Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Chair I Repair Nearly
A chair maker finds each chair he has repaired come back one joint further on than he left it, and each season finds the shavings for the next joint waiting in his bin.
- dated: "the repair season"
- narrator: "Nathan Condy, chair maker"
Tuesday, the last of September. The Mander chair is back, the one I made four joints good on in the February before last, and I opened my door to Mrs Enid Mander saying she'd only called for me to look at the right rail, "since you did the left so well." I turned the chair under the lamp before I touched it. The right rail needs no looking at. It is let in and wedge-pinned through, the way my father drove them and I do not, the pins set with the grain swimming, and it is cleaner than I could have laid it Tuesday on my best day. I put my fingers under the seat to find my chalk date-letters, the D and the C and the year I always mark there, and they are worn. Not gone. Worn, the way letters wear that have been passed over often by somebody's thumb.
Saturday, the third of November. Cleared the bin of shavings for the kindling box, the way I have every Saturday forty years, and in with my own rough stuff was a double handsful of shavings I cannot own. Brown oak, curled thin as window glass, rail-turnings and nothing else, and I have not bought brown oak since my father's last stack came home, and that went with him into the ground. I laid my own shavings alongside on the bench to compare. Mine are rough, mine come off in flights with a catch at the end of them. These are off a sharp iron in a patient hand. I have burned forty years of shavings without once finding a curl I couldn't match to a job in my book. I did not burn these. They are in the glue drawer on top of the beeswax, where I keep my patterns.
The first week of March, repair season opening. Mrs Mander brought the chair again, for the sixth joint this time, the seat rail, "before the damp gets in," very sensible. I opened the rail and it wanted nothing of me. Made good already, and the shavings for it were in my bin, fresh, the same brown glass curls, which I had not noticed going in because I had not looked since November. So I set my season's rule down here where I will see it: I go first to every joint from now on, opened whether it wants it or not, opened and cleansed on my own iron, so that there is nothing of that chair left open for another hand to find.
Then the sums, which is the part I keep in this book and say to nobody. Eleven joints in the Mander chair. Four mine over two seasons. A fifth made good in a season I wasn't looking. Seven left, at the rate the thing is travelling, and I am sixty-one with twenty winters of chair-maker's hands in me if my eyes hold. I have laid the chair on the bench and covered it with the sack, and I find I am keeping its calendar along with my own. Seven seasons and the chair is whole, and there is one autumn in my arithmetic I cannot make come out: if the repairs run on past the last joint, what will be left for anybody — and whose chair is it being finished for?