Night Soul and Other Stories (13 page)

So was it he who had sent her
back
to Bob Whey?

Clea set the compass on a counter on newspaper and wiped it. It was greasy, it was filthy, she said. And then, “Do you need this?” she said, meaning want. A scrap of paper half-taped with a frayed strip of duct-tape to the bottom of the housing. “An honor,” it read, and Xides unpeeled it, and laughed at what he found on the other side, a piece torn from a photo he remembered, a broken nose of stone, the sphinx he knew Napoleon and his horse were looking at one day for the camera.

His companion for this moment, his cleaning woman, must have known him, his face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

In the year 1990 I tell this to a woman who is on a job with me, and we share an issue of justice, I believe, but at that moment of first meeting, little more. A recollection of hers inspires mine, and she hears me out. She happens to be an expert on sound.

One summertime I dreamt of varnishes. I was a boy. “Dream” in the sense of eat, sleep,
think
varnish, thin, mix, and apply again. And varnish remover.

I carved a model whaleboat. Chiseled it, I hear the split and scrape, gouged it out of a slab of stained hardwood that had been lying on the toolshed floor for weeks—for years. A base, a stand for a trophy, I can’t imagine what. The wood had this deep and independent gravity to it, and the finish brought up a richer, plum band or stripe across the top side like the dark gap between the good creamy rings of Saturn in my book. And I—who knew where the rakes were, three trowels, the pink skull of (I think) a cat at the foot of the neighbor’s termite-ridden fence post, a rusted little handsaw, the tuning fork my mother had left beside the kitchen sink, the wintergreen-tasting twigs and dirty red bark of the woodpecker’s preferred tree on the far side of the house, my sister’s bike covered by me with a plastic tarp when she went to camp, and here behind a blue coffee can (kerosene-smelling) of nails (to be used as a target when my town friend brought his air rifle out) my sister’s zippered kit of bike tools and an unused train ticket on the shelf above the workbench in this shed where I had learned for myself the carpenter’s rule Measure twice, cut once—I who (as my father put it) kept track as much as anyone around this joint had left where I’d seen it the middle of June this eighteen-inch block of maple inherited like the tool shed itself from the previous owner. Part of something else. Noticing it now I took it up off the floor and felt it and was drawn to it by a force of ownership.

For the first time I thought vaguely, What is going on around here? In fact, I loathed myself as a boy, despised the balsa wood of my old-fashioned model kits—can you imagine? These had been procured for me by my great-uncle, a Warrant Officer in the Coast Guard, and they were specialty items even in those days. I don’t know where he found them. A heavy cruiser, an aircraft carrier, slim destroyers side by side, a buoy tender, an old scale-model 83-foot harbor patrol boat. Today it’s all pre-cut plastic, and was even then. Whereas my great-uncle thought plastic an abomination. Granted it repels “ship worms” on a real boat, but then you get chronic barnacles and you need to apply anti-fouling paint. Plastic come to think of it may have been just about all he felt himself in extreme opposition to—such a quaint objection it seems now. I could cut a hull from a length of balsa when I was nine. A double-ended Macao junk had my blood on it. Airy as cork, completely dispensable meringue-light balsa wood for kids to carve like cheese.

I’d had other kits that required no cutting to speak of. Old friend bass wood, for a Union Pacific locomotive, a Patton tank with treads that moved. But not to be compared to what I found on the floor of the toolshed,
our
toolshed now (for we had bought this place cheap after renting it the previous summer. Now what was that like?). I was almost twelve. In that instant, balsa seemed soft as styrofoam, the crust of a loaf, as flesh, I didn’t know what, an avocado, but I would try my hand upon this ill-advised hardwood maple—my knife and the dented chisel that I had come upon by chance striking it with my rake in a pile of rotten leaves. It said—this chisel, but more this curious dent or uncannily retooled minute trough in it, no more than a wicked little groove in the middle of the blade—Get started, get going.

You see my mood, humming all the time in fact.

Instead of breathing.

Remembering little things the way you can’t not remember some larger ones—now that’s confusing, the way I put it. Animal smell of the sun on the earth at the exposed root of an outstanding sweet white oak that now belonged to us; or on the other hand my mother and father’s parallel love of life, I suppose.

The woman I’m telling this to more clearly than it could have been told or thought twenty-five years before narrows her eyes, she has a look of attention and polite impatience, she wants to hear what’s coming, understanding that this isn’t a story maybe. How could there be passion in her interest, impertinence?

Kneeling among shingles, splintered shims, and hard rice grains and kernels of horse corn and preferring the bottom of a yellow milk crate to rest the block of maple on, I took the handsaw to its corners, and soon had a crude oval, kerosene-smelling because of the saw.

But
not
an oval. God! a many-sided mess on my hands to take me until I had to go back to school—the rest of the damn summer to finish the boat, the wood implacable—or until my sister got home from camp.

But
not
a mess, when I blinked and saw my crude cuts now as one sweep of gunwale either side and found my pencil in the clanking can of nails. This thing I made would be a model of an old double-ender whaleboat, not quite the flared, sea-steep prow and stern of a Portuguese fisherman’s “half-moon” but steadier and stronger. But maple?

Next morning I began to shape the gunwales and hollow out the hull on the ground outside. Holding my breath, and with awful slips and stops, holding the mad tool down one-handed with the whole half of me bearing down on the damnably minerally resistant block.

My gouge-marks looked like fingertips working another matter trying to get somewhere and there was a war on and I’m right here ensconced in a summertime state with no coastline. Jazz in my throat, my unconscious humming a frequency set to a secret future that was my own, and hoping to take up the saxophone. But ruining my fingers on the wood. Cutting myself on the blade. Muttering “Deeyum!” bringing to life this piece of a petrified forest which maybe remembered in my gougings the leafy tree it came from. By this time they were casting hulls out of cement, so here was hope for me, hollowing out my hull, holding (my great-uncle said) the line (for the Coast Guard had turned to steel and fiberglass).

Wood calms.

My sister at camp, perhaps I’m not like the people at this summer place—my parents—their mysterious routines: I was like the place itself I now think—
that
was what I was like—this close little toolshed and nine-and-a-half acres around the house to do with what we wanted.

And I was getting somewhere, because for some reason I didn’t have much time.

It was quiet there, said the woman I was telling this to; but that’s going to end. I touched her hand. It had no effect on her.

I worked the oval length of the thing deeper. I created a barrelly roominess. Gunwales flaring emerged from the inside out—and I had even
carved
(I can’t believe it today years later) a miniature cradle of passable gunwale ribs. Till one day (floorplanks maybe to come) I had nowhere to go almost yet kept faithfully sanding and finely shaving. Wanting to show the boat to Liz, the neighbor’s younger daughter whom I loved; and happy as a “free man” not to be interrupted by her, prizing the dark, plum vein straight through the block unplanable and of a natural weight. Quiet around here? Not always, as even the neighbors know. My father’s a famous talker, a public speaker, and he and my mother have a way of speaking to each other that’s very audible.

The toolshed, though, is conceded to me. At almost twelve I’m not your skilled woodworker. But I am taken for thirteen. Secret and determined—for I go into what I don’t know. I know enough to try, and am cruelly inspired some days, tall for my age, proud of the papery-tiered gray-plastered-cone hornet nest just outside the door up under the overhang of my shed roof, a generation of long brown wasps, a power I lived with and thought I could arouse from this nest to do some bidding I was not fiendish enough to yet know. I’m somebody. That was it.

Till one day, to music, the unwavering, final sound of a cello, taking you would swear something from my humming (or coming in on it) the rough-cut, gouged and gunwaled and resanded hull of my whaleboat with a tiny, carved, not-glued-on keel and stem and stern post, when I held it by the gunwales rose almost from my fingers it was now comparatively so light—though hardwood
maple
as I had learned from my mother appropriately, whose cello far away inside the house it was. It was a particular day, expectant, unwise; I knew this piece of wood, and we were expecting an important friend of my father’s in the late afternoon and my father had left for an appointment in town but was coming back, an embarrassment of riches as I saw it and saw it then, and I was not a person with ever nothing to do, though my father had an opinion on that score who himself thought being holed up in a tool shed or finding a weasel’s, probably a marten’s, little S-curved scat on the far side of the river was OK for a kid or some other types but not greatly thrilling. Or a question like my humming, sometimes loud, stood next to me if I could identify its appointment with me, this question. Which was, What did I know was going on, if anything?

My mother, doubtless alone but don’t assume anything around here, was not doing something silent but was practicing somewhere inside our land-embedded, landscape-lost cottage today, private in that wooded, stony-spined, hilly province of Vermont. Audible strangely in memory too, the faraway, heart-breaking throat-gripping authority of that instrument’s tone said, Listen, listen, bring the boat inside and test it in the bathtub. I saw it manned and rocking, I saw it passengered, did I hear music coming from it?—I was strung myself enough to concentrate so hard I might not hear tires on the driveway.

I ask as of a not quite real nightmare: and who was the woman under the bed telling a long, almost but I have to say not funny, frighteningly unrememberable story, and who were the much-decorated twin Marines adrift in slow-motion orbit about the Moon? Yet I kept scraping, and 80- and 150- and 220-sandpapering down to the rubbed-pale, somehow distinguished paper that had been coarse-
and
fine-sand. Now sounding an eerie thinness of bottom that I would rap proudly, and wishing my mother or someone would come here by chance and only for a minute and look at what I had to show. It was her college cello she was playing this July day we found ourselves apparently alone, she with a touch, a lostness and sweep of elbow enough to make you smile (I could see her), it was comical, a fineness of face I could see in the wood I worked never imagining that I was being watched; and “not a musician,” she said, for she “never” played her cello; dragged it up here (in the car) along with her high school clarinet, “the easiest reed to know” (though a weakie next to piano and sax), plus her plastic recorder from primary school. Why does she play only when she “has time”? I am told I said, because I would
say
things.

To my father this summer of 1966: If you could find a war you
liked
would you go fight in it?

Grownups laughed, so my sister I believe laughed too but didn’t like it. So what has changed? (For this has not.) Say things and people will hate you. Go to your enemies for the truth, for justice. Say things and many people will pretty much love you. My father with much political chatter both about American police state and freedom I recall didn’t seem to expect much of me. I am finding the words; they, really, me. He was for freedom. He saw you as being set for life with your abilities. I mean that you couldn’t do much, you were pretty ordinary but the struggle for freedom would make it OK. But what
has
changed?

The woman listening nods almost imperceptibly.

From that time, that day? I add.

My mother had a policy of more or less not going into town, whereas I had two friends there, one with a Buck air rifle that shot .177 BBs who had plans for us, and one with a real bow who fletched his own arrows, and a thick red blue and white target with a stand. My mother’s wariness became mine, I weighed her words. (Why don’t I think of the house as ours? Feeling like a lodge as you went foreignly through the front door—and who knew where you would wind up, is there an undiscovered annex? What was unfixed about it, if anything? We had bought the place after renting it one summer, and I was nearly twelve and believed in ownership down to the faintly harsh or peppery peppermint smell of my mother in the hall, “extremely independent” (my father described her but it didn’t sound right).

Until, this morning, on my knees on the shed floor, tapping the flat bottom of my boat, fighting it, pampering it, blowing on it, caressing it, and fine-sanding the inside, so that with proud unconcern I heard the ajar door creak and knew someone was in the doorway of this tool shed behind me (did I need a sweep-oar instead of a tiller?), I heard the faraway inside-the-house cello and turned with my sandpaper block in my hand to see a man in green perfectly familiar to me but unexpected, ambushed (both of us), so that I looked at his dark green workshirt, a tiny American flag pin in the pocket button-hole, and turned back to my work as if he visited me often or weren’t there,
or
I had contempt for him or respect.

I recall because perhaps from just about that time (because it came from this very man), I had learned that no one could touch me.

It was my friend’s, my playmate’s, father, our neighbor, and he asked me if I had seen Liz. (But why was he
over
here?) He came and stood. “Sand and varnish, varnish and sand,” he said. “Makin’ a boat?” he said. What can you say to that? “Where’d ya find the wood?” he asked, as if he knew. Right here on the floor he was standing on, I told him and he said my toolshed looked just like when the owner his friend had lived here. Former owner, I said. “Too bad he had to sell.” I didn’t mind, I said. “You don’t mind,” this man said methodically. “He was a nice fella. Not enough work around here, it’s gone down statewide.”

Continuing with my own work, I asked what work his friend, our last summer’s landlord, did. “Whatever needed doing,” Liz’s father said. “Somebody’s playin’ the violin,” he said. I looked up at him and I nodded, and in some way new to me smiled and continued my work. But I heard the distant cello’s throat-gripping, wide, biting, caressing (I believe), string-rubbing stroke of tune deep-drawn by the bow and hung along the layers of flattened day and absorbed midsummer color.