IN SUMMER THE boys and fathers worked with wood. The fathers made benches, porches, awnings, walks, steps, railings. He made toy boats. From a piece of pine one inch thick and four inches wide he would cut a ten-inch length, sawing one end to a point and tapering the other with a plane. For a second deck he would nail on a smaller piece of the same wood and make smokestacks from sections of broomstick cut at an angle to tilt backwards. If the boat was too high it capsized. Sometimes his brother made a boat for him, and sometimes he made a boat for a younger boy. Behind the general store were discarded wooden crates with one-by-two-inch frames; he and the other boys made guns from the frames by cutting off right-angle pieces with four-inch handles and eight-inch barrels. A rubber band, attached by a staple to the underside of the barrel, was drawn over the end and top of the barrel and fixed at the joint. An inch square of cardboard was inserted on top of the barrel, between the strands of the rubber band, which when released by thumb projected the cardboard fifteen or twenty feet. For a time linoleum squares were used, but abandoned when one, shot at close range, stuck in a boy’s back. His brother and father made shoe boxes, toolboxes, shelves; and replaced splintered, broken, and rotten wood in the bungalow. Among their tools were saws, planes, hammers, a hatchet, manual drills, and a Yankee screwdriver, which were oiled, cleaned, or sharpened, carefully stored, and frequently discussed. As the youngest he was allowed to scrape peeling paint from walls and ceilings and under his father’s or brother’s supervision apply new paint. In the city he made model airplanes from kits that provided plans, balsa wood parts, and glue that smelled like ether. His planes were never so successful as his brother’s: the struts dried crooked and lumps of hardened glue disfigured the joints. Into his first novel he put a comic character, based on his brother, who made boxes for inappropriate objects and then boxes for the boxes. One evening while he was working on the novel his brother had an emergency operation; immediately he excised the passages about the character in case his brother and he should die and the unfinished novel be published posthumously. He liked to take his daughters walking in parks and from fallen or new-cut branches make them walking sticks on which he carved designs by stripping the bark in spirals and crosses. He told his daughters the designs were secret American Indian motifs; he didn’t know his daughters believed him until a friend of his older daughter asked him one day which tribes the designs came from. His daughters collected the sticks until they became so numerous his wife threw them out. After he left his family he took over the studio of an artist friend, who showed him how to make bookcases, tables, and simple cabinets. He had trouble writing at the time and kept busy by buying slabs of oak and sanding them for table tops. He made more tables than he had room for and gave the excess like kittens to friends. When a table came out well he sometimes sat up drinking, waiting for the varnish to dry, and wished his father were alive to see it. He tried to elicit praise for his work from his brother, but his brother disapproved of his having left his family and of everything that had come of it; also by then his brother had a cellar workshop, was making replicas of antique furniture, and was not impressed. When he fell in love and took an apartment with the woman he made things of wood for her. She asked for a high triangular table to fit between and serve the refrigerator and stove. He made it with an inch-thick plywood top and four-by-four legs, and it wobbled. Later in a drunken rage, he will destroy it. Although he will stop working with wood he will like the feel and look of well-made doors, casements, floors, desks, and chairs and will be contemptuous of veneers and deceptively finished softwoods. He will develop a strong preference for things made of organic materials and be convinced—when he is drunk he will talk about it—that doormats, telephone poles, newspapers, tires, and such are blessed to have escaped being made of plastic. A friend will say, “How about people? They’re as organic as you get.” “They move,” he will say.