by Robert Hill
Build a bridge, build a box, in the end it’s all the same.
From the time Hunko Minton first gripped a hammer with as much authority as he gripped himself, it was his job to build the town its boxes. He’d measure the body’s height for the box’s length and the spread of its shoulders for width; when rigor mortis set in and the ankles froze forever and made its feet stick straight up, he’d measure their length and that would determine how tall the box should be. Only once in his box-building life did he ever take an unorthodox measurement to build an unorthodox box, and that box was the box he built for his own father, and for that box he measured his father’s stiff Minton sniffer and that sniffer sticking straight up was taller by far than his stiff Minton feet, so Hunko cut a hole in the lid of his box and added a rectangular ell to the face of it like a rectangular branch growing off of a rectangular tree, and it made that box the only add-on box Hunko ever built in his life. The only box that would have ever rivaled it was a box that was never built, and that box would have been the last box Hunko ever built, and had that box ever been built, that box would have been his own.
He was good at building rectangles, not bad at toe-pinchers, too. His measurements were always nearly perfect; he’d take them once and never felt the need to take them again. He’d cut his planks—the same size for the lid as the base, the same size for the sides, the same size for the head and the foot. He never worried about boxes needing a lining, nor did he build them with any thought to comfort. If, when nailed together, the box proved too snug for its occupant because his measurements were a couple of inches off, rather than start from scratch he’d bust a couple of bones and make the body fit.
No sanding, no planing, no tongues in grooves, no chamfered edges. Nothing fancy was ever needed for something the occupant would never see. Hunko’s one concern was durability. Hardwoods make the longest-lasting boxes; cherry and walnut and oak assure eternity. The sound of his hammer hitting the nails that nailed the boxes shut as it echoed across the valley was the boarding call of that eternal journey readying to launch, and like a ship’s horn or a train’s whistle, if you heard it, it meant one less person you’d ever see again.
As the middle years thinned New Eden of its remnants, Hunko built the boxes that sent almost all of us on our way. He boxed up Frainey Swampscott in a cherry toe-pincher, and sealed her up with Chippewa’s hard-gristled heart in her hands. Zebeliah Was-She-a-Hackensack-or-Was-She-a-Whiskerhooven became twice the woman she ever was in her final days, swelling up like a summer melon, so Hunko made for her a walnut rectangle as wide as a wagon. (It was equal in width to the doublewide he’d built all those many years ago for Russett and Circe Aspetuck.) Though Luddy Upton had no box at least Hunko dug him a hole; there would be neither box nor hole for Petie and Loma Soyle, who were left to hold each other’s hands until their hands turned to dust in the beds in the small room of their house where the tree limb came to fall and their days came to an end. Onesie Lope went the year of the walnut blight so she was evermored in oak; Twosie would have preferred oak herself but cherry was all there was, and because she did not like confinement in any form (something that must have had to do with being sandwiched in the middle of the trio in her mother’s crowded womb), Hunko kindly gave her the first look at whatever lay ahead by fitting her lid with a window. Threesie lived as long as cantankerous does, outliving both her sisters with a willfulness to experience life all alone, even if alone meant she’d be screaming for three. For her box Hunko reused scavenged soft planks of pine and poplar and ash and tulip he tore up from the floor and walls of the Lope family home. The planks were all irregularly lengthed, no two alike, and with arthritis stiffening his sawing arm and his hammering arm, to save that arm for his preferred activity he neither sawed nor hammered hard those planks to make a form at all. Instead, Threesie Lope traveled to wherever in a box one could hardly call a box; lumber rushing down a flooding river and coming to rest in an angry jumble of jagged boards and splintered planks all juts and edge roughs would be elegant joinery compared to what he mish-mashed up for her.
But for the mish-mash of fish and flesh that was the see-through Knotsy O’ums, Hunko took his greatest care of all, and made for her neither a rectangle nor a conventional toe-pincher to last in the dirt forever; instead he made her a seaworthy vessel to return her to her aqueous origins. No ordinary measurements would have served to make a box of any suitable proportions for the girl; for Knotsy never was at any one time in her brief life a height or width one could count on. Her fluid body, lacking in any discernible skeletal understructure, was a membranous mass ever in motion; when she walked she moved in a series of undulations and jumps similar to a salmon perpetually spawning upstream; at rest, her body appeared to loosen its tenuous hold on structure all together, turning as quivery and wobbly and runny as an aspic on a warm day.
It was wintertime, the winter of the silent ice, the year when snowy rain was all that fell and it froze on contact with every post and twig, every barn and barrel, every exposed bit of flesh that wasn’t kept buttoned up; it was in this winter when Knotsy’s life fluids froze and ceased forever. She was found by Hunko down by the frozen shores of Grunts Pond, hard as any fish you’d catch in fall and freeze for a meal much later in the year. Hunko was down there for his daily ritual, doubly urgent in his urgency to keep his unbuttoned bit of flesh from turning as sleek and hard as an icicle in his hand. Across the pond on the spot where Brisket Whiskerhooven undertook to strengthen his tongue on Knotsy’s name all those years ago, Hunko spotted the tongue twister herself, a frozen lump, as shimmery as an egg white, encased in a veil of ice. It was uncommon for Hunko to ever interrupt his urgent business before his business was complete, but spotting Knotsy on that spot he cold-froze in his motions, and consequently, his hand cold-froze to his manhood. He was frozen this way when he crossed the frozen pond to study her frozen form, and frozen this way as he stood above her in his studies. Remembering Brisket’s words, Hunko did what he needed to do to unstick the moment from his mind and his frozen hand. It was the first and last time in his life that anyone but Kennesaw ever inspired him to such an ending. And although it did the trick, whenever he thought back on this moment in his life, grunting Knotsthy! was the one memory he couldn’t really warm to.
Perhaps it was the ice at hand that gave Hunko the idea to return Knotsy to the waters she was suited for. The ground was too hard to dig a hole, and would not be soft enough to do so until long after the first thaw of spring. But the ice on Grunts Pond would give way on its own when the sun came out of its winter hibernation. There’d be no digging to do; in fact, there’d be no need to make a box that would last any longer than a log submerged. So with pine and hemlock and balsam and spruce Hunko fashioned for Knotsy a kind of sarcophagus canoe, tapered at the head and tapered at the toe, with a lattice lid and a flat-bottomed hull. The lack of structure to her limbs came in handy when Hunko needed to snap both her frozen feet parallel to her ankles in order to make her head fit fully at its end.
The day Knotsy was to set sail it was too cold out for most to say their farewells. She had been the caution that came between urgency and eventuality for every member of the last of the last, and though she was not to blame for the rule that had sentenced us all to our solitary lives, the fact of her had made her an outcast the whole of her brief, transparent existence. She had clung to life like a barnacle, like us—alive but not really living. She breathed, she moved, she went through her days as a being with a pulse, yet without purpose, and we could see in her all too clearly the unlived lives we all had led. Perhaps to say good-bye to her was to say it to ourselves, and it was just too chilly a day to do that too soon.
Hunko slid her vessel out across the ice to the center of Grunts Pond, in view of Brisket’s shoreside perch, and there it would sit for more than two months before it settled and submerged into the icy waters when they were finally ready to receive her in the exact same spot where all those generations ago Hezekiah Minton became
the first New Edener to go beyond to forever. It will never be known how Knotsy felt about being Brisket’s urgent inspiration. She never did in her time among us utter a word more solid than a bubble of spit. Yet, knowing the charity that in the recesses of every private heart forgives what it cannot help itself to begrudge, it is certain that the collective hope among us all is that Brisket’s moonlit grunts all those years ago made Knotsy’s fishy innards wriggle. And too, the hope that there would be for her a journey to complete what on dry land had eluded her. From there in the middle of Grunts Pond she could see the distant shore where Brisket once had called her name and with it still in the air she would need no sextant to guide her to his port. And if the vessel Hunko crafted for her didn’t get her there, she could always swim.
23. Kennesaw
From his father’s gropes Kennesaw had run his shame to True as refuge, and later, with Hunko too bright an ember in his furnace and him dousing the flames in an education that ceased to distract him, True had been the keeper of Kennesaw’s secrets, not that his secrets, she told him time and again, were anything to fault. In the years to come it was loneliness forged of shared grief and longing that drew Kennesaw to her; and finally, what kept him coming to her house for his birthday tea year after year was friendship based on age and familiarity, and the habits we can’t shake and the hurts we can’t outrun, and the senility that in its arbitrary mercy blocks our memories of it all.
As the wind picks up and the sky grays over, Kennesaw trudges the remaining miles into town, catching his breath by the hole in the stone wall at Nedewen Field where dust returns to dust. He passes the broken stone markers that show their old age like chipped teeth in a mouth full of mourning, and lays to rest the memories of those who have gone before him. He continues on down the gravel road and crosses the tangled patch that had once been the village green, and past the strip of acre beside the barn behind True’s house where the prized row of Granny-Macs once stood.
It’s taken him all of the morning and most of the afternoon and much of the last ninety-nine years to reach here. The weather is due to turn calamitous. Kennesaw runs a moist hand across his moist scalp as he continues on his way to True’s. He approaches her plain front gate where he rests a moment before starting up again and making his way up her walkway and onto her front stone slab, which is only a pebble more settled than his.
One arm pumping and then the other. One leg shuffling and then the other. One ache and then another and then another and then another. And this is how the aged walk into heaven.
He’s ninety-nine. It’s been a long journey. Tea sounds good to him.
Nothing in life ever really goes into a hole in the ground as long as there’s a body that remembers, and as long as that body has breath in it, those rememberings join hands with time as it trudges to its indeterminable end, just as dirt caked and dried on an uncleaned spade joins with new dirt dug from a new hole, ground by a heel that tracks dirt of its own. And not until that heel has stepped its last, and the spade is dropped by the last hand to hold it in place and left to idle and rust in the dust with no one to make use of it ever again, does a remembering get forgotten for good.
A man can go crazy with thoughts of this ilk scurrying around his head like squirrels in an attic. Yet heady thoughts like these are typical for Kennesaw. Just before he stamped the mud off his boot heels on True’s front porch, which was just before he felt the crack of his pants for any telltale wet spot of sting turned itch turned sticky, which was just before he rap-rappety-rap-rapped on the etched glass of her vestibule door, which was just before the door creaked open on its own as if on haunted hinges, he reminded himself that True with her senses gone to applesauce was lucky to no longer remember anything more puzzling of her own life than a few random pennies and pins in a drawer full of nonsense. Ninety-nine years were behind Kennesaw just as surely as the afternoon sun was well over his left shoulder and had burned a red ring round his nape. And just as sure as he’d track into True’s house warm, dense crescents of clay, he’d muddy up her parlor with all his ninety-nine years full of living past, all his family shame and all his Hunko regret, and they’d push aside True’s living past that she keeps in a mound of musty intimates, piled on the tattered davenport where she once sat waiting for Mawz Engersol to take her to a dance, and all of them can reminisce about the lives they didn’t live at their annual how-do-and-happy-birthday. To have memories that make no sense, or ones that allow no peace, is bedevilment either way, and some merciful heel or hand might earn its entry into heaven by cleaving both their skulls with a spade.
It’s so like Kennesaw to think this way that it’s not surprising that as soon as he blinked his way into True’s dark vestibule and juddered past a stack of wood crates over to her tattered parlor davenport and moved her musty intimates off the davenport and down onto a splotch of what smelled like fresh pee on the clay-hued hooked parlor rug, and finally sat his stinging, itching, clogged-up ass down on the tatters and felt a buckled spring where you don’t readily invite a buckled spring, that the squirrels in Kennesaw’s attic went frantically in search of nuts, and his bluer-than-blues lollopped, and his wits blew south, and in no time at all, face first into the musty mound of intimates atop the splotch of fresh pee on the clay-hued rug, Kennesaw and the clarity of his memories, in a fit of the vapors, landed.
24. Hunko, True, Kennesaw, Carnival, Jubilee, Luddy, Mawz, Zebeliah, Petie, Loma, Frainey, Chippewa, Knotsy, Cozy, Bull, Russet, Circe, Dweller, Spear-Wielder, Lak’isha, and Kip
So much of life happens in a house across town, on the other side of a closed door, in a room where we are not. From our vantage point beyond the place where life is happening to someone not us, we may hear of but not actually see the tumult as it plays out between husband and wife, father and son, sister and brother, sister and sister, girl and goat, friend and friend, stranger and stranger, chromosome and chromosome; the words we imagine shot and shot back may make our jaws unhinge and our eyebrows ripple in reaction to something we don’t even know is true; the hits and hits back, if there are any, at the very least give our hearts a contrapuntal beat; and every so often, loathe as we are to admit it, the kiss and kiss back that we are certain of even in the absence of any proof will flow an envious blush to our faces that streams all the way up from our loins.
This is where the end begins.
By 2:46 every molecule in the heavens was marshaled to shove the sun where the sun wasn’t ready to go, giving porch chimes the jitters like so many shrieking carillons, and even the leaves that weren’t so ready to call it a season let themselves loose. Fly on by they did, airborne crisps, with their rheumatic touches of red and gold and edgings already drying to brown, past Hunko as he stormed the apple stumps behind True’s house, the twelve trees now down to none, and into True’s side yard and right under her south-facing parlor oriel all flush with his own autumn indignation.
All morning and through much of the day the sky had allowed nothing more robust than a milky wisp to cross its brow. But at 3:15 cloud blasts dense as herds of crows spread to a great blush of black. Darkness of the kind only bats learn to love leached overhead and swallowed all movements on the ground in one long gulp. And before anyone could pack it a hamper for its travels, what was left of the sun was marked a pigeon and given the steel toe out of town.
By 3:20 grackles that had gathered on True Bliss’s ridge beam began to grouse and mutter about the engulfing gloom, riffling their wings in annoyance with each impetuous breeze, and by 3:32 when the temperature took a swan dive, they got the jumps and fled north in a clash. Birds up above and Hunko a good head down below True Bliss’s south-facing parlor oriel, not seeing up into the window exactly but not about to take flight. If only he had a bird’s eye view through that air-bubbled window glass to the shenanigans he was certain of inside.
At 3:33, True’s tattered parlor curtains took a sudden billow out the oriel’s open center window then gasped back in. Hunko jumped up best his bowlegs wou
ld let him, which was only about an inch, so he barely cleared the drip edge below the bay and had no clear shot to anything inside. Just then, the devil threw a lemonade social and sent out for ice. It was the sound first that hit him, then the sting on his skin, then the pounding ouch of it. Hail as hard as gravel shat down from the holy crapper. Out of nowhere it screeched in. It sheared trees of their limbs and limbs of their leaves. Late tomatoes were turned to paste, and soup was brewed of Carnival Aspetuck’s already pureed sucker pumpkin guts. Anything brittle or tender, anything with a flutter of a pulse, it charged itself upon. The hail made mince of every petal and sliver and feather and spider, and anything so precariously sinewed it mowed down and mashed under cherry-sized chunks. It hailed heavy and dense and seemingly unendingly. At this time of day on any day other than today, Luddy Upland might have once been gandering goose nests on the far shore of Grunts Pond. Had he been sloshing waist deep through the browning reeds only strokes from the nests and had he gotten caught in such an onslaught, he would not have known whether to cover his head or his mouth as he witnessed the ice chunks scramble every last sunnyside-upper he would have been trying to poach. In the back yard of her family’s outhouse, Zebeliah Was-She-a-Hackensack-or-Was-She-a-Whiskerhooven might have been tending her wild bees at 3:33 when all hail broke loose and no doubt her hives would have done so, too. That pine privy had been the Hackensack-or-Whiskerhooven whocanrememberanymore family’s favorite target for spending a box of shells just for the heck of it, and although Zebeliah might have fast took cover in it tucked like an ostrich with her head in the bowl and her ass to high noon those bees would have swooped in through the shot-holes and stung her rump raw. She hadn’t the hide Hunko has, and there’d have been no hiding it.