One of the first scents I ever loved was wet cement. Sometimes my father would mix it all up in a wheelbarrow. Sand, water, cement. If he was touching up a house he had just built or just starting a new one, he would dump it all inside his mixer and pull it to the construction site.
The mixer was open at the top and shaped like a deep rectangular bowl, unlike the round drums most bricklayers use nowadays. It had two arms along a horizontal shaft on the inside. They would rotate along an axis until all of the ingredients had mixed and the cement had gone from clumpy tan to a deep grey. It was the shade of grey you might see on a quilt of storm clouds just before they drop their rain. The cement was cool on the tip of my fingers. It groaned every time my father sliced it with his trowel and pulled away and up the exact amount he needed.
The smell was clean. Not subtle. It’s strong in the way cake frosting is strong. As you get closer to it, it moves from itself to your nose quickly and once it’s inside, its sharp, metallic fullness crowds everything else out.
He was an artist. There’s no question about that. Stone and women were his medium. And we kids, what were we? Maybe we were the grey sludge that held his families together. We were strong and made each house of love he built stand straight and tall. We would have lasted forever if only he had remembered that nothing lasts forever. Least of all what we build.
This would be where some old-timers like my grandfather would say, El que no mantiene no detiene. I can hear those words crackle in his mouth. But he’d be wrong. It wasn’t a lack of care that made the families my father built crumble, it was the roofs. Or rather, the ones that weren’t there. I never did see my father build one. That was for a different crew. You’d think somewhere along the line, a person would’ve told him that a house with no roof is just a box to hold the light.
For all his talent, my father only built my family two things. The first was a short, four-post brick fence. Each post was thick and made from fire-engine-red brick. Green metal flares connected one post to another.
The other thing he built was a laundry room for my mom. He started to, rather. After he laid the concrete foundation and collected cinder blocks, that was it. After it sat in our backyard for years, my mom relented to my constant requests to use it as a basketball court. I watched my father, for the last time, mix a small batch of concrete and cement a black metal pole to the center of a large truck tire. When the concrete had dried, I attached my backboard and rim to the pole. With someone guiding the top so it wouldn’t hit the ground, I could lean my goal over and roll it anywhere in the yard I wanted.
Decades later when my mom and I drove by the old house, we found only a pair of foundations on the lot. A second arson had finished off our old house when the first one didn’t. The railroad worker who owned the house before us had built it with materials that were no doubt free and handy at his work. We discovered this when we busted the wall in front in order to move the bedroom door over and found railroad ties instead of 2x4s.
When hurricanes came over from the Gulf of Mexico, our house felt like the safest place in Mathis. But now everything was gone, except for the two foundations and the fence posts whose red bricks were cracked and crumbling. They sat in front like squat sentinels in the near empty lot.
I admired the houses my father built. I was in awe at how he could take a dull pile of brick and make it a home. Sometimes a family requested stone.
One night I dreamed I was at his work site. Piles of sand surrounded me. I sat cross-legged so when I looked around, the shifting points of these pyramids were taller than I was. For a long time I believed my dream was real until one day in yoga class I grimaced and remembered how uncomfortable it has always been to sit with my legs folded in front of me.
In the dream, I study the grains of sand. They start their run near the top. It always happens suddenly. You would think a breeze or a fly disturbing the wall of granules would be needed to make it move, but that’s not true. The pyramid’s contract with gravity has an expiration date, especially when the sand is not packed. Sometimes the grains only make it halfway down the pyramid, while other times a few will build enough speed that their momentum will take them all the way to the leaves of grass and the dirt under them. I stare and wonder how long it would take for every grain to make it to the grass. Would a year be long enough for them to all run away and leave a beige circle where a pyramid had once stood? A year still feels like such a long time. You can fit so much pain into twelve months.
When my father tosses a stone back into the pile, the knock when it hits the other stones startles me. I’ve never seen him chop a stone with his trowel the way he will a brick that’s too long. A stone fits or it doesn’t. When I ask how he knows which stone will be next, he talks about puzzles. In the case of a house, there was no box with a picture to look at. He would look at the space he needed to fill, as well as the ones that didn’t exist yet, and stay two or three spaces ahead. I could see those spaces, too. I figured everyone could see their unlined shapes until someone told me most people don’t see negative space first.
The stone in his hand is the color of moldy bread. He fits it snug in the wall. Unlike the sand, it won’t run. If people live in this house a hundred years and then abandon it for another hundred, it will still sit there with its blue green eye, unblinking, full of hope.
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero and the translator of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu. He is at work on a memoir.
