When my father called us to that plot of land in Bramwell, West Virginia, we came. From Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles and Brooklyn, we came. Like lambs to the slaughter, we came.
As children, we dressed for dinner in suits and ties, pale pink dresses for me.
“This is how the Roosevelts dined,” he would say, surveying the four bowed blond heads at his altar.
My father was a man of Joyce and Proust, of history and tradition. He could recite the classics word for word and explain how rocket engines worked. Every morning he rose before dawn and padded to his study to write essays on a yellow steno pad with Ticonderoga pencils he selected from a long line of sharpened points. When the points were dulled and the steno pads full, he typed them on a Selectric typewriter and mailed them to editors who never responded.
Outside there was a modern world of cell phones and big screens, and my father wanted none of it. Within the walls of his home, we felt like prehistoric beetles trapped for an eternity in amber; every night we read our books before a woodburning fire, ignoring the modern thermostat beside it.
At 38, I still could not shake the childish belief that my father knew everything. Like a potter at a wheel, he had shaped my brothers and me—stand up straight, take pride in work, Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”
***
In the airport, I spotted my brothers immediately, their heads rising above the crowds like driftwood on an undulating sea. “You are of pure Dutch stock,” my father used to say, as if our hair and height were not a proverbial string-around-the-finger of our heritage.
A journalist from Dallas, an investment banker from Brooklyn, a statistician from Denver, we met at the baggage claim in Terminal 3 because our father had called us, the tinny ring of the phone no different from the golden bell that summoned us to dinner in our childhood.
John, the oldest, spoke first.
“I don’t know the first thing about building a log cabin.”
“I only took a week off work,” said Adam, rolling his eyes and shouldering his bag.
“Let’s just take an Uber,” John was already opening the app. “It’s a few hours away. We can split the fare.”
My father had called us to a 7-acre plot about 15 miles west of a 400-person town in West Virginia, a five-hour drive from Montgomery County, Maryland, where we grew up. On the phone, he had been cordial, asking about my business and my health. I was reading tarot cards for a living, not because I believed in them, but because my clients did, and because my rent on El Segundo Boulevard was $950 a month, and a reading cost $115 an hour. My father rarely called, so I stayed on the line until I heard a long sigh accompanied by the creak of a chair as he announced, “I’d like you to help your brothers build me a log cabin.”
He spoke of hard work and not taking short cuts, of the importance of nature and the need for solitude. A log cabin in the woods was a dream of his, like Thoreau, he told me, but he would only be satisfied if he built it with his own hands, like Thoreau, he repeated. I had to move money out of my savings to book the ticket: Eight of Swords, feeling trapped and out of options.
In the car, we talked politics and I asked about my brothers’ wives. As we pulled down the dirt path that could hardly be called a driveway, Daniel, closest in age to me and the brother who had strayed furthest from the flock—a cocktail-drinking investment banker—ventured, “Maybe he has cancer.”
We digested this possibility in silence. In the seat behind Daniel, my Facebook wouldn’t load, and I suddenly grew aggravated that my father, true to his nature, found land with no cell phone service.
“F**k,” I heard from a few seats over, and I knew that John had come to the same realization fruitlessly reloading his e-mail.
He didn’t have cancer. He had red cedars, two chain saws and a rented stump grinder. He was standing in the middle of a small clearing, squinting as we pulled up. My father was tall and fat, with a grizzled beard and a bald head. In his later years, he had relaxed the formal attire he donned in our childhood and had turned to brown corduroy pants hitched up by a pair of navy-blue suspenders slung on either side of his belly.
My brothers climbed out of the car like drips from a leaky faucet, each one hovering in the doorway to survey the clearing before dropping onto the needled ground. The last to emerge, I knew only that what I was seeing was not what I had expected.
“I thought he would have ordered a kit or something,” I heard someone mutter, and I realized that I, too, was expecting something more than a clearing and a chainsaw. When my father had called to ask me to help him build a log cabin, I didn’t actually expect to have to build one. Not like this.
My father, smiling, rushed forward with his hand extended. He shook my brothers’ hands and hugged me, asking how our travel went.
“We really should get started,” he broke off, just as Daniel was telling him about a long layover. “Don’t want to lose any daylight.”
“Do you know how to do this?” Adam asked.
My father ignored the question.
“Why don’t you set your tents up here?” he said instead, pointing to his blue and gray single-person Coleman tent. Adam helped me erect my Walmart-brand one. I ripped the tags off and stashed them in my bag. When we were done, we had built a semi-circle village, a half-moon of fraternity nestled in the forest floor.
My father had brought a plastic picnic table, upon which he laid out a cabin floorplan, stenciled on yellow steno paper and a dog-eared book titled, How to Build a Log Cabin. He summoned us to the table, where we waited, expectantly. As children, my father had often arranged us in the same way, circled around him so that he could bestow some kind of knowledge upon us—the genus and phylum of a butterfly he had found, the ashy quality of a soil sample, a notable passage in a book he was reading, or a lesson on morality from Corinthians.
When I was younger, my father wielded the inevitability of adulthood like a foreign enemy for which we must train to outwit. Every lecture was dictated with urgency, as if it were his last chance to equip us with knowledge for that afterlife that followed childhood, the vast unknown that struck fear into my father’s heart, the fear that we would be inadequately prepared for life beyond his erudite wing.
We were grown now. I ran my own business. In adulthood, I seldom reached for the tools my father had so carefully crafted for me. I never needed to discuss Dostoyevsky at a dinner party or know the genus of a species. I did not want to learn how to build a cabin. In my mind, I flipped a tarot card. The Hierophant, “have faith that you are a master in the making.”
“First we need to fell the trees,” my father explained. “We’re looking for 30 to 40-foot pine trees. We’re looking for consistency in thickness.”
“How many trees?” John asked.
“I’ve estimated about 61.”
