Eren Tal liked cedar because cedar didn’t lie to an auger. If there was a pocket of wind-shake or an internal knot in a cedar spar, the bit would bind and chatter until you pulled it back and cleared the shavings. Chalk on slate was even more honest. You couldn’t force a chalk line to curve around an inconvenient wood slot. If the timber was out of square, the white dust showed the gap down to the thirty-second of an inch.
He stood before the large, box-shaped slate board that he had hoisted onto two heavy ash frame stands against the back kitchen’s north wall. The board was six feet long and four feet high, salvaged three years ago from the cellar of a flooded maritime academy on the middle terrace. The slate had dried with a pale, grey-green bloom from forty years of salt fog. But Eren had spent the last hour scrubbing it with a stiff horsehair brush and a vinegar rag until the dark, porous stone was clean.
In his left hand, he held three sticks of carpenter’s chalk that he had traded from an itinerant boatwright: one bright ultramarine blue, one moss green, and one dull sulfur yellow.
