Three Novellas

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

Eight

  July

  News of the King’s death barely preceded the return of his body and his body alone for no other blood was shed. The soldier who had been entrusted with the King’s safety was asleep when the King was stabbed to death and because the King never cried out, the soldier slept until awakened by the sun and found the King already hours dead. This young soldier was so filled with shame and remorse over his own negligence that he would have taken his own life but for the thought that he owed it to the King to find the murderer and avenge his death.

  After stabbing the silent King, the woodcutter had gone back into the woods and started a fire inside a stone hut where she lived alone. She had stripped off her bloody clothes and burned them and put on newer cleaner clothes that were nonetheless stained with soot by the time the evidence of her crime had been consumed by the fire.

  She was back with the King’s caravan by dawn and pretended then to be just awakening with all the others. No one suspected the woodcutter and soon the young woman could discard her disguise and dress again like a young woman and blend in with the other young women of the town and have her own life back. But for the meantime, dressed still as a woodcutter, she volunteered to lead soldiers into the woods in search of bandits because the soldiers were certain it was bandits who had done the murder. She led them around and around in circles in the woods for days while others carried the King’s body back to town for a stately burial. Eventually three wizened old men were discovered, completely insane all of them, and these were brought back to the town tied and led by a rope like cattle, where they would stand trial and be executed. The young woodcutter felt no guilt about this because she knew that each of them had committed other crimes worse than the one for which they would finally be punished.

  The King was given his stately burial which appeased those of his citizens who still felt loyalty to him but while there was a public display of grief, there was also much secret rejoicing. The town council members reconvened and took up the governance of the town as they had before, out of fear, they had given their power to the family of strangers who had emerged from the woods as if divinely sent. Now they surmised it had been the devil who sent those three and they forgot the good the Queen had done for them, forgot the kindness of Samson, and remembered only the cruelty of the demented King.

  The father of the girl who had been brutally slain by the King was allowed to visit the dead King’s casket before the burial and there performed an act of mutilation that failed to comfort him as he had thought it would. There would be no comfort for him, there never is. Time healed nothing, but time made things different. Eventually he would speak to his dead daughter and about her and cherish his memories as well as his anguish. He was elected the head of the town council for he had acquired wisdom the hard way.

  The Clockmaker stayed another month to finish not only the repairs but the decorations on the clock and the council rewarded him with a sum of money that would last him for several years. He was offered a comfortable home in the town but he had made up his mind that he wanted to return to the village he had left as a young man. He felt like such an old man now, that agedness being the result of the quality, not the quantity of his years. By mid-summer he embarked on his last journey. Lydia accompanied him a couple of days until they came to a village where she was satisfied he would be cared for and given another guide to accompany him on the next phase of his long walk home.

  He had intended to make his way back home in as direct a route as possible, walking through the cool nights (for what is daylight to a blind man?) and sleeping in the warm afternoon sun. He expected to be home before the first snowfall. But the Clockmaker did not realize that he had become a legend until he was so warmly welcomed in the first village. Lydia stayed a while too and then left him with tears and kisses and admonitions to let the villagers care for him. He was wined and dined so jovially that he gave in to the villagers' entreaties to stay even longer with them and before he could get away, the first snow fell.

  The Clockmaker stayed that winter and then another, being the guest of first one family and then another, as they all vied for the privilege of hosting him. In the end he could not leave until he had spent time under the roof of each and every family in the village. He spent the days working on a gift to repay their hospitality and when he left them two summers later, almost to the day, they had an exquisite clock for which the local carpenters were proudly building a tower. In this way, the clockmaker traveled very slowly from village to village in circles or zigzagging across the countryside like a meandering brook and leaving the magical work of his hands wherever he tarried. He also listened to the stories of the people in the towns and these he pondered on his travels, feeling sad or happy for the people who confided their sorrow to him in the cryptic manner of myth since of joy they always spoke openly. From that first village he visited he always remembered the woman who told him the story of the stonecutter’s wife before herself disappearing into the snow one mid winter night.

  The stonecutter and his wife lived alone in the forest outside of the town. In their youth the stonecutter and his wife had made a handsome couple and everyone remarked upon it whenever they traveled into the village for supplies or to dance at a wedding. They seemed happy as well and had much to talk about but as the years went by they got tired and quiet and stopped talking to one another. They still danced at the weddings of their nieces and nephews, having no children of their own, but never for the sheer joy of it as once they had and for the stonecutter at least it seemed the joys of life were over and he was waiting for death to come and relieve him from its daily burdens. His wife however still liked to remark on the spring flowers, the birds, the sunshine and the rain and the fairy tale whiteness of the winter snows. She still loved the world and she began to venture out in it by herself talking to herself as if to a friend and sometimes crying in her loneliness for she missed the companionship of her husband and did not understand his growing bitterness.

  One evening the stonecutter’s wife realized she did not wish to return to the dark house and the silent man. She wanted to remain in the forest beneath the sky, neither joyful nor sad for those feelings no longer mattered and she did not even trust the earth to see to her needs as her only need was to be part of it. “Do with me what you will” she whispered and curled up within the rough embrace of a large tree root. In the dusk a mountain lion appeared seeking food for her cub and she stared at the woman in the tree and the woman stared back without fear and whispered again to the earth “Do with me what you will” and the earth turned the woman into a stone. The mountain lion could not eat her and wandered off. The rain fell on the stone and the sun shone upon it and lichens and moss grew on the stone and inside the beautiful stone the woman’s heart still beat with blood and was content.

  At first the stonecutter did not miss his wife but felt angry that she was not home to prepare his meals. He thought she had stayed away to spite him and decided not to reward her with the slightest attention, but when a few days passed and then a week and then another, he became worried that a bear or a mountain lion had gotten her. He was so sure of this that he became even angrier for had he not told her over and over again not to go alone into the forest? When a niece came to visit with her husband they insisted on going out to look for the woman and scolded the old stonecutter so that he felt he must go with them and grudgingly admitted he had been wrong to be angry and stubborn.

  After they walked a long way, the niece felt tired and sat down on a large rock and as soon as she caught her breath she thought she heard the thudding steps of a large animal and jumped up to run. But as soon as she stood up the thudding sound stopped and she sat down again thinking it had been her own heart she heard. But as soon as she sat down she heard the sound again and was sure it was something outside of herself and was again frightened and again jumped up to run and again the sound stopped. Finally after jumping up and sitting back down a few times the
niece was certain the sound came from inside the stone and the stonecutter who had brought his ax for protection split the stone in two and they found inside a large heart shaped seed, as red as blood. A voice in the stonecutter’s head told him that this was what was left of his wife. He cried then and his tears fell on the heart shaped seed and it throbbed as if about to burst into flower. He took the seed home and planted it in a pot on a sill in the sun and watered it carefully every day and spoke to it as if this were indeed his wife and the seed sprouted into a lovely flower and every morning and every evening the stone cutter greeted the flower and talked about the weather and the beauty of the world. When he died the next year his niece and her husband buried him and planted the flower upon his grave for the niece said he loved that flower more than any other person or thing on earth.

  There were many tales of transformation. His favorite involved a young woman who could whistle in the woods and summon a magical buck whom she had once saved from hunters when they were both quite young. The buck promised her in a voice she alone could hear in her own mind that one day he would save her life and anytime she was in trouble to whistle. She grew to be a thoughtful young woman, often lonely because people thought she was too serious, talked to much, asked too many questions they could not answer and so she often whistled for the buck for simple companionship, they would walk and she would talk and thought that indeed the buck did answer her. But one evening she came with a very serious request.

  “I need your heart” said the girl, “for now it is I who am hunted by an evil king who will not rest until he has my heart in his hand.”

  The deer then consented to allow a large man who had accompanied her to kill him in order to cut out his heart to take back to the bloodthirsty king. It pained the man to do this but he was comforted by the deer who spoke to him and told him how to go about the task so as to inflict the least pain and also how to bury and pray over his body so that the deer could live in a dream forest all eternity where his friend, the young woman could visit him every night.

  “And did she?” the Clockmaker asked the old one who told him this story.

  “Do you believe the story?” asked the old one.

  “I want to” said the Clockmaker and indeed he did for he knew the characters well. “Well then, I will tell you more, for this is a favorite story in these parts and every one who tells it adds a little more before sending it along on its way to the next story teller and to future generations. This is the way we heal, growing new skin over old wounds.”

  So the Clockmaker listened to the tale of the magnificent buck who died to save the young woman and was buried in special cave, a large cleft in a huge boulder that supported and was embraced by an ancient oak tree. Some robbers had been by the spot before the deer was buried there and had hidden their stolen loot. When they came back for it more than a year later, they found the spot blocked by a large stone and they wondered at this, wondered if someone had discovered their cache. They worked to move the stone and were knocked down by an enormous buck that flew past them and into the moonlit sky. The men were so stunned they passed out and slept soundly until morning. Then they went inside the cave to look for their treasure. They found among the gemstones and jewelry and pieces of gold the bones of a large deer and these they burned to keep warm while they camped that night. The ashes had a sweet smell to them and attracted a large number of birds who sang like no birds they had ever heard. When they slept that second night with the sweet smell in their nostrils and the sweet birdsong in their ears, they had visions that spoke to them of goodness and they awoke changed men. They used all their stolen wealth to help poor peasants in the surrounding villages and did more good with it than the original owners would ever have done.

  “This, however, is another story. The story of the magical deer is over, at least for now,” said the old one to the Clockmaker, sending him on his way.

  Nine

  August

  Every August 12th the earth passes through the field of an old meteor and the sky is filled with what appear to be falling stars but are really bits of debris left from that long ago meteor. Every night for several nights leading up to August 12th I lay outside on my back in a sleeping bag in the mountains waiting to see the fiery lights streaming here and there across the sky. On the night of the 11th the activity was amazing; there was a streak of light somewhere in the sky all the time. I couldn’t move my eyes fast enough to catch them all. I could not imagine the brilliance of what would take place on the following night, the 12th of August but when I went out on the 12th of August and waited and scanned the sky and almost nothing happened, three tired flashes at long intervals, I realized it was leap year and indeed I had been lucky to catch the event the night before earlier than I had expected it. Amazing really that we even understand what we are seeing, how can we know about this universe of which we are a part? How do we learn these things? How do we know that what we have learned is really true? I think sometimes that the world of my dreams is more real than the waking world I experience so intensely but with such frustrating limitations. In my dream world I can fly, I can mix up the past and the future, I think I understand what is happening in my dreams but as soon as I awake into this world, I am mystified again.

  Waiting for a bus, an organ grinder out of place and out of time, here, now, and the first few autumn leaves at my feet, all this familiar but strange. The commercial part of the city, noisy, chilly, storm dark at noon, people pass as if I were invisible and not crying for help and I am crying on the other side of the rain. I am lost and I am part of the strange mid-day twilight. The twilight is draining my life. Nobody will help me. If I could get home I would stop dying, but I cannot find my home. The darkness brings down a new world and my home is not in it at all. The doorways are old and people stare cruelly and I cannot stay here. The streets are changed. What city is this? Number 10,003, a street name like Edith, a woman's name and it begins with an E, yes Edith, odd. Arches and tunnels, a residential area after the businesses, and all the doors are locked and the blinds are down.

  No grass, nowhere to lie down, a military installation, fences. I shall never get out. I should never have left my home and I'll never find it again. I feared for my life. There was violence. I hid in closets, in basements, a wired porch, no, 'screened' is the word, but I was aware of the wires. Mountains, a well, a waterfall near by. I must have run away and gotten lost. So many died and so much violence, veiled and imminent, I sensed it, the violence and the anguish. So much fear and I had forgotten something: a baby or a dog, and I had to get back. This nightmare comes back and back and back again until I am afraid to sleep.

  Little things frighten me: cows getting into a hostile neighbor's garden or getting lost in the city. I keep taking buses into this city, different parts of it each time, and getting lost and then I can’t find a bus back to the country where the dark is soft and comforting, not terrifying like it is in the city with the neon and the noise and the strange shadows. Getting lost in cities frightens me the most, not knowing where I am or where I'm going to in a physical sense. That is what it would be in the end: lost on a street maybe even a familiar street made strange by my own homelessness and destitution. I relate very strongly to those sodden bodies on the streets. I remember something, some physical reflexive haze, a protection against the infinite moral despair. Somehow I feel it myself whenever I see them as if remembering my own future. It is confusing, this total simultaneity of time.

  I believe now that I was dreaming over and over the last hours of my brother’s life. He was lost, of this I am sure, and perhaps the rumors about drugs, LSD it would have been then, perhaps that was a truth I did not want to admit because I had warned him, the genetic propensity for schizophrenia, the danger of adding LSD to that volatile mix. That street, Edith Street, it does exist but how could I have known that then? Years later, decades later, I found it by accident, toiling up a spiraling pa
th to the Coit Tower in San Francisco and there it was all of a sudden a small side street, not even a through street, just a short block that dead-ended, Edith Street. And the addresses were prefaced with triple zeros just like in my dream. How could I have known that?

  He was sending me a message but when I found the place I had no idea its significance. There were people there, a small theatre company, something about my brother in a play: it was a dream that I had only once but I was so horrified by it, I never forgot it. I had gone to that city to see him perform in a play and he was cast as Jonah and was eaten by a whale and the special effects were very artful. Then when I went backstage to find him no one admitted knowing him, it was as if he’d been spirited away and I knew they had killed him but I did not know why, wondered if it had happened accidentally during the play or if it had been done intentionally during the play. I could discover nothing.

  The boy who was with him when he died, wouldn’t talk to anyone, the only witness and everyone suspected he was lying, some people suspected he had done it, an accident? Surely not intentionally? No motive. Drugs the rumor was, somehow drugs were to blame. I wondered if they had been approached and the other boy ran and hid, didn’t come to my brother’s aid and watched him killed. Accidentally or intentionally? What is intention? How does it differ from compulsion and how do we know? Does it make a difference? What would he want? What would my brother want me to do if I were to discover the truth? That boy he was with, he had a bad time I heard, drugs, definitely drugs and then rehab and then some kind of job in a hospital, getting his life together. He still wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t tell anyone anything and I thought he felt so guilty he couldn’t talk about it, not that he had done something violent but that he had done nothing to prevent violence. I have no facts to base this on, can only try it out and see how it feels.

  My brother no longer visits me in dreams. Maybe his connection with us in this world became less important over time. Time, how does he experience time? To us, he is eternally young, nineteen.

  It was after he died and after I fully realized I would never hear his voice again, never see his face alive again, that I began to wonder about time, how fast it flies, how slow it can feel. I thought that trees danced but so slowly we could not catch sight of their dancing and that rocks grew like plants but so slowly we couldn’t detect it and of course that is true. Our lives go by in a flash, like those bits of meteor debris in the sky, fast and perceived by us after the event, how long after we cannot even conceive. No wonder humankind has this compulsive need to measure time, to make clocks and calendars and historic records in order, by accretion of words and memories, accumulation of stories, to give weight and substance to our little flashes of life. Some people say it was necessary to make calendars to know when to plant food but once food became predictable and plentiful and hierarchy came in the wake of surplus, and with it vanity and ego and a need to control all of nature, well of course, it all had to be justified somehow, had to be given some special permanency in the overall scheme of things.

  In my dream of being lost in the city, I often find myself riding on a bus and I don’t know where the bus is going or where to get off to catch a different bus that is supposed to take me home. On the dream bus there is always a blind person. Last year I was in San Francisco (I am drawn there periodically) and I did ride the bus and there was a blind woman and she was dressed in an odd collection of clothes that I’m sure she had obtained from the Salvation Army and everything was green, different shades of green, a ruffled, child-like, summer weight, flowered skirt on a light green ground, a white blouse with an emerald green ribbon running through a bit of lace across the chest, solid green socks worn with dirty tennis shoes, a green cardigan sweater with a parade of red animals knitted into it under a dark green aviator’s style jacket, too many layers for the warm day but it can get suddenly cold in San Francisco. I wondered how she had done that, if she was really blind, or if some poor soul had collected the clothing for her and for some reason of her own had tried to color coordinate the otherwise oddly mismatched items. I became curious about what it meant to this exceedingly poor, possibly homeless, blind woman to go out all dressed in the color green and if she even knew about it. No wonder I am barely functional in this world, wondering about such inconsequential things when time is rushing by and civilization is destroying itself and we are bits of its debris flashing through a vast emptiness.

  Ten

  September

  A light rain had begun to fall when the Clockmaker arrived at the Village of K. The feel of it and the heightened scent of the pine trees helped him see the beauty of the scene in his mind, although oft-times the beauty he imagined exceeded the reality. This time he had wandered into a place so beautiful that all the sighted travelers who passed through it ached with a longing to become a part of it. Some of them did, staying longer than intended and even marrying and having families here, sometimes forsaking a first family elsewhere to start a second family in the exquisite spot.

  This, in fact, was how the village had grown since it had been started by the grandmothers. A small group of women, six precisely, had escaped the oppression of their husbands, leaving sons behind and wandered in the mountains from the east, living off the fish from streams and rivers and cress and the occasional bird one of them was able to hit with a stone. They wandered a long time in circles until they found the perfect spot to settle down in hidden serenity. Three clear rushing mountain streams pooled in a hidden valley and then meandered in wide curves through a meadow filled with wild flowers, before falling from this exquisite ledge down through a rocky canyon and on into the world beyond. The women, wily and wary, did not build their creek-stone shelter in the meadow where the structures could be seen from below and above but nestled it instead inside the sloping crevasse down which the largest of the three streams rushed and sang its way to the river and thence to a far off sea.

  First they built a large covered bridge over the stream. It was built of long thin poles that had been felled by beavers because the women had no iron tools to cut and plane the wood. All they had among them was a very small ax one of them had grabbed quickly when they had run away from their old village. This small ax was sufficient to cut up already dead wood for a cooking fire but would not have lasted long had they put it to use felling trees for building. So they took what the beavers left and built their rustic structure that served both as a bridge and a place to get in out of the rain and snow after the pole roof had been covered with mats woven from the meadow grasses.

  This bridge was wide enough for the women to cross six abreast with arms stretched out to their sides and clasping hands. This was the way they measured its width. Later the village meeting house would take up three quarters of the walkway and the bridge portion would be narrowed so that only two people could walk abreast or single file if one of them was fat.

  By the time the bridge was finished the leaves had begun to turn bright yellow and deep red and the women started immediately collecting stones from the stream to build a shelter in which they could have a fire and warm themselves through the winter. This first stone house was built against a large granite outcropping that formed a back wall. The ground sloped away from it down toward the creek so the women had to first build up a rock retaining wall to hold in the soil they dug and carried to make a level floor. They set the front wall back a bit with the pole and grass roof overhanging enough so that one could sit in front of the house and dangle her feet over the ledge protected from rain and snow and dream to the music of the stream. The house itself was large enough for all six to stretch full length and sleep. One of the side walls was built with a hollowed out place in which to build a fire to warm them through the nights. They still did all their cooking outside. The women had selected and fit the stones of the house together so carefully and cleverly that they needed no mortar but to prevent the wind from finding a way in on winter nights, the
y hung woven grass mats down two of the walls. The granite boulder which was solid and the wall that contained the fire space they left exposed.

  For several years they lived the wild life, the oldest among them remembered and these old grannies passed on the stories of what had happened to their people before the youngest among them had even been born. The old women had wandered with their tribe herding animals they kept for milk and living here and there in tents they could easily set up and take down. They stayed nowhere long enough to grow food but gathered what grew wild and hunted small animals for meat. Weather and other tribes drove them westward and the lands available for their periodic use began to disappear as more and more villages established themselves and people took land for crops and drove away the wanderers. The nomads became raiders in desperation and for a while violence was a way of life. Then their leader negotiated peace and was given land where his tribe could stay put and grow crops like their neighbors. In exchange they promised to fight for these neighbors against other raiding tribes.

  The women were glad for the peace but then worse things happened. Even though everyone had the same size field, food did not grow with equal abundance on each and some families had more food than they could eat while nearby others starved. For the women the solution was simple: those who had too much would share with those who had too little. The men, however, had other ideas. If a man gave another man grain to feed his family he wanted something more than a promise of future reciprocity. He wanted a goat or a cow, or, if the poor man did not have a goat or a cow, he wanted one of the man’s daughters and thus the women began to be traded as goods and against their wills and inclinations. Two of the older women, recalling better times, took their grown daughters and a granddaughter old enough to travel fast and hunt and escaped the village of their husbands and fathers who had betrayed them.

  It would be two full cycles of the seasons before any men discovered them and these men were so taken with the daughters and granddaughter they wanted to stay with them. The grandmothers had to give in to the wishes of the daughters who believed they could keep these men under control and maintain their communal life style but of course the very first thing they all did was build two more stone houses to separately shelter each man with the bride of his choice.

  By the time the Clockmaker happened upon them, the first two old grannies had long since died and the granddaughter was herself a great grandmother and the oldest woman in the village. As the oldest she was well respected and under her guidance the village still maintained certain rules. The crops now grown in the meadow were planted, cultivated and harvested by everyone and each family given its share according to the number of mouths that needed feeding. No one family had more than any other and women had an equal vote with the men when decisions were to be made. When a new house needed building the village voted on it. When it was necessary to send someone outside to trade for tools and other supplies, the village voted on it. Marriages and births and birthdays were celebrated by the entire village and deaths were mourned by all.

  The Clockmaker spent a dozen years in this village where he was asked not for a clock but to carve the face of each and every villager into the wood walls of the covered bridge meeting house, in order that their history might be recorded thus. He was able to do this because he could feel the form of each face with his hands and recreate it in wood and eventually in stone with an accuracy that seemed like pure magic to the villagers. As he did this work, he also collected all their stories, the secret ones they told about themselves as well as the ones they told about each other.

  The old men told cautionary tales and tales about animals who behaved like human beings but with more wisdom. The young men told tales about the young women they thought they loved and who they feared would betray them, but the women, young and old told tales of wandering. The clockmaker remembered the stone cutter’s wife and listened for her in these tales of wandering women.

  The one that haunted him most was the tale of the woman who fled to the stream. After many years of marriage and after her children were grown with families of their own, this woman had begun to wander off alone causing her husband to worry. Once he found her laughing out loud as the stream seemed to carry her away. He rescued her from drowning in the torrent of river water swelled by melted snow and spring rains and she was angry with him. She said she would not have died. She said she wanted the river to take her . . .

  “If that is not dying I don’t know what is” he had said to her sister who was a healer and knew all the secrets of the herbs that grew in the hidden places. He asked his sister-in-law for something he could give his wife to bring her to her senses but the sister-in-law told him there was no such plant. She told him she could give him something that would make his wife sleep long and deep at night so he could also sleep, knowing she would not run off as soon as he closed his eyes. Just to be sure, the man tied one end of a piece of cotton string to his wife’s ankle when she finally fell into her deep, herb induced sleep. Then, when he himself went to bed, he tied the other end of the string to his own ankle so he would be awakened when she stirred. In this way the man was able to watch his wife’s every waking move and still get his rest at night.

  When he ran out of the sleeping inducing herb he visited his sister-in-law to get more and she told him she wanted to visit her sister first and try to talk some sense into her and he said “go ahead and try. I’m sure it won’t make any difference. She has become incapable of rational thought and conversation.” But the herbalist found her sister to be very capable of rational thought and conversation and they spoke of many things throughout the afternoon while the husband went about his business. The healing woman did not think it was craziness that her younger sister wanted to live the wild life in nature and let nature take her when it was time. She might have liked to live such a life herself were she not responsible for curing the ills of the villagers in both body and spirit. She was, after all, the oldest daughter of the oldest woman in the community and as such had inherited her power, knowledge and responsibility.

  When she next met her brother-in-law she gave him a weakened version of the herbal infusion for his wife and something to help him regain his strength which she had observed was waning. He trusted her completely and gave his wife the infusion meant for her and drank the one meant for him. That night he slept so soundly that he never felt his wife untie the string from her ankle and escape quickly and quietly into the night. When he awoke to find her gone he was distraught and angry at his sister-in-law but she comforted and soothed him as she had promised her sister she would and before a year had passed they were married.

  When the healing woman came to have her face felt all over by the blind artist who then magically carved her likeness into the wall, her husband had recently died and no one knew what had become of his first wandering wife. Her body had never been found. The healer told the Clockmaker this story because she had never told anyone the truth of her part in her sister’s escape and she wanted to tell someone before she herself passed on. Feeling herself close to death, she had asked to have her face and her story immortalized by the Clockmaker and then she too disappeared into the mountains, perhaps to seek her sister.

  “It was not right” she had told the Clockmaker, “not right for a man to tie his wife to him with string, not right for him to try to keep her from the mountain or the river when her soul ached to burrow into the mountain, longed to rush over rocks with the fresh clear water from its deepest springs. He had to understand her need to become part of her world even if it meant abandoning her body.” She trusted the Clockmaker to understand this and indeed he did.

  The healer was not the only villager to tell the story of this wandering woman but hers was the version he believed. One woman who told him the story said she thought the herbalist herself had murdered her own sister with poison and hidden her body so she could marry her sister’s husband. She made it clear she had
wanted him herself, him or someone, she was a lonely woman given to weaving bizarre fantasies. She told everyone her theory and no one believed her so why should he? Nonetheless he was kinder about it than her neighbors. Many of the villagers told him the spiteful woman’s story that was really no story for she had no story that was her own so made up stories about others.

  But really they all did. Even some villagers who held the herbalist in high regard, because of some cure she had wrought for them, blamed her for her sister’s escape. They all thought the wandering woman had died in the wilderness, must have died, they could not imagine her surviving what they preferred not to risk. The Clockmaker thought that she had survived for he had happened upon her before coming to the village. At the time he had thought she was the stone cutter’s wife and later he thought perhaps the world was filled with these women who fled the banality or the cruelty, the pain or the sheer silence of their lives with men to live freely in the forest. He never mentioned these thoughts to anyone. The Clockmaker simply wrought his magic in the wood and stone and listened. He would store up the stories for when they were requested.

  Eleven

  October

  What primitive poet philosopher gave us this trilogy of words: earth, heart, hearth? Is not fire at the heart of the earth and is it not symbolic of returning to origins? Some tribal peoples we call “primitive” build their simple homes around the hearth or fire pit and give that center proper awe and respect and some take care to face their doorways to the rising sun or the setting sun, depending on how they express their respect for that first fire.

  The dictionary defines “primitive” as 1. being the first or earliest of the kind or in existence, 2. early in the history of the world or of humankind, 3.characteristic of early ages or an early state of human development, 4. In anthropology pertaining to preliterate or tribal people having cultural or physical similarities with their early ancestors no longer in technical use, 5. unaffected or little affected by civilizing influences; uncivilized; savage primitive passions and so on, the definitions thereafter becoming more specific to linguistics, art or biology, categories created by civilized scholars. “Primal” on the other hand is afforded this secondary definition: “of first importance; fundamental.”

  What happens to a civilized society that seeks to leave its fundamentals behind? Can it even be done? In his own language, the Clockmaker thought about this, I know it. I know that he pondered as I do the questions about what is fundamental, what is the primary, the most important aspect of human nature.

  When the clockmaker had completed the portrait of the youngest child in the village, only then did he rest from his daily routine of work for he had worked with a passion that would not let him rest, had worked through the Sabbath each week and through the festivals celebrated by the villagers, stopping reluctantly when they begged him to partake of their feasts, to listen to the music their musicians played while the villagers danced and to hold the hands of friends on either side and dance in circles with them. He enjoyed these breaks but never lost the feel of the all consuming work in his fingers until the task he had set himself was done.

  And then the passion was gone and he left thoughts of carving in wood or in stone behind in the village. The passion to carve had died in his heart and his hands and he craved instead some other healing thing, for after the distraction of his hands was finished, his pain was still there waiting for him. He realized he needed to get back to his home and to hear voices familiar from the long distant past.

  He had lived in the village more years than he had lived in the city as a Clockmaker, first as an apprentice, then a master, then the creator of the world's finest, most magnificent clock and finally, the blind prisoner of a lunatic King. But his days in the village had been so ordered and his purpose there limited and temporary so he never allowed himself to feel attached to that place as he had to the city. When he left to continue his journey home, it was if he had sojourned there but a few weeks, to wait out the winter weather and to render a small service to the people. The stories they told him all ended on the day their faces were finished and they went about their business, grew up, married, had children, grew old and died. All those things happened to someone each year and he was an honored guest at all the weddings and funerals but he did not participate in their lives. He had recorded their existence for the centuries in wood and in stone and when he left them, he concentrated on recalling the stories they told him.

  As he continued his odyssey across the land, retelling the stories in his mind, refining them, waiting for an audience of strangers, the villagers became for him not some three hundred souls but a single man, a single woman, a single child, experiencing all the life, the pain of it and the joy of it, that had been distributed among the many and he began to create myths to explain what being human was like. It was an explanation first to himself for he had missed so much of it and an explanation for some imagined companion that walked with him in the nights for he had resumed his habit of walking at night and sleeping in the daytime sun, an explanation perhaps to God for he wondered sometimes if God could possibly imagine what he had unleashed in the minds and hearts of humankind. This was a question he would ask the rabbis when he finally found his home again.

  In order to remember the stories that folded so many lives into one, he recited them to himself in words that were rhythmic like music, and in this way, he composed long songs, epic poems, and he began to think about teaching these stories to someone else who could pass them on to yet another and down through the years for he wanted them to be a lasting gift, like the carved portraits, like the clocks had been though he tried not to think of the clocks in these waning years.

  In the midst of these thoughts, he had another revelation about the nature of art and it was that art was like the clocks in an attempt to usurp some of God's power. The making of clocks was an attempt to measure the infinity of time and the making of art was an attempt to create something that would survive the passage of time as human life never could. So were religions and the teachings of the rabbis, the talk of the soul and its return to this recognizable world: an attempt to deny or even overcome the inability of humankind to participate in the infinity of time. But why then, he would ask himself, create human beings, if only to let them die and disappear, never to return? Perhaps the infinity of the soul simply made sense. He tried to believe that God had indeed spoken to the authors of the Torah and that the authors of the Talmud knew this and understood what they spoke of, but too often he had doubted it and he was afraid to vanquish the doubts of his youth that had seemed so practical and inescapable. He was afraid to become a crazy old man wandering in fields he could not see, feeling his way to the rivers he could hear and waiting helplessly to hear voices he hoped he would recognize. He had left his home to see the world, to learn something from it and now he was blind and felt more confused than before he had left. He longed to hear the voice of God and was afraid to receive what he prayed for.

  Yom Kippur comes sometimes toward the end of the month of September, sometimes as late as mid October, the Jewish lunar calendar being incongruent with the Christian solar calendar. The Clockmaker made efforts in the city to keep track of the annual Day of Atonement and to observe the day in some fashion even though he did not join with other Jews to pray and request God’s forgiveness for the inevitable sins of the community as well as his own. He had learned as a child that the world was a broken thing and that the Jewish people were intended by God and exhorted by the prophets to make what repairs they could here and there, day by day, with small acts of kindness and mercy, and larger acts of justice when that was possible, but always to make their own lives an example. As a child of course he expected that once done, such deeds, such mitzvot, would accomplish a permanent, lasting improvement in the world, but he had learned, as a blind man, that repairs done today could be undone tonight and he understood now the dance of back and forth and up and down that lif
e really was.

  Avinu, Malkeinu, our Father our King, he prayed to himself from memory, gently beating his breast with the rhythmic confession of each sin, forgive, forgive, forgive. Give forward, give first, and wait for the promises to be kept and forgive those promises when they prove too much or impossible to keep. For what are human beings after all if not incomplete and imperfect? Perhaps the King had merely done what God required when he blinded the Clockmaker for the Clockmaker had created something greater than a man, more lasting, more perfect and for that surely there must be retribution. The Clockmaker had finally repaired the great clock, repaired it so that it would continue to work for centuries, but he had hidden small flaws in the workings and decorations, hidden obeisances to the God he had forgotten for so many of the days of so many of his years.

  Now he was done with creation, with clocks and sculptures and thought about the stories, for God, it was said among his own people, loved a good story, and so he talked to God, telling the stories, looking forward to finding the rabbis in his village and hearing their stories for surely much had happened in his absence. While he walked in the direction of the morning sun, he gave thanks for the beauty of the world, broken as it was, for the fragrance of the dew dampened leaves that he breathed in with deep pleasure, the sounds of the birds that he heard with delight, the fresh coolness of the stream water that he found by its song that beckoned and guided him, and for his memories of the colors of dying leaves so vivid in the slanted light just after dawn, just before dusk. Surely the pleasure he had derived from his body, from his senses was equal or greater even than the pain it had given him, and he marveled at it, gave thanks for it, remembered the prayers he had learned as a boy and recited them all like a song that flowed as naturally as blood flowed through his veins.

  Around him the wind blew golden leaves from the trees and the ground glittered and crunched with them. Sometimes the wind was icy on his skin and he remembered and imagined the sky dark in the afternoon and the golden leaves gleaming as though all the light lost from the sky were stored in them and the world was lit by them as if by a multitude of candles. He would bend to gather up handfuls of leaves, touch them to his eyelids and remember Red; remember Yellow and a myriad of colors in between. He would reach out to find the trees and caress their bark and remember Ash and Locust, Birch and Oak, Elm and Poplar and sweet Maple.

  At night, listening to the wind in the trees, the Clockmaker dreamed, as his creator dreamed, as the earth itself dreamed, of the joy of energy and rhythm, the bursting forth of fire from a volcano, the back and forth dance of the tides, the tenderness of new trees growing up from the ashes of the old, the tension and release and beauty of compressing rough substances like wood and coal into gemstones hidden in the body of the earth, bursting into brilliance in the atmosphere, and oh the pain, the pain of those extractions, the painful friction of earthquakes, the dull enervating drain of parasites living in and upon the earth, in its fluids and hard and soft substances, filling its arteries with what cannot thrive therein, sickening it, the earth, sickening it, so that it could no longer sustain its own life and that of the parasites, the human beings who sucked more from the earth than the earth gave freely, killing it slowly until it had to fight back, rid itself of these greedy parasites. That was the dream, dreamed in unbounded time, a gift, this glimpse into the sensations of the earth itself. In time, this species like other species in other times would be sucked back into the earth and become something else, something the earth could live with and sustain, at least for a time.

  The Clockmaker prayed to God the Father for forgiveness before he lay himself down upon the ground to sleep, but realized in dreams that came to him from deep inside the earth that formed his bed, that Earth the Mother gives and takes and subsumes and transforms with no thought for sin or atonement. When the heat of the sun became unbearable and he awoke and sought the coolness of a stream, he had already forgotten his dream but it would come again when he slept and became someone, something, entirely different.

  In his sleep, the Clockmaker embraced the earth as a caterpillar might, as a snake conforms its body perfectly to the contours of smooth rocks and loam, of scratchy, grassy mounds and valleys. Sometimes in his sleep he dreamed that he soared like birds rising on shafts of earth warmed air and touched down lightly on sand or skimmed along the glassy surface of crested ocean waves. Never had he experienced such thrills and joy as he experienced in these vivid dreams. To the traditional prayers of thanks for the body and its physical sensations he added his own to give thanks for the gift of imagination and for whatever it was in his mind that allowed him to connect to the world outside the boundaries of his body.

  Twelve

  November

  The fall air was so crisp and clear that every sound was born a long distance with all its clarity intact. The Clockmaker was guided onward by the sound of music from a distant house, it was the music of a harp and a human voice and it was sad and lovely and he hurried onward, following his ears and his nose as well for as he came closer he could smell the sweet scent of burning pine. Even so, it took him a full day to find the source of the music and the sweet scented air. He stayed the night with the solitary singer, a young woman who had recently buried her husband. She sang to give herself company and hope, for the winter would be hard alone in the woods in these hills.

  That night the young woman told the clockmaker a story that at first confused him. She talked about events that he did not remember hearing of and yet they were events that everyone should have heard about. She told him how she had grown up in a world across the ocean where she did not feel she belonged and how she had come to this place which had been the place her father’s family had lived until they were all rounded up and killed. She described how the people were rounded up from all over the countryside and from the cities and put on trains and shipped to large ovens for extermination. She talked about vast numbers of people, more people than even existed in the Clockmaker’s world and finally as the night wore on and he listened to the horrific history he thought he must have walked out of his own time or perhaps the young woman had come back in time, but either way, he realized her past was his future and he hoped he dreamed but when he eventually fell asleep and awoke again, she was still there, still singing and he knew this was more real than his memories of the King and the town. It was as if those other realities had fallen off the edge of the earth into a great void and he was trapped in a future that multiplied the cruelties of the King in numbers that could be comprehended only by comparing them to the stars in the sky or the blades of grass in the meadows. And yet the men who had engineered the torture and extermination of so many human beings had tried. They had tried to count them, making lists, endless lists. The young woman had told him this still amazed herself at the nature of such record keeping and the Clockmaker had remembered the king counting his own heartbeats as if to measure the infinite gave him some power over it.

  Why had the young woman come back, he wondered, if her parents had escaped across the ocean? This she could not explain but thought a while and said she had wanted to see the place where her father’s childhood memories had happened. Then she had fallen in love and married a man here but he had died of some disease and now she did not know where to go next. She said all her life she had thought of herself as completely free, a citizen of the world, free to go anywhere and live anywhere for as long as she wished and no longer.

  The young woman invited the Clockmaker to stay and the music she made was tempting, but he had become anxious that if he did not make his way quickly death would overtake him before he reached his home, his proper place and time. His nightly dreams had been invaded by a new sensation. Now he dreamed that something slow and sluggish filled his veins and was quietly shutting down the workings of his body. He dreamed that his body, asleep, was already decomposing and turning into earth, to the ash from whence it had come, nourishing the saplings and mushrooms, the
very rocks that surrounded him. It was not a frightening feeling nor painful, rather peaceful, a relief even, but when he woke he wanted more time to find the meaning of what his life had been. He was almost but not quite ready to let it go. ...

  ...It is that time of year of rotting apples and early doom. I hear wind in the trees and it sounds different than it did in the summer. The last of the brilliant autumn colors have blown away like so much debris in the city streets and I remember the days we used to rake them into piles and burn them in the gutters. I liked that time of year even then, even as a child, even though I understood it was a time of death and the coming of a long cold silence. It was peaceful.

  I found another story in the paper, not about a cannibal this time, but about another voluntary victim. A homeless man who usually begged for change on the same street corner until a resident of the neighborhood invited him to fix up a shed in his yard and there the homeless man made a home for himself and his dog. The owner of the property said the man had fixed it up nicely, had food and water and candles. The owner had been interviewing him in order to write about him and had taken photographs. There was a photograph of the man with his dog in front of the little backyard shack in the newspaper. He was forty eight years old and had been homeless for five years before moving into the shack. The owner said the man had told him he’d been devastated by a divorce, his whole life had fallen apart then, but the newspaper story did not go into details, did not give the reasons for the divorce that was the reason for his circumstances. The man had lost most of his toes to frostbite and got around in a wheelchair, but he was able to stand without it.

  Another man, a broken hearted man in great despair, perhaps a friend, the story did not address how they knew each other, got him to take part in a drama he wanted to stage for the woman who had just broken up with him, broken his heart and his hope and his reason. It is possible he offered to pay the homeless man. Homeless people end up having to sell anything and everything in order to survive. That is what the news article said. In any case, what happened was the two men went together to the street in front of the ex-girlfriend’s house and the broken hearted man cried her name and told her loudly that what she was about to see was happening because she wouldn’t listen to him. The article did not say what it was she didn’t listen to, presumably that the man couldn’t live without her, something like that. Then he began to beat the other man who had risen from his wheelchair and was knocked back down into it. The woman who talked to the press and the police said she thought that much of the scenario had been planned but not what happened next.

  The broken hearted man simply could not stop his rage once it was unleashed and he continued to brutally beat the other man who said “hey man, that’s enough” as the woman who was watching reported it. Another woman who lived down the street had come out and she hollered to the man in the wheelchair to come to her and he wheeled himself to her so she was right there when the heart-broken man stabbed him in the throat and she promised the man as he was dying that she would take care of his dog.

  The woman for whose benefit this drama had been planned told the police there were many victims that day including her ex lover who she said had “put up” with a lot, what exactly she didn’t say, that he had “gone through” a lot, again not too specific. Perhaps there will be a follow-up story. The strange thing is I do not take the paper anymore. I found just the one page when it blew into my yard with a swirl of dead leaves.

  It struck me, this story, because of my dream that my brother had been murdered when he took part in a stage play. I’ve been obsessed with it, the news, the stories of violent deaths, twisted vestiges of ancient rituals of human sacrifice still happening without the ritual, the awe, the intent. My dreams are haunted by past lives filled with violence. I was born and reborn so many times in the land of ballads where words were sung not spoken and the tale was always the same. I killed someone or someone killed me but always I was a victim. I came finally to the city where I was alien but safe in my invisibility and yet I longed to find the places that were the scenes of my pain. I longed to tell the story of my life like it used to be, should be, would be if it could be, to tell it like it mattered. My head is full of characters and they are all me or knew me or killed me or were killed by me or saved by me or saved me. I yearn to find again the one who saved me. Telling their stories, my story, is like breathing. Who was I the other day when grief and deprivation exploded into spontaneous human sacrificial rites and the only kindness was the hurried promise to care for an orphaned dog? What caused that poor man, what causes anyone, to do such terrible things? Where is God? When does this business of repairing the world ever get finished?

  I had a grandfather, a man I actually feel close to although he jumped from a tenth story window years before I was born, when my father was himself only a child. He could not bear to witness the violence. He jumped before having to witness the Holocaust of Nazi Germany but the only thing new about that particular incident of genocide was the systematic and efficient way in which the Nazis sought to exterminate every last Jew the same way scientists would go about exterminating some strain of bacteria. They merely perfected, with scientific precision and on a horrific scale, what human beings had been randomly doing to each other for as long as recorded history and continue to do as I write this. My grandfather had other images to haunt him, the same ones I’d heard about and envisioned since earliest childhood: the women dragged by the hair on their scalp behind the galloping horses of Cossacks until they were dead bundles of torn clothing, ripped skin and broken bones, the babies stuck on the ends of bayonets, the buildings burned after the occupants had been bolted inside, the screams of pain, the cries of grief and loss and that endless question “why?” and after all this time, all these centuries of the recorded violence of human history, we are left with that single question “why?” and no answer coming any time soon. For a while I thought I might find an answer, some revelation in San Francisco. I would go and stand on this street or that, at an intersection, waiting for the answer to come to me in one of those voices like the voices of my characters, those people I don’t even know and never really recognize, just take down their various dictations. But my brother’s voice, or some other voice that identifies itself as my own grandfather, I never hear them. Whatever they know, they aren’t telling. Perhaps it will come in a story, the last one, the one that tells itself to me as I myself lay dying. But there is this one thing that I have discovered writing these tales. I have discovered that it does not matter who killed my brother or how or why, whether by accident, neglect or intention. What drove my innocent and gentle brother from this world is the same thing that drove my scholarly and probably gentle grandfather away. It was the accumulation of violence that is everywhere around us. However vast the expanse of time and space that surround us, every soul confined to a human body is trapped in a cell with the poisonous snake of violence coiled in a corner ready to strike. I think I was born knowing this and forgot. I remember now, when the call came, the two words: “Dougie’s dead”. . . . in that millisecond before the stages of grief set in, my first reaction was relief. I was relieved that he was finally safe.

  EPILOGUE

  The Clockmaker knew he was home when he heard familiar voices in the midst of the same conversation he had overheard on the day he had left so many years before. The Rabbis were discussing the day’s Torah portion, the same portion for the same day of the Jewish calendar year, every year. Whatever the words of that day’s allotment of instruction and guidance, the Rabbis would extrapolate, analogize, dig for deep meaning, seek elusive meaning, and perhaps even make up their own meaning to suit the issues of the day. This was the ongoing work of the Rabbis and it was never done because they were seeking the ultimate repair of a broken world, to cure the grief of the earth’s own soul.

  When a strange old man approached them, they did not recognize the face of the Clockmaker but,
when he spoke, they recognized him as the young man who had left long ago or perhaps not that long ago after all, to see the world. Unseeing, he had become unseen, but he was heard and known by his voice. He was welcomed as if he’d been gone only a few days. And certainly it seemed as though it were only a few days since he had last overheard the rabbis telling their stories because the stories were the same, and always would be. He knew this from his sojourn with the young woman in the woods, had it been only a night or a century?

  Someone helped him to wash and gave him wine and bread and a place was found for him to rest and live out his days which numbered slightly more than a month by the calendar. He died on the Christian New Year’s eve while a distant clock tolled the hour and the year and he dreamed he heard the sound of passing trains and the almost, but not quite silent sob of a woman mourning.

  #

  The Vast Darkness