by Joe Derkacht
Episode Seven
Resting her elbows lightly on the card table, Zell adjusted her glasses and closely surveyed the picture of the jigsaw puzzle we were working on, before searching among the loose pieces she had spread over a cookie sheet.
“Let me see yours again,” she said, abruptly reaching for a cookie sheet littered with my own share of puzzle pieces, pieces I’d stared at without success for the past three hours. She squinted over them a few moments, pulled out two, and handed the rest back to me.
“Keep looking, John,” she said, as she hooked the pieces into a section she’d nearly completed. For maybe the tenth time that night, she told me puzzles were good exercise for the brain. Maybe it would help jog my memory, remind me of how I had once assembled my Grandfather clocks.
Good theory, I supposed to myself. Now if I could just find one single solitary piece of the puzzle to fit with one of its 999 mates, instead of them being a senseless jumble. In the meantime Zell had linked together the outside edges and filled in two-thirds of the rest by herself.
“The brain needs time to recover,” she said, speaking of mine as if it were not present, which was, I also supposed to myself, by all accounts true, considering the damage inflicted upon it by electroshock therapy. Until that opportune moment should come, though, she thought it would be good to suggest various means by which I might support myself.
Brows furrowed in concentration, she slid a metal spatula under a large section of puzzle, cautiously lifted it, swung it into position, and lowered it into place.
“For a start you could do yard work,” she said, looking as hugely satisfied as any crane operator might from lifting the key part of a skyscraper into place.
While I certainly remembered cutting lawns in my teen years and it was true that a decrepit old push reel mower sat in the corner of my garage, the growing season was drawing swiftly to a close.
“Well, maybe not,” she remarked. “What about hiring out as a handyman? You must remember enough of your carpentry to repair roofs and windows. With the number of storms we have, you’d have all the work you want, dear.”
I shook my head. Somehow, I still hadn’t gotten across to her that I didn’t remember anything of my former skills. Worse yet, my problems went further than simply attempting to progress through the basics and advancing to where I could one day again be called an artisan, a prospect likely to consume years. I actually found myself afraid to run my woodworking equipment. The ear-splitting whine of the saws, the whirling blades with their flesh-eating, barracuda-sharp teeth, gave me the heebie-jeebies. What if one of those blades cracked, came flying off? What if I forgot what I was doing, let my mind wander, accidentally sliced off a finger—two fingers—a hand—an arm—my head?
Such thoughts made my breath catch in my throat.
“You should try returning to church.”
I grunted, not so sure, though she’d made the same suggestion numerous times. The thought of facing unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar place, even if I was supposedly familiar to them, was too daunting. Besides, what would they think of my bruised face and my tremors?
She must have seen my anxiety, because she said: “At least you don’t have to worry about being arrested, you know. You can be grateful for that.”
I shook my head, wiggled my jaw, and gingerly ground my teeth together, testing my bite. As much as I might be on the mend from my fall, a few of my teeth were bothering me. Maybe I should cut out the coffee and sugar cookies?
“Am I a Lutheran?” I asked. In spite of her urging me to return to church, I didn’t know which church she meant. Every Sunday morning I heard her elderly white Buick Skylark leave the driveway promptly at eight, while on Tuesdays her quilting sessions called her out by nine. Like everything else, I simply must have forgotten that I ever took the drive into Seaside with her and Angie Blackmer.
“You, Lutheran?” She followed her question with a laugh. “No, do you want to be? Your mother’s parents were Finnish Lutheran, you know.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I, I don’t remember going to church.”
She glanced out of the corner of her eye at me, as she expertly lifted in another section of puzzle with her spatula. The emerging picture was of a bearded old man bent over a workbench, crafting a wooden toy. A Grandfather clock stood in the background. Because Zell had the box lid propped up for us to gauge our progress, I knew what the entire picture was supposed to be, yet I still hadn’t been any help. Picture or no picture, she’d pieced together the puzzle by herself.
“Now that I think of it, I suppose you didn’t attend church much as a child—” She didn’t have to finish the thought. I was well aware of how most of my memory after elementary school was a black void, that what I did remember came mostly from my earliest school years and beforehand.
“Santa Claus!” I exclaimed, the name popping into my head.
“Santa Claus?” She asked, looking at me peculiarly. “Yes! I didn’t realize you weren’t aware of that.”
The man carving the wooden toy was Santa Claus. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about Christmas, which was coming up in little more than a month. I’d just misplaced Santa’s name somewhere in my brain’s filing system. The red suit with white ruffs had teased at my mind all evening.
“That’s good,” she said encouragingly. “Little by little, it’s coming back to you. We’ll just keep praying it all comes back.”
She saw me shake my head.
“That kind of attitude won’t help, John. I know what Dr. Schiffman told you, that in many of these cases the damage is permanent. But we’re just going to have faith for something better. Like most men he figures it’s best giving you the facts as he sees them, afraid if you get your hopes up and things don’t turn out the way you like, then you’ll just fall to pieces and want to throw yourself off a cliff.
“You do see how that kind of thinking doesn’t help, don’t you?”
I shrugged, hoping she couldn’t read my mind, how I’d been thinking of an extended swim in the ocean. A long walk off a short pier. That sort of thing.
“I’ll drop you off at Driftwood Bible Church in the morning. The more you return to your old surroundings and the people, the more you’ll remember.”
She steadily added in puzzle pieces, working as she talked. Santa Claus was complete. The Grandfather clock and most of the toys on the workbench were done, leaving the background walls and Christmas poinsettias to be filled in.
“I’m sure of it,” she continued. “I saw the very thing during the war. Does that make sense?”
I grunted my assent. The war. Dubya Dubya Two. What a lot of the black and white photos in the back hallway were about. The picture of the girls in Army fatigues was of Army nurses, herself among them so many years ago.
“Did I go to church often?”
“Every Sunday and sometimes Wednesdays, before a certain woman came along,” she said, biting her lip and hunching over the puzzle.
“Are the people nice?”
“Nice enough,” she said, momentarily relaxing.
“And?” I asked.
“I don’t much care for the new minister,” she admitted. “Which might have something to do with his not thinking too highly of Lutherans.
“Which is his problem,” she laughed. “I don’t have any problem with the people at Driftwood Bible. He’s just a bit of a cold fish and I hear all he talks about is hellfire. Other than that, I’m sure he’s wonderful!”
We both laughed, me thinking I would have to make certain I overslept my alarm or otherwise manage to beg off when she came for me in the morning.
After we finished the puzzle, she took me home. In spite of my perfectly functioning backyard porch light, she was not yet comfortable with letting me walk alone at night.
“Breakfast will be at seven, John. If you’re not up in time, I’ll wake you with a cup of black coffee under your nose.”
I stood
in the open doorway and watched to make sure she safely retraced her steps through my back yard. As I waited, Ferd walked in, whapped my leg with his tail as he squeezed by, and made a mad dash for the bedroom. He was curled up next to the pillow, purring as loudly as most people snore, by the time I crawled into bed. I went to sleep wondering how I could get out of both breakfast and church in the morning. It wouldn’t be easy; I didn’t want to offend Zell, make her think I didn’t like her cooking.