A Spool of Blue Thread

“Li

“It is?”

“Or varnished, at least. It’s finished. This is how it’s going to be.”

“Oh, Junie, can’t we paint it blue? Please? I think how best to describe that blue is ‘sky blue,’ but by that I mean a real sky, a deep-blue summer sky. Not powder blue or aqua blue or pale blue, but more of a, how do you say—”

“Swedish,” Junior said through set teeth.

“What?”

“It was Swedish blue; you had it right the first time. I know because every goddamn house in Spruce Pine had Swedish-blue porch furniture. You’d think they’d passed a law or something. It was a common shade. It was common and low-class.”

Li

The main thing he needed to do before they moved in was add a back porch. All the house had now was a little concrete stoop — one of the few battles with the Brills that Junior had lost, although he had pointed out to them repeatedly that their architect had provided no space for the jumble of normal life, the snow boots and catchers’ masks and hockey sticks and wet umbrellas.

Junior always made a spitting sound when someone mentioned architects.

He didn’t have men to spare these days because of the war. Two of them had enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, and one had gone to work at the Sparrows Point Shipyard, and a couple more had been drafted. So what he did, he took Dodd and Cary off the Adams job and set them to roughing out the porch, after which he finished the rest on his own. He went over there in the evenings, mostly, using the last of the natural light for the outside work and after that moving inside (the porch was enclosed at one end) to continue under the glare of the ceiling fixture his electrician had installed.

He liked working by himself. Most of his men, he suspected — or the younger ones, at least — found him stern and forbidding. He didn’t set them straight. They’d be talking woman troubles and trading tales of weekend binges, but the instant he showed himself they would shut up, and inwardly he would smile because little did they know. But it was best they never found out. He still did some hands-on work; he wasn’t too proud for that, but generally he did it off in some separate room — cutting dadoes, say, while the rest of them were framing an addition. They’d be gossiping and joking and teasing one another, but Junior (usually so talkative) worked in silence. In his head, a tune often played without his deciding which one—“You Are My Sunshine” for one task, say, and “Blueberry Hill” for another — and his work would fall into the tempo of the song. One long week, installing a complicated staircase, he found himself stuck with “White Cliffs of Dover” and he thought he would never finish, he was moving so slowly and mournfully. Although it did turn out to be a very well made staircase. Oh, there was nothing like the pleasure of a job done right — seeing how tidily a tenon fit into a mortise, or how the proper-size shim, properly shaved, properly tapped into place, could turn a joint nearly seamless.

A couple of days after he took Li

The porch swing sat next to the driveway, resting on a drop cloth.

And it was blue.

Oh, God, an awful blue, a boring, no-account, neither-here-nor-there Swedish blue. It was such a shock that he had a moment when he wondered if he was hallucinating, experiencing some taunting flash of vision from his youth. He gave a kind of moan. He slammed the truck door shut behind him and walked over to the swing. Blue, all right. He bent to set a finger on one armrest and it came away tacky, which was no surprise because up close, he could smell the fresh paint.

He looked around quickly, half sensing he was being watched. Someone was lurking in the shadows and watching him and laughing. But no, he was alone.

He had the key out of his pocket before he realized the back door was already open. “Li

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Junior asked him.

Dodd spun around.

“Did you paint that swing?” Junior asked him.

“Why, yes, Junior.”

“What for? Who told you you could do that?”

Dodd was a very pale, bald-headed man with whitish-blond eyebrows and lashes, but now he turned a deep red and his eyelids grew so pink that he looked teary. He said, “Li

“Li

“Did you not know about it?”

“Where did you see Li

“She called me on the phone last night. Asked if I would pick up a bucket of Swedish-blue high-gloss and paint the porch swing for her. I thought you knew about it.”

“You thought I’d hunt down solid cherry, and pay an arm and a leg for it, and put Eugene to work varnishing it in a shade to look right with the porch floor, and then have you slop blue paint on it.”

“Well, I didn’t know. I figured: women. You know?” And Dodd spread his hands, still holding the brush and the rag.

Junior forced himself to take a deep breath. “Right,” he said. “Women.” He chuckled and shook his head. “What’re you going to do with them? But listen,” he said, and he sobered. “Dodd. From now on, you take your orders from me. Understand?”

“I hear you, Junior. Sorry about that.”

Dodd still looked as if he were about to cry. Junior said, “Well, never mind. It’s fixable. Women!” he said again, and he gave another laugh and then turned and walked back out and shut the door behind him. He just needed a little time to get ahold of himself.

She was the bane of his existence. She was a millstone around his neck. That night back in ’31 when he went to collect her from the train station and found her waiting out front — her unevenly hemmed gray coat too skimpy for the Baltimore winter, her floppy, wide-brimmed felt hat so outdated that even Junior could tell — he’d had the incongruous thought that she was like mold on lumber. You think you’ve scrubbed it off but one day you see it’s crept back again.

He had considered not going to collect her. She had telephoned him at his boardinghouse, and when he heard that confounded “Junie?” (nobody else called him that) in her stringy high voice he’d known instantly who it was and his heart had sunk like a stone. He’d wanted to slam the earpiece onto the hook again. But he was caught. She had his landlady’s phone number. Lord only knew how she’d gotten it.

He said, “What.”

“It’s me! It’s Li

“What do you want?”

“I’m here in Baltimore, can you believe it? I’m at the railroad station! Could you come pick me up?”

“What for?”

There was the tiniest pause. Then, “What for?” she asked. All the bounce had gone out of her voice. “Please, Junie, I’m scared,” she said. “There’s a whole lot of colored folks here.”

“Colored folks won’t hurt you,” he said. (They didn’t have any colored back home.) “Just pretend you don’t see them.”

“What am I going to do, Junior? How am I going to find you? You have to come and get me.”

No, he did not have to come and get her. She didn’t have the least little claim on him. There was nothing between them. Or there was only the worst experience of his life between them.

But he was already admitting to himself that he couldn’t just leave her there. She’d be as helpless as a baby chick.