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The rain pounded on the tent that night, brutal, insistent bullets hammering the thin lining above his head. Each one drilled a thought further into his skull. What the hell was he doing?

He’d already made a good start on the groundwork; a complete plank floor rested on posts overlooking the now rising river. His bought and paid supply of wood, tools and raw materials, the lego box of his future home, lay on that floor covered in thick tarpaulin. 

He could hear the buffeting of the tarp as it flailed on its guylines against the storm, the booming an amplified echo of his own tent flapping in the wind. Had he tied it down tight enough? 

He curled up tighter, small as childhood, enormity of the project growing around him. He was not insensible; he knew the grand plan was not achieved in broad strokes but in small, steady steps. He knew it would be hard, but…

Was he strong enough to hold the beams upright while securing them? Against gusts undoing work before it was done? He looked at his hands, once urban soft, now raw and blistered after barely a week of manual labour. 

Could a ten man job really be done by one? As much as mind and will could prevail, at what point did reality convene? As the mighty Clint Eastwood once said: “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” Had he stretched his too far? He was an amateur boy, playing at being a man.

He cowered and shook, blaming the cold rain, while the wind screamed and the tent stank of wet dog, which was also his smell too now.

The rain cleared with the sun. He unzipped the tent flap and rose to greet the morning, hand steadying himself on the ground. Something felt wrong. He looked down at the mud that was not mud and saw his palm print in Rufus’s dog bones, freshly laid.

The stream was calmer after last night’s torrent. He washed his hands, then put his face in the water, immersing in chill freshness. He raised his head to the cough of an engine carrying through the woods. 

He knew who it was before he walked back to greet the Volvo trundling down the track towards him, before the old man eased himself slowly out the station wagon and stared around the site, exhaling with patented weary combination of sigh and grunt. It was the one person he didn’t want help from, the one person who wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t take a hint, who never listened.

He nodded to Rufus, wiped his hands on his jeans and walked forward, resigned to the inevitable.

“Hi Dad,” he said.

IN HIS OWN WAY THE ACT OF WORK WAS A PROFESSION OF CARE

“You’re building it in the wrong place. Too close to the river, rivers rise don’t you know?”

So it began. His old man had never given him a compliment his entire life and wasn’t going to start now. The layout was wrong, it was the wrong kind of wood, is this drill strong enough? It was easier to bite his tongue than rise to the bait; practice had taught how to steel himself to the endless stream of negativity, not allow those waves to engulf, but some days were harder than others. 

And they were long days. Dad arrived about eight each morning, with his own flask of coffee, because he made it best himself. They sawed and nailed and slotted the beams and planks and slowly the shapes became a frame. 

He blanked out his father’s criticisms of every proposal, balancing with the positive a second eye, two more hands and experienced advice brought to the table. Dad’s knowledge of carpentry and joistwork was a godsend; flaws were raised his amateur eyes hadn’t spotted and he was grateful for a voice that did not care for niceties or false platitudes to point them out.

Most of the day they worked in silence; Dad never talked much at the best of the times. A belief in stoicism, that withholding of emotion to walk tall and proud and strong in self, had somehow become twisted over time, transforming into an extreme state where nothing was said because nothing needed to be said. 

The few words that came out were therefore rarely anything good; warmth wasn’t practical, everything was withheld. Why did you need to tell someone you cared when actions or your company should inform them without words? What was the point? Was everyone so needy and stupid? 

Some days he wondered why the old man was there. A last attempt at control? Boredom? Jealousy? Bitterness? It was family land after all, bequeathed by grandfather to grandson. Was Dad more disgruntled than he allowed to show, having been skipped a generation by his own father? 

Such empathetic thoughts held his tongue when his father’s lashed, as it did frequently at Rufus; the dog was forever under their feet, scattering tools, sniffing nails and gnawing on planks. The old man did not know how to show love, but in his own way the act of work was a profession of care.