Pounding nails.  He saw the irony in it now.  They had lived on the river since 2005.  Built the house of their dreams. Plans lifted from blueprints that they found on a wonky table made of plywood and sawhorse easels.  The construction workers - gone, slider door yet to be placed.  They just walked in.  The plans were unfurled, a hammer held one end and a Phillips head the other.  He took pictures with his phone, jotted some notes in a text to himself.  Once ready, they showed their own architect, and mimicked the print - flipping it so that the kitchen and office were switched with the laundry and main bedroom.  It only took a few years later to question walking into that vacant slider door.  Ahmuad Arbery did the same thing, entered a construction site.  When he back tracked to continue his run down the residential street, Ahmuad was followed to his end.

*
	Pounding nails.  He bent down on sore knees.  He had had both knees replaced but he still hobbled.  Crouched he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up.  His momentum faltered, gravity pulled into that memory hole.  
	He swore he would never pound nails again.  Yet here he was replacing boards that had rotted on the dock.  Nails jiggered up like the rodent on the whack-a-mole game. He had pounded them down before, but it was time for them to be replaced.  So he went to Lowe’s with his measurements.  They cut the lumber down just right.  Back at home, on the river, knelt on the dock, he was pounding nails.
	The first time he actually did this, he claimed he knew what he was doing.  Vietnam 1967.  Stationed just outside of Saigon in a hamlet he no longer can recall its name.  He was the Chaplain’s Assistant.  The Presbyterian Chaplain, had graduated from West Point.  The Chaplain could hit a target but because of Geneva Code, was not meant to carry a loaded weapon.  Was only meant to carry his faith.  Was only meant to carry the weight of their confessions.
	As the Assistant, he was supposed to transport the Chaplain to non-conflict areas so that the Chaplain could carry out his duties.  He learned to carry some of that weight, shared in the responsibility of writing letters home to the nearest of kin.  “It is the Army’s regret to inform that…”  
	Even now, after all of these years as he pounded nails that echo out over the water, he could recall those lines by memory.  The pound of the nail like the plunk of a typewriter letter.  The echo reverberating like the chime at the end of a sentence.
	In ‘Nam, once his Commanding Officer found out that he came from a lumber companying owning family, assumed he had other talents than driving fast along dirt paths and rice paddies.  He let his CO assume.  He let him carry that belief because he felt that it would benefit.  A cause and effect. That’s how he first started pounding nails.
	The Commanding Officer wanted his own barracks.  He chose the Chaplain’s Assistant to build the “hooch.”  Measure out the square footage.  Draw up a list of materials.  How much lumber?  How much corrugated metal?  How much cement mix?  A hammer and a Phillips head.
	 Enough room for the Commanding Officer, the West Point graduated Presbyterian Chaplain, and his Assistant.  Enough room for a chapel, that could be converted to a dining-living area; where prayers could be paused and shots of bath-tub gin could be pounded instead.
	Driving down posts into hand churned cement, pounding nails into two by fours to frame a three dimensional rectangle.  The red-mud-clay was the worst.  The biting ants - that trickled in to find the dry instead of drowning - were more than the worst.  Mildewed boots were discarded for flipflops, the in-camp footwear of choice.  Rain pounded.  Stress pounded into headaches.  Fists sometimes pounded, and the hammer.
	Often he would wonder, woken in the middle of the night, who the fuck is pounding nails at this hour?  Only to realize, no that’s not an air-gun hammer, but a machine gun unloading its distorted prayer. Its echo pounding out a rhythm, that he would the next day have to pound out on his typewriter.  A cause and effect.

*
	Pounding nails now in 2025, brings an entirely different mediation.  Then, pounding nails built a shelter that only a short while later would be completely torn down.  A tearing down of a failed military complex.  
Pounding nails now fixed something so that little feet springing off a dock into the river water below wouldn’t come away bleeding and in need of a Tetanus shot.  Pounding nails now is its own mantra, a reminder that he made it out alive unlike so many whom he wrote letters home.  Pounding nails, one plunk and an echo at a time.  Their own cause and effect, sometimes tearing down, sometimes building up, sometimes a chime like a sound bowl in prayer.






Poet, Educator, and Advocate Shelli Rottschafer (she/her/ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in Latin American Contemporary Literature (2005). From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught Spanish at a small liberal arts college in Michigan. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry from Western Colorado University (2025). Shelli resides in Louisville, Colorado & El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, Daniel Combs, and their Pyrenees-Border Collie rescue pup.