A Sudden Light: A Novel

by Garth Stein

  “Why did he do it? Why did he give it all back?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and we continued walking a bit before he added, “Isobel knew.”

  “What did Isobel know?”

  “If you feel you don’t have enough, you hold on to things,” he said. “But if you feel you have enough, you let go of things.”

  “How much is enough?” I asked after a few paces.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted with a shrug, and we arrived at the barn.

  It was quite large, as far as barns go—Riddellesque, one might say—with massive sliding doors on one end that looked to be rusted shut by the weather and the years. The boards that made up the barn’s walls were easily a foot wide, abraded by decades of rain and wind, but still in remarkably good shape considering the age and unfinished nature of the building. Centered along the broad side of the barn was a small door, flanked by long, low windows. Grandpa Samuel led me to the door and inside; he flipped a light switch, and fluorescent work lights flickered to life, revealing a dusty, disheveled woodshop.

  I peered around cautiously. The plank floor was feathered with a bed of wood chips and sawdust years in the making. Stationed throughout the barn were giant machines, old and constructed of heavy steel. I knew these tools, as I had spent much time in my father’s workshop over the years, but these specimens were much older: a band saw and a lathe and a planer and a drill press. More than that, even. A table saw and an oil drum rigged with some kind of contraption I couldn’t fathom.

  “Wood steamer,” Grandpa Samuel explained.

  There was a workbench that spanned the entire back wall and, above it, a wall of tools on pegboard. The opposite wall was adorned with as many shelves as would fit, stocked with bottles and cans and jars, dozens of old coffee cans sporting tape labels to identify their contents. Dust-filled spiderwebs occupied every possible corner of the barn, no doubt limiting the amount of nutrition the spiders would earn from them, as they surely were visible even to the blindest fly. The entire room held a fragrance that was composed of so many elements, and yet was so distinctive. The scent of different woods—cedar and cherry and oak and more—of wood oils, of glue, of varnish, and the slightly acrid odor of wood burned on the saw or the drill press. The smells of sweat and spilled coffee. The smell of ozone emitted from the bushings of an electric motor trying too hard, spinning too fast, burning itself to death if only to please its master.

  “What do you do here?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Wood,” he said.

  I found a large stack of various types of wood and, next to it, a pile of chair legs or something. I didn’t know what. Spindles for a banister, or table legs. Dozens of them, all slightly different. Some raw, some oiled, some finished with a glistening varnish. I picked one up.

  “You repair things?” I asked, examining the piece.

  “Sometimes.”

  Dozens of chair legs. Or more like studies of chair legs. Maybe a chair leg factory.

  “You make chair legs,” I said. “Do you sell them?”

  “I like using the lathe,” Grandpa confirmed. “But Serena said I can’t get dirty tonight.”

  He opened a can of linseed oil and started painting it on a spindle that was being held in a vise on the workbench.

  I sat on a stool adjacent to him and watched. He was very intent with the oil, painting it on in long, even strokes. More Zen of Grandpa. He worked on wood for the sake of woodworking. It was the process, not the product.

  “Is that what happened to your fingers?” I asked impulsively, and immediately regretted it. But sometimes a question had to get asked. “The band saw?”

  Grandpa didn’t respond. He continued applying his oil. After a few moments, he spoke.

  “I fell when I was a boy,” he said. “I fell through a window.”

  “Ouch.” I winced, and he looked up at me.

  “It’s all I remember.”

  He held my gaze for a moment, and I wondered if he was telling me something deeper.

  “Clever Trevor,” he said. “Why do they call you that?”

  “They don’t. Serena does, but no one ever has before.”

  “Because you’re clever.”

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He stretched out his left hand, palm flat and facing me, and he held his hand toward me so I could see the scars of his missing fingers.

  “You can touch them,” he said.

  So I did. I reached across the table and took my grandfather’s hand. The skin was old and worn. The flesh was thick. But I ran my fingers over his palm and finger stumps and it wasn’t weird or anything. It wasn’t creepy at all, though it may have read like that to someone who wasn’t there. He stood with his eyes closed, letting me feel his missing fingers, and I felt them, too, in a way. I felt what Grandpa Samuel’s fingers used to feel.

  “Touch,” he said, and he lowered his hand and opened his eyes. He turned away and went about his work, leaving me to myself.

  I wandered around the shop, examining the tools, the endlessly different planes that had caught my eye in my father’s shop in the marina. I wasn’t invited there often. My father never tried to recruit me into the ranks of woodworkers or boatbuilders. He didn’t deny me, but he didn’t invite me into his world, either. And I always wondered why. Why didn’t my father want me to follow in his footsteps? Most fathers did. At school, the boys who had lawyers for fathers wanted to be lawyers. Those whose fathers farmed the land grew up learning how to farm. But not me. Even though I always loved visiting my father’s workshop in the marina, discovering things of interest. The spokeshave was my favorite tool, for no other reason than that I imagined shaving little wooden spokes to make wheels. I loved the Japanese saws as well, and different mallets and augers. I was drawn to the tactile nature of it, the sensory experience. I saw how my father’s arms were so strong from the physicality of it. And yet, my father seemed to cede me to my mother. To her world of books and academia and learning. Which was nice, and I was good at it. But deep down, I always yearned to learn to use my hands.

  I walked in on my father once, in his workshop, when I was a kid. I had started riding my bike to school, and I was pretty proud of myself, so sometimes I would go by the shop on my way home. When I walked in the room, I saw my father alone, sitting in a chair and leaning over, his head resting on his arms, which were folded across strips of wood laid out across sawhorses. He was asleep. At least I thought he was asleep. He wasn’t. When he heard me standing there shuffling my feet, he opened his eyes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “What do you hear?”

  “I hear hundreds of years of life. I hear wind and rain and fire and beetles. I hear the seasons changing and birds and squirrels. I hear the life of the trees this wood came from. Try it.”

  So I pulled up a chair and sat next to my father and put my head down. I couldn’t hear anything except an outboard motor running in the engine shop next door. I raised my head, disappointed.

  “I can’t hear anything,” I said.

  “Everything has life,” he said. “Everything has a history. The trick is allowing yourself to hear it. Maybe one day you will.”

  I nodded and acted like I understood what my father was saying, though I didn’t have a clue. And I’d never heard him talk like that before; I had never thought of my father as a spiritual person. But after a few days at Riddell House, I was beginning to understand what he had meant. And I also was beginning to understand that, if he grew up with a spiritual mother and a nonspiritual father, he might have been conflicted in the same way Ben was. How do we reconcile the differences between what we see and what we know?

  On the far side of the barn, opposite the big doors, was a loft with a ladder leading up to it. Grandpa Samuel was busy sorting through a Folgers coffee can in search of something, so I climbed the ladder up to the loft. The work lights spilled across the loft fl
oor, but it was still nearly dark. I noticed a dangling string; when I pulled it, a bare lightbulb came to life.

  There wasn’t much to see except spiderwebs and, shoved to the back of the space, a half dozen old footlockers. Vintage lockers with wood bumpers and leather straps and RIDDELL, THE NORTH ESTATE, SEATTLE, USA, stenciled on the sides. Tucked behind one of the lockers was a canvas bag. I unbuckled the strap and looked inside. It was filled with metal spikes and leather straps, coils of rope and a length of chain. Intriguing, but meaningless to me. I tried to open the footlocker closest to me, but it was locked. They were all locked. And the locks were serious iron things. Internal locks, not padlocks. A screwdriver and a hammer wouldn’t open them. I climbed down the ladder. Grandpa Samuel was still looking through the same Folgers coffee can, sifting through it for something he couldn’t seem to find.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked him.

  “A screw,” he replied. “I need a screw.”

  I leaned over and peered into the can. There wasn’t a single screw in it.

  “Those are keys,” I said. “You have the wrong can.”

  He stopped and considered the problem; then he handed me the coffee can and went to get another can from the shelf, a can that perhaps had screws in it. And I had to wonder: he’d been standing there for five minutes looking for a screw in a can of keys; I was hoping to find keys that might open the lockers. . . . Something clicked in my head.

  “Did you ever read The Mountains of California?” I asked him. “By John Muir.”

  Grandpa Samuel looked up from his new coffee can: Chock Full O’Nuts.

  “I don’t think so,” he replied.

  “Did you ever find a letter Benjamin wrote to Harry about working on the coast?”

  He stopped and thought at length.

  “I don’t think so,” he repeated and turned his attention back to the Chock Full O’Nuts can.

  “Ben is nervous,” Grandpa Samuel had said that night at dinner. Maybe it wasn’t a note to himself he had written on the Post-it. Maybe it was a note to me. And maybe it wasn’t from him but from someone else using him. I felt sure that it wasn’t a coincidence. Just like it wasn’t a coincidence that the Crosley record player was playing in the ballroom or the wall said my name. A ghost—or a spirit—was trying to reach me. I felt a little shiver as I looked around the barn and wondered who.

  I took the coffee can up to the loft and sorted through the keys. The trunk keys seemed pretty distinctive, so it wasn’t hard to find a few of them. I tried them on one of the trunk locks. None of them worked, so I moved to a second trunk and tried again. Success. I opened the lid, but there was nothing inside but dust. I left the key in the lock so I’d know which one it belonged to and tried a third trunk: blankets.

  The fourth trunk was a little more interesting. It was full of clothes—sweaters and jeans, mostly. Man-size. I pushed them aside, hoping I wouldn’t disturb a spider as big as my head. Beneath the clothes were papers gathered in old folders. School papers. I looked through them. They belonged to my father. Essays and math tests. A few paperback books with notes in the margins. Camus and Fitzgerald. A small hardcover book titled A Magician Among the Spirits, by Harry Houdini. A play script with highlighted lines: Mr. Paravicini in The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie. (I didn’t know my father acted, but Serena had mentioned it.)

  I slid my hand down the side of the locker to feel what was at the bottom. I discovered an orange and blue track cleat with rusted spikes. (More evidence.) And an old Magic 8 Ball, which read REPLY HAZY TRY AGAIN when I turned it over. I dug around some more until I found a sweater wrapped around a hard object. I unwrapped it and discovered a carving of a hand grasping a globe. It was dark wood and highly polished. Everything about the hand was exaggerated, slightly larger, slightly thickened, like the hand from Michelangelo’s David that I had seen in photos, veins and tendons showing under the skin. The globe held by the hand was the earth. The continents were all in their proper place. Very deliberate. The sculpture appeared to have been hacked off something else. I could tell because the bottom of the piece was not stained and, in fact, was rough and choppy. And there was another thing that I found unusual: when I held it, I could feel it. It was like my father and the planks of wood in his shop. I could feel its life, its journey: a strong sense of relief at having been discovered. But to believe that, one would have to believe inanimate objects have spiritual energy. One would have to have faith.

  I bundled the carving up again and wondered how I could sneak it out of the barn without Grandpa Samuel noticing. I wasn’t convinced he would notice much of anything, to be honest, but still. I took off my sweatshirt and wrapped it around the sculpture and tucked it under my arm.

  “What are you doing up there?” he called from below.

  I moved to the edge of the loft.

  “Looking around,” I said.

  “Be careful,” he warned and wandered off again.

  I descended the ladder with my bundle. There was no danger of Grandpa Samuel busting open my smuggling operation—he was agitated and unfocused, wandering around muttering to himself—and, even if I were discovered, would it matter? It was a hunk of wood, though it felt more substantial than that. Grandpa Samuel took a dowel to the lathe and switched the machine on. Then he muttered something and switched it off. He took a plank to the table saw and switched the saw on. Then he switched it off. Clearly, he was struggling with his mandate not to create sawdust.

  “I’m going back to the house,” I said.

  He didn’t acknowledge me, so I left and headed back up the hill.

  My father and Serena were still in the kitchen talking, so I slipped around the house and went in the front door. The foyer was dark.

  As I started up the stairs, I heard my father call to me. “Trevor,” he said, and I figured I was busted, so I stopped and wondered if my father would notice the bulge in my shirt and ask what it was. I waited for him to come down the hall, but he didn’t appear.

  “Trevor,” my father said again, like he was standing right behind me. But he wasn’t right behind me. I stepped down the couple of stairs and stood in the middle of the foyer. “Trevor.” I looked down the hallway and saw the light in the kitchen and I could hear them talking. My father and Serena were in the kitchen.

  “Trevor,” the voice said again, right into my ear. I whipped around: no one. My heart was beating fast, but it wasn’t only out of fear. I felt something else as well: a need to know who or what was trying to reach me.

  – 14 –

  TREE CLIMBING

  I knew I was dreaming. I was fully aware that I was asleep in my sticky room, entangled in the bedsheet, and yet I was caught up in a dream that seemed so familiar and welcoming, I didn’t dare struggle against my sleep for fear of destroying it . . .

  * * *

  I am in a deep forest with trees so thick at the base—as big as a house—and a canopy of branches so dense, barely a speckle of light hits the forest floor. I’m with someone. I know this person: it’s Harry. The two of us hike across the terrain, which heaves and rolls like waves at sea. The spongy ground is covered with moss and needles. We climb over roots as tall as ourselves. It is dark and cool and the birds sing. We arrive at the base of a tree at least forty feet in girth, its thick bark old and gnarled. I look up at the branches, which begin far above my head. Harry smiles at me.

  I open my canvas satchel and remove my leather gloves, my climbing gaffs, and a length of chain. They are strangely familiar to me, as if I use them all the time. As if I know exactly what to do. We carry no axes, no saws. No, we are not here to cut this tree down. We are here to climb it.

  And then we are ready. Harry asks the tree to protect us. And then we climb.

  I hold the ends of my flip line, which encircles the massive trunk. With a whipping motion, I snake the chain up a foot or so and pull it tight. I dig in with my spikes and up I go. Higher and higher. I pause to rest and I look down. Harry is not far below m
e; the ground is much farther. It must be a hundred feet up to the first branch, maybe more. When I reach that branch, I pull myself up and climb onto it. It’s three feet in circumference, easily. I balance on it without effort or concern, and I remove my spikes. I tuck them into my bag along with the rope, and then I remove my boots and socks and gloves.

  “What are you waiting for?” Harry asks, still holding on to his flip line, poised below the branch.

  I look up into the crown of the tree and see the branches jutting from all sides, reaching out and weaving together with needle-covered spars, but near the trunk there is space, and I can see exactly how we will work from branch to branch, up into the tree. I reach up from where I stand and take hold of a higher branch with one hand, and, with a small hop, I grab on with my other hand so I am dangling. I push off the trunk with my feet and walk myself up to where I can sling my hip over, and then I am sitting on the branch above. I spy another branch to grab on to and I continue my ascent. I know Harry is following me; I don’t have to look for him.

  Higher we go, and higher still into the tree’s bosom. The rush of adrenaline is so intense it is explosive. Nothing but our own muscles and strength keeping us alive. Rubbing pitch on our hands to grip through the sweat. The need to focus on one thing—the next branch—until the branches swallow us, and, soon, we can’t even see the forest floor. The higher we go, the denser the branches grow, until, perhaps three-quarters of the way to the top of the tree, we find that it is like being in a room made of branches. There is no fear here, as almost nothing can be seen except brown branches covered with gray moss and lichens, and green and brown needles of the tree. So many branches are within easy grasp; the thicket is so dense, I believe that, if I fall, I will become tangled in the branches themselves. As if the tree would save me from my death.

  Higher. I lose myself completely in the task. Where I stop and the tree begins is unclear to me; I have become a part of the tree. Up past the crown, into the very top, where the spread begins to taper and other tree-tops can be seen below us as we climb. Higher! Until only a few feet remain and the trunk narrows (as the trunk of a Douglas fir does, so close to the top), and is impossibly thin and sways with the weight of Harry and me without any consideration of the wind, which, when it blows, makes us sway that much more. Then the terrifying reality hits me: the tree that we have climbed is the tallest in all of the world, or at least of all the trees I can see in the world, which are many, as the sky is clear and the forest spreads out endlessly below. All around me, I can see the tops of other trees poking above the canopy, so thick and lush, like a cloud of pine needles. Two hundred feet—two hundred fifty—three hundred—more!—into the spire of a great living being. Above the canopy are birds and clouds and sun and heat and wind and a feeling that, if I were a giant, I could walk across the treetops. I could step out and walk for miles on the blanket of the forest. The rest of humanity, which is hidden so far below, is ignorant of all that Harry and I can do and see.