by Joe Derkacht
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Neither one of us could have guessed just how miraculous the answer would be. The high-pitched whine of a radial arm saw ripping through a piece of lumber was something I would have recognized anywhere. No longer knowing the safest, most proper use of one was irrelevant, when it came to being jerked awake by one in the middle of the night. The sound was nearly loud enough to be coming from under my window. The alarm clock on my nightstand read 5:01. What crazy person would be working at this hour of the morning?
Burying my head into my goose down pillow didn’t begin to help. Still groggy with sleep, I gradually realized the source of the noise was my own workshop. I dismissed a fleeting thought to call Blackie and wake him from his own slumber. It was probably nothing more than a high school prank. If I couldn’t roust a few kids on my own, what good was I?
Light blazed from the workshop’s open door. Whoever they were, they were certainly brazen. As soon as I set foot on the pathway, the whine of the saw died. The crunch of oyster shells under my feet warning the intruders of my coming? I stuck my head inside the doorway.
No kids. Instead, a man stood with his back to me, whistling a maddeningly familiar tune somehow beyond my ability to place. Worse yet, he wore a ridiculous red velvet suit with white fur trim. Across the workbench were scattered wooden toys in various stages of completion. Someone had also put out bright poinsettias in foil-wrapped pots.
Such beautiful toys! It would have been like sacrilege to disturb him, when he was making toys for children. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind, than he put aside the toy he was working on and instead picked up a notebook. Leaning over his shoulder, I saw him turn first one page, and then another, and another, all of them devoted to drawings as familiar to me as the tunes he whistled. Unfortunately they were just as inaccessible.
He closed the notebook. He selected and pulled lumber stock from my stacked supply. He marked off swift measurements and switched on my saws, planers, routers, sanders. He ran the lumber through, again making enough noise to wake the neighborhood. Working more swiftly than I thought possible, he glued, joined, clamped… applied veneers… sanded… sprayed on varnishes, and sanded and varnished again, and again, and again… added clock works, weights and pendulum… polished stone, cut abalone shell, pieced together stained glass… screwed in the door hinges, inserted a glass pane…
Before standing back to admire his handiwork, he switched off every piece of machinery. Miraculously, the floors and workbenches were clean, entirely free of sawdust and woodchips.
Turning in my direction, he gestured toward the completed Grandfather clock with a flourish, and then winked at me. He was white-haired, bearded, half bald, wearing wire-rimmed glasses. It was my father.
Still whistling, he faded from sight. With that, I felt myself begin to rise, as though surfacing from the bottom of a lake. I awoke, his whistling still in my ears. The tune was a Christmas carol, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. I was pretty sure Angels We Have Heard On High had been another of his selections, and Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly.
How strange, how deeply, deeply strange, I thought. Reluctantly sitting up and swinging my legs to the floor, I found myself whistling, too. The sound was even more satisfying than the thought of a pinch of Copenhagen.
What a dream!
If it was a dream. What if it had been real? I threw on my jeans and rushed out to my workshop. As I opened the door and flipped on the lights, I smelled freshly sawn lumber. I nearly heard the echo of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring lingering yet. My eyes searched hungrily for my father, and for toys and poinsettias, any sign at all that the dream might have been real. The three coffins, the unfinished Grandfather clocks, were in their usual place. No new one stood ready for my inspection.
When I rested my hand on the radial arm saw, I felt warmth radiating from its motor housing. My imagination?
Crazy! I thought, momentarily shuddering; maybe it was the voices, again. Should I tell anyone?
Dream? What did the dream mean? Did it mean anything? Was it supposed to? I sat down on a metal folding chair and covered my face with my hands. Just what had I seen? As I pressed my fingers hard against my eyeballs, I no longer saw a man in red, or toys, or poinsettias, or even a new Grandfather clock. Instead, step-by-step images came to me of how to construct one of my clocks. Opening my eyes, I stared at my unfinished clock carcases.
Maybe starting over again was possible. But how did one come up with the ideas in the first place? The idea, the inspiration, the epiphany that might birth a work of art in the mind and heart, was as important as the skill to bring one to completion. Without a knowledge of how I’d meant to finish the work already begun, all would be clumsy at best.
It was then that I saw the gray vinyl notebook sitting out on the workbench next to those three clock carcases. Chills ran up and down my spine. I couldn’t remember leaving any notebook out the night before. Flipping it open, I began leafing through the pages. As in my dream, each presented a highly-detailed drawing executed in a sure hand. As before, whenever I perused the books from the shelves in the house (I was not yet entirely comfortable thinking of it as my house), the measurements still presented me with problems. But I was catching gleams of insight into the mind that had once been capable of both creating these drawings and bringing them to reality. Beautiful reality, if the drawings were any indication, and the photos I’d found of others I’d done.
Two hours passed, in my close inspection of the notebook, before I realized the drawings corresponded with the three carcases awaiting their completion. My first clue should have been the number of notebook dividers with their colored, transparent tabs.
But how was one to go from page to finished piece? Beside each drawing were paragraphs printed block-style in a neat hand. More clues to help me along the way? I might now possess a better grasp of the work before me, and of my former techniques, but at present I still could not read and the numbers included in the drawings meant nothing to me.
Numbers. I at least understood what numbers were for, that the measurements corresponded to those printed on a metal tape measure. I picked up my tape measure from where it lay abandoned on the workbench like the gray notebook. The heft of the metal case was strangely reassuring. Pulling out a length of the blade, I stared at the black numbers printed on yellow.
An image flashed through my mind: My father sat at his workbench drafting a scale drawing of an armoire he meant to build. He turned to me with his ruler and asked me to check the measurement. Fractions had been difficult for him, at least those smaller than an eighth of an inch. The memory came flooding back, of how he had often had me double-check the measurements for his projects, whether for a house or for a piece of furniture.
Yes, fractions had sometimes been a challenge for him. Yet he hadn’t let that fact keep him from building everything from his beloved chairs and tables to a handful of finely crafted houses.
Excited, I pulled the tape out further and compared the numbers on it to one of my drawings. If these numbers corresponded to what I’d actually produced in the cases standing next to my workbench...
Gradually, I became aware of someone watching me. It was Zell, coffee mug in hand. Her face beamed.
“You must be feeling better!”
“I think I am,” I said, rubbing my forearm over my sweaty brow. “I still can’t read yet, but numbers seem to be coming back to me.”
I measured the height of the nearest carcase and locked the tape and shoved it in her direction.
“Tell me what that measurement is, will you?”
She squinted at it for a moment, before saying, “Seventy-two inches.”
I opened the gray notebook and leafed through to the appropriate page. I pointed to the drawing.
“Is that what this measurement says?”
She glanced at it and nodded, agreeing quickly.
“Then it’s beginning to com
e back to me,” I said, collapsing onto my folding chair.
“That’s not all,” she said, smiling and handing the mug of coffee to me.
I took a slurp from the cup, and asked, “What do you mean?”
“You were whistling when I came in.”
“Whistling?”
“You used to whistle all the time. It didn’t matter if you were working here in your shop, or mowing your lawn, or weeding in the garden. You were always whistling.”
“That must have been annoying!”
“Not at all,” she said. “You whistled quite beautifully.”
“I did?”
“I always loved hearing you,” she said, wiping a tear from the corner of one eye.
“Yes?”
“My Albert was a whistler. Not nearly as accomplished as you, mind you. I’ve sometimes wondered if he was killed because of it, if he forgot where he was and somebody from the other side heard him whistling and just sort of fired in his direction.”
WWII again.
“Maybe he annoyed them?”
“Maybe,” she said, smiling. “Do you think you can whistle that again?”
“What?”
“Joy to the World. You were whistling it when I came in.”
“Really?” I said, pursing my lips and experimentally blowing air through them, whistling a nonsense tune. “Doesn’t sound like much to me.”
“Oh, you!” Zell said, hitting me on the shoulder.
“John?” A voice called from the door. It was Reverend Grunwald, in jeans and a rumpled plaid shirt.
“Reverend Grunwald!” Zell exclaimed. “John has some good news!”
“Wonderful,” he said. “Good news early in the morning is always the best kind.”
“He can tell you all about it, and in the meantime I’ll rustle up John’s favorite breakfast for us, strawberry waffles with whipped cream.”
“Oh, good news on top of good news,” Reverend Grunwald said, obviously pleased. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation, and winked at me. “Can your neighbor cook, though, John? That’s the question.”
“She’s not bad at all,” I said.
Zell was already to the door. She turned with a parting shot of her own. “It’s not surprising you have so few friends, John Raventhorst. And as for you, Reverend Grunwald—”
“Yes, Mrs. Zelig?” He asked, eyeing her innocently.
“Oh, just get on with what you came to do.”
“That I will,” he said. “I’m looking forward to those waffles of yours.”
“Hmmph,” she snorted, walking out.
