The Carousel Horse Apprentice

• Chapter 1: Salt Air and Rotten Pine
• Chapter 2: The Key to the Roundhouse
• Chapter 3: Grain of the Basswood
• Chapter 4: The Master Carver's Chisel
• Chapter 5: Tracing the First Stride
• Chapter 6: Boardwalk Neon Bleeding Out
• Chapter 7: The Romancer in the Shadows
• Chapter 8: Sweeping Up Cedar Shavings
• Chapter 9: The Hollow in the Torso
• Chapter 10: High Tide and Low Receipts
• Chapter 11: Sanding Away the Years
• Chapter 12: Ears Pinned Back
• Chapter 13: The Mechanics of the Crank
• Chapter 14: A Jumper Left Behind
• Chapter 15: Priming the Ghost
• Chapter 16: Secrets in the Trappings
• Chapter 17: Red Lead and Turpentine
• Chapter 18: The Last Season Notice
• Chapter 19: Laying the Gold Leaf
• Chapter 20: The Fire in the Pavilion
• Chapter 21: Glass Eyes in the Dark
• Chapter 22: Splintered Reins
• Chapter 23: The Painted Mane
• Chapter 24: Mounting the Brass Pole
• Chapter 25: The Final Turn of the Organ
• Chapter 26: Frozen in Mid-Leap

The smell reached you before the music did, though on a windy Tuesday in late June, there was no music at all. What you got instead was the stink of decaying pilings at low tide, rancid peanut oil blowing off the Fry-O-Matic vents, and the distinct, vinegar-sweet perfume of wet rot settling into sixty-year-old eastern white pine.

Jesse King knew the smell down to his molars. It lived in the frayed cuffs of his denim jacket and coated the back of his tongue whenever the Atlantic spit a fine, gray mist over the promenade of Ocean Crest. The town was called that on the highway signs, but everyone who lived year-round within spitting distance of the surf called it the Ditch. It had two miniature golf courses with sunken green carpet, an arcade where three out of five claw machines gave an error code, and Olympic Park, which wasn’t Olympic and barely qualified as a park. It was a half-mile slab of uneven timber built over the sand, groaning beneath the weight of three carnival rides that had outlived their warranties during the Carter administration.

Jesse stood by the edge of the pavilion railing, his sneakers resting on a yellow board that flexed every time the surf slapped against the cribbing beneath. In his right hand, he held a heavy linoleum knife he had stolen from his uncle’s utility drawer three days ago. In his left, a chunk of two-by-four he’d salvaged from behind the Tilt-A-Whirl fence.

He wasn't supposed to be here until four. His official job at the park was sweeping crushed funnel cakes and cigarette butts out of the drainage grates, a gig that paid four dollars and fifty cents an hour under the table from the front office, which smelled like wet carpet and dead cigars. But four o'clock was an hour away, his mother was currently working an overtime shift at the dry cleaners in Wildwood, and their apartment was two rooms over a bait-and-tackle shop that always vibrated when the compressor for the bloodworm tanks kicked on. Staying there made his ribs ache with restlessness.

He shaved a thin ribbon off the scrap pine. The blade was dull, leaving a ragged white wake across the weathered gray skin of the wood. Pine was nasty to cut when it was wet; it didn't slice clean like the basswood blocks his grandfather used to talk about, but instead bunched up into fibrous little knots that resisted the edge until the blade slipped and nearly took off a thumbnail.

"You're going against the grain, kid. That's how you lose a knuckle."

Jesse didn’t jump, but his shoulder blades snapped tight. He kept his eyes on the scrap of wood, his thumb planted firmly across the spine of the linoleum knife.

Old Man Birch was standing four paces behind him, leaning his hip against the faded iron fence that separated the boardwalk from the drop-off to the sand. Nobody called him Arthur, even though that was the name painted in flaking gold leaf on the small wooden locker in the carousel shed. To the teenage ride operators who lasted two weeks before running off with carnival girls or hitching rides up to Seaside Heights, he was just Birch, or the Crank, or that bastard who didn't let people smoke near the engine house.

He was sixty-five if he was a day, with forearms like cured ham and hands that looked as though they’d been smashed in an industrial press and roughly reassembled. He wore a gray canvas apron over grease-stained twill trousers, and despite the ninety-degree heat rolling off the ocean, a flannel work shirt with the sleeves cut off ragged at the elbows. A cigarette—unlit, as always around the rides—dangled from the left corner of his mouth, mashed flat by his teeth.

"It’s just garbage wood," Jesse said, his voice cracking slightly on the first syllable before finding its lower, gravelly register. He hated that crack; it belonged to a fourteen-year-old, and he had turned fifteen three months ago.

"Garbage wood doesn't change the laws of physics," Birch said. He took two steps closer. His boots were thick-soled work leather, studded with bits of brass filings and dried sawdust that never seemed to come off, even in a downpour. "Wood grows in rings. Ring means line. Line means grain. You fight the line, the line fights back. Then the blade skips, and we have to hose down the boardwalk because you sprayed blood over the tourists."

"There aren't any tourists," Jesse said, gesturing with the blunt side of the knife toward the long, empty vista of the boards.

It was true. A squall had rolled through around noon, dumping four inches of salt rain in thirty minutes, chasing the few day-trippers from Philadelphia back to their station wagons. The sky was still the color of a galvanized zinc tub, and the only soul out was a lone seagull trying to crack a plastic butter packet open against the lip of a trash can.

Birch grunted. He reached out with one broad, blackened hand. "Give me that thing."

Jesse hesitated for half a breath, then passed the knife over handle-first, the way his uncle had taught him before he stopped teaching him things altogether. Birch took it, inspected the edge with a thumb calloused so thick it sounded like emery cloth scraping over the steel, and made a wet, dismissive sound in his cheek.

"Butcher knife would do better than this. It’s got a belly like a broodmare. Edge is rolled over." Birch fished into the pocket of his apron, pulled out a small rectangular stone that looked like a gray river rock, and spit directly onto its face. Without another word, he held the linoleum knife at an angle Jesse couldn't quite calculate—maybe twenty degrees, maybe less—and began to work it across the stone in tiny, rhythmic circles.

Shh-tick. Shh-tick. Shh-tick.

The sound had a tempo to it. It was dry and steady, like the cicadas that buzzed in the scrub pine behind the trailer park out on Route 9.

"You've been hovering around that roundhouse since May," Birch said, not looking up from the stone. His gray hair was thin on top and plastered to his forehead with grease and sweat. "Like a dog waiting for someone to drop a hot dog in the dirt. Your uncle say you could hang around my floor?"

"Uncle Gary doesn't care where I hang around," Jesse said. "Long as I don't get arrested. He’s down in Cape May until Friday on the scalloper."

"Gary was never worth half a damn on dry land," Birch remarked, matter-of-fact. He flipped the knife and worked the other side of the bevel. "Can't run a line straight, can't fix an outboard without three extra bolts left over when he’s done. Runs in the blood, maybe."

Jesse felt the heat climb the back of his neck, hotter than the noon sun. "I can cut straight."

"You can cut your own hide, that's what you can do." Birch stopped, wiped the slurry off the steel with his apron, and held the knife out toward Jesse. "Try it now. Don't hack at it like you’re chopping kindling. Push it. Follow the line of the fiber. Don't fight where the tree wanted to go."

Jesse took the knife back. It felt warmer now, greasy from the old man's fingers and slick with spit. He set the blade against the scrap pine, right at the corner where the knot met the clear wood. He leaned into it with his shoulder, not his wrist.

The knife went through the white wood like cold lard. A curled, translucent shaving peeled away, smelling instantly of resin and turpentine, landing softly on the green canvas toe of his shoe.

Jesse looked up, unable to keep his eyes from widening just a fraction.

Birch didn't look impressed. He tucked the sharpening stone back into his pocket and turned his gaze toward the massive, octagonal building that sat at the center of the pier like a beached ironclad warship.

The pavilion—the Roundhouse, everyone called it—had sixteen sets of double doors, all of them closed tight against the salt air, secured with heavy sliding latches and padlocks the size of dinner plates. The outside was covered in asphalt shingles that had once been green but were now bleached the color of sea foam, streaked with rust from the thousands of roofing nails that were slowly backing out under the vibration of the boardwalk.

Above the roofline, the cupola poked up into the fog, its louvered slats clogged with old pigeon nests and dirt. From inside, even through the heavy cedar planks, you could hear the low, metallic groan of the machine resting. It wasn't completely still; carousels never were. The wind from the surf found the joints in the pavilion, got under the skirts of the platform, and rocked the thirty-ton steel frame just enough to make the brake shoes moan against the center drive.

"You know what's in there, kid?" Birch asked, his back still turned.

"A carousel," Jesse said.

"A carousel," Birch mocked, his voice a flat, dry rasp. "A carousel is what they put in shopping malls with plastic fiberglass ponies that look like they were squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. That thing in there is an illingworth. Forty-eight head. Built in nineteen-fourteen up in North Tonawanda. Hand-carved white basswood, quartersawn oak framing, three tiers of jumpers, and an organ that would drown out a diesel train if the leather bellows weren't so full of mildew."

Jesse had seen it, of course. Everybody had seen it during the peak weeks in July when the doors were cranked up on their tracks and the light poured out across the pier. But seeing it from behind the brass barrier while forty screaming kids from Cherry Hill kicked the stirrups was different from what Birch was talking about. Jesse had stood outside the side entrance at midnight after his sweep shift, listening to Birch in there with a hammer, tapping away at something that sounded like bone.

"They're falling apart," Jesse said softly.

Birch turned around, his eyes small, dark, and set deep behind shelves of sun-spotted bone. "What did you say?"

Jesse swallowed, but he didn't drop his chin. "The gray one on the outside. By the gate. Its mouth is cracked clear through to the bit. You can see the dowel inside where the glue gave out. And the black one with the eagle saddle—the tail fell off two summers ago. Somebody screwed a piece of painted broomstick into the rump to keep the kids from sticking their fingers in the hole."

Birch was silent for so long that Jesse wondered if he should start running toward the arcade before the old man decided to throw him over the rail. The ocean churned below them, slapping against the greasy pilings with a heavy chug-slosh that sounded like an engine drowning in bilge.

Finally, Birch reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out an ancient silver Zippo, and flicked it open with a snap of his wrist. He held the flame to the dry tip of his cigarette for three seconds, didn't inhale, and let it go out. He put the lighter away, leaving the tobacco unburned.

"The gray one is a stander," Birch said, his tone dangerously quiet. "Carved by a German named Stubenrauch. He didn't use dowels; he used tongue-and-groove white oak splines. That crack isn't glue rot. It’s dry shrinkage from forty years of salt fog getting into the end grain through the nostrils because the owners are too cheap to buy three coats of marine spar varnish every October."

He took two strides toward Jesse, towering over him by half a foot, smelling like neat's-foot oil, tobacco, and the black chicory coffee he drank out of a thermos all day long.

"And that tail on the black horse," Birch continued, pointing a thick, blunt finger at Jesse’s collarbone, "was stolen by three fraternity boys from Penn State who thought it would look good over their fireplace. The broomstick was temporary. That was nineteen-eighty-one. Temporary lasts a long time when the season is only ten weeks long and the bank owns the rides."

Jesse looked down at the scrap of pine still clutched in his left hand. The clean slice he’d made looked tiny and pathetic compared to the huge, snarling beasts locked inside the roundhouse.

"You want to learn how to fix that mouth?" Birch asked suddenly.

The question hit Jesse between the ribs, sharp and sudden as the spray off the surf. "What?"

"You heard me. You got big ears and big hands. Both of 'em look mostly empty. The office pays you twenty-two bucks a night to sweep up trash that's going to blow into the water anyway by morning. You want to work on wood, or do you want to keep scraping dirt out of the cracks until the pier collapses under your feet?"

"I don't know anything about horses," Jesse admitted. His voice sounded thin again, but this time he couldn't help it. "We had an old hound back when we lived in Bridgeton, but it got hit by an oil truck."

Birch snorted, a sharp blast of air that shook the dead cigarette between his lips. "Good. Real horses are stupid, dangerous animals that cost too much money to feed and kick you when your back is turned. A carousel horse doesn't eat hay, it doesn't drop manure on your boots, and if it bites you, it’s because you had your fingers where the gears mesh."

The old man turned and began walking toward the small, sunken service door at the rear of the pavilion—the one hidden behind the high-voltage transformer box where the pigeons roosted.

"Put that pig-sticker away," Birch called over his shoulder, not checking to see if Jesse was following. "And stop dragging your feet on the pine. The salt's already eating the boards fast enough without you scuffing the top coat off."

Jesse stood there for three seconds, the cool sea wind whipping his hair into his eyes. Then he slid the linoleum knife deep into his back pocket, dropped the scrap pine onto the boards, and ran five quick steps to catch the heavy, greasy door before it clicked shut against the ocean.

The lock on the service door was not a Yale or a Master. It was an iron box the size of an unabridged dictionary, bolted directly through four inches of tongue-and-groove white oak with square-headed drift pins. Birch fished into the pocket of his apron, bypassed three ordinary brass keys on an oval ring, and brought up a slab of black iron that had two irregular notches cut into its flag and an oval bow big enough to fit three of Jesse's fingers through.

"Original Corbin ward," Birch said, shoving the key into the dark slot. He didn't turn it right away. He wiggled it up an eighth of an inch, waited until he felt the tumbler give with a faint, greasy thunk, and then threw his weight into the turn. "Made in New Britain, eighteen-ninety-four. If you break it, you don't go to the hardware store for another. You have to find a blacksmith who isn't ninety years old or stone blind, and good luck with that in Cape May County."

The bolt withdrew with the sound of a shovel dragging over wet gravel. Birch shoved the door with his hip, and Jesse followed him into the dark.

The air in the Roundhouse didn’t move. It was twenty degrees cooler than the pier outside, but heavy—soaked with seventy years of machine grease, cold paraffin, boiled linseed oil, and the dry, sweet dust that comes off aged timber when it sits out of the sun. The light inside came through the high clerestory windows up in the drum of the roof, thirty feet above the platform, where sixty years of salt grime had turned the glass into the color of unwashed sheep’s wool. Pale, yellowish shafts slanted downward through the gloom, full of drifting motes, hitting the horses like spotlights in an abandoned theater.

Jesse stopped three feet inside the threshold. He had seen the machine with the rolling doors up, of course, when the music was blaring and the yellow incandescent bulbs were hot enough to cook a beetle, but in the gray dark it looked less like an amusement ride and more like a herd of prehistoric things caught in an iron cage.

There were three concentric circles of them, all frozen mid-gallop around a center pole of riveted steel that went through the floor and vanished into the timber trestles beneath the pier. The outer row was the giants: the standers, Birch called them, four feet tall at the withers, their nostrils flared wide and painted vermilion inside, their teeth bared as if they were chewing on their own curb bits. Behind them, hung on spiraled brass poles that reached into the overhead sweep arms, were the jumpers—smaller, leaner, their hind legs tucked high against their bellies, caught forever in the act of leaping over a hedge that wasn't there.

"Close the door," Birch muttered, his boots already clumping heavily across the perimeter floor toward a row of wooden workbenches pushed against the north wall. "Salt gets in here, it sits on the gears. Then I have to spend four hours with kerosene and a wire brush before the Saturday shift."

Jesse pushed the oak door shut until the latch dropped with that same heavy, iron clack. The sound echoed up into the cupola, answered only by the rustle of pigeons nesting in the dead bellows of the band organ.

"Over here," Birch said.

The workshop occupied the quadrant between doors twelve and fourteen, behind the ride's primary brake wheel. It was less a shop than a timber graveyard. Piles of scrap—hunks of basswood, quartersawn yellow pine, scraps of ash cut into rough wedges—were stacked in bins made of shipping crates that still bore the stenciled addresses of freight houses in Buffalo and Philadelphia. On the main bench, lit by an industrial goose-neck lamp clamped to a two-by-six, lay three wooden horse legs, two severed ears, and a headless torso that rested on its side like a butchered calf.

Birch flicked the toggle on the goose-neck lamp. A hundred-watt bulb flared to life, humming violently.

"First thing," Birch said, leaning his hands on the bench and glaring down at the timber, "is you don't touch the iron. You see a wrench, you leave it where it lies. You see an oiler, you leave it alone. The mechanism is forty tons of cast steel swinging around a three-inch pivot. If a tooth shears on the bull gear while the motor’s under load, it’ll take your arm off at the shoulder and throw it into the Atlantic before you know you’re missing a hand. You understand that?"

"Yes, sir," Jesse said.

"Don't call me sir. You’re not in the Navy, and I don't work for the government. Birch is plenty." The old man reached behind a drill press and pulled out an eight-pound zinc bucket with a frayed hemp handle. "Go to the drum by the organ. Turn the spigot. Fill this three fingers from the rim with kerosene. There’s a box of cotton waste next to it. Take an armful."

"What are we fixing?" Jesse asked, taking the bucket by the cold metal rim.

Birch didn't look up; he was already running his thumb over the jagged stump of an ear on the workbench. "We aren't fixing a damn thing until this place stops smelling like your auntie’s closet. You want to touch the chisels, you earn the right by clearing the slag off the deck. The center pivot hasn’t been degreased since the Fourth of July weekend, and the lint from the beach towels has turned into something you could pave a road with."

Jesse took the bucket and walked toward the center of the machine. The floor of the platform was made of wedge-shaped segments of maple, worn smooth by millions of sneakers, saddle shoes, and bare feet until the grain stood up in yellow ridges. Every step he took produced a low, resonant groan from the timbers below. When he passed under the belly of an outside stander—an armored horse with a carved leopard skin thrown over its rump—he couldn't help but reach out and touch the flank.

The paint was thick, maybe twenty layers deep, cracked in fine, geometric webs like dry mud. Beneath his fingers, the surface was strangely cold, but the wood beneath the lacquer felt solid as granite. It didn't have the dead, plastic feel of the fiberglass boats on the water ride down the boardwalk. It had a weight that seemed to press down into the deck.

The center housing was a massive cylinder of riveted iron, surrounded by a wire-mesh cage that smelled of tallow, petroleum, and seventy years of dead moths. Through the diamond-shaped links, Jesse could see the great bevel gear—a wheel eight feet across with teeth the size of his fist, each one coated in a black, butter-thick paste that had collected sand, popcorn hulls, and small scraps of paper.

Beside the housing sat a fifty-gallon steel drum with a brass spigot. Jesse set the bucket beneath it, turned the thumb-screw, and watched the clear, blue-tinted fuel gush out, filling the air with that sharp, oily stink that always made his sinuses tighten.

He loaded his left arm with a bundle of greasy gray waste—waste thread from the textile mills up in Paterson that came in fifty-pound bales—and carried the bucket back to the center cage.

"Not out there," Birch barked from across the floor. He hadn't left his bench, but he seemed to have eyes set into the back of his canvas shirt. "Underneath. Crawl under the rim behind the band organ. Watch your skull on the sweep rods. If you bend one of the tie-rods, the horse will track two inches to the left, and the crank will eat the bronze bushing by nine o'clock tonight."

Jesse found the access crawl: a missing plank in the platform floor near the rear wheel of the band organ, where the massive decorative facade of carved cherubs and gilded trumpets blocked the view from the boardwalk. He dropped the bucket down into the dark, swung his legs into the hole, and dropped down onto the sand.

Underneath the carousel, the world smelled different.

The sand down here was damp and gray, untouched by the sun since the pier had been redecked after the storm of sixty-two. Overhead, the yellow pine framing was an intricate web of timber trusses, all radiating out from a central cast-iron spider that sat on a massive concrete pier sunk five fathoms into the beach. Every time a car rumbled down the access road behind the park, the whole structure trembled, sending a fine rain of dried moss and salt-crust down onto his neck.

Jesse found the main ring gear above his head. It was a greasy ring of iron teeth, twelve feet in diameter, bolted to the underside of the spinning deck.

"Scrape it with the putty knife first," Birch shouted from above, his voice muffled by the floorboards. "Don't just slop fuel on it. The grease has salt in it. Salt plus steel plus water equals junk. Scrape it down to the gray metal, wipe it dry, then paint the teeth with the tallow from the small pot. Don't use the motor oil. Motor oil slings off when she gets up to six miles an hour. Tallow sticks."

Jesse knelt in the cool sand, took a flat-bladed scraper from the leather pouch Birch had tucked into the bucket, and went to work.

The grease came off in thick, black curls that smelled like fried lard and old bearings. It was heavy, miserable work; within ten minutes, his forearms were burning from reaching overhead, and his knuckles were gray with grit. Every time he cleared a four-inch section of the gear, he could see the marks of the men who had machined it—fine, concentric grooves left by an eight-foot lathe in a foundry that had probably been torn down before his mother was born. On the web of the casting, raised letters stood out under the black crust: ILLINGWORTH MFG. CO. - TONAWANDA N.Y. - PAT. AUG 1898.

He worked his way around the circle, tooth by tooth, inch by inch, while overhead he could hear the rhythmic scritch-scratch of Birch’s cabinet rasp smoothing out the pine ears up on the bench.

Jesse didn't mind the dark. Back in the apartment over the bait store, his mother had a habit of leaving the radio on the counter tuned to the country station out of Dover—songs about broken trucks and women who left in the middle of the night—competing with the wet, slapping sound of the minnow tanks below. Gary’s room smelled like dirty wool socks and stale Genesee cream ale. Down here, there was only the cold smell of the sand and the greasy iron, and if you stopped moving for a second, you could hear the Atlantic coming in under the boardwalk, six feet below your knees, washing through the pilings with a low, sucking sound that made your chest feel empty.

After an hour, his knees were numb from the damp sand. He climbed out through the trapdoor, his hands blackened to the wrists and his blue work shirt smeared with grease across both shoulders.

Birch was standing by the outer row of horses, a small wooden mallet in his hand. He didn't look at Jesse's face; he looked directly at the bucket. It was half-full of black sludge.

"You missed the bevel on the pinion gear," the old man said without turning around.

"No, I didn't," Jesse said, wiping his nose with his forearm and only succeeding in transferring a streak of axle grease to his bridge. "I did the pinion first. It’s got a chipped tooth on the small side. Third one past the keyway."

Birch paused. The mallet stayed suspended three inches above the flank of a palomino with an eagle carved into the pommel. He slowly lowered the mallet and turned his head, his small, dark eyes narrowing until they looked like splits in dried leather.

"Third tooth?" Birch asked.

"Third tooth," Jesse said. "Looks like somebody dropped a bolt through it once. It was ground down flat with an emery wheel so it wouldn't catch, but it's missing about an eighth of an inch on the face."

Birch stared at him for four seconds, his unlit cigarette shifting from the left side of his jaw to the right.

"Nineteen-seventy," Birch said. "A grease monkey named Deitz left a three-quarter box wrench on the web when he went for a cigarette. Started the motor under twenty horsepower. Broke the tooth off clean and cracked two ribs on the cast frame."

He looked down at Jesse's sneakers, then back at the bucket.

"Leave the sludge by the back door. Don't dump it through the boards. If the environmental boys from Trenton see an oil slick on the sand, they’ll shut the park down before the weekend, and then Mr. Henderson will have an excuse to sell the whole damn pier to the condo people from Atlantic City."

"Are they going to?" Jesse asked, setting the bucket down on a patch of greasy cardboard. "Sell it?"

"Henderson’s eighty," Birch said, turning back to the palomino. "His boy is a lawyer up in Newark who doesn't like the smell of saltwater and thinks carousels are for peasants. If the summer receipts don't cover the liability insurance by Labor Day, they won't even board the windows up. They’ll just bring in a flatbed from the auction house in Pennsylvania, take the forty-eight head, and turn the Roundhouse into a parking deck for forty cars."

He tapped the wooden flank with the side of the mallet. The sound wasn't the hollow thock of a crate, but a dull, heavy tonk, like a church pew.

"Come here," Birch commanded.

Jesse walked over, wiping his hands on the bundle of dry waste until the skin was raw and pink beneath the gray grime.

The horse before them was a jumper, though it was currently hung low on its iron crank rod, its hoofs barely four inches above the floor. It was painted a sickly, curdled cream color that had yellowed toward the tail, with an embossed saddle that had once been scarlet but had faded to the color of canned ham. The mane was carved in thick, ropy strands that tumbled down both sides of the neck, but the right ear was snapped off at the base, leaving a white, fibrous scar of pine.

"Feel that," Birch said, pointing to the neck just below the jaw.

Jesse hesitated, then laid his palm against the wood.

"What do you feel?"

"It’s cold," Jesse said. "And rough. The paint’s flaking."

"Not the paint, you idiot. The wood. Close your eyes and push your fingers in. Don't pet it like a rabbit. Find the joint."

Jesse closed his eyes. The smell of the old man—tobacco, stale coffee, and something like burnt sugar—was thick right next to him. Jesse ran his fingertips along the side of the neck, moving toward the shoulder. Halfway down, beneath three-sixteenths of an inch of yellowed lead paint, his skin found a seam. It wasn't straight; it ran in a gentle, curving zigzag, less than a hairline wide, but as distinct under his skin as a scar on an arm.

"There," Jesse said.

"That's a scarf joint," Birch said. "Three pieces of five-quarter basswood glued up with hide glue before they ever put an adze to it. See, a tree doesn't grow sixty inches wide without a hollow in the heart. If you carve a horse out of one big log, the heart rots out from the inside, the moisture gets trapped, and in ten years you’ve got an empty shell full of dry rot and carpenter ants. So you build a box."

Birch reached out with his mallet and tapped the horse’s barrel, right behind the girth. The sound was unmistakably hollow.

"It’s empty?" Jesse asked, his eyes opening.

"Hollow as a cider cask," Birch said. "Four planks for the sides, two for the deck, top and bottom. Glued with boiled hoofs and hide, then clamped with four-foot screw clamps until the joints were tighter than your uncle’s wallet. Then the carver—this was Marcus Illingworth himself, nineteen-hundred and twelve—he sits on a bench with a two-handed drawknife and he hews the box down until it looks like a horse. Then he glues the neck on. Then the legs. Then the tail."

"Why did he make the joints zigzag?"

Birch gave a short, hard nod—the first sign of anything resembling satisfaction Jesse had seen on his face.

"Because a straight joint splits when the wood shrinks," Birch said. "Wood moves. It’s dead, but it thinks it’s alive. Every time the fog comes in off the water, this horse swells up like a bloated dog. Every time the August sun hits that glass drum up there, it bakes out the moisture and the wood pulls back. If you don't give the grain room to slide against itself, the whole side blows out."

He reached into his apron and pulled out a small drawknife—its handles made of turned applewood, blackened by sweat, its blade no longer than five inches, curved like a new moon.

"Grab that pine leg off the bench," Birch said.

Jesse went to the bench and picked up the leg. It was heavy, made of three blocks of white pine glued face-to-face, roughly shaped with an ax into something that looked like a very thick, three-cornered baseball bat. It smelled fresh—dry and resinous, unlike the salt-soaked timbers under the floor.

"Put it in the vise," Birch said. "Hock down. Don't crank it until the wood groans, just until it doesn't wiggle when you lean on it."

Jesse set the pine into the jaws of the massive cast-iron leg-vise bolted to the end of the bench. He spun the iron crank until the maple jaws bit into the soft wood.

"Now," Birch said, handing him the drawknife.

Jesse took it. The steel was cool, but the applewood handles were warm, shaped with hollows for the thumbs that didn't fit his hands quite right; Birch's hands were wider, flatter.

"The hoof," Birch said, pointing with his dead cigarette at the square, blunt end of the wood. "A horse doesn't stand on a block. He stands on a hoof. A hoof has a wall, a sole, and a frog. You know what the frog is?"

"The thing in the middle," Jesse guessed. "The soft part."

"It’s the wedge," Birch said. "It absorbs the shock when forty stone comes down on frozen mud. If you don't carve the frog, the horse looks like he’s stuck in cement. He looks dead. You want him to jump, you have to show why he's off the ground."

He stepped behind Jesse, his shadow falling completely over the boy and the vise.

"Bevel down," Birch commanded. "Don't chop. Draw it toward your ribs. Use your lats, not your elbows. If you pull with your forearms, you’ll dig in and stall out on the first knot."

Jesse set the curved edge against the pine. He felt the grain immediately—it was different from the scrap he’d had out on the boardwalk. This was sugar pine, soft and straight, but dry enough to split if he was stupid with the blade. He set his feet wide on the maple floor, took a breath that smelled of kerosene and old sawdust, and pulled.

The knife bit. A thick, yellow curl rose up from the wood, whistling as it peeled away from the block, falling to the deck with a soft shack.

"Again," Birch said.

Jesse pulled again. Another curl. He found the rhythm he’d heard out on the rail: shh-tick, shh-tick. The wood gave way before the steel, revealing the creamy, pale meat beneath the rough saw-marks.

"Stop," Birch said.

Jesse froze, the blade halfway through a third cut.

Birch reached out with a hand that was missing the tip of the left index finger and pressed it against the surface Jesse had just exposed.

"You're dishing it," the old man said flatly. "You're leaning into the left handle because you're right-handed and your shoulder’s dropping. You dish that hoof, the shoe won't sit flat. If the shoe doesn't sit flat, the whole leg looks crooked from the promenade. A tourist doesn't know why it looks wrong, but he knows it does. He thinks: that’s a cheap horse. Then he doesn't spend his quarter."

Birch took the drawknife out of Jesse’s hands. He didn't say another word. He stood over the vise, his thick shoulders squared, and with three long, effortless sweeps of the tool, he flattened the face of the cut until it looked as though it had been run through a four-sided planer.

"The office opens at seven tomorrow," Birch said, laying the drawknife on the bench with a light clink. "You tell Mr. Henderson you’re my floor boy now. He’ll tell you he only pays three-fifty for shop help. You take it."

Jesse wiped his hands on his trousers. "I make four-fifty on the grates."

Birch picked up an oil rag and began to wipe down the blade of the drawknife, his movements slow and steady as an engine stroke.

"A broom doesn't teach you nothing except how much dirt people leave behind them," Birch said. "You want to sweep peanut shells for four-fifty, you go on back to the pier. Nobody's holding you by the belt."

The old man turned his back and walked toward the small locker where his coat hung from a copper nail.

Jesse stood by the bench. He looked down at the pine shavings around his sneakers. They were pale, clean, and curled like butter ribbons against the grease-blackened boards of the floor. Out on the pier, the wind had picked up again, rattling the corrugated iron panels on the roof of the Tilt-A-Whirl, but in here, behind the four-inch oak doors, it was so quiet he could hear the tallow dripping off the center gear into the bucket he’d left below.

He reached down, picked up a single curl of pine, and put it in his shirt pocket next to his linoleum knife.

"I'll be here at seven," Jesse said to the old man's back.

Birch didn't answer. He just reached up, took his flat cap off the nail, pulled it down over his ears, and pointed with his chin toward the heavy brass lock on the inner gate.