Kris

by J. J. Ruscella

  The other boys had stopped working and were watching me and waiting to see how well I would proceed, snickering among themselves in hopes I would miss a mark or rudely cut a piece of fine lumber.

  “None of that,” Josef barked at his apprentices. “You each have many tasks ahead, and I am watching your work.”

  Josef turned to me and poked me in the chest with a T-square. “Think you can handle that?” he asked.

  I took the tool in hand and began measuring the logs and marking them. I measured each of them again and again and again, until any doubt of error was erased. And I began to cut with slow, meticulous strokes of the saw. The backward cut was easiest. It seemed the direction the teeth cut into the wood with less difficulty. Once a deep enough groove was made, the forward motion was less jumpy, more even. With greater confidence I began leaning into the work, pulling and pushing, a slow and continuous movement working the saw steadily through the wood.

  Markus was beveling the edges of a table with some kind of cylindrical knife. He giggled to the other boys over the simplicity of my task. They responded in kind to his prompting and distracted me from my efforts.

  It wasn’t that their teasing affected me. I was too deep in a world filled with greater issues for me to be aware or care about such things. I was looking to their actions as examples from which to learn. I was hungry for knowledge, and I wanted to understand how the knife in Marcus’s hands functioned.

  “Focus, boy! Keep your eye on the wood,” Josef snapped. “It’ll be months before I put a knife in your hand. I’ve no patience for mistakes.”

  I did as Josef directed.

  “A carpenter is useless if he doesn’t cut his own wood,” Josef said to me intently. “Start by knowing the saw. You must use it like an extension of yourself, and guide it with a dedicated focus that will bring you mastery over the raw and wild nature of the wood.”

  Josef’s powerful words would remain with me throughout my life. “Use it like an extension of yourself.” That was his first instruction to me on my road to becoming a master. The tool responds to your thought without the mental distraction of figuring out how to make it function. The truth of this I have seen again and again throughout my life, from great musicians to gifted cooks and bakers. Art, I have come to believe, means the excellence of a thing. It is also, I imagine, how we were made in God’s image. The creator gave us the great ability to create with the talents bestowed upon us and with craftsmanship earned from learning and hard work. It is in our small creations that we resonate the power of God.

  Jonas nicked his finger with a knife and let out a whimper. I glanced over to see what had happened. Josef grabbed me by the chin with his rough, scarred hands and glared directly into my eyes. “Focus!” he commanded.

  I looked down at the wood I was about to cut. The saw blade was resting on my thumb. Had I started to cut the wood, I would have injured myself, delaying the plan that was taking shape in my head. Shaken, I lifted the blade off my finger and reset it upon the mark I had made in the wood. As I began to saw, Josef took hold of my elbow, moving it to a steady pace. At first I fought what seemed an awkward action. But once I caught the natural flow, I felt the blade move more smoothly through the wood and the effort lessened for the muscles in my shoulder.

  “When you are out of tune or out of rhythm, the teeth will skip and catch on the wood,” Josef said to me. “There is a place where the saw works with your arm. With proper practice, tools will do their job cleanly; with mastery they will obey your thoughts.”

  “You will have repaid your debt once I have two sets of quality chairs,” Josef said as he walked away.

  “How will I know they are good enough?” I asked.

  “When I can’t tell the difference between the chairs you have made and the ones I have made with my own hands.”

  I threw my focus into measuring and remeasuring, cutting and trimming.

  Later that week, several men from the village approached the carpentry in an old and battered wagon. Josef greeted them outside. I listened as one of the men told him of a body found along the roadside on his journey back from trading at the coast. The woman seemed a victim of illness and the recent storm. They wanted Josef’s help in collecting the remains and tending to their disposition.

  The other boys were filled with morbid curiosity, for they were not experienced in death. I remained quiet, pretending to be focused on my work.

  Josef instructed all of us to continue our tasks and hastened to add that he would not accept any misbehavior. Then he ventured off to help the other men tend to the body they had discovered. For me there was no doubt who they were intending to bury, and I was thankful.

  These are good men, I thought. But I could not reveal to them the awful road I had traveled. “Never let them know where you are from,” my mother had told Garin. Was she right? Would I find myself cast out again into the cold relentless winter? I decided to practice silence. It was a habit that I came to rely on.

  In the evening, I was sitting alone at a small table in the carpentry eating a hearty soup and bread when Josef returned. From the darkness I listened closely as he told Gabriella what had transpired.

  They had found the woman, frozen by the roadside. They knew she had been looked after in some fashion since she was laid in a sleeping position with her arms crossed about her breast, and with her head supported by a pillow of snow and ice. Her suffering and struggles were revealed by the look upon her face and the evidence of illness left upon her body.

  “It seems to me she may have died before her body froze,” Josef told Gabriella. “She was laid to rest there, no doubt, because the building storm and bitter cold made it too difficult to take her any farther.”

  “And, what became of her body?” Gabriella asked.

  “We found the ground too hard and solidly frozen to bury her with dignity,” Josef said. “Since the others were fearful of the disease, we built a large fire and placed her body upon it, until it was fully consumed by the flames.”

  Gabriella comforted Josef, “May the Lord bless her soul and those who loved her.”

  I watched the flames leaping and raging in the furnace of the carpentry. I thought of how many times over the past year I had seen such fires consume the memories of friends and neighbors. My mother’s departure in this way gave me final assurance that she would not be further abused and that my duty to her was finished. I was finally and fortunately released from her control over my life and of my destiny, I told myself. I was free to do what I thought best.

  A plan had taken hold in my mind, and I was committed. In a year’s time I would reunite my family. I mentally retraced my steps, creating a picture in my head of the journey back to find my scattered siblings. I would be fourteen years old, a full-grown man, no matter what she had said, ready to take care of all of us.

  May our mothers forgive the arrogance and insults of our youth. There are some of us to whom telling is just not enough; we must learn through the pains of experience.

  That night, when I returned to my bed, the little toy wooden bear that my brother had left behind was resting on a table near my bedside.

  I did not know when Josef placed it there or how he understood what it could have meant to me. Though we never spoke of it, I knew he had discovered at least a portion of my secret story. I laid the wooden bear near my pillow as I went to sleep and tried to cry. I had cried for the abuse endured by our horse, Gerda. I had cried and cried in unstoppable rivers of tears that overflowed their banks and streamed in burning channels down my cheeks until I could not cry another tear, until my breath had been sucked from my lungs. But when I thought of the weight of suffering and misery my father and my mother, my brothers and my sisters and I had been crushed and splintered by, I could not summon a tear.

  Gerda healed well, and on off days I would spend long hours brushing her and grooming her or simply sitting in her stall splitting hay. My work, my focus, my dedication to carpentry, to Josef and to Gabriella, carrie
d me forward hour after hour, day after day, week after week, as I slowly increased my skill and confidence.

  Sometime during that year, my fourteenth birthday came and went. At the carpentry shop, I experienced generous growth and built myself up from the scrap of a boy that I had once been to a young man of greater strength and value—and girth due to the glorious pastries plied on me by Gabriella. Stocky, well, even hefty, I may have been, but I could lift more than all three boys together, even Marcus.

  I worked by Josef’s side whenever he would allow and captured lessons regarding his techniques, which were by now instinctual to him. When I measured and cut piece after piece of raw wood, he would stand nearby to lend a helping hand, a watchful eye, or a terse direction. When I missed a mark or hesitated to complete a difficult task, he was beside me to help me rethink my approach and regain a solid footing.

  Josef created finely formed and durable carpentry in great measure, each piece bearing a special accent or signature that gave it uniqueness and meaning. He would delicately carve these rich-grained woods with geometric patterns or elaborate flourishes and dust the pieces with a soft-bristled brush to survey every groove and cut. He would fit these pieces together into glorious church pews, benches, chairs, and other valued furniture that he would create on commission or sell to those who encountered him at the market.

  I helped by applying fine finishes and oils to pieces once assembled or by building simple tables and doors, which became increasingly sophisticated as my skills improved.

  One afternoon as I raised a nearly finished door to a standing position and was blowing sawdust from its panels, Sarah breezed through the carpentry. The dust swirled around her vibrant green dress and framed her like a living work of art. She stole my attention. I knew she had been in the carpentry often during the many weeks of my training, but I was so consumed with my work I could not remember actually seeing her. So beautiful she was that I knew if I gave myself opportunity, I would fall victim to distraction each time she came into a room. At some point I realized I was staring.

  Though polite in her greeting and ever so friendly, touching my arm as she walked by, she didn’t look directly at me or notice my attentions.

  But Markus, Noel, and Jonas did. Their jealousy was obvious when they saw how Sarah affected me. And I knew they would do their best to make me look the fool and embarrass me before her. Noel glared at me from behind a stack of boards and tossed a chunk of wood onto a scrap pile in the corner.

  Over the coming months, I would continue with my tasks as Sarah came and went each day to steal a glance at projects I was struggling to master. She tried so hard to appear detached, as if she did not care what I was doing, but when I would look away or return to my work, she would sometimes sneak behind me to lightly tap me on the shoulder or brush past me when she left for home. Her playfulness made her all the more beautiful to me, but I could not easily release my guard and speak with her freely. I thought her so kind to take an interest in a broken soul like me. But she didn’t know the horrible things I had done. I was sure if she looked into my eyes she would discover the truth, so I maintained a distance, telling myself that any distraction would keep me from attaining my goals. But she kept coming, and, in secret, I took comfort in her presence.

  Gabriella, too, would watch us work from time to time, and on special days might bring us muffins or a plate of cookies to reward us for our efforts. The other boys would race to snatch as many cookies as they might, but I refused to fight them for the crumbs and pieces they would squabble over and stayed focused on my duties.

  One day, as Gabriella noticed this, she called me aside and handed me a small platter of frosted cookies all my own. Markus was jealous, envious that I received this special attention. Jonas smiled at me. We shared a similar status, and he understood how significant these small joys were. But Noel was furious in his resentment as I took a generous bite and proudly set the platter near my workbench. And how utterly aghast they all were when Sarah entered the room and I proffered her my plate.

  “Would you share these with me?”

  Sarah looked at me in surprise. I had never before spoken to her. In all this time, and under her subtle attentions, I had never said a word to her. She paused and looked at me to consider my offering.

  Somehow I found myself talking: “You brought me bread and honey. Now I would like to share with you.”

  Then Sarah smiled. Her eyes sparkled. She reached out and took the frosted cookie I was holding. She was supposed to take one of the cookies from the plate I held out to her. But as she grasped one side of the cookie, I held the other firmly, almost not knowing what to do, and neither of us released our hold. That awkward moment was one of the most wondrously embarrassing of my life. And when I finally snapped out of my delirium, watching her take a bite from the cookie was a fourteen-year-old boy’s dream.

  Marcus dropped a log on Noel’s foot, and his piercing howls made Sarah laugh. I had forgotten how lovely the sound of laughter could be.

  “You don’t talk much,” was all she said as she turned to leave.

  There were always chores for us to do at the carpentry, and we stayed forever busy organizing supplies, cutting wood, sharpening tools, and cleaning up debris. Josef taught us to keep an orderly shop, to value hard work, and to dedicate ourselves to a job well done. He demanded that we put forth our best efforts at all times and increase our skills and productivity. The work was satisfying, and we were well looked after.

  I went about my duties each day in silence, though the other boys often bickered or taunted one another as they carried out their tasks. I did not have a need to talk and rarely spoke, as my thoughts were occupied by the projects I worked on and the objects I helped Josef create.

  One day, while I was sitting at a worktable eating a delicious and generous lunch that Gabriella had brought us, she surprised me as she placed a crisp, leather-bound journal near my side and set a small piece of charcoal atop it. “This is for you to practice your letters, dear,” she said to me. “You do know how to read and write, don’t you?”

  I nodded. My mother had taught me my letters. It had been very important to my father since he could not read.

  “You might want to use this to keep notes about your work or drawings of plans, or you may want to write down what you are thinking.”

  I knew the value of milled paper. This was a gift of immense worth, a personal treasure beyond any monetary value. It was leather bound, with a cover that wrapped the book once over again and then tied with a leather cord. Books were rare, and it reminded me of the Bibles carried by the traveling holy men who would visit our village church. But this journal was empty, awaiting my life to fill its leafy pages. And as I sat there gently holding it, running my fingers along its rich texture, I gained a friend. When I wrote inside this book, I was speaking to a lifelong confidant, a companion who was always there to listen and who never judged. We explored thoughts and ideas. We spoke about my darkest secrets.

  I am not sure Gabriella knew the gift she was giving me. Maybe she did. She and Josef had a wisdom all too often absent from this world.

  On one quiet afternoon while taking a short respite for lunch, I sat looking through a window at Josef and Markus outside. They worked together to load a sturdy table into the back of a customer’s wagon. Josef had finished the table a short time ago and was delighted with the results. So proud was he of his work that he had described and demonstrated to us the quality of the joints and the ways they fit together almost seamlessly. Josef was never boastful, yet he wanted us to learn and appreciate fine craftsmanship, to take joy in our achievements, and he used examples such as this to illustrate how superior results were achieved. And although our customers lavished praise and thanks upon all of us for the works we created, it was important to Josef that we learn to evaluate our own results.

  “Confidence comes from within,” he would say to us. “A man who places his personal value in the hands of others will find himself begg
ing for approval.”

  He inspired me to complete tasks. Not only did a realized project fill me with gratification, it also served to reinforce my feelings of self-worth.

  Each day the carpentry tools were responding more easily to my bidding. A technique once taught became a building block as I began to combine them into uses I had yet to learn. I studied the carvings in the legs and arms of the chairs Josef had created and did my best to reproduce them. When time permitted, I cut and assembled sections of a new chair similar to the ones I had broken on my arrival. Frustration! I knew it would be some time before I could match the quality of Josef’s work. My failures fueled my dogged tenacity.

  But all was not without a cost. Josef might have been caring, but he was a stern taskmaster. When I carved too deep or left a sloppy edge, he would admonish me in front of whoever was there to listen, making me redo entire pieces for the smallest of mistakes. On the rare occasion that I nicked or cut my hand with a tiny slip of the knife, he always seemed to be right behind me with a terse corrective slap on the back of the head, a reminder to take my time and focus. In those fleeting childish moments, I hated him, threw unspoken expletives in his direction. But once the sting to my ego had worn off, I strove twice as hard to earn his respect.

  The world itself spoke to me of methods and mechanisms, and I began to consider new designs of my own. When I observed a small child playing outside near the wagon, rolling a rusty round iron band from some discarded barrel by prodding it with a stick, I saw the crank, I saw the lever, and I saw the wheel and pinion that would give life to otherwise inanimate wooden objects. I looked to Garin’s wooden bear for inspiration and thought, “What if it could move? What if it could bend, or walk, or dance?” A dancing bear? Perhaps I could make a toy for each of my brothers and sisters and give it to them upon our reunion. If I did this they would surely know that I had never forgotten about them. I grabbed a warped piece of lumber lying on the ground, a handful of pegs, and began creating gears.