Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  Sally saw no future in it, and said so, but Kovacs coaxed Horace along, telling him he was a natural.

  “You know, I’m getting ready to retire—my hands can’t take it anymore,” the old man told Horace. “They’re going to need a new blacksmith. Why not you?”

  Horace went to the museum director at the time, Dr. Vanderoot, who had grown the place from a ragtag collection of plows and tools to a living historical village. When Horace asked if he could transfer from archives to the smithy, Dr. Vanderoot was all for it.

  “Anybody can study history,” Dr. Vanderoot applauded, slapping the arms of his captain’s desk chair, “but it takes a special man to forge it! A bad pun, yes, but I say, ‘Do it!’ ”

  Horace did. He immersed himself in the dirty work, and gave up his intellectual pursuits without once consulting Sally or weighing the impact on her. His transformation into a man she did not marry had begun.

  * * *

  FALL SEMESTER, SOPHOMORE YEAR. Two bright New York State kids admitted into the public side of Cornell, the ag college, and thrown in with the smart (and rich and more sophisticated) kids from Connecticut to California.

  She was shy and kind of pretty, right off the farm, nervous as all get-out to be in Ithaca, afraid she might not be up to the challenge of an Ivy education. He was tall and long, dark hair falling over his forehead, with strength of conviction to match the breadth of his shoulders, without shame for his state upbringing.

  They shared a few classes, but during a discussion of Elmer Gantry in Am Lit 201, it happened. Unintimidated by his fellow students, or Professor What’s-his-name, a Columbia-educated New Yorker, he spoke his mind about the mean portrayal of country folk as mush-brained suckers in early-twentieth-century novels. Horace argued that Sinclair Lewis made cartoon characters of rural people in the fictional town of Zenith, and had the novel stereotyped blacks in a similar way, it would have fallen off the academic world’s approved list. He then went a step further and surmised that Lewis was a “sellout,” who was just giving New York editors what they expected, or worse, wanted.

  “He was from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, for God’s sake, he should have known better,” Horace said.

  “That’s a fairly grand and preposterous supposition, Mr. Mueller,” the professor said.

  But Horace dug in. It was his turf. He argued the novel was not a great book, but a predictable “yawn” about morally corrupt, Evangelical preachers preying on country rubes. Once again, religion and country folk were turned into punch lines by “so-called sophisticated people who did not know how to seek divinity within, or from the earth.” Horace said that, all manned up, leaning forward on his desk, shoulders squared to their widest, aware of the silent snickers and sideways glances around him.

  The professor argued that the portrayal was accurate.

  “The proof of stereotyping lies in your certainty that I’m wrong,” Horace shot back. “There’s the real danger: you believe what you’ve read in a novel is more valid than what I’ve lived.”

  Checkmate, Sally remembered thinking, filled with admiration for Horace’s ballsiness, and she felt something stir in her, something innate. Was that when she fell in love with him? Or was it a few days later, when he came up to her after class and simply said, “Walk with me.” It was a gentle order, an invitation delivered with confidence, without waver or fear that she would not accept, and that feeling came back. She learned at that moment where the expression “swept off her feet” came from and they walked up to the magnificent gardens of the Cornell Plantations under a brilliant blue autumn sky.

  Without a trace of self-consciousness, he guided her by the elbow over the brick pathways. He placed his hand on her shoulder or low on her back to usher her through some narrow walkways ahead of him. He made her giggle at the names as he enunciated them slowly . . . the W. C. Muenscher Poisonous Plants Garden . . . the Muriel B. Mundy Wildflower Garden . . . He joked that “Triphammer”—the name of the footbridge over the falls below Beebe Lake—didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

  They walked around the lake (she cut her environmental chemistry class), talking easily about everything—the world, their dreams, and how those dreams might fit into the world. As the sun went down, he took off his flannel-lined jean jacket and put it over her shoulders. It was enormous. She felt like a little girl dressing up in her father’s coat. It was warm from his body heat, and she felt safe. Safe and warm. From that first day, until he went crazy, that’s how Horace always made her feel.

  * * *

  IT WAS ALWAYS COLD IN Ithaca; in her room at Balch Hall, where the environmentally conscious university kept the heat at 65, and later in the apartment they shared on Eddy Street where the radiators would stop clanging in the middle of the night and ice crystals would appear like intricate etchings on the windowpanes each dawn. “Our art collection,” Horace would say as he enveloped her in his arms and warm determination to someday make it all right. He was earnest, as they used to say. And together, they were a serious young couple, not given to drunkenness or other campus stupidity. They fell in with kids like them, young people who cared about pollution, American corporate imperialism, corruption of the political process, the falling national intellect led by the news and entertainment industries. Stuff like that. Their friends were kids from all over America, and Sally was exploding with a sense of worldly growth. They were all groping for something to believe in—and something to leave behind—and found one another. They gathered in dorm rooms and later in shabby Ithaca apartments to sip wine and talk passionately about big ideas.

  Horace’s big idea was to cure “modern alienation” and the nation’s “ethical breakdown” by returning to small-town life.

  When someone would argue that small-town life was too confining, Horace countered that it was “liberating, in its own rigid way.”

  “You know what’s expected of you and what to abide by,” Horace said. “It cuts down on moral confusion; I think positive creativity can spring from that”; and then he ticked off the famous farm-town inventors, writers, and artists, from Thomas Edison to William Faulkner to Jackson Pollock. He even threw in Sinclair Lewis, because it suited his argument.

  Sally thought Horace’s outlook was noble and sweet, and, of course, naïve, when he spoke of a society going back to American basics: Ten Commandments, Bill of Rights, and common sense.

  “Politicians and the controversy whores in the media convinced us we have no common ground,” he liked to say. “They exploit our differences, rather than explore our similarities. On every issue, they work the extreme fringes, left and right, giving platforms to special-interest groups. The voice of the great middle is never heard.”

  When he said these things in front of their friends, Sally saw in Horace a dynamic potential leader, someone with a vision to help make things right, through writing, teaching, or maybe even politics. She saw a man who could make an impact. And she couldn’t wait to get him alone underneath the assortment of sleeping bags and cheap comforters they used to keep warm. He wrapped these around her like a queen’s robe when she straddled him and found the right place and rhythm; rubbing against his hard belly where it felt best for her and not having his significant length be too intrusive. Horace didn’t seem to mind, as she went and went again. “Just ride me, baby,” he would whisper, with one giant hand on her ass and the other clasping the quilt at her neck to keep her warm. When her greed and energy expired, she would collapse next to him, and he would get on top of her, bearing all his weight on his knees and elbows. He would blow the perspiration cool on her breasts and lick it off her belly. He went farther down to remoisten her, and sometimes he stayed long enough for her to go again. Or twice. After, she would pull him up and guide him in, with both hands. She loved using both hands, and kept one wrapped around him to keep him from going too deep too fast. Not that she had to worry. Horace understood their size difference. “Am I hurting you? I don’t want to hurt you. Did I hurt you?” he would say, always caref
ul, always considerate.

  * * *

  THE ROLE SHE FIRST WANTED in correcting the world was ecological science, but the head-spinning explanations of atmospheres, biospheres, hydrospheres, and lithospheres, and the math- and science-heavy curriculum of chemistry, physics, biology, geology, and hydrology, were too much for her. Environmental science sounded like a noble idea as a freshman, but as a junior, the -ologies and -spheres were coagulating into one sticky mess in her mind. So she decided to switch to education.

  She remembered the day she told him she was going to quit science. Careful, considerate Horace turned on her, with a quick, condescending judgment that shocked her.

  “Horace, I feel like gorging out,” she said. “It’s too much for me. Maybe I’m not smart enough.”

  “It’s not about intelligence, it’s about commitment,” Horace spat out. “If you’re committed enough, you can make it work.”

  But she couldn’t. Not surrounded by people who spoke in a language she couldn’t comprehend and who wrote in formula riddles she couldn’t decipher. She wasn’t smart enough for it to be easy, and (maybe Horace was right) not committed enough to hack through. She quit, and Horace couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  * * *

  SALLY PLUGGED IN HER LAPTOP and thought of the incongruity of the scene. The science quitter, now here in her ratty robe, at a tin table in an antiquated kitchen, paying bills online and watching their checking account diminish in real time. It fell in chunks of odd numbers: $86.57 for cable and Internet, $109.19 for car insurance, $120.24 for cell phones, $90.76 for electric . . . $406.76 gone, just like that. Another month of making a partial payment on the mortgage. Another month of minimum credit-card payments that didn’t even cover the climbing interest on her maxed-out cards. One step up and two steps back. So expensive, just to live. She hid all this from Horace because she knew what he would say. Unplug. Simplify. Reject the brainwashing of the communications economy. Did Michael really need 24/7 SportsCenter updates on his phone? For Christ sakes, Sally! She could hear his voice as if it were in her head.

  It started when he became the blacksmith. Next came his desire to “authenticate” their home life. The mansion apartment was too confining.

  “We own no land,” he said.

  He wanted a farm. A few chickens, a vegetable patch. A life of “self-sufficiency,” no matter how meager.

  “I don’t want to grow my own food. Who has time?” Sally said. Then, remembering the sinkfuls of bloody feathers from childhood, added, “Jesus, Horace, if you’ve ever plucked a chicken, you’d never want to do it again.”

  Oh, the sick irony when he found this house on Chicken Farm Hill Road just a little more than a mile from downtown, but a world away.

  But she followed him here, to the two acres and a house “with potential” hidden off the unpaved part of the road with a winter view of the lake. She hoped his “own two hands” mantra would manifest itself in home-improvement carpentry and other finishing work. Instead she ended up with a yard of rusting sculptures of twisted band iron.

  * * *

  THEY WERE MARRIED IN THE summer after senior year. It was the logical next step. Horace got a teaching assistantship and went for his master’s. Sally was thankful she got her teaching certificate and supported them (barely) by teaching third grade at Immaculate Conception in town.

  While Horace was buried in his thesis, Sally hid from him that she hated teaching, that the sound of shrill children’s voices gave her headaches, and the small-time politics and cattiness of the staff reminded her of high school. She suffered through two years there, and when Horace got his degree and job in the museum archives, she only pretended to apply for teaching jobs. It was the first time she lied to him about anything, and maybe that was the first big step away. She told him jobs in Cooperstown schools were scarce, and she went to work for a dental practice as an office manager. Again, Horace was disappointed, and her arguments that the job paid better than teaching didn’t help.

  “You have so much to offer, and you’re going to shuffle paper.”

  Horace never said it, but Sally could hear him thinking it: She quit. Again. But what did Horace expect? Somebody had to pay the bills and provide good insurance. History, and teaching, weren’t doing that.

  And in bed, she was no longer a queen. He banged away at her sometimes as if he hated her not living up to his expectations, and stopped asking if it hurt. She was a married woman now.

  In the archives, he was writing papers and researching the exhibits. She thought he would eventually get bored, go for his doctorate, and find a college teaching job, and that would be that. Good, clean, secure work, with tenure and benefits and a pension at the end of the day. She saw herself as a faculty wife, circulating within a university community, enjoying the arts, becoming involved in charities and civic affairs. Sophisticated and cultured, leaving behind the farm girl who feared being called “white trash.”

  Then Horace became the blacksmith.

  All these years later, Sally could never figure out why. Did he have the soul of a great actor, losing himself in character? Or was he just afraid to compete in the modern world? Was he a complicated man trying to find a simpler time, or a simple man beaten down by complicated times?

  White trash. She knew in her heart she wasn’t. But there were the realities. The drafty house. The woodstove that made her cough like a smoker and made her clothes smell like they were bought at a fire sale. Horace’s beat-up Ford Escort, spewing blue exhaust all over town. More than any of that, the look on her face. She saw age and bitterness creeping in, like she’d seen on her mother and other farm women when they hit their mid-forties. Life would not turn out the way they wanted. It would turn out the way they had expected.

  She was tired, as her grandfather used to say, of not having two nickels to rub together. It would be nice not to be broke for a change, to have a husband who wanted nice things. All the bickering over money, justifying every little household purchase, wore her down.

  “Why would you buy a teapot when you can boil water in a pan?” Horace once asked her when she came home from Walmart with a whistling teakettle, on sale for $3.96.

  She was tired of the inconvenience of their lives. Drying clothes on the line, because the amps in the house couldn’t support a modern dryer. Not flushing pee in the toilet because Horace didn’t want to overtax the septic (and chided Sally about how much toilet paper she used). Getting frozen firewood from the porch to warm the house every winter day when she came home.

  She was tired of his wiry beard hair scratching her neck and face. Tired of him climbing on top of her with his crushing weight. Tired of his smell.

  About ten years ago he stopped using deodorant or deodorant soap. He instead announced he would wash only with Octagon or Lava, soaps traced back to the nineteenth century. The Octagon was a big, waxy brown bar that came in a paper wrapper. It lathered up yellow and had an oily smell to it. The Lava had granules of pumice that got out the deep coal dirt of Horace’s hands, but chewed up his skin and left his fingertips like sandpaper. Sally could find neither at the local grocery store. She had to make a special trip to Tractor Supply. She complained about the inconvenience, and the fact, she tried to say gently, at first, that neither worked well.

  “Horace, you stink!” she finally said.

  “I work hard in a hot place,” he said. “I smell like a man who works hard in a hot place.”

  “You smell like a man who sleeps under an overpass. Which would be fine if you lived alone, but you live with me. Why can’t you use a better soap?”

  “These soaps are authentic to my times.”

  “Your times? You live now. Besides, it’s offensive to me! Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  Horace made a better effort to wash up after work, but the stench, though not as biting, still lingered, and only made Sally more tired of Horace.

  Tired of the dead weight of the thick legs and hard arms he threw over her at night, whi
ch made her own arms and legs go numb. Tired of him wanting her, and tired of not wanting him. Tired of feeling like she wanted to scream.

  Mostly, she was tired of Horace’s voice and the way he tried to steer Michael. If the kid wanted to watch a game on TV, Horace warned of “joining the American army of fat-assed spectators.” When he wanted to play himself, Horace warned of choosing “sports over intellect and meaningful work.”

  Later, when Michael starred, especially in baseball, Sally argued that he attacked his games with the same passion, the same slightly scary violence, as Horace put into his work.

  “Look, Horace, he swings that bat with as much might as you swing an ax.”

  “Working in the woodpile has purpose,” Horace countered. “It’s how we heat the house.”

  Horace worked weekends, but when he came to Michael’s weeknight games, he stood off alone, away from the bleachers, his blackened nineteenth-century work clothes matching his dark face.

  “You could pretend to be enjoying it,” Sally said.

  “I don’t have to live vicariously through my kid,” Horace replied. “I’ll leave that to the ‘dude’ dads.”

  In his first few years of Little League, Michael couldn’t wait to tell Horace how he did on those Saturdays and Sundays. “Dad, I went two for three . . . Dad, I hit a home run . . .” But then he stopped, almost as if sports were a refuge from Horace, not something to share, like most fathers and sons. Horace happily saw it as a pass; relieved to have Michael’s implied permission to stop coming. But for Michael, it was only to spare himself from more Horace lectures.

  Those never ended. Everything was a “life lesson.” Nothing ever just was.

  Sally remembered when Michael was nine or ten and she gave him a cheap handheld video game for his birthday. He figured it out quickly enough, and loved to play and play. Horace had it all figured out, too.