My father also hated paying taxes. The words behind the lament varied from year to year, but the message and feeling behind it remained consistent.
“Damn it, Maggie,” he would rail at my mother. “I’m paying these people to turn the country into a land of zombies and idiots.”
At the same time, he insisted I join the very structures he so despised, advising me in no uncertain terms that I would walk stages at both high school and college graduations and that, by God, he would be there to watch me do it.
I shouldn’t make it sound as if Dad ruled with an iron fist or demanded all waking time be spent between work and study. He believed a well-rounded physical education necessary for a healthy mind. When I went through the sports phase, he sat in the bleachers and cheered along with the rest of the parents. About the time I turned twelve, he introduced me to an old man down the street who’d spent his life in a gym teaching both kids and parents everything from workout routines to martial arts.
He went by the name of Virgil and had to be at least seventy years old when I met him. He was totally bald and sported a perfectly white Fu Manchu mustache. The old man stood about my height, but looked thirty pound leaner and wiry, like a snake. I’d seen him before, heard Dad talk about him, but never dealt with him myself. I’ll get to Virgil a bit later, but suffice it to say that where my father took on the task of teaching me to be what he considered a contributing member of the society he shunned, Virgil taught me how to walk through it without being afraid.
At sixteen, I had the first real break with my father - a good one. Up to that point, I had been the follower in virtually every aspect of our relationship. On a warm and sunny afternoon three weeks before school let out for the summer, I settled down at the kitchen table, grumbling and muttering curses under my breath, all of them directed at Juanita Whatley, my scowling and diminutive gnome of a science teacher. Homework assignments had fallen to a school-year low in my other classes, with most of the instructors as tired of grading the papers as we were of slaving over them. Not so with Juanita, or Wacky Whatley as we called her.
She stood maybe five feet tall, if that, wore a buzz cut that would have made any Marine proud and started the school year promising each and every one of us would learn to hate her. She was right. We did. She also promised that we would learn much more than physics.
On the first day, she sent chills through the entire class. Banging on her desk with a ruler and glaring out over the room, she uttered a prophecy that would have scared the bee-Jesus out of anyone with a brain.
“By the time you leave, you will never look at another word problem, either in school or in life, with fear again.”
She was right on that account as well. We had no choice. She bombarded us with them. Academic life under Wacky Whatley turned out to be a live or die proposition. You either learned to assimilate equations from wordy and rambling descriptions or you failed miserably. My father, of course, approved of her wholeheartedly.
In any case, I ended up in a chapter called The Physics of Sound. We’d skimmed through that section earlier in the year. I can’t remember what pulled me back to flip through the pages, but situated in the middle of a long and utterly dry narrative, unfettered by the usual scattering of Greek symbols that left many equations looking like hieroglyphics, lay a simple formula for calculating frequencies in an open pipe. Like a cartoon character, the idea that blossomed felt like a light bulb had suddenly clicked on inside my head.
Two days before, I’d dropped a socket from my father’s took box onto a concrete floor by accident, and had been amazed at how that simple piece of steel sounded just like a tiny bell. The instant I saw the equation, I thought about the extra water pipes he had stored in the workshop and wondered if I could turn them into musical notes. I could and did. Only the sound seemed a bit off. I scratched my head over the reasons and reworked the formula for each note, but came up with the same lengths. I remember staring at the paper, wondering what I missed.
The next day, after Wacky had dismissed class, I walked up to her desk with textbook in hand. She glanced up, managing to look both annoyed and curious at the same time. Neither emotion took me by surprise. Few had the courage to approach her unless they damned well had to. A student standing in front her desk neither sweating nor summoned must have taken her aback. As for the annoyed expression, Juanita Whatley always looked pissed and ready to wallop someone across the head - if for no other reason than to knock the ignorance out the other side.
I laid the open book on her desk and told her what I’d tried to do.
“So you want to make wind chimes,” she said and leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrowing into a withering look that primed the sweat glands even though I had approached her on my own.
“You’re close,” she said finally. “Quit thinking about pipes though. Chimes are bells, even if they look like a pipe. Find a reference for casting bells. That should help you figure out the right dimensions.”
I stumbled away, thinking I had the answer, thinking her words made perfect sense given the sound the socket had produced. I’d just spent months clinging to every word out of her mouth as if each carried a message straight from heaven. Finding a reference sounded simple. Nothing in her terse reply gave any indication that the search for answers might be a little more involved than hunting out the right section in my textbook. We didn’t have the internet in those days. It took another week of flipping through books at the local library to find what I needed.
I started building wind chimes that summer with basic materials, easy things I could buy at any hardware store since Dad didn’t seem too happy with me chopping up his supplies. The shopping list proved simple and cheap, consisting mostly of copper pipe that I could transform into bells and redwood planks I could use as base plates and strikers. The lure went beyond simply building them, even beyond the fact that I had stepped into a world where my father had never ventured.
The real pull came from the wind, how something so simple, so natural could turn an evening on the deck into a musical interlude as complex and soothing as any set of notes crafted by man. I built them for sheer fascination at first, then for family, with my mother suffering through the trial stages. Her cherry trees sprouted chimes for a couple of months while I worked through pipes, notes, drill holes, and strings. By the time I had the sound and process perfected, she had thirty or forty of them hanging around the house. A simple breeze sent the whole yard into a clanging frenzy.
She never complained, not once. Mom was like that. Where Dad would go off on tangents, rail at society, and yet happily solve problems for everyone else, Mom kept his world and mine on an even keel. She was our foundation, the glue that both kept us knitted firmly together as a family and gave Dad and I a home we could come back to.
Once I’d reached the point that the early efforts proved sufficiently embarrassing, I cleaned out her trees, leaving only a couple that she liked the best.
A year later, I put one together for a friend. He happened to live next door to a woman who owned a local hardware store. Two weeks later, he brought the two of us together. She offered a discount on the raw materials and a slice of the profits if I would supply her store.
My father had been ecstatic with the idea. While my friends marched off to fast food chains and clothing stores at the mall, I toiled away in his shed, turning out half a dozen a week at first. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d added ten more mom-and-pop building supply stores across six counties and commandeered his shop with jigs set for wood and pipe. I’d also reached the point where the volume kept me working constantly to fill the orders, churning out sixty to seventy a week with little time for any type of social life. Dad would come out at night and work along side me, peddling the time off as yet another project related to his boat. Listening to him talk about sailing free and clear across wild oceans, set fire to a dream of my own.
When I stared at my chimes, they looked and sounded as good as any turned out by
a factory and that was the problem. Nothing set them apart except for the Handmade and Local Craftsman stickers slapped across the strikers. I didn’t want to be a local craftsman. I wanted to work in precious materials, to turn the simple, wind-driven device into a work of art, to mesmerize, not only with haunting melodies, but also craft something so fine and elegant that even those who would never buy one, would long for them.
The idea stayed with me up through college, up to the point where I met Rebecca Hamilton. Becky was stunning, incredibly intelligent and for some reason that I never fully understood, wanted me. She also had a demanding side and quickly impressed me as the kind of woman who would not sit idly by while an unemployed woodworker turned artist built his reputation. I majored in business and minored in physics. While the two may seem at odds with each other, they fit well into the burgeoning plan to start my own company. They also fit well with her, just in another way. The double major proved equally suitable for life in a suit and tie. I ended up chasing corporate dreams as a project manager for a software vendor rather than the personal ones that kept me busy in high school.
Becky and my father never liked each other. We stayed together for fifteen years and for much of it, they squared off like fighters eyeing each other across a boxing ring. She saw him as a querulous old man, an Archie Bunker type who had too many opinions and too little tact. He thought her flighty and uninteresting, remarking the first time he met her that she reminded him of a replica of a fine painting. She looked good, but beyond that, had little substance. In the end, both of their opinions proved true. He grew grumpier and more argumentative with each passing year. Becky’s constant need for reassurance grated even before we married.
Dad used to say that life was a learning process. I ignored him for the most part, equating the vague, pseudo-psychological mumblings with the scores of hapless people who frequented the talk show routes. God knows, the TV offered enough of them - people who managed to come across as both tearful and fidgety while rationalizing incredibly dense decisions to one sympathetic host or another. I should have listened to him. Becky offered a few lessons that I could have avoided if I had, with the main one simple, clear, and infallible. If someone doesn’t like who you are, trying to change for them is rarely successful and doing so carries even more remote odds that you will end up being happy yourself.
He survived Becky by a year, a fact I attributed to an obstinate determination to outlast her. The doctors had been warning him about his heart for years. Twice I’d been summoned to the hospital for what amounted to a death watch. Both times he emerged as ill-tempered as ever. It wasn’t that the fight left him when Becky piled her belongings into a moving truck. He just seemed serene, as if he had finally reached the end of a long and difficult journey and could finally relax. As much as Becky and I needed to be apart, her leaving stung more than I cared to admit. With the barbs still flying between us, I had little desire to support my father’s smug and suddenly pleasant demeanor, particularly since it rode high on my own discomfort.
Of course, the plan had been to deal with him eventually, except eventually never came. He died sitting on his deck, a half-burned cigar in one hand, a bottle of rum in the other, and a peaceful look on his face. I thought the cause had to be his heart. His doctor said no. It appeared Dad had simply stopped breathing. Maybe he just ran out of fight. Maybe it was just his time. I don’t know. We hadn’t talked for weeks.
The breaking point for me came on a Sunday night, no more than a month after he passed. I walked through the shop I had started in my garage in the same house I’d built for a wife I no longer had, footsteps echoing across a concrete floor that bore scuff marks from hard soled shoes and tread patterns from dirty tires, but not one ounce of sawdust. When Becky left, she left the house and the bills with me. I didn’t mind. I’d spent months building a good part of it including a version of the workshop. The saws were nearly as clean as the day I’d bought them, gleaming under the fluorescent lights like a scene from a Black & Decker commercial.
I stood looking at them, running my fingers across blades still shiny and sharp, thinking about my Dad, the nights when he worked the teak rails on his boat while I sanded redwood. The simplicity of those years called to me in a way I couldn’t explain, but one I knew I needed again. I turned in my notice the next day, put the house my father had left me and the one I’d built for my ex on the market. They sold quick enough, even in a depressed market. I started shopping the day I signed the last of the paperwork.
I bought a piece of land in eastern Tennessee, an hour and a half from the hills of Western North Carolina where I’d been raised and where Becky still lived. The property ran along county lines between Washington and Sullivan and skirted a lake that snaked through both. A similar plot near the tourist and retirement havens that had blossomed in North Carolina would have cost three times what I paid for it. Situated four miles out from Interstate 26, the sprawling section with its tall firs and spruce trees looked like a scene reminiscent of postcards at Christmas,
That’s how I ended up with a parcel of land straight out of heaven and how I heard the news at midday with sleet rattling off the windows like ice clinking in a glass. The set of bells in front of me had no buyer. The pipes had been crafted in solid silver, the notes driven by minors and the sound both clear and soothing. The wood I had cut from American cherry stock, sanding and staining it to a rich luster so dark the surface looked like blood pooled under moonlight.
I never sold the chime. As far as I know, the bells still hang in the shop, silent and destined to gather dust rather than compose symphonies in the wind. I hate leaving chores unfinished. Time hadn’t been on my side though. The Fever turned a lot of lives upside down, changing both priorities and plans for many. By the time I had an interested buyer, my outlook had evolved, migrating from both business and art, to simple days with a warm sun, a light wind, and time where I had nothing to do but remember life before it became so complicated. Days when I could walk in the house and find Mom in her apron washing dishes while something steamed on the stove and hear Dad banging away at one project or another out in the shed.
The question on my mind had nothing to do with what I needed to do to survive, but where I wanted to die. I’d had every respiratory infection known to medical science as a kid. With The Fever airborne, the options for survival seemed limited and gloomy. I didn’t choose the island as a place to escape. I chose it because I’d gone with my father the only time his boat ever sailed in saltwater.
He had towed it into the driveway when I was fifteen years old after rescuing it from a barn in Ohio and walked around it like he had just towed the Queen Elizabeth home. My mom had a noticeably cooler stance towards it.
I could understand. The boat was filthy, the rigging frayed and the sails limp, dirty, and full of holes. Water had gotten inside at some point, leaving most of the interior either rotted away or chewed by rats and mice. The trailer had a quarter inch of dirt, hay dust, and manure dried brick hard on the frame. Where shit and dirt failed to gain a foothold, flakes of white paint stained brown along the edges clung listlessly to a thick patina of rust.
To John Walker Hill, the twenty-three feet of fiberglass and cloth encapsulated a life-long ambition to sail the coast of America. As long as I could remember, we’d had boats around the house. Sailboats, motorboats, canoes, if it floated, Dad had one at some point. He took them in trade, pulled them out of junk yards, and even bought one now and then. Some had been bigger, some smaller, but none had ever suited him. I’d grown up on the decks of a dozen different types of craft, most of which had never made it out of the mountains. A couple of lakes, both within an hour’s drive had served as the proving grounds in his search for something big enough to haul him and his gear, versatile enough to sail coasts and bays, and small enough to hook up to the back of his truck.
“This is the one, Maggie,” he had told her proudly. She had sniffed, wiped her hands on her apron, and pointed to the kitchen.
Thus began another two decades of the boat mostly sitting. My father may have sailed her half a dozen times and only once in the ocean. The rest of his trips were weekenders on local lakes. The sailboat turned out to be everything he wanted. Dad simply never had the time, nor the money, to take half a year off and go wander the coastline. That didn’t stop him from rebuilding, resurfacing, repainting, shining, and polishing every square inch. By the time he died, the beaten old sailboat he had drug out of a barn, gleamed bright enough to sit on a showroom floor. He had named her FantaSea.
When he passed away, I had to go through his things. My father hadn’t been one to leave chores undone or strings hanging. His will stated that the house should be sold and whatever contents I didn’t want, donated to charity or put up for auction. At the time, his last wishes came across as cold and unfeeling. It took months for me to realize how thoughtful those wishes were. No one wants to put away the people they love or their memories. I’d have hung on to that house forever and never used it. He knew that. The will, read by his attorney, a gaunt old man by the name of Gavin Franks, might have sounded heartless, but in reality saved me the anguish of letting go and the guilt associated with doing so.
What I found when I flicked the light on in his garage was an unnamed craft with a newly painted stern and a note in the cockpit. I hadn’t spent much time with him in his last couple of years, the distance borne of emotions torn between a failed marriage and his unbridled happiness that the doomed union had finally ended. He hated my choice of profession and my choice of wife, predicting in his sometimes harsh but accurate way that both would suck and neither in a good way. While his prediction held some accuracy, he’d also spent a good bit of effort pushing the relationship towards that final cliff. I figured I had no reason to forgive or to make apologies. I kept waiting on him. I should have known better.
The Island - Part 1 Page 2