Читать книгу The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison, Kathryn Harrison - Страница 16

AS IT WOULD MAKE no sense to assemble and disassemble a kite of such complexity and proportion, Bigelow is building a shed for it on the bluff, and, outside the shed, a platform on which to mount a reel. He has lumber left over from the construction of the station house, and he has bought a box of cheap, bent nails from Getz.

On days he does not see the woman, he spends his afternoons on the bluff. He straightens nails with a hammer, striking sparks from the flat rock where he pounds them. He frames the shed and he puts up walls, he pitches the roof steeply to prevent snow from sticking.

Then he carries all the kite’s pieces from the station up to the shed, making two trips with a sledge, first the spars and the wing ribs, and the next day all the rest, muslin and tools and the instruments he wants to send up into the sky.

Inside the new building, protected from the wind, he begins to put the kite together. Crouched under a hurricane lamp tied to a beam, Bigelow is so involved, day after day, with the details of the work at hand—box corners and lock slots, lengths of hemp soaked and tied wet so as not to loosen in flight, spars, three of them, that crack under tension and have to be replaced, a seam so crooked it has to be resewn—that he doesn’t see the whole of what he’s making.

Not until it’s done, ribs tight, stitches knotted. Bigger somehow than he expected. Grander and more beautiful, with a grace that drawings can’t convey.

He walks around and around the kite, squeezing to fit between the taut muslin panels of the cells and the plank sides of the shed, running his fingers over the fabric, touching spars that he sanded, one each night in his station, until they were as smooth as her skin.

He can’t wait to get it outside, into the wind.