Ragged Company

by Richard Wagamese

  We’d generally sit on the veranda on those nights we rented films and wait for the night to fall, and either Margo or I would tell them what we were going to see. It had become a habit after Digger and I had shopped around for the best and latest viewing equipment and installed it in their living room. They were the proud owners of the biggest domestic television, which was hooked up to a top-of-the-line home theatre system. The sound was magnificent. The image was dumbfounding. We’d sit in the plump and spacious chairs bought especially for their viewing potential and get as lost in story in that house as we did in the movie theatres. Then, after the viewing, we’d assemble ourselves on the veranda again and talk. They had become astute aficionados of film. Even Digger, in his gruff appraisals, made astounding critical sense.

  “No fuckin’ way someone’d say that in that situation,” he’d say, and go on to explain the reality of life’s little moments. It was always enlightening, always engaging.

  I enjoyed the film. There was a part of me that still clung to the necessity of admiring the technical handiwork of emotional films rather than comment on their content. Still, a part of me had pulled away from all that. I’d try to concentrate on the lighting, the sound, or the camera angle. But in those moments when the crucible of human feeling is laid bare upon the screen and there’s the warmth of a woman’s hand on your arm in the darkness, like Margo’s on mine that night, it’s difficult to focus on workmanship. Despite myself, I was drawn to the poignant drama of love’s great endurance, its tragic loyalty, its resilience that lay at the heart of that great old tale. Drawn to it as much I was drawn to enclosing my hand about the hand that lay on my arm in the darkness. When it was finished we gathered on the veranda.

  “Ah,” Amelia said settling into the rocker we’d found for her at an antique store near Digger’s new shop. “That was very nice. I liked that.”

  “Me too,” Dick said. “I thought that the lady was gonna stand up at the end, though.”

  “Now why the hell would you think that?” Digger asked.

  “I dunno,” Dick said. “I guess I thought that maybe the love would make her strong enough once she seen the guy again.”

  “Jesus,” Digger muttered.

  “I guess everybody hoped that some miracle would take place,” Margo said. “When you’re in love you always believe the miraculous can occur.”

  “That’d be pretty fucking miraculous there, lady,” Digger said. “Shit like that don’t happen to people, though.”

  “No?” Margo said archly.

  “No.”

  “And you live where nowadays, sir? You have how much money?”

  Digger grinned. “Touché. But still.”

  “Still nothing, you old grump,” Margo continued. “Love can’t truly be defined and neither can its properties.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Digger asked. “Some old movie?”

  “No. Just my observation.”

  “You been in love, Miss Margo?” Dick asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was some time ago now but yes, Dick, I was.”

  “What was it like?” he asked.

  She smiled wistfully and looked off down the street. Then she crossed over to the railing, leaned on it, and looked up into the sky. “It was like blue,” she said finally. “Like that blue you see when the light changes from day into night. A deep, eternal blue that gets put in your heart and then, when it’s gone, for whatever reasons, you discover that it lives in the sky, right there where you can see it every night. An eternal, haunting blue. That’s what it was like.”

  “Wow,” Dick said. “Is it always like that?”

  She turned, leaned on the railing, and said, “I don’t know. But that’s how it was for me.”

  “Me too,” Timber said.

  He crossed the veranda as well, looked up at the sky, and then turned and leaned on the railing beside Margo. His hands trembled while he lit a cigarette and all of us, hushed by the deep quiet we felt in him, waited. He exhaled a thin stream of smoke, pressed his eyelids tightly together, and rubbed the tight space between his eyebrows with the first two fingers of his hand. Digger got up and brought him a glass. He drank all of it in a long, slow drain, then wiped his mouth with the back of a hand.

  “It was a long time ago for me, too,” he said. “Sometimes I think that it was so long ago that maybe I could forget, that maybe time could take care of it, that maybe enough years can go by after something that you walk through it eventually. But you don’t. You can’t. Because there’s always sky, there’s always that blue up there to take you back to it. Always.”

  “Take you back to what, Timber?” Amelia asked.

  “To the city by the sea,” he said quietly.

  “Where’s that?” Dick asked.

  “It’s far away from here, Dick,” he said. “Back a long ways and back a lot of years now.”

  “You ain’t never gone back there?” Dick asked.

  “No. Not until tonight. Not until that movie. Not until Margo mentioned the sky.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He smiled sadly at her. “It’s okay. It’s been coming anyway. I guess it’s been coming since we first walked into the movies that day and the screen lit up in front of me. The light reminded me.”

  “Do you want to tell us about it?” Amelia asked.

  “No,” he said. “No, I really don’t. But I think I need to.”

  Digger filled Timber’s glass again and we all settled into our chairs and watched and waited for Timber to tell his tale. And as we sat there in the hushed light of that summer evening, I looked up at the endless blue that hung above our heads and recognized something of my own there, something I’d tried to insulate with the years. Timber’s story took me back to it again.

  Timber

  I USED TO WALK through the bush at the back of our farm when I was a kid. The others would get together for kid games but I learned real early to enjoy my own company better. I liked walking through the trees. I liked how the shadows played in there. I liked how the wind sounded moving through those big old branches like it had a lotta songs it needed to sing. And me, back then—well, I wanted to hear all of them. The Hohnsteins were farmers for as long back as anyone could remember, even back to Germany before they crossed the ocean. Seemed like the natural thing for a Hohnstein to do was take to the farm. But me, well, I felt something different inside me and it was only when I walked through the bush that I got a sense of what that might be. It was like they called to me. The trees. I used to put my hand on the trunk of one sometimes and I could feel the vibration moving through it. I could feel its life. I could feel its spirit. I could feel its hunger for the sky.

  One night after chores I sat with our hired hand out on the back stoop. I must have been fourteen. He was a whittler. He’d sit back there and smoke and think and whittle on wood. That night he pulled out his jackknife and a four-inch block of pine and started in on it. I watched as stroke after stroke of that blade slimmed and reduced that wood. Watched as he mindlessly shaped it, fluted it, edged it, scraped it, and rounded it until finally there was the vague shape of a cow in his hands. He smiled and handed it to me.

  I’ll never forget that. When I held that imperfect little cow in my hand I felt the same thrum of vibration that I felt in the trunk of a swaying, bending, living tree. The same spirit lived there. The same energy. I rubbed that little cow. Rubbed it and felt its lines, its curves, its clefts and hollows, and I felt in my fingers, in my palms, in the inside lines of my thumb a hunger for the blade, the wood calling itself to shape, to form, to life again. I asked him if I could borrow his knife and when he handed it to me I ran off to my room.

  The next night I walked out to the stoop and handed him the knife.

  “What’d you do with it?” he asked. “Did you work on that cow?”

  I handed him the little cow in my pocket and he looked at it wordlessly for a long time. “Jesus,” he said finally. “Lordy, Jesus. You’re a carver, boy. Y
ou’re a carver.”

  I can’t explain what I did or how I did it. I only know that the energy that I felt in that piece of wood hummed against my skin and called to me, told me how it wanted to live, the shape it hungered for. And I made it happen. That little cow became a miniature of the cows in our field, alive with the same placid laziness, the same fat roll of contentment.

  He gave me the knife and I began to work wood. It seemed like I had a second kind of vision, a whole other way of seeing so that pieces of wood became something else to my eyes. I saw the bear that lived there. I saw the caribou. I saw the eagle. Then I put a blade to it and coaxed them forward into shape and substance. My parents were amazed, and in a show of staunch German pride they bought me a carver’s kit and put a workbench in the garage for me. School became less important suddenly and I spent most days and nights in my little shop working the wood. I got better. I got faster. I got more and more sure-handed. I sold some pieces at the fall fair. I was happy. We turned the garage into a full workshop for me and I fell into project after project. People came from miles around to commission pieces for their homes and I was always busy. When I was sixteen I bought a truck and had money in the bank. I never worked the fields again. I was a woodsmith and I loved it.

  I wanted to make pieces that would live and breathe with the spirit of the trees they came from. I wanted to honour them. For a while it was enough to take the small commissions from those neighbouring counties, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to learn more and when I heard about an apprenticeship available in the city, I applied for it. When the man saw pictures of my work he offered me the position right away.

  Marek Milosz was a Czech, and a distant cousin of a poet of the same name. You could tell. There was poetry in his work. In his blood was the blood of intricate Czech carvers who’d fashioned great moving clocks, and in his shop was a clock fashioned like a whole town with wheels and tracks that moved miniature men, women, and children through the motions of townsfolk. It was amazing. It took up a whole table. I could have watched it for hours. I wanted to create the same life out of wood.

  Milosz taught me very deliberately. Where my self-taught hands had blazed away at wood, he brought them patience. Where my mind’s eye had told me how to bring a piece to life, he brought me spontaneity, the ability to fashion wood as it presented itself, to use the whorls, knots, and imperfections to highlight and augment a piece. Where I had taught myself through large scale, he brought me the intrigue and magic of the miniature, the fine, the subtle, the detailed sculpture of wood. It was all I cared for. It was my world and I tucked myself into a small room near his shop where I slept. All of my awake time was spent in the shop.

  Then she came. I remember that day in its smallest details. It was one of those sunny spring days when the sudden absence of rain makes it wonderful and light explodes over everything. The light in the studio was perfect for the small moves I was making on a clock in the shape of an old gypsy fiddler. I was adding small filigrees to the surface of the fiddle’s neck when the door opened and the smell of spring wafted in. I looked up and there she was.

  She was small. Short and as perfect as a carving. She wore hiking boots and jeans, a long duster coat with a scarf thrown loosely about her neck and a brown wool sweater underneath. When she shook her hair she closed her eyes to do it, and I remember thinking, Freedom; she looked like freedom when she did that. Then she opened her eyes. They were the sharpest blue I’d ever seen. Set against her thick black hair and angular face they were startling, and when she looked at me she squinted and I felt seen. She walked about the shop for a while, trailing her hands across the surface of the things Milosz had finished enough to consider selling, and she stopped now and then to inspect some work up close. A tiny fragment of a smile stayed on her face the whole time. My work had stopped. I just watched her.

  Finally, she turned and walked toward me. I felt my heart beating strongly in my chest and I swallowed hard. I felt awkward and clumsy, far too big for my clothes suddenly. She looked past me at the fiddler and wordlessly reached out to touch it.

  “Romany,” she said quietly.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s a Romany fiddler. You can almost hear the sweet ache of Hungary falling off the neck of that fiddle. Are you Romany?” she asked, looking at me.

  I swallowed, my Adam’s apple feeling like a huge, dry thing in my neck. “No,” I said.

  “Could have fooled me. It takes a gypsy to carve a gypsy. The face, the expression, the hands, the fiddle, they’re all perfect. Alive, almost.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not a big talker, are you?” she asked with a smile. “That’s okay, though. Your work speaks for you. This is amazing. This piece is amazing. Is all of this yours?”

  I cleared my throat. “No. It’s my teacher’s. This piece is mine, as is the bear and cubs over there and that chair.”

  She walked over to inspect the two pieces of mine that Milosz had deemed worthy to sell.

  “They’re better than his,” she said. “Anyone could see that. This chair is awesome. Such brittle-feeling wood but so strong, and the scrollwork up the legs and along the backrest, very, very fine.”

  “Thank you.”

  She smiled. “You’re welcome. I’m Sylvan. Sylvan Parrish.”

  I introduced myself. She was a librarian. She’d come to the city from the East a few months before, where her father was a poet and teacher and her mother a basket weaver. Art and creativity had never come to her, she said, but the love of it had always been with her, as had the love of books.

  “When I’m in the library, surrounded by all those volumes, all the stacks, I feel like I’m in the company of a great many friends. Friends who never leave and friends who are always there when you need them to offer comfort and warmth. I feel anchored there,” she said.

  She’d read about the Romany gypsies. Her mother had suggested that somewhere along her lineage there had been a gypsy and the culture had always attracted her. “But this fiddler is the most alive gypsy I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Is he for sale?”

  “Well, it’s not finished.”

  “When it is, will you sell it to me?”

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  “How long?”

  “Tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Fine. I’ll come back then. Say, five?”

  “Yes. Five is good. But don’t you want to know the price?”

  She looked at me and I felt myself falling into those deep blue eyes. “No,” she said quietly. “No. See the way you’ve done the hands? See how they caress the bow and the neck? That’s love, my friend. That’s love. There’s no room in love for cost. I’ll be back tomorrow at five. I’ll buy you dinner.”

  And she was gone.

  All that day and all through the next I laboured on that gypsy fiddler. I put everything I had into it. Milosz just nodded his head and left me alone. I didn’t tell him it was sold. I just bent to my work, coaxing life into that wood and thinking of the smile it would bring to that beautiful face and the sparkle it would bring to those magnificent eyes. When I applied the thin lacquer at noon the next day, it seemed to glow on its stand like it was waiting too.

  She was right on time. When she saw it she put both hands to her face and breathed deeply though her fingers. Then she cried. Thick beautiful tears slid from the corners of her eyes and I could feel my heart breaking in my chest as I watched her. She bent forward at the waist and looked closely at the face of that old fiddler.

  “The eyes,” she said. “What you did with his eyes since yesterday is amazing. You put love there, love and agony and joy, like the music itself. It’s like you can hear it now. It’s an evocative piece.”

  “Evocative?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It means to call forth, to summon, to bring out. You’ve called forth the spirit of Romany. The spirit of the gypsies. I love it.”

  We walked to a tiny restaurant near the shop. She ordered for us b
ecause I was simply too lost to make a decision. She laughed at that and her laughter was like spring rain: quiet, regal almost. We drank some red wine while we waited for our food and she talked about her work and the world of books. I spoke about the farm, about how I felt among the trees, their vibration, their energy, their life, and how I came to be a carver and a furniture maker. I talked about my family and the generations of farmers that I came from. When the food came I was amazed that I had talked for so long.

  “Do you hear that?” she asked halfway through our meal.

  “What?”

  “The music. Listen.”

  A song was playing over the sound system in the restaurant. It was a music I had never heard before played on instrument foreign to my ears. But the sound it made wasn’t strange to me. It rubbed against something I’d carried in me for a long time, and that something recognized itself in the music.

  “Dvořák,” she said quietly. “The Cello Concerto.”

  “Dvořák?”

  “A Czech,” she said. “A Romany too, I think. At least his music sounds that way to me. I have this at home.”

  “It reminds me of Milosz,” I said. “He’s a Czech.”

  She placed her fork on the table and looked at me with those wonderful eyes. I looked back, unafraid and open. “You are a wonder,” she said. “Milosz. A Czech. And you’ve been around him and picked up the influences he carries without even knowing it. Picking them up and turning them into something magical through wood. Do you know how special that is?”

  She spoke for a long time about the people she’d read about. Writers, painters, musicians, architects, all of the great builders of the world, and as I listened I felt my world getting larger through her words. I found myself wanting to meet these people too. The meal passed almost without my knowing.

  “May I see you again?” I asked as we stood outside the restaurant.