ironworker(sm)

Story and photographs by Lehan Ramsay

Yamashita#2(sm)

One of the Carpenter Guys took me to take a look at his house. Every inch filled with treasures, enough room to roll down his bed. Stamp album after stamp album, scroll after scroll, gilt covered whatnots, religious icons. Some of these things looked to me like they belonged in a museum. I suspect that the Museum Guys are not nearly as resourceful as the Carpenter Guys.

All the Carpenter guys seem to have a love of old things. They would pop around while the Carpenter Guy was working, look at my recycle-shop tea-room cabinet, say Oh, the doors don’t match, and move on. Any time we came across some old sheets of newspaper they would whip them off. Unwise customers at the markets were impressed by anything wrapped in old newspaper.

murata(sm)

Carpenter guy got half of the scrolls I found in the cupboard. We unrolled them on the floor and his great knowledge all-at-once deserted him. I don’t know anything about scrolls, he said. You choose one, and I’ll choose one, and… I  have not yet forgiven him for it.

The Carpenter guys let me have the wood from an old house they were dismantling, dragged it over and dumped it in the yard. Inside the pile I found the black lacquered counter of a sushi bar cut in two. The kind of sushi bar you use your fingers to eat with. I wiped it down and found a shelf for it in the house. I watched them take the house apart until they found an old teabox in the foundations. But I never saw what they found inside the box. And then they quickly brought in the bulldozers and all the rest went off in a truck full of splinters. I saw the tea box still lying there and brought it home for tools.

niwashi(sm)

You can ask the Roof man to fix chimneys, but you can’t ask him to build things, people will be annoyed. You can ask the Concrete man to build a fence at a pinch. But even I know that you can’t ask him to take a look at the floor. The Carpenter Guy has to do that. If you want to put charcoal into the floor you will need the Carpenter Guy’s permission. And then you will need to drive to the Volcano and talk to the Charcoal Burners up there.

But no old house is comfortable without charcoal. When they pulled down the old house built on the old hospital three doors down, I asked for the gates. Everyone who knew anything pulled the charcoal out of the foundations. By the time I learned about it none was left.