Spirit Level

Kacie England

Drywall is the least creative of the trades, my father said. He spoke in tight, lyrical quips: carpentry creates, electrical ignites. I listened, considering his verses as I fussed with the bookshelves I’d invited him over to inspect, shelves he made for me some time ago. The white built-ins were peppered with uneven holes, evidence of my impatience and inaptitude with a drill. Picture frames I’d tried to hang off the side of the unit sat askew, my recent poems printed and matted beside them. 

Though I’d seen my father wield his DeWalt thousands of times, my attempts made it clear some things weren’t hereditary. The fix-it gene had skipped me. For him, there was no explanation: he had phalange filaments, screw-driven bits that clicked somewhere into his soul. At Labor Day cookouts, my father would sit next to his mother, and I imagined her delivering him into the world with a metallic, motorized whine, bolts for baby toes. Both laborers in their own right: she constructed a boy, later a man who would build his own family in addition to commercial strip mall structures. 

I toyed with the bubble stick. Spirit level, my father corrected me, while he waxed poetic about the degrees of artistic merit assigned to each construction post. Masons create something foundational. HVAC techs keep you warm at night. My eyes followed the yellow air pocket as it bobbled back and forth inside the ruler. Back and forth, back and forth. A see-sawing motion that reminded me of the cadence of my father’s arm when he opened up our living room ceiling when I was eight. Our two-bedroom, barely-one-bathroom home sat on a gravel road the borough forgot about. A fixer-upper, the realtor called it. A good starter home. Though we all knew we’d end there. But as our family grew bigger, the house shrank. I watched with wide-eyed wonder as my father’s handsaw carved the large hole, sheetrock stardust collecting in my eyelashes. A new bedroom for you up here, baby. In a few cranks, something new that was never there now was. An alternate dimension, a purgatory between our dead-end home and the heavens. Years later, I’d travel to Italy. Cultural light-years away from the home on the dead-end street. A place my father said he’d always wanted to go. To try real pizza, he said. A tour guide would tell me about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, explaining that Michelangelo thought his rivals set him up to fail by commissioning him to paint the masterpiece. He considered himself a sculptor, not a muralist. The guide taught me a new word: fresco. When my father picked me up at the airport in his work truck, I told him he was a Renaissance man. He made things out of nothing, a universe anew from wet plaster and scaffolding.

Years before bookshelf-remedying or Rome, my father would take me to the job site when school was out and my mother had question fatigue. Stop asking me about words in the Farmer’s Almanac, she’d plead. Precocity earned me a two-way ticket to Hard Hat USA. I’d spend a 10-hour shift with my father, illegally steering the forklift when his coworkers were on lunch, squealing from the adrenaline spike of a telehandler tether-ride. In an unfinished corner of the build, I would set up my own workshop: sparkle gel pens, diaries with loose pages. Drywall powder settled in the bends of my journal, glittered asbestos embellishing my acrostic poems. I was working with a new word. GYPSUM BOARD, he said in between heavy breaths, hoisting the sheet up onto the framing. It’s fire-resistant. Makes the walls safe. With the panels in place, it was time to mud, a process that seemed never-ending. A draft that always needed refinement, a painting that required more lacquer. 

I studied the way my father teetered on aluminum drywall stilts. His putty knife moved in syncopated, measured brush strokes. Swirls of plaster slathered onto the sheetrock like acrylic on canvas. One coat dry. Wait. Reapply. Over and over and over. Most of the time, it looked like he was floating. Like one of those acrobats with big, billowy pants over circus stilts. Bouncing from wall to wall, applying the thick, white paste over seams, fasteners, and corners. Every so often, I’d peek up from my notebook to see his knees buckle underneath the stilt straps, a wobble pushed through in the final mudding rounds. Looking back, his teetering foreshadowed the need for a knee replacement years later. The one he still can’t afford. I got stuck on the letter “U” in my GYPSUM BOARD poem. I was pleased when I finally settled on ​​UNYIELDING.

And done, he said, straightening the frame. We stepped back in tandem, admiring the spackled-over holes and re-painted panels. He hung my poems in a vertical line on the side of the bookshelf—just how I wanted them, in the order I asked for. If I could build bookcases or tables or fireplace mantels all day. Now that’s an art, a real art, he said. I watched as he studied the shelves, knocking and shaking the corners. Any bastard can throw up some board. 

He moved his hands through the stacks, pulling out titles, flipping through pages. He asked What’s this one about? and What you make of this line? Questions of syntax and diction and craft. Inquiries posed from an artist to a poet.

Kacie England is a writer and composition teacher based in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. Her work, shaped by rural landscapes, working-class roots, and the complexities of girlhood, has been published by The Watershed Journal, Sunbury Press, and the Carolina Piedmont Writers Guild’s literary journal County Lines. She teaches at Mercersburg Academy and is pursuing a master’s in Fiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University.