Carmen Colson said, “No, but we have a car and a pickup truck and I don’t see a garage anywhere.”
They were standing on the side porch off the kitchen, toward the rear of the two-story Dutch Colonial. The real estate man said, well, it didn’t have a garage, but there was a marvelous old chickenhouse out there. See it? Carmen’s husband, Wayne, said, “Jesus, look at that!” Not meaning the chickenhouse. There was a whitetail doe standing way back against the tree line, off beyond a field growing wild. As soon as he said it Carmen knew they were going to buy the place. It didn’t matter the front hall was bigger than the sitting room, the closets were tiny and wasps were living upstairs in the bedrooms. There were deer on the property. Twenty acres counting the field that ran nearly a quarter of a mile from the house to the tree line and all the rest woods connecting to other woods the real estate man said, you bet, were full of deer.
Carmen said to her husband, after, “Hon, I was born in a house newer than that one.” At this time five years ago they’d been living in one a lot newer, too, a crackerbox ranch in Sterling Heights, ever since they got married.
Wayne said sure, it was old, but look at its possibilities. Knock out a wall here and there, do a little remodeling, the kind of work he could handle, no problem. Wayne said, “You sit in that back bedroom window upstairs. It’s like looking out a deer blind.”
Their only child, Matthew Colson, transferred to Algonac High, where he starred three years as a wide receiver, power forward and third baseman for the Muskrats, won nine varsity letters, graduated, joined the U.S. Navy and was now serving aboard a nuclear carrier, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, in the Pacific. The front hall was still bigger than the sitting room and the closets tiny; but the wasps were gone from upstairs, Carmen had removed all the paint from the woodwork and they now had a two-car garage. In one half of it was Wayne’s sixteen-foot aluminum fishing boat on a trailer. Their Oldsmobile Cutlass went in the other half, because Carmen got home from work a good hour before Wayne’s Dodge Ram pickup would pull into the drive. Wayne was an ironworker and ironworkers stopped to have a few once they came down off the structure.
Carmen’s dad, now retired and living in Florida, had been an ironworker. Her parents were divorced when she was seventeen, the same year she graduated from high school a straight-A student and her dad took her to the Ironworkers Local 25 picnic. This was where she met Wayne Colson, a young apprentice they called Cowboy, blond-haired and tan wearing just athletic shorts and work shoes, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. She watched him look over his bare shoulder at her as he put on his gloves, getting ready for the column-climbing contest. It was where they used just their hands and feet to go straight up a ten-inch flanged beam staked to the ground and held in place by a crane. Carmen watched Wayne Colson climb that thirty-five-foot beam like it was a stepladder and fell in love as he came sliding down the flange in seven seconds flat, muscles tensed in his arms and back, and looked over at her again.
That summer Carmen would borrow the car, drop her mom off at Michigan Bell, where she worked as a telephone operator, then drive forty miles to happen by the building site where Wayne was working. She could pick him out—standing up there on that skeleton of red iron, shirt off, hard hat on backward, God, maybe nine or ten stories in the air—because once he spotted the car he’d wave. Then he’d stand on one foot on that narrow beam, the other foot out behind him, his hand flat above his eyes in kind of an Indian pose and she’d just about have a heart attack. Sundays they’d go for a ride and he’d show her office buildings in Southfield he’d bolted up, Carmen imagining him climbing columns, walking beams, fooling around way up there in the air. Wasn’t he ever scared? Wayne told her there was no difference between being up forty feet or four hundred; go off from either height it would kill you. If you had to fall, he told her, try to do it inside the structure, because they decked in every other floor as they bolted up. But either way, falling inside or out, it was called “going in the hole.” Wayne let seventeen-year-old Carmen heft his tools, his spud wrench, his sleever bar, his bull pin, the sledge he called a beater they used for driving the bull pin to line up bolt holes that weren’t centered. He buckled his tool belt around her slim hips and she could barely move with the weight of it. He handed her a yo-yo, the thirty-five-pound impact wrench they used for bolting up, and Carmen had to tense her muscles to hold it. He told her, hey, she was pretty strong, and said, “Don’t ever get hit on the head with one of these, some Joe happens to drop it.” He told her a Joe was an ironworker who couldn’t hack it. If you were in the trade and your name was Joe you’d better change it. He told her an apprentice was referred to as a punk. If a journeyman called you that, it wasn’t anything to get uptight about. He told her she was the best-looking girl he’d ever met in his entire life. She smelled so good, he loved to stick his nose in her dark-brown hair. He’d tell her he wanted to marry her, the sooner the better, and Carmen would get goose bumps.
Her mom, Lenore, said, “You’re crazy to even think about marrying an ironworker.” Carmen said, well, you did. Her mom said, “And I got rid of him, too, soon as you were of age. Ironworkers drink. They don’t come home from work, they stop off. Don’t you remember anything growing up? Us two eating alone? Doesn’t Wayne drink? If he doesn’t, they’ll throw him out of the local.”
Wayne said to Carmen, “Well, sure ironworkers drink. So do painters, glaziers, electricians, any trade I know of the guys drink. What’s wrong with that?”
Lenore said, “You are a lovely young girl with your whole life ahead of you. You’re smart as a whip, you got all A’s in school. You could go on to college and become a computer programmer. You keep seeing that ironworker he’ll talk you into doing things you’ll be sorry for. You’ll get pregnant sure as hell and then you’ll have to get married.”
Wayne said, “I would never make you do anything you don’t want to,” giving Carmen a wink.
Lenore said, “A girl as attractive as you, with your cute figure, can do better than an ironworker, believe me. You know what’s going to happen? You’ll be stuck in a house full of babies while he’s out having a good time with the boys. Once you’re married you’ll never see him.”
Wayne said, “What do I do? I go fishing once in a while, deer hunting in November. I’m in a softball league but you come to the games, and I bowl, yeah, but that’s all. No more than what other guys do.”
Lenore said, “At least live in Port Huron, so I can be nearby when you need company, ’cause you’re gonna.”
Carmen had taken a course in handwriting analysis, A Guide to Character and Personality, at the Y when she was a senior in high school. One evening in a bar, just to double-check her own judgment, she asked Wayne to write something, for instance about the job he was working on, and she’d analyze it. He didn’t even hesitate. She watched as he wrote fairly fast with a moderate right-handed slant, forming large letters of uniform size. Carmen was relieved to tell him his writing showed he was reliable, enthusiastic and sociable—Wayne nodding—and that his big middle zone indicated the size of his ego, but was probably necessary for anyone who did structural work. She told him she liked his upper-zone dynamics, the way he crossed his t, putting the bar above the stem, pretty sure it meant he was witty in a satirical kind of way. The even pressure of his writing showed he had a strong will and that when he was told what to do it had better make sense. She said uneven pressure meant emotional instability. Wayne said, “Or your pen’s running out of ink.”