There was a time when I would have given anything to know about my grandfather, Tamar’s father, that man living the life of a hermit in a patch of primeval forest near the Vermont border. I used to ask Tamar about him. One time I asked her when she was rubbing the once-frostbitten toes of her right foot with mineral oil.
“Is your foot hurting?” I said.
“No,” she said. She wiggled it in my face, to prove how non-hurting her foot was.
“Do you think, Ma, that a hermit could survive on about fifty dollars a year?” I said.
“Absolutely not.”
“How much then? How much do you think a hermit who does all his own trapping and food-gathering would need to survive with just the bare essentials?”
“At least five hundred,” said Tamar.
She knows. She always has an idea.
“Why five hundred?”
“Food staples. Candles and waterproof matches. The occasional tool. One Greyhound bus ticket per year. Books.”
Books. Would a hermit read books? Is that something a hermit would do?
“Are you sure about the books?” I said.
“All hermits read books.”
“But he wouldn’t have to spend money on them,” I said. “He could hike into the nearest village and use the library.”
“He could not use the library. To use a library, you must obtain a library card, and to obtain a library card you need a permanent address. A hermit does not have what would be considered a permanent address. Also, a hermit would not return to a village often enough to avoid huge overdue fines, which he could not afford to pay.”
She made sense.
“A bus ticket?” I said.
“All hermits must leave their hermit dwellings once a year. It’s an unwritten rule among hermits. It’s part of the Hermit Bill of Rights. As a hermit expert, I would’ve thought you already knew that.”
I took my roll of adding-machine paper and started out of the kitchen.
“Don’t be mad,” Tamar said.
“Then don’t humor me. Good-bye.”
“Where are you going?”
“To visit a friend.”
“Which friend?”
“Georg Kominsky: American Immigrant,” I said.
“That’s seven miles, Clara.”
“It’s early in the day,” I said. “I’m a good walker. I’ll be there by lunchtime.”
I put my roll of adding-machine paper in its tin holder and zipped it into my backpack.
“Be careful,” Tamar said. “Watch for cars.”
Do not ever walk seven miles in sandals without socks. I knew this before I was half a mile down Route 274 but I did not turn back. I refused to give Tamar the satisfaction. By the time I was at the intersection of Crill Road and 274 my feet were not in good shape. I took my sandals off and wound dandelion leaves around my toes so that they would stop rubbing up against each other. Every quarter mile or so the dandelion leaves would grind themselves into a pulp and I had to wipe them off and start over again. After a while blood from the blisters started mixing with the green dandelion leaf pulp. I wished desperately that it was fall, so that the milkweed pods along the road were ready to burst, and I could line my feet with the silky down inside them. For the last three miles I dreamed about the softness of milkweed in the fall.
The old man was working in his onion garden when I got there. By then I was barefoot, despite the possibility of rusty nails and broken glass on the road.
“Clara?” he said.
“It is I. Do you have a Band-Aid?”
“Yes.”
He got up and went into his trailer. The minute he said “yes” tears started coming out of my eyes. I sat down on the floor in his miniature bathroom and he handed me a tin box of Band-Aids. The box had a hinged lid. It was unlike the flimsy paper box of Band-Aids that we have at our house.
“This is a very nice Band-Aid box,” I said.
I picked out two large Band-Aids, two narrow small ones, and two round ones.
“This box is a metal object, and it is also useful,” I said. “But is it beautiful?”
“Why aren’t you in school?” the old man said.
“Why aren’t I in school? It’s summer vacation. Don’t you know anything?”
I heard myself say those words. They came popping out. They hung in the air between us. They ran like subtitles in the bottom of my brain: don’t you know anything? don’t you know anything? don’t you know anything?
The old man knelt down on the floor beside me. He unrolled some toilet paper and wadded it up and passed it to me. I did not say, I’m sorry. What would be the point? When words like that come out of your mouth they cannot be reclaimed. They already exist. They’re in the world for the rest of your life and nothing you can ever say will take them away.
People are like that, too. Even if they die moments after they’re born, they existed. They were alive. The memory of them can never be taken away.
I took the toilet paper and wiped my eyes. The old man pulled my sandals off.
“These are not good shoes for walking,” the old man said.
I said nothing. I kept my silence. I forced myself not to say the words that were shouting themselves inside me: don’t you think I know that by now?
The old man took another wad of toilet paper and wet it in his miniature sink. He dabbed some soap on it and washed my toes. The soap stung but I said nothing. When he was finished, he dried my feet with a white towel and put the Band-Aids on.
“You walked the whole way?”
“The whole way.”
I did not put my sandals back on. I looked inside them and saw the reddish stains from my blood on the toetips. We went back outside to the onion garden. The old man grew nothing but onions and onionlike plants such as chives. He used to eat an onion a day. For good health, he said. That’s something they did in his village that doesn’t exist anymore. Everyone ate the equivalent of one raw or cooked onion every day. Everything they cooked was cooked with onion. Onions have special properties that protect your health. That is what the old man believed to be true.
His breath didn’t smell like onion either. You’d think it would, but it didn’t. That’s because the old man developed an immunity against onion breath. He ate so many onions in his life that they didn’t affect his breath. He had an affinity for onions.
In his onion garden there were some onions that came up every year. The chives were the first things up in the spring. You could see them poking their narrow green stalks up before the snow melted, like miniature quills from the olden days. Chives thrive in the cold. They are not intimidated by lingering snow and ice. They are indomitable.
Now that the old man is gone, and his trailer has been crushed into a slab of scrap metal, I wonder if the chives are still there. Do they still live beneath the ground? Will they push themselves up through the last of the snow and ice when spring comes again?
That day, the old man and I sat by his onion garden next to the bank of Nine Mile Creek, near the forge that he bought at the auction in North Sterns, as he wet a rag and wiped the dried blood off my sandals.
“You fought with your mother?”
I said nothing. Awful words chased themselves around the bottom of my mind but I did not let them out.
“Here,” the old man said. “Divide this clump of chives.”
He gave me a trowel. I used to call a trowel a spade until the old man corrected me. “A spade is a long, shovel-like tool,” he said. “You are talking about a trowel.”
“Plunge the trowel straight into the center of the chives,” he said. “Then work it back and forth until you can lift out half the clump in one trowelful.”
I did not hesitate. If I had been on my own I would have, but because I was with the old man I plunged without hesitation. He was the master. I believed in what he said. The chives came out easily.
“That clump is for you,” the old man said. “Plant them at home.”
“Ta
mar is keeping my grandfather from me,” I said.
The old man took the clump of divided chives from me. He packed some dirt around the roots, wrapped the whole thing in wet newspaper and then put it in a plastic Jewell’s bag.
“I have a grandfather out there and Tamar won’t tell me anything about him,” I said.
“Where is he?”
“He lives in a primeval forest. He’s a hermit.”
“What is a hermit?”
Sometimes that happened. I forgot that he was an immigrant. I forgot that English was not his first language. I forgot that he couldn’t read. He had no idea how to sound a word out, how to go to the dictionary and look it up. The old man couldn’t absorb the meaning of a word from the writing around it, the way I do when I read a book. He had to hear it in conversation. Probably several times he had to hear it, before he could even register it as a word he didn’t know. Then and only then could the old man start to grasp the possible meaning of a word like hermit.
“A hermit lives in a cave in the woods,” I said. “He spends most of his time foraging for basic necessities. The rest of the time he sits and smokes a pipe and thinks.”
The old man pulled a large bunch of his scallions. Four or five scallions to the old man were the equivalent of one raw yellow onion. Two walla-walla onions counted as one raw yellow onion. Chives did not really count as part of a raw onion. Chives are ornamentation and flavoring more than anything else, according to the old man.
“So your grandfather is a hermit who lives in a primeval forest,” he said.
The old man pulled the large drooping green outer layer of scallion off each of the scallions and tossed them back into the onion garden. The old man wasted nothing. What some people might think of as garbage—the outer layer of a scallion—he viewed as fertilizer for future scallions.
“He might be,” I said. “He very well may be. But Tamar won’t tell me anything about him.”
“So you do not really know where your grandfather is?”
“That is correct. But I think he’s a hermit up near Vermont.”
“You think.”
“I’m conjecturing,” I said. “It’s a definite possibility.”
He said nothing. He took his garden hose and uncoiled it, then turned on the water so a thin stream trickled out. The old man did not believe in a hose gushing water. The old man believed in a trickle of water over time, as opposed to a burst of water in seconds. He lay the hose down next to the middle row of walla-wallas. At first the water soaked straight into the ground. Then the ground directly underneath became saturated and the water started trickling down the middle row and spreading into the rows on either side. That was the old man’s plan. That’s how he used to water his entire onion garden.
“This is a real possibility?” the old man said.
“Of course it’s a real possibility,” I said. “Why do you talk that way anyway?”
The old man wrapped the scallions in more wet newspapers.
“I’m sorry!” I said. “Forgive me!”
Exclamation marks kept stabbing out into the air after the words that I didn’t want to let out. Stab and stab and stab, words and more hurtful words pushing against each other inside me, dying to get out.
“Clara.”
Then I could stop. The sound of the old man’s voice saying Clara started running through my mind instead. Clara clara clara clara clara clara clara, chiming like a bell.
“Come here,” he said.
Clara come here, Clara come here, Clara come here.
I followed him. He went into the trailer and lifted a cookie cutter in the shape of a star down from its hook and put it in his shirt pocket. He carried the wrapped scallions in one hand and he held out his other hand to me. I did not allow myself to think that there might be some kids from my class at Sterns Elementary in town, buying candy at the drugstore or a cone at the Woodside. I did not allow myself to imagine what those kids from my class might think and what they might say if they saw me walking with bare bloody feet into town at age eleven, which is how old I was last summer, holding the hand of an elderly American immigrant who was carrying a bunch of scallions in his other hand.
I took his hand. I walked with him. We went into town.
“Are you hungry?” the old man said.
“I am hungry.”
The old man opened the door of Crystal’s Diner for me and held it while I went in. I go to Crystal’s quite a bit. In addition to food out of cans and jars, Tamar will also readily eat a hamburger and a milkshake. Tamar prefers strawberry-chocolate milkshakes. It’s an unusual combination.
Crystal lives in North Sterns, farther out than us, with her nephew Johnny. Johnny’s special ed. The old man would call him retarded. Johnny has his own booth at the diner. It’s only out-of-towners who ever sit in Johnny’s booth. Even they learn fast, because Johnny comes walking up sideways, which is the way he walks, and just looks at them with a sad look. After a while they realize that they’re in his booth. They get up and go to a different booth. They take their forks and spoons and knives, their plates and their coffee mugs, their jackets and their purses. They wipe up any water-condensation puddles with their napkins and they take their wet napkins with them, too. They leave the booth perfect for Johnny, as if no one but Johnny had the right to sit there. That’s the effect Johnny has on people. One look at him and even out-of-towners want to take care of him. Nobody wants to hurt Johnny. Everybody wants the sad where-is-my-booth look to go away from his face.
Crystal’s never had to say a word.
Crystal and Johnny live in a two-person family. I live in a three-person family—Tamar, me, and Baby Girl—although Tamar would disagree.
Tamar would say, “It’s you and me, kiddo. Get it through your head.”
Johnny Zielinski was in his booth coloring in a coloring book. You might think that because he’s fifteen, Johnny’s too old for a coloring book. You would be wrong. Coloring helps to improve Johnny’s coordination, which is not good. He falls quite a bit. He has a hard time with a pen or a pencil, so Crystal keeps a mug filled with giant crayons in his booth. Johnny will color for an hour or more at a time. Many’s the time I’ve watched him.
“Hello, Mr. Kominsky,” Crystal said. “Hello, Ms. Winter.”
“It’s not Winter,” I said. “It’s winter. Lowercase w.”
Crystal gave me a look.
“And how do you know I was saying it with an uppercase w?” she said.
“I can tell.”
“You’re right. I did say it with a big W.”
“I know you did.”
Crystal said nothing about my bare feet, which were covered with Band-Aids but still oozing blood.
“Mr. Kominsky?” Crystal said. “Do you prefer your name spelled with a lowercase k?”
“He doesn’t care,” I said. “Big K is fine.”
“I was asking him,” Crystal said.
“Big K is fine,” the old man said.
How would he have known? How would the old man have had any idea whether a big K was fine? He couldn’t see the words scrolling by in the bottom of his head the way I can. He had no idea what the difference between a big K and a little k is. All he could do was listen for the difference, and the listening difference without the seeing difference is so tiny as to be naught.
We sat down in the booth next to Johnny’s booth. He was coloring with a giant red crayon held in his left hand. The old man took the star cookie cutter out of his shirt pocket and put it on the table in Johnny’s booth. The sun shone in the window and sparked off the shiny metal. Johnny put down the red crayon and picked up the cookie cutter. He swung it from the tip of his finger. He laughed in his own particular way, which if you didn’t know better you’d think was crying.
Crystal brought over two hamburgers and two milkshakes. She set down a bottle of ketchup and a bottle of mustard. The old man gave her the bunch of scallions wrapped in wet newspaper.
“Thank you, Mr. Kominsky,�
�� she said. “I will put these to use in the tuna salad.”
Was Crystal Zielinski the old man’s friend? Did she know he couldn’t read? Did the old man love Johnny Zielinski? These are the things I wonder about now that the old man is gone. I remember that day and I wonder.
“Do you love Johnny Zielinski even though he can’t read?” I said.
It was a day when I could not stop myself. The words kept flying out of my mouth and there was nothing I could do to stop them. Words that would ordinarily just meander through my mind gathered speed, took wing, and flew into the air.
The old man took off the top of his hamburger bun and squeezed a ring of ketchup around the border of the hamburger. Then he took the mustard and squeezed two drops for eyes and a curved line for a mouth. Then he put the top of the bun back on and mushed the whole thing.
“Do you love me?” I said.
Crystal brought over two glasses filled with ice and water. Johnny clinked his star cookie cutter on the window to see the sun sparkle off it. The old man looked at me.
“Tamar’s keeping me from my grandfather,” I said. “He’s my only family. He’s all I have.”
The old man gave me his napkin so I could wipe my eyes again.
“Tamar won’t tell me about my baby sister,” I said. “She will not allow me ever to mention my father. She has no idea how much I need to know.”
“Why did your grandfather become a hermit?” the old man said.
That was the old man. That was something he used to do, take what you said and not question it. He just kept on going with what you had told him, as if it were the truth.
“The guilt,” I said. “He couldn’t take the guilt.”
The old man nodded.
“He had to live with the guilt,” I said. “Day in and day out, there it was. Wake up in the morning, there it was staring him in the face again.”
“And what was it that was staring him in the face?”
“Guilt, because he killed his grandchild.”
“I thought it was winter that killed his grandchild.”
“Winter played a role,” I said. “I do not deny that winter played a role. But who do you think was behind the wheel of that truck? Who do you think was driving when it slid into the ditch? Who was it who decided to go Glass Factory Road instead of Route 12?”
Shadow Baby Page 10