by Paul Harding
George never permitted himself to imagine his father. Occasionally, though, when he was fixing a clock, when a new spring he was coaxing into its barrel came loose from its arbor and exploded, cutting his hands, sometimes damaging the rest of the works, he had a vision of his father on the floor, his feet kicking chairs, bunching up rugs, lamps falling off of their tables, his head banging on floorboards, his teeth clamped onto a stick or George's own fingers.
His mother had lived with him and his family until she died. Upon occasion, at meals mostly, maybe because that was the site of her being preempted, outsmarted by her former husband, left at the dinner table with her plans to have him taken away, she would recall what a frivolous man his father had been. At breakfast, she scooped oatmeal into her mouth and pulled the spoon from the clutches of her dentures with a stupendous clanking and sucking and would say something like, A poet, ha! He was a birdbrain, a magpie, a loony bird, flapping around with those fits and all.
But George forgave his mother her contrary heart. Whenever he thought about what her bitter laments sought to stanch, he was overtaken by tears and paused, looking up from the headlines of the morning paper, to lean over and kiss her camphored brow. To which gesture she would say, Don't you try to make me feel better! That man cast a shadow forever over my peace of mind. The damned fool! And even that would make George feel good; her incessant litanies soothed her and reminded her that that life was over.
As he lay on his deathbed, George wanted to see his father again. He wanted to imagine his father. Each time he tried to concentrate and go back, tried to burrow deep and far away from the present, a pain, a noise, someone rolling him from side to side to change his sheets, the toxins leaking from his cancer-clogged kidneys into his thickening and darkening blood, reeled him back to his worn-out body and scrambled mind.
One afternoon, in the spring before his death, George, his illnesses consolidating, decided to dictate memories and anecdotes from his life into a tape recorder. His wife was out shopping and so he took the recorder down to his work desk in the basement. He opened the door between his workshop and tool shop. There was a woodstove in the tool shop, between the drill press and metal lathe. He crumpled up some old newspaper and put it in the stove, along with three logs from the half cord of wood he kept stacked in a remote corner of the shop, near the door to the bulkhead. He lit a fire and adjusted the flue, hoping to warm the concretey chill of the basement. He returned to his desk in the workshop. There was a cheap microphone plugged into the tape machine that would not stay upright on the clip collared around it. The clip was so light that the twist in the wire running from the microphone to the recorder kept flicking it over. George tried to straighten the wire, but the microphone would not stand, so he merely placed it on top of the tape recorder. The levers on the recorder were heavy and required some effort to push down before they clicked into place. Each was labeled with a cryptic abbreviation and George had to experiment with them before he felt confident he had found the right combination for recording his voice. The tape in the recorder had a faded pink label upon which had been typed, Early Blues Compilation, Copyright Hal Broughton, Jaw Creek, Pennsylvania. George recalled that he and his wife had bought the tape at one or another of the Elderhostel college courses they had taken during one or another summer years ago. When George first pressed the PLAY lever, a man's voice, thin and remote, warbled about a hellhound on his trail. Rather than rewind the tape, George felt that such a complaint might be a good introduction to his talk, so he just began recording. He leaned forward into the microphone with his arms crossed and resting on the edge of the desk, as if he were answering questions at a hearing. He began formally: My name is George Washington Crosby. I was born in West Cove, Maine, in the year 1915. I moved to Enon, Massachusetts, in 1936. And so on. After these statistics, he found that he could think only of doggerel and slightly obscene anecdotes to tell, mostly having to do with foolish stunts undertaken after drinking too much whiskey during a fishing trip and often enough centered around running into a warden with a creel full of trout and no fishing license, or a pistol that a doctor had brought into the woods: If that pistol is nine millimeters, I'll kiss your bare, frozen ass right out here on the ice; the lyrics to a song called Come Around, Mother, It's Better When You're Awake. And so forth. But after a handful of such stories, he began to talk about his father and his mother, his brother, Joe, and his sisters, about taking night courses to finish school and about becoming a father. He talked about blue snow and barrels of apples and splitting frozen wood so brittle that it rang when you split it. He talked about what it is like to be a grandparent for the first time and to think about what it is you will leave behind when you die. By the time the tape ran out an hour and a half later (after he had flipped it over once, almost without being conscious of doing so), and the RECORD button sprang up with a buzz, he was openly weeping and lamenting the loss of this world of light and hope. So deeply moved, he pulled the cassette from the machine, flipped it back over to the beginning, fitted it back into its snug carriage of capstans and guiding pins, and pressed PLAY, thinking that he might preserve such a mood of pure, clean sorrow by listening back to his narrative. He imagined that his memoirs might now sound like those of an admirable stranger, a person he did not know but whom he immediately recognized and loved dearly. Instead, the voice he heard sounded nasally and pinched and, worse, not very well educated, as if he were a bumpkin who had been called, perhaps even in mockery, to testify about holy things, as if not the testimony but the fumbling through it were the reason for his presence in front of some dire, heavenly senate. He listened to six seconds of the tape before he ejected it and threw it into the fire burning in the woodstove.
Saw grass and wildflowers grew high along the spines of the dirt roads and brushed the belly of Howard's wagon. Bears pawed fruit in the bushes along the ruts.
Howard had a pine display case, fastened by fake leather straps and stained to look like walnut. Inside, on fake velvet, were cheap gold-plated earrings and pendants of semiprecious stones. He opened this case for haggard country wives when their husbands were off chopping trees or reaping the back acres. He showed them the same half-dozen pieces every year the last time he came around, when he thought, This is the seasonpreserving done, woodpile high, north wind up and getting cold, night showing up earlier every day, dark and ice pressing down from the north, down on the raw wood of their cabins, on the rough-cut rafters that sag and sometimes snap from the weight of the dark and the ice, burying families in their sleep, the dark and the ice and sometimes the red in the sky through trees: the heartbreak of a cold sun. He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it. You could never do it. So buy the gold, warm it
with your skin, slip it onto your lap when you are sitting by the fire and all you will otherwise have to look at is your splintery husband gumming chew or the craquelure of your own chapped hands.
No woman ever bought a piece of jewelry. One might lift a pendant from its bed and rub it between her fingers. She would say, It sure is, when he said, Well, now, that's a beautiful piece. Sometimes he saw a woman's face seize for the slightest part of a second, the jewelry stirring some half-forgotten personal hope, some dream from the distant cusp of marriage. Or her breath would hitch, as if something long hung on a nail or staked to a chain seemed to uncatch, but only for a second. The woman would hand back the trinket he offered. No, no, I guess not, Howard. Case slipped back into its drawer, he would turn his cart around in the yard and start back out of the woods, winter already sealing the country people in behind him.
The local agent for Howard's supplies was a man named Cullen. Cullen was a hustler. One day a month, he sat at a table in the back room at Sander's store and rooked his agent of his due. He spread Howard's receipts for the month out across the table and leaned forward and looked at them through the smoke of the cigarette that always dangled from his lip. When he did this, Howard always thought that the agent looked like he was dealing cards for a hand of poker or a magic trick. Cullen squinted at the receipts: Only five boxes of lye; need six to make discount. Ten cotton mop heads. Good, but my cost went up. Need to sell a dozen now. You get a nickel less than before. What about that new soap? I don't care it's tough to convert these backwoods biddies; you're a salesman. What the hell are you doing out there? Sniffing daisies? Godammit, Crosby, what are you doing with those iceboxes and washing machines? How many brochures have you handed out? I don't give a good goddamn if they don't understand installment plansinstallment is the future; it is the grail of selling! Cullen scooped up the receipts and crammed them into his case. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of money. He peeled a ten and seven ones out of the roll. He dug in his other pocket and pitched a fistful of change onto the table (like dice, Howard thought) and flicked fifty-seven cents' worth of coins out of the pile with a forefinger and put the rest back in his pocket so quickly, it was as if that, too, were one of his tricks. Sign here. Crosby, how are you going to be one of my twelve? This was the part of every meeting with the agent that Howard dreaded-when Cullen quoted Bruce Barton. Who was the greatest businessman ever, Crosby? The greatest salesman? Advertiser? Who? Howard looked at the knot in Cullen's cheap tie and smiled, trying not to look put out but trying not to answer the question, either. Come on, Crosby. Haven't you read the book? I practically gave it to you for cost! Howard sighed and said, It was Jesus. That's right, the agent said, half getting out of his chair, pounding a fist on the table, pointing a finger out toward heaven, past the new snowshoes hanging high on the walls. Jesus! Jesus was the founder of modern business, he quoted. He was the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem. He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world! How are you going to be one of my twelve, Crosby, if you can't sell, if you are not on fire to sell?
One hundred and thirty-two hours before he died, George awoke from the racket of the collapsing universe to the darkness of night and a silence, which, once the clamor of his nightmares faded, he could not understand. The room was lit only by a small pewter lamp set on one of the end tables near the couch. The couch ran along the length of the hospital bed. At the far end of the couch, leaning toward the light on the table, sat one of his grandsons, reading a book.
George said, Charlie.
Charlie said, Gramp, and put the paperback book on his lap.
George said, Why so damn quiet?
Charlie said, It's late.
George said, Is that right? Still seems awful damn quiet. George turned his head to the left and then right. To the left was the Queen Anne armchair and the fireplace in which he had not built a fire for thirty years, not since he quit smoking pipes. He remembered the pipe tree he had kept in the basement, at his work desk. At first he had imagined his enthusiasm for pipes to be like that which he had for clocks; he had bought the pipe tree at a flea market in Newburyport. How do I remember this? he thought in the bed, concerned with parsing the quality of the silence he experienced almost as a noise, of finding its source, and, instead, here was the flea market in Newburyport and the table of junk with the pipe tree and what the old crook who ran the table looked like (some sort of retired sailor or merchant seaman, with an Irish sweater and Greek fishing cap) and sounded like (salt-cured Yankee via Bangor via Cape Breton) and almost every item on the table (rusted trowels, eyeless dolls, empty tobacco tins, flaking sheaves of sheet music, a candy thermometer, a statue of Christopher Columbus) and how he had bartered with the man for the tree (How close to ten cents would you take for that pipe tree? Five bucks! How'd a thief like you get in here? Two bucks? Well, you'd better hold on to it a while longer. A dollar and a quarter? Sold.). He bought a dozen pipes from various collectors. He put them in the tree, with the intention of cultivating a taste for a range of expensive tobaccos and using each pipe for one type of tobacco only. Within a week, he smoked the cheapest house blend from the local tobacconist in a pipe he had bartered as part of a deal for a box full of clock parts, and which, when an occasional puff tasted sour, he suspected of being made not from wood, but plastic. He smoked bowl after bowl of cheap shag while he fixed clocks. At the end of the day, after dinner, he sat in the Queen Anne chair (which he had bought cheaply at an estate sale because two of its legs were broken) by the fire and smoked the last bowl of the day. When he developed a precancerous blister on his lower lip, he threw out his pipes and the tree and the tins of tobacco and contented himself with smoking half of an occasional cigar when he had to sweep dead leaves out of the garage. Although he had not sat in the Queen Anne chair since he quit smoking his pipes, there remained a sort of shadow of his outline on the fabric of the chair's backrest; it was not so much a stain as a silhouette of just slightly darker fabric, which could be seen in just the right light from just the right angle, and which still would have fit his shape perfectly, had he been able to rise from his sickbed and sit in the chair.
His head was propped up with pillows. In front of him, at the foot of the bed, he could see a narrow part of the Persian rug that covered the floor. Beyond the rug, at the far wall, was the dining table, with its leaves taken out and its wings lowered. It ran nearly the width of the wall. At either end of the table was a ladder-back chair with a cane seat. Hanging above the table (on which there was always a bowl of wooden fruit or a crystal vase of silk flowers) was a still life done in oil. It was a dim, murky scene, lit perhaps by a single candle not visible within the frame, of a table on which lay a silver fish and a dark loaf of bread on a cutting board, a round of ruddy cheese, a bisected orange with both halves arranged with their cross sections facing the viewer, a drinking goblet made of green glass, with a wide spiral stem and what looked like glass buttons fixed around the base of the broad cup. A large part of the cup had been broken and dimly glinting slivers of glass lay around the base. There was a pewter-handled knife on the cutting board, in front of the fish and the loaf. There was also a black rod of some sort, with a white tip, running parallel to the knife. No one had ever been able to figure out what the rod actually was. A grandchild once remarked that it looked like a magician's wand, and, in fact, the object did resemble the type of wand that amateurs use to conjure rabbits or make pitchers of water disappear into their top hats at children's birthday parties. But the rest of the picture, no matter how recently or distantly it had been painted, was by influence or origin Dutch or Flemish, and the rod certainly not a pun or clever joke. And so it remained a small household mystery, which the family was content to puzzle over now and then for a moment when they were waiting for someone to get his coat on, or were daydreaming on the couch during a winter afternoon, and which no one cared to research.
To his right, pas
t the right end of the dining table and the chair next to it, was the small entryway, which consisted of the doorway into the living room, the front door on the right, the door to the coat closet on the far side, and the door to the unfinished attic (which, when he had built the house fifty years before, George had fitted for plumbing and electricity, with the intention of eventually making the space into a single large family room) on the left. To the right of that was a rolltop desk, in which George kept bills and receipts and unused ledger books. There was another oil painting hanging above the desk, this one of a packet schooner sailing out of Gloucester in stormy weather. It was a scene of roiling dark greens and blues and grays swarming around the lines of the ship, which was seen from the rear. The insides of the very tips of the waves were illuminated from within by a sourceless light. If you watched the straight lines of the schooner's masts and rigging (storm up, the ship was not under sail) long enough in the dim light of an early evening or on a rainy day, the sea would begin to move at the corners of your vision. They would stop the moment you looked directly at them, only to slither and snake again when you returned your gaze to the ship.
Directly to George's right was the blue couch and its end tables, where his grandson sat, now looking at him, book in lap. Behind the couch, there was a large bay window, which looked out onto the front lawn and the street behind the couch, but heavy curtains, which his wife had kept closed day and night since he had come home to die, obscured it. The curtains were as thick and heavy as those of a theater. They were creamcolored, with broad vertical pillars of a maroon so dark it was almost black. The pillars were festooned with leafy tendrils that spiraled up and down their lengths. In between the diagonals of the bunting were alternating images of songbirds with scraps of ribbon or grass in their beaks and of marble urns. Looking at the curtains, it seemed to George that his grandson sat in front of a small, obscured stage and that he might at any moment stand up, step aside, and, with arm outstretched in introduction, present some sort of puppet show.
