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The Inheritance of Tools SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS Sanders (born,1945) grew up in
Ohio, earned a Ph.D. in English from Cambridge University in
1971, and has taught ever since at Indiana University. His dozen books include
fiction, science fiction, a
biography of Audubon, and several collections of personal essays. The essay
collections, In Limestone
Country (1985), Secrets of the Universe (1991), Staying Put (1993), and Writing
from the Center (1995),
focus on living and writing in the Midwest. Sanders interprets his seemingly
diverse work as an integrated
whole: "I have long been divided, in my life and in my work, between science and
the arts." As a novelist,
Sanders focused on "many of the fundamental questions that scientists ask,"
seeking "to understand our
place in nature, trace the sources of our violence, and speculate about the
future evolution of our species.
My writing....is bound together by a web of questions," which he continues to
ask in personal essays
dealing with "the ways in which human beings come to terms with the practical
problems of living on a
small planet, in nature and in communities. 1 am concerned with the life people
make together, in
marriages and families and towns. ."
The elegiac "The Inheritance of Tools" appeared in the award-winning “The
Paradise of
Bombs” (1987), a collection of personal essays mainly about the American culture
of violence.
This essay reveals Sanders's concerns, as a writer and as a son, husband, and
father with the
inheritance of skills and values through the generations. Here description is
explanation, as
Sanders shows how tools become not just extensions of the hand and brain, but of
the human
heart, as the knowledge of how to use and care for them is transmitted from
grandfather to father
to son to grandchildren-- a girl as well as a boy. The ways in which people use
tools, and think
about tools and care for them, reflect their values and personalities; "each
hammer and level and
saw is wrapped in a cloud of knowing."
At just about the hour when my father died, soon after dawn one February morning
when ice
coated the windows like cataracts, I banged my thumb with a hammer. Naturally I
swore at the
hammers the reckless thing, and in the moment of swearing I thought of what my
father would
say: "If you'd try hitting the nail it would go in a whole lot faster. Don't you
know your thumb's
not as hard as that hammer?" We both were doing carpentry that day, but far
apart. He was
building cupboards at my brother's place in Oklahoma; I was at home in Indiana,
putting up a
wall in the basement to make a bedroom for my daughter. By the time my mother
called with
news of his death--the long distance wires whittling her voice until it seemed
too thin to bear the
weight of what she had to say-my thumb was swollen. A week or so later a white
scar in the
shape of a crescent moon began to show above the cuticle and month by month it
rose across the
pink sky of my thumbnail. It took the better part of a year for the scar to
disappear, and every
time I noticed it I thought of my father
The hammer had belonged to him, and to his father before him. The three of us
have used it
to build houses and barns and chicken coops, to upholster chairs and crack
walnuts, to make doll
furniture and bookshelves and jewelry boxes. The head is scratched and
pockmarked, like an old
plowshare that has been working rocky fields, and it gives off the sort of dull
sheen you see on
fast creek water in the shade. It is a finishing hammer, about the weight of a
bread loaf, too light,
really, for framing walls, too heavy for cabinet work, with a curved claw for
pulling nails, a
rounded head for pounding, a fluted neck for looks, and a hickory handle for
strength
The present handle is my third one, bought from a lumberyard in Tennessee, down
the road
from where my brother and I were helping my father build his retirement house. I
broke the
previous one by trying to pull sixteen-penny nails out of floor joists--a
foolish thing to do with a
finishing hammer, as my father pointed out. "You ever hear of a crowbar?" he
said. No telling
how many handles he and my grandfather had gone through before me. My
grandfather used to
cut down hickory trees on his farm, saw them into slabs, cure the planks in his
hayloft, and carve
handles with a drawknife. The grain in hickory is crooked and knotty and
therefore tough, hard to
split, like the grain in the two men who owned this hammer before me.
After proposing marriage to a neighbor girl, my grandfather used this hammer to
build a
house for his bride on a stretch of river bottom in northern Mississippi. The
lumber for the place,
like the hickory for the handle, was cut on his own land. By the day of the
wedding he had not
quite finished the house, and so right after the ceremony he took his wife home
and put her to
work. My grandmother had worn her Sunday dress for the wedding, with a fringe of

lace tacked
on around the hem in honor of the occasion. She removed this lace and folded it
away before
going out to help my grandfather nail siding on the house. "There she was in her
good dress," he
told me some forty odd years after that wedding day, "holding up them long
pieces of clapboard
while I hammered, and together we got the place covered up before dark." As the
family grew to
four, six, eight, and eventually thirteen, my grandfather used this hammer to
enlarge his house
room by room, like a chambered nautilus expanding its shell
By and by the hammer was passed along to my father. One day he was up on the
roof of our
pony barn nailing shingles with it, when I stepped out the kitchen door to call
him for supper.
Before I could yell, something about the sight of him straddling the spine of
that roof and
swinging the hammer caught my eye and made me hold my tongue. I was five or six
years old,
and the world's commonplaces were still news to me. He would pull a nail from
the pouch at his
waist, bring the hammer down, and a moment later the thunk of the blow would
reach my ears.
And that is what had stopped me in my tracks and stilled my tongue, the
momentary gap between
seeing and hearing the blow. Instead of yelling from the kitchen door, I ran to
the barn and
climbed two rungs up the ladder-as far as I was allowed to go--and spoke quietly
to my father. On
our walk to the house he explained that sound takes time to make its way through
air. Suddenly
the world seemed larger, the air more dense, if sound could be held back like
any ordinary
traveler
By the time I started using this hammer, at about the age when I discovered the
speed of
sound, it already contained houses and mysteries for me. The smooth handle was
one my
grandfather had made. In those days I needed both hands to swing it. My father
would start a nail
in a scrap of wood, and I would pound away until I bent it over
"Looks like you got a hold of some of those rubber nails," he would tell me.
"Here, let me see
if I can find you some stiff ones." And he would rummage in a drawer until he
came up with a
fistful of more cooperative nails. "Look at the head," he would tell me. "Don't
look at your hands,
don't look at the hammer. Just look at the head of that nail and pretty soon
you'll learn to hit it
square.
Pretty soon I did learn. While he worked in the garage cutting dovetail joints
for a drawer or skinning a deer or tuning an engine, I would hammer nails. I
made innocent blocks of wood look like porcupines. He did not talk much in the
midst of his tools, but he kept up a nearly ceaseless humming, slipping in and
out of a dozen tunes in an afternoon, often running back over the same stretch
of melody again and again, as if searching for a way out. When the humming did
cease, I knew he was faced with a task requiring great delicacy or
concentration, and I took care not to distract him He kept scraps of wood in a
cardboard box--the ends of two-by-fours, slabs of shelving and
plywood, odd pieces of molding--and everything in it was fair game. I nailed
scraps together to
fashion what I called boats or houses, but the results usually bore only faint
resemblance to the
visions I carried in my head. I would hold up these constructions to show my
father, and he would
turn them over in his hands admiringly, speculating about what they might be. My
cobbled-
together guitars might have been alien spaceships, my barns might have been
models of Aztec
temples, each wooden contraption might have been anything but what I had set out
to make
Now and again I would feel the need to have a chunk of wood shaped or shortened
before I
riddled it with nails, and I would clamp it in a vise and scrape at it with a
handsaw. My father
would let me lacerate the board until my arm gave out, and then he would wrap
his hand around
mine and help me finish the cut, showing me how to use my thumb to guide the
blade, how to
pull back on the saw to keep it from binding, how to let my shoulder do the work
"Don't force it," he would says "just drag it easy and give the teeth a chance
to bite." As the
saw teeth bit down, the wood released its smell, each kind with its own
fragrance, oak or walnut
or cherry or pine--usually pine because it was the softest, easiest for a child
to work. No matter
how weathered and gray the board, no matter how warped and cracked, inside there
was this
smell waiting, as of something freshly baked. I gathered every smidgen of
sawdust and stored it
away in coffee cans, which I kept in a drawer of the workbench. When I did not
feel like
hammering nails, 1 would dump my sawdust on the concrete floor of the garage and
landscape it
into highways and farms and towns, running miniature cars and trucks along
miniature roads.
Looming as huge as a colossus, my father worked over and around me, now and
again bending
down to inspect my work, careful not to trample my creations. It was a landscape
that smelled
dizzyingly of wood. Even after a bath my skin would carry the smell, and so
would my father's
hair, when he lifted me for a bedtime hug
I tell these things not only from memory but also from recent observation,
because my own
son now turns blocks of wood into nailed porcupines, dumps cans full of sawdust
at my feet and
sculpts highways on the floor. He leans how to swing a hammer from the elbow
instead of the
wrist, how to lay his thumb beside the blade to guide a saw, how to tap a chisel

with a wooden
mallet, how to mark a hole with an awl before starting a drill bit. My daughter
did the same
before him, and even now, on the brink of teenage aloofness, she will
occasionally drag out my
box of wood scraps and carpenter something. So I have seen my apprenticeship to
wood and tools
reenacted in each of my children, as my father saw his own apprenticeship
renewed in me
The saw I use belonged to him, as did my level and both of my squares, and all
four tools had
belonged to his father. The blade of the saw is the bluish color of gun barrels,
and the maple
handle, dark from the sweat of hands, is inscribed with curving leaf designs.
The level is a shaft
of walnut two feet long, edged with brass and pierced by three round windows in
which air
bubbles float in oil-filled tubes of glass. The middle window serves for testing
if a surface is
horizontal, the others for testing if a surface is plumb or vertical. My
grandfather used to carry
this level on a gun rack behind the seat in his pickup, and when I rode with him
I would turn
around to watch the bubbles dance. The larger of two squares is called a framing
square, a flat
steel elbow, so beat up and tarnished you can barely make out the rows of
numbers that show
how to figure the cuts on rafters. The smaller one is called a try square, for
marking right angles,
with a blued steel blade for the shank and a brass-faced block of cherry for the
head
I was taught early on that a saw is not to be used apart from a square: "If
you're going to cut a piece of wood," my father insisted, "you owe it to the
tree to cut it straight. Long before studying geometry, I learned there is a
mystical virtue in right angles. There is
an unspoken morality in seeking the level and the plumb. A house will stand, a
table will bear
weight, the sides of a box will hold together, only if the joints are square and
the members
upright. When the bubble is lined up between two marks etched in the glass tube
of a level, you
have aligned yourself with the forces that hold the universe together. When you
miter the corners
of a picture frame each angle must be exactly forty-five degrees, as they are in
the perfect
triangles of Pythagoras, not a degree more or less. Otherwise the frame will
hang crookedly, as if
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Sanders.tools Essay 11pt
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