ULTIMATE CONCERNS AND OTHER VANITIES

XII. JOE PETTRIONI WORKED HERE

I discovered the old Wilkie button while I was crawling about the attic of Ledgerock one rainy day. I am an inveterate snooper when it comes to the innards of a house. Before the purchase, I walked, crawled, wiggled like a snake through every nook and cranny, rattling pipes, inspecting wiring, poking beams with an ice pick, and just plain looking things over.

My prying wasn’t limited to buyer’s caution, though. Even after I owned the place I continued to make the rounds. It’s a compulsion of sorts, it satisfies a need. My grandmother called it being nosey.

The stonework on the chimney at the far end of the attic caught my eye. Here, where it would normally never be seen, was the same attention to detail I had observed in the fireplace below: the selection of fieldstones that are friendly to one another, the care in cementing the joints. The rough flooring on which I was kneeling ended several inches from the chimney and on an impulse, I shined the flashlight into the space to see if the same workmanship continued below floor level. To my surprise, the stone was faced with brown beaver board, perhaps for insulation, and to it was pinned a red, white and blue button! Here, out of sight, I thought to myself, a button? I lay flat on my stomach for a better look and made out the names WILKIE and McNARY. Beneath the button was written in pencil “Joe Pettrioni, January 17, 1941.” It was a proud moment, you could tell, by the flourish of the writing.

This wish to be remembered--is there anything more human? As I lay there, it seems to me I heard, rather I should say felt, Joe’s modest reminder. The Wilkie button was the giveaway. In a gesture attributed to men of more sophisticated pursuits, he was ostensibly memorializing another man, but was it not his own name and work he wished to have remembered?

When I inquired about Joe, people around town wondered how I knew he had done the stonework on our house. “Why, he died long before you ever moved in,” one of them said. “Don’t make them like Joe anymore, no siree. He was a real craftsman, he really cared about his work.”

“You must have found one of his bottles,” a friend said.

“Bottle?”

“Yes. When we added on to our house three years ago the workmen discovered a soft drink bottle cemented up in one of the walls. It was an old‑fashioned thick, blue‑green bottle with the word sarsaparilla blown into it. Inside was a rolled up piece of sandpaper, and on its smooth side was written Joe’s name and a date in the early  forties when the house was built. He was a young man then. How I wish I had that bottle. The carpenters took it to the shop to show their buddies and it disappeared.”

Much of Joe’s work, I began to notice, has a touch of whimsy about it. Just off the living room is a small cozy room with leaded pane windows, cathedral ceiling, and a fieldstone fireplace angled in one corner. The walls are faced with orange‑yellow brick, and the trim is rough‑cut oak, stained black. The effect is English, as is true of the rest of the house. Wherever brick meets stone, the stone is allowed to run out into the brick in such a playful way here and there that one is not aware of two dissimilar materials joining. Above the windows, the last layer of brick is extended out a half inch or so, preparing the eye for the change that is about to come. I may be wrong--one learns to be careful in speculating about another’s motives--but I don’t think Joe worked for the buck or for the praise of others. He worked for the thing itself. Only when he finished did his vanity assert itself. Even then, it was a modest, gentle act, hidden from view.