. I fixed our decaying house, taught the girls about structural engineering while building snow forts, and delivered lectures on hydraulics while flooding our swampy pasture for a skating rink. I piously split wood and stoked our wood stove grateful to the almighty. In addition to my ascendant self-image, I began to win scratch-off lottery tickets at will.

I’d read an article about the relationship between melancholia and mania described in 1st century Greece and how hospitals began experiments with Lithium to treat patients in the late 1800s, but in the 1980s, antidepressants were not yet in fashion. Whenever I called my father and mentioned my “moodiness,” he’d suggest staying busy.

“Only crazy people need therapists,” I remembered him telling me as I stomped through bee-covered goldenrod towards two hot men who looked like construction workers from The Village People.

I shook the hand of the gentler-looking one, who I hoped was the project manager, and asked if they were hiring.

“Hell, didn’t you see all them bees?” the first one asked.

“Nah,” I said, realizing my bushwhacking impressed them.

“How much you guys paying?” I asked, channeling Michael Landon.

“For what?” the thinner one snickered.

They looked like Cain and Abel from an Esquire photoshoot. Abel, the project manager, continued driving stakes when Cain turned to study me.

“You got a head shot?” Cain asked. “What’s your background, pretty boy?”

My heart skipped with adrenaline. I’d grown a beard since high school and hated being called pretty. How dare he? Recent spiritual practices required truth to keep my good fortune flowing, but I couldn’t tell these rugged-looking guys I’d waited tables, babysat Indians, and sold vacuum cleaners.

“I dig graves,” I said, dropping my larynx nonchalantly. Then I added, “I have a strong back.”

“Human?” Cain asked, slightly off guard.

“Yes,” I answered, staring.

“Well then, how ’bout using it to move that plywood over there?”

“Where to?” I asked eagerly, tramping towards the sloppy pile as Abel groaned in disapproval.

“He needs to fill out paperwork first,” Abel said while pounding stakes in the ground.

Oil-sprayed sheets of 3/4″ plywood are used to make forms for concrete. They’re expensive, and the more they can be reused, the better, but the more they’re used, the oilier and heavier they get. Each weighs over a hundred pounds. Without a forklift, they must be heaved onto the back, balanced, walked, then dumped. I’d lugged about ten sheets from the road when Cain reluctantly started the forklift and Abel handed me paperwork.

The slick feel of oil-soaked plywood reminded me of another time I’d sought salvation through manual labor, years before, back when I still believed in miracles. May Wyman’s mother Jane was a Christian Scientist who regularly sunbathed topless by their pool. When I was a kid, May and I were best friends, and her mother, an actress, was the talk of the town. Neighborhood kids would sneak outside their yard, trying to get a glimpse of her arresting boobs, which were rumored to have been augmented.

May’s mother was a devotee of Mary Baker Eddy, the former medium who founded Christian Science. On pleasant Sunday mornings, she taught neighborhood kids who dropped by that “God is Love and he who abides in love abides in God.” Unlike the horror stories I’d heard from Catholic kids doomed till noon on Sundays, mystical Christian Science seemed magical. May’s mother read poolside from Mary Baker Eddy’s “Science and Health” while her two teenage sons exhibited their diving skills in Speedos. Though the Wymans didn’t believe in doctors, medicine, or wearing many clothes in summer, everyone in May’s family, especially her two older brothers, were in stellar health.

My father said Jane was “unxious,” characterized by excessive piousness in an affected manner like ointment, but I liked May’s mother far better than my own. I regularly worked in her gardens simply for the way she’d pat my head. Though everyone else suspected, I knew Jane Wyman had magical powers.

May’s family moved to Southern California when I was sixteen, and her mother was delighted when I phoned her from Vermont ten years later.

“Jeddy,” she said, “how wonderful to hear from you!”

After sharing “family” news, I told her I’d been regularly winning scratch-off lottery tickets.

“Isn’t that wonderful! You must be doing something right,” she exclaimed.

When I said I thought it was from “doing good,” she said, “Isn’t love wonderful,” then warned me to keep my mouth shut.

“You’ve got a tiger by the tail, Jeddy, but you must be very careful. Tell no one. Keep it zipped. Believe me. People won’t understand.”

Building a church will be a good place to practice good deeds, I thought as I left our dead-end road that morning to find work. Karen high-fived me when I returned that afternoon wearing a hard hat, just like she did when I won lottery tickets.

The smell of fresh sawdust and wet concrete at the church site brought back memories of another time I’d tried to build something meaningful in Vermont. Before Karen, before the lottery tickets, when the cold and isolation had nearly driven me mad, I was playing a morose violin sonata like a dying swan in that empty schoolhouse when a church pianist neighbor who was out snowshoeing knocked on my door.

“I thought I was hearing things,” she said, stomping out of her squeaky snow shoes. “I’m Cordelia, Cordy for short. You must be a gift from God.”

She visited long enough for us to plan a jam session at her house with another violinist she knew. Rather than Bluegrass, surrounded by the buzz chainsaws and distant snowmobiles outside, we played Bach’s double violin concerto in D Minor.

Now, years later, the same bitter cold that had once drawn me to Cordelia’s warmth was freezing my fingers as I worked on the church. The sound of hammers and power tools had replaced Bach, but I was still seeking something I couldn’t name, when Cain caught me returning from my meeting with Jack Eden.

“What did you tell Jack?” Cain demanded suddenly.

“What?”

“You heard me. What the fuck did you say about me?”

“Nothing,” I said and tried to change the subject.

When he kept pressing me, I said, “An invention.”

Though the exposed rectangles left over from plywood sheets on the church’s interior looked industrial, I’d prototyped a form that would leave embossed geometric patterns instead.

“Bullshit!” he yelled and began swerving his truck while deliberately glaring at me like a madman. “Is this what you said I was like? Did you tell him I was crazy? Did you?”

He stepped on the gas. “Scared, pretty boy?”

“No,” I said. “Stop the truck.”

That just made him speed up more. “Now you scared?”

“No! Let me out!” I yelled, but as I opened my door and began to swing my legs out, he slammed on the brakes.

“Damn. You’re crazier than me,” he said as the truck came to a halt.

I hopped out. “Thanks for lunch,” I said and hitchhiked back to the office.

The bruises from Cain’s truck incident faded, but the crew’s perception of me had permanently shifted. From then on, they treated me differently. Whenever they wanted my suggestion about how to approach a problem, they’d mockingly ask, “What would Jesus do?”

One day, returning from the trailer with my lunch, after someone made a crack about my “inner stillness,” I decided to play along. The words of May’s mother echoed in my head, a reminder of another kind of faith.

“God is Love,” I said, just to get a rise, “and he who abides in love, abides in God.”

Then I sat on a boulder and crossed my legs in the lotus position to eat my lunch.

“Look, ladies, it’s Buddha,” one of the crew called out.

I flung my hands into the air, and within moments seagulls swooped down and hovered around me like angels. The same birds I’d watched for months circling the site, waiting for workers’ scraps, now created my miracle.

“What the fuck,” they said, incredulous.

Saying nothing, I hid my sandwich, got up, and walked away in smug silence.

Winter ended late that year, prolonging the kind of cold that could freeze flesh in minutes. The hexagonal church was nearly complete except for one crucial connection. The last massive beam needed to be secured where five others met, sixty feet above the frozen ground. A rented cherry picker, which had been used for the other five connections, had sat idle for days, waiting for the weather to warm. Without the roof secured, the whole job stalled.

The crew stood around the kerosene heater, breath freezing in clouds, no one willing to attempt the final pin placement. The same instinct that had driven me through bee-filled goldenrod now pushed me forward.

“Let me try,” I said.

We all worked wearing hooded coveralls, but even with my parka underneath and mitten-covered gloved hands, I never imagined cold, wind, or height like that. As Abel lifted me skyward in the swaying bucket, the arctic wind found every gap in my clothing. The last beam rested in place above me, waiting. I had the pin which simply needed to be banged in, but by the time I reached the top, my face had gone numb and my fingers had turned to wood. The sledgehammer felt impossible to grip. Far below, the crew had become tiny specks in the vast white landscape.

The wind howled through the exposed beams, drowning out any chance of communication. When I waved my arms to be taken down, the bucket didn’t move. The cherry picker must have stalled, I thought. With no reason to stand and wait in the punishing cold, I crouched in the bucket, my thoughts turning absurd as my body temperature dropped. None of this would’ve happened if only I’d been attracted to May’s mother’s hard boobs.

After what felt like at least a half hour but was “only about five minutes,” they said, the bucket bounced back to life and brought me down.

“What the fuck happened?” I asked, trying to keep a kerosene heater from igniting my coveralls.

“What do you mean?” Abel said. “How did you get it started?”

Then Abel told me there was nothing wrong with the cherry picker.

The revelation hit harder than the cold. All my miracles – the lottery tickets, the seagulls, even my brief moments of grace with Karen – had been elaborate performances for an audience that didn’t exist. I tossed my hard hat out the window on my way home, bought a six-pack of beer, and began drinking it all. Achingly disappointed in everything and everyone, especially myself, acts of kindness abruptly ended, and I became despondent. Karen tended to me and everything else, waiting patiently for my resurrection, but like a depressed daffodil, I didn’t emerge from the covers till spring.

My next job was driving a truck delivering tropical foliage plants for a northern greenhouse, and I never bought lottery tickets again.