THE HAMMER’S NOT FOR THAT

By Ben Greenman / @2019

From forthcoming collection of stories, as yet untitled

Timothy keeps a hammer in a box under his bed. Where are the nails? There are no nails. The hammer’s not for that, as he’ll explain to anyone who will listen. Almost no one will listen, so he says it louder and louder. “The hammer’s not for that. The hammer’s not for that! The hammer’s not for that!!” His mom hears him the third time and comes into the room. “Put that away,” she says. He hadn’t meant for her to hear him, even at his loudest. Her voice is not loud. It’s soft, like his voice was the first time he said the hammer wasn’t for that. He puts the hammer away, somewhat red-faced now. His mom goes out of the room, and the second the door closes he wonders if she was real. How do you know for sure if a person is real if you can’t see them? He knows the hammer is real. He cannot see it because the box is closed, but he remembers it. He cannot un-remember it. He builds back the reality of his mom from that example. He slides the box with the hammer under his bed. Then he reaches over his head to the small bookshelf that has been above his bed since it was a crib and grabs a comic book. He hates regular books. They are for kids who are dorks and jerks, dumb kids who act smart. He is a smart kid who acts dumb, and he feels the rightness of that decision on every page of the comic book. Such freedom! Such comfort! Whatever expectations others might have of him, he can just smash them flat. The hammer’s not for that either.

He cannot sleep. He leans over the side of his bed, slides out the box, and looks at it. He lives in his room most of the time, except when he’s living in the basement where the television is, or at school where other kids also live for part of every weekday, or at a restaurant, or at the supermarket with his mom, or along the side of the road where he sometimes stands and looks for his father’s car. This requires special planning, especially where worrying is concerned. If it is a rainy day, he must let the water fall into him without worrying about catching a cold. (But rain causes colds, doesn’t it?) If it is a sunny day, he must squint against the light without worrying that it is putting cancer in his skin. (But the sun is one of cancer’s main suppliers, isn’t it?) If he does not know whether the day will be sunny or rainy, he must venture out onto the sidewalk and walk along the road without worrying if it will eventually be a cold day, or a hot day, or a windy day, or a day with locusts or hail or plague. He has read about all these things in the Bible. He found one in the nightstand on his mother’s side of the bed when he slept there for a month or so. He had been under the impression that the Bible was supposed to be a book of comfort. He feels ripped off. His mother still keeps that Bible there. Or so she says. She’s smart enough to know what’s really in it, so probably she’s put it away, or moved it to the nightstand on his father’s side of the bed, which is where she slept for a month or so. Maybe on her side now she keeps comic books. Good old mom. He smiles. He’s out on the side of the road, looking for his father’s car. He’s not smiling.  

His father’s car is red. Or is it blue? Whatever color it is, that’s the color it was the last time he saw it, which is the last time he saw his father. There had been discussion of anger, his father’s anger, and his mother had been clear that she could not put up with it for much longer. She swerved at the end of a long speech. “Can not?” she said. “Will not.” Then she repeated herself with increasing volume. “Will not! Will not!!” His father stood. “Well,” he said. Or “Well, then.” Or, “Oh.” Whatever he said, it was the last thing he said. His voice was not raised. His anger, often the only thing about him, had dissipated. He walked out to his red or blue car and drove away. A week later, Timothy received a postcard. He heard his father’s voice when he read it. There was still no anger in it, though he could not make sense of the tone he heard in his head. “I could not, for many reasons, stay,” the postcard—his father—said. “But going has made a failure of me in ways that can never be reversed, not even if I reverse the going.” The second “g” in going was flattened against the right wall of the postcard. This Timothy remembered more clearly than any red or blue or “Well” or “Oh,” even though he had ripped the postcard into a million pieces, burned it, mixed water into the ashes, poured the ashy water into the dirt outside of his bedroom window, covered it with a board, and then nailed the board into the earth. That’s what the hammer was for. 

He will not sleep tonight, and maybe not ever. He takes the box off the floor and lifts it onto his bed. He takes the hammer out of the box and weighs it in his hand. The hammer has a flat snout that he used to drive the nails through the board and down into the earth. Where are the nails? They are outside. He turns the hammer over. It also has a claw. He knows that this can be used to pry the nails from the board. That’s a start. Then he will lift the board away from the earth, separate the ashy water from the dirt, divide the ash from the water, reverse the fire until the postcard is in not ashes but pieces, reverse the ripping until it is not in pieces but whole. The Bible has resurrection in it, where death reverses into life. When he read it in his parents’ bed, it was one of the only parts that comforted him. He can use that to make comfort now. “Can?” he says. “Will!” He realizes immediately that he has spoken too loudly. He cannot unsay what he has said but he can re-say it, and he does, repeating it more and more softly, imagining his words getting smaller like in a comic book. He feels the lightness of them as they shrink. What silence! What innocence! He weighs the hammer in his hand again. He’ll pry out the nails. He’ll bring the postcard back to life, back from ash, back from pieces, and understand it fully and reply to it and his father will reply to his reply, not with another postcard but in person, driving his car back onto the street, turning into the driveway, hugging him, forgiving him. When he thinks about it, he doesn’t even worry about the weather. He’ll pry out the nails. The hammer’s for that.