T. Boyle - The Women

When he turned back round, the two men were still standing there patiently beside him, but Billy had removed his hat and held it down at his side, clutched in his good hand. “He’s equal with either hand, Mr. Wright,” Johnnie went on as if there had been no interruption, “—what they call ambi, uh, ambi—”

“Dextrous.”

“Yup, that’s right. That’s what he is. Hell, he’ll drive nails with a hammer in both hands, bang-bang-bang.”

The wagon slid back with an abrasive squeal and Ben Davis let out another skein of curses. The horses stood rigid. Very slowly, an inch at a time, the teamster eased them back until the weight of the wagon rocked the wheels free of the ruts and got them moving forward again.

“You think you can work with that arm?” Frank asked, addressing Billy for the first time.

Billy looked down at the toe of his boot and traced a pattern in the wet earth. “I can manage.” 157

It took a day or two to appreciate how much an understatement that was. Billy worked as hard as any two men — every time you looked up, there he was, the plaster arm flashing in the sun, hauling lumber, juggling tools, lending a hand wherever it was needed. He tossed the sling aside the first day and by the end of the week the cast seemed as much a natural extension of his body as the arm it contained and the strong sure hand and fingers sprouting from the end of it. Every saw cut he made and every nail he drove passed muster — left-handed, no less — and he worked with such an intensity of concentration it was hard to get him to sit down for lunch or even a coffee break and when he did sit down it wasn’t for long. He’d fidget and shuffle his feet and stare off across the yard to where the frame had begun to rise above the floor joists as if he could see the whole thing complete and wouldn’t rest till it was done. And he’d climb like an acrobat, his tool belt dangling in the air, the cast hooked over one stud while he hammered home another. He was the first one there in the morning and the last to leave at night, and after a while Frank asked him if his wife didn’t miss him, and Billy, looking down at the toe of his shoe rotating in the sawdust, said, “Not much. I guess.”

By the end of the month, there were all sorts of people coming round to look at the place — Frank’s bungalow, they were calling it — and Frank tried to accommodate them all because he was going to have to live here amongst them and, of course, his reputation had preceded him. He supposed they expected him to breathe fire and speak with a cloven tongue after what the newspapers had said about him and certainly the local farmers and their wives had come to sit in judgment, but they would have reacted the same no matter who was buying up two hundred acres in their midst and putting up a house and barn and expecting to farm the place and make a living out of it. That he was one of the Lloyd Joneses, Anna’s boy, the nephew of James and Jenkin and the rest, cut him no slack. If anything, it made matters worse because they were going to hold him to a higher standard — he could see it in their eyes as he squired one hidebound old Welsh farmer after another round the place, explaining as patiently as he could the theory behind the design and painting the hills full of orchards and gardens and pastures. And what did they have to say once he’d walked them through the place and expended all the breath he could draw? “Awful big for just your mother, ain’t it?” And: “Must be costin’ a fortune.”

Snooping. Endless snooping. He was a public figure and this was a public undertaking, no matter how much he tried to keep it quiet. The workmen went home to their wives at night. They talked at the lumberyard, at the quarry, at the feed store, the grocer’s and the church. The truth was that the whole community knew what he was up to whether he liked it or not and though no one mentioned Mamah — no one would dare — the rumor of her settled over the place in a vast glutinous web spun by every busybody in the county and all of them tugging simultaneously at the threads. It was only a matter of time before the first reporter came slinking around.

He happened to be beneath the house, in the basement room where the boiler would be set in place to provide hot water and steam heat for the winter, listening to the metronomic tap-tap-tap of Billy Weston’s hammer just above him and giving the place a final look-over, when the moment came. Footsteps on the floor. A man’s voice insinuating itself in the interregna between the beats of the hammer. “Hello, there. . Say, hello !”

The hammer paused. “Yeah?”

“I’m just here to, well, I’m from the Trib . Name’s Adler. You work here, for Wright?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s a pretty elaborate place, isn’t it? Kind of a bohemian design, wouldn’t you say? What would you call this, modern architecture, is that it?”

No response. Frank could hear the hammers of the other carpenters at work, a sound as multi-voiced and steady as a driving rain. There was the smell of the earth, of the stone, of boards fresh-cut.

“Seems like Wright has big plans for the place.” A pause. “He ever mention the Cheney woman?”

No response.

“But if he did, you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”

“Can’t say as I would.”

“Well, what’s it cost, you think? So far, I mean? Must be a pretty fair piece of change.” Silence. Banging aloft. “I don’t guess I’ve ever seen so much stone for one little house — or such a mob of workmen. You’d think he was building one of those Chicago skyscrapers here, wouldn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t think that, not especially.”

“What would you think then?”

There was another silence, then the steady beat of Billy Weston’s hammer, speaking for him: tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.

Frank never spoke with the man — no one did, as far as he knew. And if he found anybody opening his mouth — and he let them all know it, from Ben Davis and Johnnie Vaughn right on down to the casual laborers hired to haul things up the hill and fetch on demand — then that man would be looking for another job. No excuses. He expected loyalty, absolute and unwavering, and loyalty meant keeping your mouth shut, just like Billy Weston. Still — and it goaded him the way they goaded the Brahma bulls in the chute at the rodeo — the newspaper came out the next day with a page-one story under the header ARCHITECT WRIGHT BUILDING LOVE NEST FOR MRS. CHENEY.

It always amazed him how fast the days swept by when a job was going right, the mornings coming sweet and hot, the sun arching overhead by degrees to bake them all the color of mulattoes, thunderstorms rolling in of a late afternoon to drench the studs and make soup of the earth and all the while the house fleshing out over its ribs and growing into the snug low roofs and cantilevered eaves that would hang thick with icicles once winter came. He’d never needed much sleep to sustain him — five or six hours a night and leave the rest to the slugabeds — and he found himself up at first light, pacing the hillside, getting the feel and the smell of the place, eager to get going and Sundays off a kind of deprivation. He listened to the crows, the jays, the orioles, bent to the earth and sifted it through his fingers, picturing the flower gardens he’d plant in the spring, the cherries and peaches and apples, asparagus, rhubarb, melons.

As often as not Billy Weston was there to greet him with a laconic “Mornin’,” his stoop-shouldered figure emerging from the mist of the fields, the cast gone now and his right arm tanning and strengthening under the sun, the tool belt dangling from his left hand and his hat cocked down over his spectacles. They talked quietly over coffee and fresh-baked rolls until the others began to file in — or he talked and Billy listened — and it was the best sort of talk, the kind that freed his mind to see, and it wasn’t long before Billy began to see too. Taliesin was rising and it wasn’t just for him and his mother and Mamah but for Billy and all the rest of the community, a thing of beauty that would tip the balance sheet of the great buildings of the world and make people line up and marvel for years to come. He looked out over the misted fields and felt his own genius wrap round him like a cloak. He was the world’s greatest architect. He was. 158