The nail bins were the old kind, wooden, tilted toward you, each one a different length, and the whole rack smelled of the light oil they coat nails in to keep the rust off in the bin. It gets on your fingers. It is a thin gray-brown film you can smell for an hour after, metallic and faintly like a blown-out match, and it means you have been handling loose steel. You do not get that off buying a boxed carton with a picture on the front. Bulk nails you touch.
I had a job at home and the job was the reason I was standing there. A section of fence rail had pulled off the post, the nails backed out over years of the wood swelling and drying, swelling and drying, until they stood a quarter inch proud and did nothing. That is what a nail failing looks like. It does not break. It just slowly stops holding, walks itself out of the wood a hair a season, until the day the wind leans on the rail and the rail comes off in your hand. So I needed nails, and I needed the right ones, because the wrong ones would do the same thing again faster.
Length was the first decision and the bins made you choose by eye. There were little cards on each bin with a size on them — 8d, 10d, 16d, the penny sizes that stopped meaning pennies a hundred years ago and now just mean length in a code you either know or have to translate at the bin. Sixteen-penny is three and a half inches. I know that the way I know a few useless-until-suddenly-necessary things. The rail was inch-and-a-half stock going into a four-by-four, so I wanted something long enough to bite deep into the post but not so long it came out the far side and waited there to catch a wrist. I held a 16d against the two fingers I was using as a ruler. Too long. A 10d, three inches. Closer. I wanted the point to bury itself in solid post and stop.
Then the kind. The bins had smooth shanks and they had the spiral ones, the ones with a twist rolled into the shank so they turn as they drive and hold like a screw wants to. The smooth ones back out. The smooth ones are what had failed on my fence, driven by whoever built it, cheaper by the pound and easier to drive and gone in ten years. The spiral shanks cost more and fight you going in and do not come out, which is the entire point of a nail, the not coming out. I took spirals. I had learned the lesson already and paid for it once in a fallen rail and did not need to pay for it twice.
The scoop was steel, dented, hanging on a chain too short to reach the far bin so you had to lean. I ran it into the 10d spirals and they came up in a heavy heap, more than I needed, and I tipped some back, and the ones I tipped back did not go back clean — a few caught crossways on the lip of the bin and I had to knock them loose, and one skated off onto the floor and I left it, because a dropped nail on a hardware floor is a thing everybody leaves, a small tax the store pays on selling things loose.
The bag was brown paper, the small size, and here is what the bags do. They tear. A pound of nails is heavier than a paper bag has any right to carry, and worse, the nails have points, and the points find the corners. Every single time, one sharp corner works through the paper on the walk to the scale, and a nail or two starts to poke out of the bottom seam like something trying to be born. Mine did. I felt it go, a small give in the corner, and I cupped my hand under the bag the rest of the way, which is what you learn to do, carry a bag of bulk nails like it is already leaking, because it is.
The scale hung from the ceiling on a chain, a dial scale with a needle, the pan swinging a little when I set the bag in it. The needle went around and bounced and settled. Just over a pound. There was a chart, price per pound, and I did the arithmetic in my head and it came out to less than I expected, which is the reverse of the grocery store, where bulk always costs more than the guess. Here the nails were nearly nothing. It is the labor around them that costs — the driving, the pulling of the old ones, the trip. The nails themselves weigh more than they are worth.
I thought about how many of these would end up bent. That is the other thing you buy with a pound of nails, a certain number of failures. You drive ten and two hit the grain wrong and fold over, or you catch one at a bad angle and it curls, or the point finds a knot and the whole nail turns sideways and you have to pull it, black and hooked, and start again with a fresh one. A pound of nails is not a pound of fasteners. It is a pound of attempts. Some of them will end up bent on a rock in the grass under the fence, pulled and tossed, waiting to find a tire or a bare foot in a year.
At the register the man tipped my bag over the counter to count nothing — you cannot count a pound of nails — and just read the weight off the pencil mark the scale station let me write, and rang it, and slid the bag back. The torn corner had gotten worse on the counter. By the time I reached the truck a single spiral nail had worked all the way through the seam and was standing point-down through the bottom of the bag, and when I set the bag on the seat it stood there a moment on that one nail like a leg, before it tipped and spilled a short bright line of steel across the vinyl.