The Bureau

The Leaving | Chapter One

They brought it on a Tuesday, two men in a box truck, and set it down in the middle of my shop floor, and for the rest of that fall I walked around it.

I had not asked for it. The younger one had a clipboard and a place for me to sign and a page from the estate I read only as far as the line that said the bureau was to come to me. They carried it like men carrying a thing they have been told is valuable and can feel in their backs is only old, tilting it through the door and catching the rear corner on the jamb. I told them to mind the left foot. They minded it after. Then the truck backed around in the yard and went off toward the causeway, and the shop was quiet, and the thing stood where the light from the river window fell on it.

Marian had been dead three weeks.

She had lived four doors up the street, in the gray house with the lilac that came over the fence onto the sidewalk so that in June you walked through it. For a long time she had been the person who came and sat in my shop. Late in the day, mostly, when the light was going. There was a Windsor by the stove with an arm I had spliced years back, and that was hers, and she would sit in it with a mug of the coffee I keep going and watch me work and not need me to talk. She did not ask much of anyone. She asked less of me than I would have given, which is its own kind of arrangement and suited us both. When she stopped coming I heard it from the man at the post office before I heard it any other way.

The letter from the estate said she had wanted me to have the bureau because I was the only one she knew who could keep it from going to pieces. That was the phrase, keep it from going to pieces, and it was true that there was no one else on the street who could, and true also that she had sat in that Windsor enough years to know I would not be able to leave a savable thing as it was. She was not a sentimental woman. She was a thorough one.

It was a tall bureau of four graduated drawers, the kind a farm would have had in a back bedroom, and it had been made by hand and a long time ago. The case was white pine. The drawer fronts were a figured maple that the old shellac had carried down over the years to the color of dark honey, near black in the corners where hands never went. Whoever built it had cut the dovetails by hand, and you could still see the scribe line they had worked to, faint under the finish, one line gauged across the end of each board and the saw brought down to it and stopped. It stood on ogee bracket feet. Three of the feet were the feet it was born with. The fourth was not. The fourth had been built back up by somebody with a piece of the wrong wood, poplar where the rest was pine, and three screws driven in from the outside, the heads countersunk and puttied and the putty gone its own color over time. It was the kind of repair a family makes to keep a thing standing, not the kind a shop makes to set it right.

The rest of it was what a hundred years and more will do. The case had racked out of square, so the whole piece leaned a degree off true and the drawers no longer sat flush in their openings. The top carried a shrinkage check running most of its length, a crack the board had opened in itself, season by season, giving up its moisture in dry winter rooms. The backboards were riven and not sawn, split out of the log with a froe and left rough on the inside face, and the up-and-down marks of a sash saw stood on the one board that had been sawn, which told me the age of it before anything else did. Older than the country pieces people usually bring me. The boards had shrunk apart until there were gaps between them you could lay two fingers in, and through the gaps you saw the boards of my own wall. When I rocked it, something shifted inside the case, low and loose, and I knew without looking that the glue blocks had let go and were lying in the bottom, the little triangles of pine that hold a carcase square, dropped off their joints when the hide glue gave up the last of its hold.

The brasses were not all the brasses it came with. Two were the right age, cast and a little crude, and two were newer, matched as near as someone could match them out of a hardware-house catalog, and the difference stood plain once you had seen it. Below each pull the drawer fronts were worn pale, where a hundred years of thumbs had gone in to take the weight, the wood there rubbed to satin and faintly hollowed, the wear a stone doorstep takes under one step taken ten thousand times. I read a piece by its wear before I read it any other way. The wear is the part no one made on purpose. It is the truest thing the wood will tell you, which work it was put to and for how long and by how many hands. It will not tell you why the work was done, or why it stopped. The wear is the doing and not the reason.

I pulled the top drawer to feel how it traveled. It came out heavy and dragging, dropped at the nose, because the runners had worn to a dish and the drawer was riding on wood that was no longer there. The smell came with it. Old glue first, and dust, and under those the dry sweetness of a place mice had been into, and under that a smell I can only call the smell of having been shut a long time. The drawer weighed in my two hands as though the years were in the wood and not just on it. I worked it back into its opening, where it caught and stuck and then went home, and I stood with the flat of my hand on the top of the thing for a while. Then I turned off the lights and went home.

It sat there from October past the new year.

There was no shortage of reasons. Hide glue wants warmth and a little damp to go off as it should, and my shop in November is neither. A job like this one wanted to come clean apart, every joint of the case knocked down and squared and built back true, and there was no doing that in a corner with three other jobs on the bench. I told the estate’s man I would have it over the winter. I told myself I was waiting on a board of maple wide enough and figured enough to patch the worn drawer fronts, and then the board came in and I stood it against the wall, and I let it stand there too. The estate’s man called the shop once, near Thanksgiving, to ask after it, and I told him these things take the time they take and cannot be hurried in the cold, which was true, and was not the whole of why it was still standing against the wall.

Work came and went around it. I reglued a set of six kitchen chairs for a family up in Ipswich and they came and got them and paid me in a check and a pie. I made a new top for a tilt-top table whose old one had warped past saving, and matched the color close enough that you would have to be told. In December a young couple brought in a cradle, oak, plain, that had been the husband’s when he was born and his father’s before him, and a rocker had split through, and they wanted it sound by February. I steamed a new rocker and bent it to the old one’s line and set it, and they came and carried it out to the back of their car with the woman already showing, and they were glad of it. I have done a great deal of that kind of work over the years. People bring me the things they mean to hand down. I keep them in repair and they carry them on.

The bureau stood through all of it against the back wall, leaning its one degree, and I would catch it at the edge of my eye while I was at the bench on something else. Some evenings after I had locked the door I stood in front of it with the lights still burning. I did not touch it. I looked at the foot that was wrong and the top that had opened and the daylight gaps in the back, and I let myself see the whole of the job, every step of it to the end, as you have to see it before you can pick up the first tool. Then I would shut off the lights. The Windsor by the stove sat where it had always sat. I had not moved it.

Marian would have had something to say about it standing there so long against the wall. She had no eye for furniture. She called the maple oak, and the pine whatever came to her, and I never set her right, because being set right was not what she came for. She came for the warm off the stove and the racket of the tools and a place to sit at the end of the day that asked nothing back. One evening late she sat and watched me bend a chair rail in the steam box, the wood coming round slow against the form, and said it was a shame to work a thing that hard only to be sat on. She stayed to see would the bend hold, and when it held she said nothing, which from her was the nearest to praise she came. It was about the most she ever gave a piece of mine, and she gave that grudging. I had let her have that and not a great deal else. While she was alive to come and sit, it had seemed like enough.

The marsh went brown and then it went gray. The tide came up the river twice a day and went out and left the flats steaming in the cold, and the antiques shops on the main road put their lights on early, and the dark came down by half past four. I ate standing up, mostly, and listened to the radio, and the work I had was enough to fill the days and not quite enough to fill them.

It was sometime after New Year’s, a flat cold day with the tide out and the marsh frozen gray at its edges and the light coming low and white off the flats, that I cleared the bench.

I do not know why that day and not another. I had said the winter, and the winter was going by. I took the chair I had glued up off the bench and set it on the floor to wait its turn. I swept the bench down and wiped it with a rag and laid out the things I would want, the mallet and the clamping blocks and the seam knife and the hot pot for the glue, in the order I would want to reach for them. Then I walked the bureau over from the wall, corner to corner as the two men had, and set it in the good light by the river window where I could get clear around it.

It had outlasted everyone whose hands had worn the runners down to a dish, and it had come down the years and down the street to my shop, and now it stood in the morning light and waited, the way wood waits, which is to say with no waiting in it at all.

I stood and looked at it a while longer. Then I picked up the seam knife and got down on one knee to the base of it, where the wrong foot was, and started in.