The Gimlet

The gimlet lived in the same jar as the bradawl, and in the thin light of the morning Nyra drew it out to show the girl a deeper way to begin a hole. It was a small T of steel and beech, a screw of bright metal below a handle worn smooth, and it turned in the fingers with a little threat of its own sharpness. Nyra set it on the bench beside the bradawl so the girl could see the two together, the one that pressed and the one that cut.

The girl looked from one tool to the other. “Why the gimlet,” she asked, “when the bradawl already starts a hole well enough.” Nyra answered that the bradawl only pushes the wood aside and leaves it crowded, while the gimlet cuts a true round and draws the waste up and out behind it. “The bradawl is quicker for a peg,” she said, “and the gimlet is right when the hole must go deep, or hold a screw, or take a dowel that will bear some weight.” The girl turned the gimlet once and felt the thread catch at the air.

They set the bench by the window and marked the places where the holes would go, and Nyra started the first with a press of the point and then the slow turning that drew a thin curl of wood up the groove. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. No column could hold the small resistance of the pine against the thread, or the way the curl rose and broke and fell to the floor, or the quiet that sat with them while the hole went down true and clean.

When the holes were bored Nyra wiped the bright screw on a rag and had the girl take the book down from the shelf. “Write the day and the work and the number of them,” Nyra said, and the girl set it all in her careful hand, the gimlet holes among the plain rows of the page. “The book will tell you that we bored six holes in the pine,” Nyra said, “and it will not tell you how the last one went the sweetest of all.” The girl read the line back and found it true and small.

They swept the curls of pine into the stove and stood a moment in the warmth while the kettle came awake. The gimlet lay on the bench beside the bradawl, the two of them plain and done, showing nothing of the holes they had made or the morning they had spent. Nyra and the girl looked at the quiet work together, each keeping what the other could not quite set down. The book keeps the depth of the hole, and you keep the clearing of it.