by R.P. Burnham
Malcolm Kimball, just months shy of being sixteen, looked forward to that birthday in the same way a prisoner looked forward to the day of his release. It would be the day he would be through with school forever. A long time ago in days he could barely remember he was free. He had parents who controlled him, disciplined him, even slapped him sometimes, but he was in a familiar world where nobody made him doubt himself, where he felt comfortable and connected and part of something, which to him was what freedom meant—to live in a place where he could be himself. He recovered touches of that feeling on school vacations, but he was never far enough away from school to be able to forget his bondage. He still remembered the shock of his first year in public school. The kids didn’t seem to like him. They called him a dirty boy and made fun of his shabby clothes. In games at recess he was never chosen until there were no choices left. Teachers treated him indifferently or meanly while fawning on the rich kids in town. So right from the beginning school made him feel sad, a feeling that lasted right up to last day of school in June every year.
Getting older made no difference. Young or old, school for him was a daily humiliation. The only thing he really learned from school was that he was stupid and should be ashamed of himself. Students would titter when he was asked a question in class, so much so that his usual response was to freeze up. Between classes kids would make mean remarks in his presence. He was stupid as a brick. He was so dumb he had to look at a crib note on his arm to remember his name. The only time he answered a question correctly was when he said he didn’t know. Even some of the teachers seemed to enjoy making him squirm. The guidance counselor at C. A. had seen him only once and that was to tell him he needed to learn a trade. He took no part in school activities and had no friends among the city kids. The only thing he was good at was shop because there he used his hands and his brain was not required. His reading ability was very limited. Big words became a twisted mass of swirling letters when he tried to understand them. Facts wouldn’t stay in his head. One day in history class he couldn’t remember the name of the father of our country. He got poor grades, D’s and F’s, and a few B’s in shop. He knew even the D’s he got were usually simply to pass him on and make him some other teacher’s problem. He stayed back in the eighth grade before everyone recognized that a second stab at the same subjects was useless. He was passed on to high school, as unprepared as possible.
All this time he was as lonely as a skunk. He had friends, but they were not able to help him feel better. He was sure nobody could understand the humiliation and pain he experienced. Even his own sister, Sissy, was ashamed of him and avoided him at school and on the school bus. She, like every other kid, didn’t think he had feelings, but he did. For many years he cried often in his secret loneliness until a day came when he became ashamed of himself for being a baby. Then he cried no more, even though he felt even sadder the older he got. But that was life. Life was sad, and he swam in a sea of sadness.
The way he escaped his awful situation was to daydream. In his younger years he would daydream of beating up kids who taunted him about his shabby clothes and stupidity. By the time he got to high school and his body had changed his daydreams took other forms. He spent hours at home and in school seeing himself driving a powerful and expensive European car like a BMW or Jaguar and having girls falling all over him. At the service station where his neighbor’s son, Luke Berry, worked and had helped him get a job, there were always stacks of girlie magazines in the desk drawer in the office. He pored over them every chance he got. There was a girl who rode the school bus with him who had developed early and already had voluptuous curves. He was too shy to even speak to her, but he spent hours imagining every contour of her body, and when he looked at those nude women in the magazines he put her face on their exposed bodies and imagined them doing all sorts of wicked pleasures together.
But if his daydreams allowed him to feel free in a way he never was in life, he also remembered that his grandmother often said if wishes were horses beggars would ride. He might be stupid, but he did know the difference between dream and reality. After wasting an hour or two thinking about sex and expensive cars, he was always left with a hunger that gnawed at his empty innards and made him feel useless and hopeless. Who are you trying to kid? he’d think sometimes. He was never going to own a BMW, and it was doubtful any girl would ever find him interesting when he didn’t find himself the least bit interesting. He felt inferior because he knew he was inferior, just like he knew he was stupid.
When in the grip of this despair, he would know that to think he would be free once out of school was also a pipe dream. Though school was the worst, there was really no place he was safe from being reminded of his inferiority and stupidity. Even with his friends he might find himself in danger of sudden humiliation. His friend Denny Farquhar had a car, an old Ford heap he bought with money saved from after-school jobs and fixed up with spare parts from car graveyards. In it he, Denny, Bob Pollock and Alden Pope had many fun nights cruising around and looking for girls and talking about girls and thinking about girls and stopping at fast-food places to eat junk food and hope to find girls. When they could they drank beer. More rarely they got ahold of some grass to smoke. Sometimes they would leave the car and hang around a street corner in Waska looking for girls. When they did, though, it was worse than not meeting them. He never knew what to say to them and so hung back. None of the girls took the slightest interest in him. They always gathered around Bob, who was a handsome dark-haired guy, or Denny because he had a car. Sometimes when they met up with town boys a different situation arose. One of them might say to Denny, “I see you’ve got the genius with you” or some other nasty dig which led to some fights. He’d get a savage pleasure from beating the loudmouth up or—just as often— he’d get his ass kicked. Either way the fights were always broken up before anyone got seriously hurt. Besides, it was the girls who took no interest in him that hurt the most, and you couldn’t fight girls.
There was one thing that was getting better. He didn’t realize it at first, but the job he got in the fall and the money he earned (and which part of went to supporting the family) made him begin to feel a little better about himself. Being interested in cars and good with his hands, he did quite well, so that after a while he actually started feeling rather proud of himself and even a tiny bit hopeful because he got a glimpse of life beyond school that wasn’t a daydream. And in June he became even prouder when the owner of the station, Dave Audet, asked him to be the one to stay until nine on Friday nights and be the one who closed the station up. It was the first time in his life he had been given an adult responsibility. Sometimes he’d take the key to the garage out of his pocket just to look at it and feel a thrill of pleasure. He wasn’t expected to do much beyond pump gas, but he had been able to diagnose engine problems three or four times that turned out to be correct when Luke fixed the car later. Neither the boss nor Luke said anything, but he knew they saw what he had done.
Most nights, though, were rather boring. He got gas for a dozen or fifteen cars on average, and much time was simply spent waiting for nine o’clock. One night in mid-July that was even slower than usual, he was sitting at the cluttered desk in the office ogling nude women from the girlie magazines in the top desk drawer. He was engrossed in the suggestive pictures and fantasizing about them, but he was aware that something in the back of his mind was bothering him, so after a while he looked up so he could think clearly.
Through the opening into the garage he could see the 1985 Toyota Luke was working on. He was overhauling an engine that had over 100,000 miles of use. At four o’clock when Malcolm arrived for work he’d helped Luke by cleaning the crud from the carburetor. More and more he was learning the trade and trusted with important tasks. He looked at the calendar that showed a seminude babe suggestively straddling a motorcycle, then below it to the keys hanging on hooks of the four or five cars they were servicing currently. The bosomy woman distracted his mind again, so he turned in the swivel chai
r to look at a shelf of specification catalogs for many models of cars. Luke and Dave used these books often to look up parts. They kept common items like fan belts and oil filters in stock, but most stuff they needed was ordered from those catalogs and then delivered by an auto supply business in Bedford. That was one part of the business that bothered Malcolm as far as his prospects for getting more responsibilities. He was embarrassed to admit that he read slowly and with much difficulty. A few times Dave had asked him to look up a part, but he did it so slowly Dave had come out of the garage and angrily asked him what the hell was the problem?
That certainly bothered him, but now he remembered what had been troubling him as he ogled the naked women. It was past eight o’clock and Denny hadn’t called or driven by. When he closed the garage at nine, Denny was supposed to pick him up so that they could cruise through the streets of Waska for a few hours, then go home. If Denny didn’t show, he would have to hitchhike upcountry to get home. Sometimes Denny forgot to check in and still came. Other times he’d find a girl or something and be too busy to remember his friend. It was that prospect that was bothering him. The last time that happened he couldn’t get a ride and had to walk the many wearisome miles to home.
His grandmother, always filled with wisdom, used to say that what will be will be—though she didn’t say it anymore now that little Mark was sick and not getting better. Even so, Malcolm took it for a piece of good wisdom. He opened the desk and drew forth another girlie magazine, fully resigned to his fate. He began staring at the nude women and was soon so lost in his fantasies that the pictures gave rise to that he was surprised almost to panic to hear the bell triggered by a car going over the signal hose. Quickly he shoved the magazine back into the desk drawer and slammed it shut. He peered out to see a sleek silver BMW and panicked even more when he recognized the boy on the passenger side and the driver getting out of the car. It was two of the big men on campus at Courtney Academy. There were also two boys in the backseat, probably football stars and class officers like the two in front. Ray Caron and Brian Olson were the two whose names he knew. He was always embarrassed when looking at these magazines. He felt like people could see the wicked things he was thinking just by looking at him. To have to face these boys who regarded him as no better than a worm was the worst thing he could imagine happening.
He was so scared he had to fight the urge to duck down behind the desk. Only the fear that Dave would find out that a customer came and got no service, and the fact that the boys were walking towards the office, allowed him to win the battle over his cowardly panic. With a dry mouth, a pounding heart and a voice that cracked like a grackle’s call, he came to the door and said, “Can I help you?”
He could tell they recognized him. Strangely, though, just like him they seemed embarrassed that he was someone they knew. They looked at each other, waiting for one to step up.
Finally one of them, not Brian Olson who was driving and whose father probably owned the car, but one of the kids from the backseat, said, “We’ve got a problem with a tire.”
He was a handsome blond boy who spoke for the team at football rallies. Malcolm had always been in awe of his self-confidence in speaking in public, so it was very strange to see him so uneasy and unsure of himself. He looked at the front passenger-side tire to see it was flat.
Stating the obvious, Ray Caron said, “It’s flat.”
“We’d change it ourselves,” Brian Olson said, “but…” Then he stopped, at a loss for words.
“But we’re going to a party,” the blond boy said.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Ray Caron said, and the others nodded.
Malcolm saw him color, and finally he understood why. They didn’t know how to change a tire and were embarrassed to admit it. The realization confused him, surprised him, but he did see that they needed him. “I’ll take a look at it,” he said.
He went into the garage to get the portable car jack and rolled it out, carrying in his hand the other tool he would need, the pneumatic drill. He first loosened the bolts before jacking up the car, then removed them and pulled the tire off while the four boys watched and talked quietly among themselves. Taking the tire by the rim, he said, “I’ll be right back.”
In the garage he put the tire in a barrel of water and inflated it with the air hose. Instantly he saw the bubbles rising from where a nail had punctured the tire. He patched it with a round patch-plug combination and inflated the tire again. This time no bubbles showed.
Within five minutes he was mounting the tire back on the car. Looking at the four boys still huddled together like a nest of baby squirrels he felt differently about them and more confident and less afraid of what they thought of him. In a corner of his mind and unexpressed even as a thought, he was also aware that he felt a certain contempt for them and their girlish helplessness.
To Brian Olson he said, “It’s patched and will be okay. You might tell your parents that if they drive fast and for a long time it might be better to get a new tire, but this one should be all right—good as new, in fact.”
They seemed grateful. Brian Olson said, “Thanks a lot. We really appreciate it. How much do we owe you?”
Another car drove up for gas. He was glad to see that—there would be no awkward good-bye to say. Pausing on his way to the other car, he said, “Ten bucks should do it.”
Denny never did show up that night. He had found a new girl, and in the following weeks while he spent all his time with her Malcolm was marooned upcountry most of the time and forced to hitchhike to work and back. Weekdays when he wasn’t at work he hung around the house and carved cars and even tried a few birds, a chickadee that was not very good and a blue jay that was better. Mark was still sick and his mother more worried than ever. Some days she grew impatient with him and made it clear she wished he was out of the house. When her frowns grew too dark to ignore, he would take walks in the woods. Sometimes if his sister Sharon was home she would go with him, but mostly he was alone. He would also leave his fishing pole behind because his mother now hated fish for what they had done to her boy, and as a result Malcolm spent his time observing and thinking. Something different bubbled in his head after the night he changed the tire for those boys. He felt it before he knew it, and it was in the woods that things became clear.
Reading the signs of deer’s nesting place, seeing where a pileated woodpecker had made large oval holes searching for grubs in a dead tree, and finding the coughed-up bones and fur of field mice that an owl had deposited after digesting his prey, he thought of what his father always said about country people—that they knew the woods. The knew a deer’s footprints from a bobcat’s, they knew where the rare lady’s slipper bloomed, they could tell if a trout favored a deep pool in a brook and knew what flies they tied would land it. They knew how to repair their houses and cars and the stuff they used. These things they knew because it was essential to their lives that they know them. In fact, he thought, remembering many meals they had eaten, it wasn’t just the country menfolk who knew the woods and nature. His mother made stinging nettle soup and cattail chowder. She knew that pokeweed, milkweed, toothwort, early spring ferns, and dozens of other wild plants were edible. Malcolm recognized that these things were a kind of knowledge. What was new was the connection to book learning. All his life he had listened to his father and believed him but still thought of himself as one who knew nothing. Now he saw that knowledge came in different flavors. The rich city kids knew stuff from books, but they couldn’t even change a tire. They were polite to him and embarrassed in his presence because they did not know. Those people needed people like him. Maybe life was unfair, but he saw that sometimes things balanced out, the shoe was on the other foot, and the rich people were forced to submit to him. When he looked at some moss growing on a tree and knew it pointed north, he knew he could find his way home even without the sun. But those rich boys? They would be lost in the woods. They would need someone like him to come and rescue them. They lived in big house
s and drove expensive cars and bought anything they wanted, and yet without people like him they would have nothing.
Not only did he feel himself growing and becoming more confident in the life he would have after he quit school, he also started feeling proud of his parents for what they had endured and for what they knew and had passed on to him. They had a strength that he had inherited. To the trees that sighed in the breeze and the forest birds that chirped their greetings he whispered his discovery that he was becoming a man.
But there was one other thing a man did that he had never done, and thinking about it as he stared at the pictures in the girlie magazines at the service station, he grew more and more dissatisfied with fantasy. From some of the guys and even his sister Sissy he had heard that one of his neighbors, Mary Peckham, bathed in the Waska River many times in the summer. She was three or four years older than him, and the last of six kids in a family as poor as the Kimballs. She lived down the road from them in a shack just like theirs that didn’t have indoor plumbing. All the guys said she was a nymphomaniac and wasn’t particular who she screwed. Many times when he took walks in the woods he went by the river looking for her, but he either looked in the wrong place, went at the wrong time, or the rumors that she bathed in the river were false because he never saw the slightest sign that anyone bathed in the river. But one day when on a walk in the woods he stopped to listen to the sounds of splashing water in an inlet of the Waska River. He expected to see a beaver or maybe an otter, but instead he saw Mary. Approaching the shore quietly, he peered from behind a thick bush and saw the naked girl in the water. She was not pretty, but her body was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She was leaning over and rinsing the soap from her brown hair when he first saw her. She bobbed her head below the surface three or four times, then took a couple of steps towards the shore. Watching her large breasts sway and jiggle as she shook the water from her hair, he became aroused. The contrast between her tanned arms, neck and face and the whiteness of her body as she stood waist deep in the water and lathered her body with a bar of soap in slow languid strokes under her arms and then across her breasts emphasized that he was seeing the hidden parts of her.
His breath quickened as he felt himself growing more excited. If the rumors were true, she would not mind at all if he boldly showed himself. He thought about it, even egged himself to step forth and accost her, but he didn’t dare. He also could not force himself to slink away in defeat. Instead he just stared so that she, like the pictures in the girlie magazines, made his mind start fantasizing. Then the decision was suddenly made for him. She dipped down to rinse the soap off, and when he leaned forward to follow her, the motion caused a branch to snap under his foot.
“Who’s there?” she called.
“Come on, who’s there,” she repeated, angry now. “It’s not nice to spy.” She spoke like a teacher, angry, demanding, expecting to get her way.
Guiltily he came forward. She stood in the water, her breasts just bobbing at the surface and her nipples erect. Less clearly he could see the dark patch between her legs.
His mouth was dry.
“It’s me, Malcolm Kimball.”
She folded her arms under her breasts and regarded him with her head cocked to one side. She made no effort to hide her nakedness. “You’re Sissy’s brother, ain’t you?”
He nodded, afraid to speak and embarrassed at the bulge in his pants.
She saw it too and smiled. “Why don’t you be a gentleman and join me? That’s better than spying, ain’t it?”
“I wasn’t spying,” he lied. “I was walking in the woods and heard something.”
“And you had to look. How long?”
He felt his face redden. “Only a little while. Do you always take a bath here?”
“Not in the winter.” She fell backwards, and for a moment he saw her thing. He was so excited now he couldn’t think straight. He knew what she wanted from him. He wanted it too, even though it was going to be his first time and he was scared as hell. She turned and swam across the little pool, then turned and swam back.
“Come on,” she said. “What’s the matter? You embarrassed? I seen it before, you know. I ain’t afraid, if that’s what you think.”
When he didn’t answer and didn’t make any move, she said, “Hey, you ain’t afraid, are you?
“No!”
“Then come on in.”
He started unbuttoning his shirt, then stopped. “There ain’t anybody here, is there?”
“Just you and me. We got the woods to ourselves.”
He nodded, liking her tone of voice now. Quickly he took off his clothes and awkwardly picked his way to the edge of the pool where she looked up at him, a different expression on her face. Before he could step into the water, she came out and wordlessly led him to a grassy area near the trees where she spread her towel like a blanket on the ground.
“I get old towels from the motel where I work as a chambermaid,” she said. It was a strange remark, but he didn’t have time to think about it. Suddenly she kissed him, her tongue probing his mouth. Then she fell to the ground and guided him into her. They spent a long time on that towel before they returned to the water to clean themselves up, and it was an education to him, different from what Denny described, different from what he had imagined, and much better. She was patient with him and taught him what a woman needed so that by the third time she experienced the same pleasure he did.
While they were drying off she asked, “You walk out here often?”
“Yeah, lately,” he said. He was thinking that he was a man now. He was thinking that when the guys talked he wouldn’t have to feel embarrassed that he had nothing to say.
“Well, all I’m saying is I bathe here two or three times a week.”
The learning experience continued for the next few weeks until he told Denny about it one night when his girlfriend was doing something with her family. He spoke proudly, but Denny’s reaction was to laugh—a long, scornful laugh that Malcolm didn’t like. It was like Denny was thinking Mary was such a slut she would even screw him.
His feelings were hurt, and he started walking away, only to stop when Denny asked him if he was taking any precautions. When Malcolm didn’t understand, he laughed and said, “She spreads ’em for half the town. It’d be a miracle if she hasn’t caught the clap or something. And besides, what if she gets pregnant?”
He hadn’t thought about that, but Denny’s contempt for Mary and concern for him made him realize he should be careful. He had seen dozens of movies and TV shows where women entrapped men into marrying them. Mary didn’t seem to be on that trip, but maybe she was good at hiding her schemes. The question to ask himself, he decided, was, did he love her? He didn’t have to think too long before no popped into his head.
So after his talk with Denny he decided to avoid Mary—at least for a while. He started walking in the woods on the other side of Route 177 when his mother shooed him out of the house. Then one day he remembered something Chris Andrews had asked him in the middle of June when he paid him the last ten dollars for keeping his eye on the Ridlon shed. He wanted to know if Malcolm knew anything about a strange temple in the woods. He didn’t, and after looking for it a few times following Chris’s directions he decided Chris was pulling his leg. But with afternoons to kill and no fishing to be done, he went for a walk past the pond and on higher ground than the dangerous river bottom where Mary might be waiting, and when he came upon the triple birch tree he’d given as a landmark to Chris, he remembered that Chris had gotten lost because he went east. He decided to try that direction for a time before bearing north towards the pond, and after several hundred yards of hard going through thick brush, he came upon a chicken-wire fence with NO TRESPASSING and NO HUNTING signs every twenty yards or so. He followed it for a while until through the trees he saw it.
It was about fifteen feet long above a wall about eight feet tall, and then above it was a pyramid that rose another ten feet or mor
e. The wall was made of big blocks of stone of different sizes with the smallest a couple feet long and a foot high. They seemed to fit perfectly without mortar. The pyramid looked familiar. In some schoolbook he had seen pictures that looked like it.
It was strangely beautiful, and he looked at it with growing awe that someone in the middle of nowhere had made such a thing. He began walking around the structure, but almost immediately he saw a place where the ground dipped into a small gully. Under the fence he crawled so that he could get a better look. He was wise enough to know that the temple was unfinished and that whoever built it probably lived in one of the houses on the Perkins Road. He approached the temple quietly and cautiously and went around the corner. This side must be the front, for he saw a slab of granite supported by three pairs of columns of some white shiny stone that extended about six feet in front of an opening three feet wide. Curious, he walked over to it to have a look inside, but suddenly he stopped in panic. He could hear a strange hammering sound coming from inside. He stepped back quickly, only to step on a branch. It snapped with a loud report almost like a gun. It was the second time such a noise had betrayed him, and again he felt the same panic that he was going to be found out.
Before he could turn and run a man came out of the building and looked at him. He was old with white hair, deep lines on his forehead and a big red nose. He was skinny yet muscular. At least he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and his deeply tanned arms were muscular. Without saying anything, he stood and scowled at Malcolm. Only then did Malcolm notice he clenched a hammer in his right hand. “Boy,” he said in a low growl, “you’re on private property.”
For a long moment Malcolm stared back at the man, but the silence made him so nervous that he blurted out the first thing that came into his mind. “I’m sorry, mister. I know I shouldn’t be here, but it’s so beautiful…”
His words seemed to soften the old man. The scowl disappeared, and in its place a slight smile played across the corners of his mouth. He put the hammer down and folded his arms.
“Did you build this, mister?”
He gave a little laugh that came out as “Ha!” Rubbing his chin, he said, “Well, I designed it and built a lot of it, but I certainly had help.”
Malcolm looked up at the pyramid. “I’ve seen pictures like that in books. What is it?”
The man followed his eyes up to the top of the structure. “That would be the Mayan part of the building. It’s in the shape of a Mayan temple.”
Malcolm was unsure who the Mayans were, but his curiosity wouldn’t let him hide his ignorance. “Who were they?”
“Indians in Mexico and Central America. They had a great civilization before Columbus came to America.”
Malcolm looked at the fluted white columns behind the old man and then above them to where some strange words were chiseled into the stone: PHOEBE VIVET.
“I carve things in wood. I don’t understand how you carve stone.”
He flashed a pleasant grin and said, “The short answer is a little at a time. Sometimes you use a cold chisel, sometimes a hammer. And you have to know where to strike. Rock has grains just like wood. For final work you use abrasives to polish and smooth the stone.”
“Does abrasive mean rough? I use sandpaper on my wood carvings.”
He nodded. “It’s the same idea. Sometimes you use diamond-studded material, sometimes a portable grinding wheel. You understand that—but let me ask you something. Do you know anything about architecture?”
Malcolm shook his head.
“Because, you see, there are three recognizable architectures here I’m paying homage to. The pyramid is Mayan like I said, but the walls are Incan. And the portico”—he pointed to the columns and slab of granite when Malcolm showed he didn’t understand the word—“is Hellenic, Greek, you know. See how those columns are fluted and have an elegant simplicity? That’s the famous Doric column.” He walked over to the wall and beckoned Malcolm to follow. “See how the stones in the wall fit perfectly together? That is one of the amazing technical achievements of the Incas. With nothing but hand tools they shaped the stones to fit perfectly together. They pounded the rock with stone hammers. Hundreds, even thousands, of men worked on these temples.”
Malcolm stared at the wall, again seeing how the seams were so perfect they were almost invisible. With stones of different sizes he could visualize the difficulties. The first row would be easy, but when the workers moved up they would have to individually fit four sides of every stone. It seemed impossibly hard. “How did they get each side to fit?” he asked.
The man’s eyes brightened. “Ah, I see that you recognize the difficulties. There are several theories. One is that they made models to scale with clay. Maquettes are what these models are called. Then they used mathematics to transfer the model to reality. Another theory is that they made moldings of a stone’s surface and used them to shape the next stone. They were remarkable engineers, those Incas.”
“Is that how you do it?”
The man shook his head in a way that seemed to express regret. “No. I’ve done a few stones that way just to see how it can be done, but I’ve had to cheat. The one thing I don’t have a lot of is time, you see. So I had a quarry in Vermont cut most of the stones to my specifications. I did make a maquette and do the math for that, though. So I know the maquette method is very possible. I also cheated on material. The walls are sandstone, very thick so that they can support the granite slabs that are the floor of the Mayan temple. The columns of the portico are marble, though. That’s authentic enough.”
Malcolm looked from the man to the building and then back at the man. He could see the huge amount of sheer physical work that went into making this strange place. Even with the stones precut, it must have taken a lot of work. “You did this all yourself!?”
He was aware he was expressing awe, and he saw that it pleased the old man. “I had one of my sons helping me whenever he could spare the time.”
Malcolm looked at one of the stones that must have weighed a ton. “How did you lift those huge stones to the top? How did you do that Mayan part?”
The old man smiled and beckoned with his finger. Malcolm followed him around the corner of the building where he saw a huge mound of gravel that went up past the eight-foot wall at a slow incline and then leveled off. Behind the mound of gravel a bright yellow and large backhoe was parked. “I used a technique borrowed from the Egyptians when they built the pyramids, and then I took the liberty of buying a used backhoe.” He smiled broadly and in such a friendly way that Malcolm thought he must have been dreaming when he saw the hostile scowl on the old man’s face when he first saw him. He was beginning to like this old man—like him and trust him.
The feeling seemed mutual. “So what do you carve in wood, young man?”
He reddened. Suddenly he saw that in comparison to this temple what he was doing in wood seemed pretty stupid. “Nothing special like you’re doing. I’ve carved a lot of cars and have done a few birds. I think now the cars are pretty dopey.”
But the old man wouldn’t let him put himself down. “You’re young. You’re making cars because they interest you. At your age I was obsessed with having a car too.”
“But what you’re doing is so much more.”
“Maybe, but I have more years than you. What is your name, young man?”
“Malcolm Kimball.”
The old man looked at him sharply. “Is your family the one that had the mercury poisoning?”
Malcolm nodded. He felt embarrassed to be known in this way. The man probably thought he was trash.
“Your brother, I’m guessing?”
Malcolm nodded. “He’s only a little boy.”
“How is he?”
“He’s doing poorly, but my mother hopes he’ll get better.”
“Of course she does. I do too.” He spoke kindly. “Well, Malcolm Kimball, I’m Adam Kaminski, and I’m pleased to meet you.”
He put out his hand, and M
alcolm shook it.
“Let me ask you something else. You seem very interested in this work. Do you have a summer job?”
“Yes, I work at a service station downtown. Elm Street Auto. I’m working Friday nights and Saturdays, five hours Fridays and eight hours on Saturdays.”
“What do you do?”
“Oh, mostly I pump gas, but I help with the cars too. I’ve learned a lot. Dave—he’s the owner—thinks I’m a good worker. I even get to close up the place on Friday nights.”
“So you’re reliable.”
For a moment he couldn’t remember what the word meant. Mr. Kaminski watched him closely. “I’m guessing you must be.”
Then he remembered a business his father sometimes worked for, Reliable Movers. “Oh yes, I think I am reliable. I try to do good work.”
“And you like carving?”
“I like to make things. It’s fun to take a block of wood and turn it into something else.”
“Well, let me ask you one more question. Do you have time to do more work helping me? I could pay you the same wages you get at the garage.”
He found himself jumping in the air in his excitement. “Oh yes, I do. You won’t be disappointed. I’ll work hard. I’ll love the work, I just know it.”
“I would ask of you only one thing. Don’t talk of this project to anyone. Until it’s done I don’t want any publicity.”
“What will I say if my parents ask what I’m doing?”
“Be vague. Say you’re helping me build a new building on my property. Can you do that?”
“I promise.”
In the next few weeks Malcolm worked many afternoons with Mr. Kaminski and put in many more hours and made much more money than he did at the garage. This money joined the rest of his savings that he kept in a locked box under his bed and would help pay for the first car he planned to buy as soon as he was sixteen and got his license. It was summer and his father was working, so he was not asked to contribute any additional funds to the family. Not that it mattered—he spent little time thinking of a car now. His mind was filled with the work he was doing. Constructing the top of the Mayan temple was the task at hand. At the top of the stairs on the flat slab of granite they first made numerous measurements. Then Mr. Kaminski marked with chalk the placement of the stones from his diagram before they started to assemble the structure of ten rectangular columns holding up a decorated roof. Mr. Kaminski explained that in a real Mayan temple this part of the temple would actually be large enough to walk into, but in their building it was a miniature about one-fourth actual size. Holes were bored eighteen inches into the granite columns and six inches into the granite floor so that steel rods would give the columns added stability. Mr. Kaminski believed that the weight of the columns would keep them in place, but he decided to “overengineer” (that was the word he used) them to be certain. He said he got this idea from the Greeks, who used a similar technique to join sections of marble columns together. The steel rods were mounted into the column and held in place with wooden wedges. Then the column was lifted in the basket of the backhoe and guided into the hole in the granite. It was slow and tedious work, and on the first day they mounted only one column. The slowness was for safety. First Mr. Kaminski had to make sure the backhoe was solidly and evenly balanced on the gravel, and then he made sure that Malcolm never got under the swinging bucket when it was in the air. They both had to work at the column to guide it into the bored hole. The bucket would be dipped a little, ropes would be loosened, and then adjustments in placement made. This happened many times before they got that first column in place. On the following day Mr. Kaminski had a better idea. He used the bucket and arm of the backhoe like a crane. After carefully tying the column with heavy ropes, he drove the backhoe up the gravel mound and swung it over to where Malcolm guided it into the hole in the granite. This method worked much better, and in three more afternoons all the columns were in place. A day was spent enlarging the gravel mound and then the next stage of the construction began—the top of the building.
During this time Malcolm learned a lot about building in stone and a lot more about archaeology and architecture. Mr. Kaminski told him how the Incas built over 2,500 miles of roads along the coast of Peru, including suspension bridges and tunnels. It was brilliant engineering, he said, but also led to their downfall. The Spanish, mounted on horses, used those roads to move quickly in their war against the Incas. He also told Malcolm about the elaborate irrigation and aqueduct system they developed for agriculture and how their great mountain city of Machu Picchu high in the Andes had not been discovered by Westerners until 1911. Mr. Kaminski had been there just as he had been to Mayan temples like Nakbe and Palenque in southern Mexico and in Central America. He told Malcolm that the Mayans developed writing in the third century B.C. and that they were brilliant mathematicians who had developed a very accurate calendar. He spoke of the Parthenon in Athens as one of the world’s most beautiful buildings and how Greece was the birthplace of western culture. He said Platonism was really the theology of Christianity and that the Greeks were the world’s first scientists. He said all that and much more that Malcolm listened to with great interest. It made him wish he was a scholar, for Mr. Kaminski made all the information sound exciting.
One thing he didn’t say much about, especially in the beginning, was personal information. But the more they worked together the more comfortable Malcolm felt with the older man. He had noticed with Luke and Dave at the garage that working together built trust and understanding, and he was sure the same thing was happening with him and Mr. Kaminski. He called him Malcolm most of the time, but often also “my boy” in a friendly, fatherly way. So after a while and by degrees, their conversations started to become more personal.
When one day in early August Mr. Kaminski said something about hoping to finish the top of the temple before school started in September, Malcolm told him that in November he planned to drop out of school. At first Mr. Kaminski gave him the regular adult advice about the importance of education and the like, but when Malcolm said that book learning was not for him and explained that he didn’t do well in school, he actually listened to him. “Well,” he said, “you have to follow your own star. I wanted my son to be an engineer, but he wanted to be a teacher. It caused a lot of bad blood. Only when I conceded to his dreams and let him live his own life did we become friends again. So do what you think is best, only make sure it is the best for you.”
“Was he the son that helped you build this?”
Mr. Kaminski shook his head. With a little laugh he said, “No, that was Phil. He’s as crazy as I am.”
“Does your other son think you’re crazy?”
“Maybe, but me and Charlie at least talk now and are friends. But let’s get to work.”
On another day Malcolm asked Mr. Kaminski why he was building the temple. He had wondered about it for a long time and was a little scared when he asked the question.
But Mr. Kaminski was not bothered by it. After thinking for a minute, he said, “It has to do with love, my boy. That and time. Are we bigger than time? Is love eternal? Are we eternal? But it’s something I don’t think you would understand right now. When you’re an old man like me maybe you’ll know why. It’s not something you can explain easily. Why does a beaver build a dam? Why did Michelangelo sculpt David? Why does an old coot build a temple?”
But Mr. Kaminski must have thought something was left unsaid because the next day he brought a photo album of Incan, Mayan and Greek ruins supposedly to answer some questions Malcolm had asked about Machu Picchu and Mayan temples. In many of the photographs there was a tall woman with round glasses and hair in a bun who was always smiling broadly. In some of the pictures she and Mr. Kaminski stood arm in arm. She was still smiling but he had a serious look on his face. Those pictures required explanation, but he started off explaining some pictures of Warsaw, Poland. His mother, brother and he were Polish refugees after WWII who had been sponsored to come to Americ
a by the Congregational Church of Waska. Mr. Kaminski was six years old at the time and spoke no English, but he said he and his brother picked it up quickly while his mother always spoke with a thick accent. As a boy he was interested in mechanical things and had become an engineer at the University of Maine. It was there he met his wife. Her name was Phoebe Whitney.
Suddenly Malcolm remembered in a bird book seeing the spelling for the common phoebe and made the connection. “Her name’s Phoebe, isn’t it? Those words over the white columns, that’s her, isn’t it?”
Mr. Kaminski nodded. A sad faraway look came into his eyes. “She loved to travel. She wanted to do more when we were younger, but I was a workaholic. I was away from home twelve hours a day, sometimes longer, working on bridges and buildings. I neglected my duties as a father and a husband—that’s another reason I had so many problems with Charlie, my second son. She was a wonderful woman. She loved nature and worked on committees at the Congregational Church on civil rights and feeding the hungry. I think—I hope—she had a full rich life, but when I finally took early retirement so that we could share our lives more, within four years she died from a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said, not knowing what else to say. He could see tears glistening in the corners of Mr. Kaminski’s eyes and was embarrassed. “She must have truly been a wonderful woman.”
That was the right thing to say.
“She was. Life’s unfair, my boy. It should have been me.” But then he looked like he was angry with himself. A cold look came into his eyes and he said, “Let’s get back to work.”
After that Mr. Kaminski was close-mouthed for several days. He spoke only about the work at hand and only when necessary. He seemed to be brooding about something, and Malcolm, unsure of himself and the ways of the world, began to wonder if it was something he said or did or if it was simply that Mr. Kaminski regretted being personal with such a country boy as him. The other day he had even yelled at Malcolm when he didn’t understand some instructions and pulled when he should have pushed at the roof assembly as they were trying to place it on top of the columns with the backhoe. It had hurt his feelings that Mr. Kaminski acted just like an impatient teacher with him. It didn’t make him feel any better when his boss told him he yelled because he thought Malcolm was in danger. He too began to brood. His doubts returned. School and life, life and school, they were both the same. He began to think his days of working with Mr. Kaminski were numbered. He felt sad, confused, disappointed. One day he saw Mary, who was waiting near his house as he was walking to the temple and wanted to know if he was avoiding her. He told her that he had been working with a man helping him construct a new building, but that he had a feeling the job was soon going to be finished. Maybe he would see her in a few days, he said.
But that very afternoon before they started work Mr. Kaminski began talking about his wife’s three cats. They were all elderly now and hated to be boarded at the vet’s when he was away. Their names were Muffin, Piddle and Hector. As he listened to this description of the cats, Malcolm didn’t know what to think and stared wide-eyed at his boss.
Why was he talking about cats now? It didn’t make sense.
But he soon enough saw the reason. Mr. Kaminski had to pay a visit to his brother’s family because a nephew was getting married, and he needed someone to feed Phoebe’s cats while he was away. When he explained that to Malcolm and gave him the key to his house, Malcolm felt tears stinging at the corner of his eyes and turned away quickly while he roughly pulled his hand across the middle of his face. He looked at the key in his hand, a large bronzed one with a groove in the shape of a sword paralleling the cut edge, then back at Mr. Kaminski. He remembered the day Dave gave him a key to the garage and understood the trust that was placed in him. Though Mr. Kaminski would probably not understand how proud he was, proud and grateful, he wanted him to know he was worthy of this trust. “I’d be proud to help out, Mr. Kaminski. Don’t worry, you can trust me.”
That was it, wasn’t it? Trust. The man’s silence was because of private sorrow, because he loved his wife and hadn’t been able to show her that love. It had nothing to do with him, Malcolm Kimball. He felt bad for Mr. Kaminski, but still he positively glowed with happiness. Soon school would be behind him and the years that went into the future, they were going to be good years.
Duty
