I work in concrete. Occasionally.

Maybe if things had been different, I would be a mason.

My father was a mason. His name was Les. I guess it still is Les except he’s dead now.

When I was a kid I worried about him getting sucked into the concrete mixer at work. It looked like the mouth of a monster to me, bellowing loud noises. I imagined my father stepping too close to it and – bam- being pulled into the vortex of its swirling chaos.

Growing up, Les encouraged me to become a mason. I drifted through school, bringing home average grades and college wasn’t encouraged.

“Don’t need college, Ray,” my father used to say, pointing at our neighbor, Abe Finch.

Finch was what my father referred to as an “over-eddicated” person, someone who finished college and made less money than Les.

As a kid I used to envy Abe Finch’s kids, who didn’t have to worry about their dad being sucked into a cement mixer monster. Then I grew up and drove past their house in my own sports car while they were getting off the school bus and I began to see the wisdom of my father’s philosophy.

So the summer before I finished high school, I took a summer job working with masons. They were friends of my father, guys named Ronnie and Donnie, who were like the Cheech and Chong of masons, although their business had the respectable name of RD Concrete. They showed up late, left early and broke every safety rule in the book.

We mixed concrete the wrong way and thought it was funny. We poured concrete in places it had no business being and snorted in laughter.

But Ronnie and Donnie are also part of the reason why I still work in concrete. I had fun doing it. I came home from my job with a smile on my face. Les asked me what I was learning and I said “Lots” and that was fine with him. He never asked any specifics and I didn’t tell him anything.

He thought he was sending me to two guys who would teach me a trade. Instead, he sent me to two artists. But even that isn’t why I still work in concrete.

**

It was the first day of August that it happened. Donnie didn’t show up because he hurt his ankle playing basketball with some friends, so Ronnie and I were working alone on a house over in the Pine Tree development. Like many Ohio suburbs, it was a pricey area so RD Concrete charged accordingly. Ronnie and Donnie were making a pretty penny for putting some concrete steps at the back of a two hundred thousand dollar house just so the owners didn’t have to walk around it.

Ronnie went to get lunch around eleven, leaving me alone. I kept working, smoothing the concrete over the framework, patting it down, making it as even as I could. Sometimes I imagined the concrete was a sculpture and I was Michelangelo. Donnie always laughed at me when he saw me go into a trance like that.

“Just put it in there, Ray!” he said a hundred times to me and then he and Ronnie would look at each other and laugh even though it wasn’t funny any more.

So now I only caressed the concrete when I was alone on the job. I saw Les do it a thousand times when he worked with concrete and it just seemed to me that a mason should.

“What are you doing?” a voice asked.

I looked up. The owner’s daughter, a girl around ten, stood there, wearing a yellow summer dress that was over a turquoise bathing suit. I knew her name was Polly because I heard her mother say it over and over again all morning. Polly was eating a red popsicle and swaying from foot to foot. I don’t know how long she was standing there.

“Working”, I said in my most adult voice.

“Is that concrete?”

“Yes.”

“Is it yucky?”

“No, not really.”

“It looks yucky.” Then she said “Can I touch it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll mess it up.”

“But my mommy and daddy bought it. So why can’t I touch it?”

“Concrete’s not for playing in. It’s not like silly putty,” I said.

“How old are you?”

Good, I thought. She’s losing interest in scrawling in the cement. “Sixteen.”

“Wow. You’re old.”

I continued to hit the cement with the spade and it made a pinging sound that echoed around the yard. When I stopped to take a drink of water, I realized Polly had knelt down near me and was staring at the fresh cement.

“How come you don’t draw in it? That would be fun.”

“Cement isn’t for fun. It’s serious business.” That was what Les always said to people who wanted to draw in cement. I figured it might work for Polly.

It didn’t. Polly tossed her popsicle stick into the fresh cement.

“Why did you do that?” I asked, fishing it out.

“You could make a cross if you did this,” Polly said, grabbing it out of my hand and tossing it again. It landed perfectly, forming a cross.

“Polly, are you bothering this man? He’s trying to work,” Polly’s mother said from the kitchen window over our heads.

“I made a cross, Mommy. See? Can we keep it?”

“Well, I guesso. As long as it’s in the corner or something. Is it?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. It was –a small popsicle sized cross on the right bottom corner of the landing of their new steps.

It annoyed me all day. When Ronnie came back with lunch, he pointed it out to me and I explained that the owner told me to leave it there.

“Crazy customers,” he said, digging into his Big Mac.

I even told Les at dinner how it annoyed me to have my work ruined. How I spent so much time patting the concrete down just so and how it looked almost perfect. Les grunted and told me that people just didn’t appreciate fine work. And then he let me have a beer in commiseration.

The next day the house was unusually quiet when I showed up for work at 8:30 a.m. I didn’t hear Polly or her mother in the kitchen having breakfast. I was walking around the backyard, getting things ready to work, when I heard someone clear his throat and saw Polly’s father standing there.

“I- we- don’t need you today,” he said.

The guy looked awful, like he hadn’t slept at all. “I’m almost done,” I said. “My bosses are on their way and we could finish by eleven, easy, and we’ll be out of your way.”

“It’s – something’s happened,” he said. “An accident. Polly – my daughter – she was run over by a car last night on her bike.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Well. If you could just leave. My wife needs quiet.”

“Sure. When do you want us back?” I asked.

“I’ll call. Okay?”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to do with him standing there watching and I figured Ronnie and Donnie would pick up the equipment we needed for the next job, so I just walked back to my car.

It was then I remembered the cross on the landing.

I pulled into a 7 Eleven lot and cried. I cried because I didn’t let Polly play more in the cement and now she was dead. I cried for her parents. I cried for her. I think. All I know is that I cried so hard that my shoulders went up and down and I knew I couldn’t go home looking like this, with my face red.

So I sat there until my cell phone rang. Ronnie asked me where I was and I told him I went home. He told me to meet them at a new worksite and gave me the address.

He asked me if I was okay. I told him I had something I had to do.

I drove back to the house to show Polly’s father the cross. But Ronnie had covered it over with cement after I left the day before, so the two of us stood there looking down at a perfectly even concrete surface.

I finished out that summer working with RD Concrete, but decided to go to college to become an art teacher. Les griped at me because I made less money than him, but I think he was proud of me.

And all I wanted to do with concrete after that was play in it. So I do.

Now a few times every summer in my backyard, I mix concrete and pour it out and invite neighborhood kids to scribble whatever they want in it. I let them draw squares and circles. I let them leave messages for posterity.

I do it for Polly, who was smart enough to know to do it herself.

Copyright 2008 Ruth Harrigan