by Steve Vernon
Old Zeke held the cigarette erect, staring intently at the embered end as if he were staring into the ashes of a long dying campfire.
And then after a long moment he continued to speak.
“He dreamed of her even now, not knowing just who she was, her memory as intangible as the chains with which the moon pulls the tide.”
Another pause.
“He looked down at the wood that lay before him. This was the last piece of timber upon the drying rack, high in the rafters. There wasn’t a scrap of workable wood left in the shop. He had worked on this piece patiently, feeling the turning of ten full moons dancing high above him as he worked his creation until it was as near to perfect as creation could get.”
“He had no client for this work. To tell you the truth he hadn’t even bothered looking for one. Success was a bird outside his window. It whistled once and flew away.”
“Yet there was still this one last piece of wood to be worked. A forked limb of a wolf pine. The wood had hung above his head for far longer than he could remember, seasoning and drying and waiting. Now there was nothing left but the comfortable ritual of creation. It was the only thing he was ever good at. The only dream he ever knew. For some reason he felt compelled to complete the figurehead before this last moon had turned.”
“He looked at her now and for an instant of eternity he lost the cool distance perspective of the craftsman’s eye. He gazed at her with the concerned pride of a loving father; the heat of an ardent lover; the admiration of a connoisseur of fine art. Her flesh sheened with a fine patina blended from salt heavy sweat and the oils of his skin. Her arms were demiloed stumps, her thighs tapering into the merest suggestion of legs, her entire body torqued painfully back into a longbow’s aching arch towards heaven.”
Angus thought of the turn of Sally Ferguson’s ankle, as he’d glimpsed it peeking from beneath the hem of her skirt.
“He might have freed her at the moment in the heat of his intense yearning if he had not suddenly fallen in a graceless apoplectic seizure that ended his dance on earth in a single rhythmless jig. They found him draped over the figurehead, the body he was finally finished with shrouding the unfinishment of hers like a pair of tired lovers sprawled upon an unmade bed.”
“Did they bury him then?” Angus asked, thinking of what Sally Ferguson might look like in his own bedroom.
Old Zeke shrugged.
“Death is an easy art for the poor. There were no relatives. He was buried in a potter’s field in a woodcarver’s grave lacking even the simple blessing of a crude wooden cross. The landlord seized possession of the carver’s tools and belongings in lieu of unpaid rent. The empty shop was leased to an honest undertaker and the landlord felt it was a pretty damn good bargain. Death is far more certain than any act of creation.”
“Well that’s not much of a story,” Angus said.
“It isn’t finished yet,” Zeke answered. “Learn a little patience.”
And then he went on talking.
“The figurehead was sold as salvage to a shipyard. The thrifty shipyard owner tacked her to the bow of a derelict merchant ship that had been rebuilt into a prison hulk, moored temporarily in the harbour. She was an afterthought, just something to raise the asking price of the vessel in case of a possible sale, and to allay the sailor’s fears. The crew believed a figurehead would keep watch for oncoming storms.”
Zeke made a fist and pounded the air.
“They nailed her to the bowsprit, using great clenched spikes driven hard with teeth-gritting swings of a merciless iron maul. The shipwright who drove the nails heard a sound as he swung his maul, a sound like a wounded woman, but he thought it was nothing more than the shout of a passing gull.”
A Wriggle of Maggot
“Don’t pick at that scab,” I said.
“Why not?” Billy asked.
It was a pretty good question, and I suppose I ought to have a pretty good answer for it. I was the Grandpa, after all, and this was our sacred fishing trip to the Fence Woods. It wasn’t our first trip and I didn’t imagine that it would be our last, but my time in the Korean War had taught me that life and death could be awfully sudden things and ought not to be taken lightly.
I know I don’t look that old, but this here world is a river that runs a lot deeper than most folks can imagine. That’s something else I’ve learned, and I try to impart a little bit of what I’d picked up along the trail every day that I was given a little more time with Billy and I thanked what gods grew out there for the gift of that precious time.
“Scabs are a part of you,” I said. “Our wounds are what we wear over our hurt, and you ought to let a thing like that just lie where it’s growing.”
“What if it’s the scab’s time to come off?” Billy asked. “What if the hurt has gone away and there’s nothing left but an itch?”
“Even a lonely old itch can be company,” I told him, looking off into the woods at the memories buried out there. “You carry what you’re given and you grow it as best as you can.”
I tasted the stillness and the years of life and death that grew up and rotted in a forest like this. All of nature leaping up and lying down before us, entire life times acted out on this wooded canvas. A man ought not to let himself be blind to what’s growing on around him. The world is calling and a fellow ought to learn to listen to the secrets it has got to say.
“I’m not lonely,” Billy said. “Not so long as we got us.”
That was good enough to grin at. Billy was always so good for the healing of my soul, and that was a wonder when you thought of it hard. Life just hadn’t been all that kind to Billy with a mom who had drowned herself in a gin bottle, one shot glass at a time, and a daddy who had never been much good at sticking. I raised Billy up as best I could on my own and he seemed to keep his grin on right in spite of it all. My own missus had died a long time ago and I’d buried her out here on these woods. The law had given me more than a little trouble over those particular burial arrangements, but I’ve stopped listening to any government or council but the tom-tom that beats in the warm darkness of my heart.
Billy picked at the scab again. I knew that trying to tell a sixteen year old boy not to do something was nothing more than farting against a peculiarly stubborn breeze, but a man has got to try to make things stick.
“Don’t pick at that scab,” I repeated. “Scabs cover up echoes, and underneath them your body is dreaming about the pain it felt, and if you wake it up too soon you might have to feel the pain all over again.”
“Grandpa Battle,” Billy said. “That’s just not true. My health teacher told me what scabs were, your body’s mechanism for protecting its injuries. Where ever do you dream these stories up?”
“I pull the stories out of me,” I said. “They grow in my belly, like worms crawling around, and sometimes I just have to reach in and pull them out of me and let them crawl around to see what I’ve learned along the way.”
Billy laughed. His laughter was a little like a cool rain coming down on a hot summer day. It just felt good. And then he picked at the scab again, because he was only thirteen, and obedience was something best suited for dogs and horses and accountants.
“Don’t pick at that thing,” I repeated, with a bigger smile to show I was mostly kidding. “Or I will have to kill you and bury you out here in these woods.”
I felt bad about Billy’s dad on account of he had been my own blood son. I’d raised him up just as hard as I could, trying my best to see him right but sometimes things just don’t stick on a body. Kids are like mystery seeds that way. You plant them as best you can and there’s no telling just what will grow.
“Why?” Billy asked again, only this time he was grinning in a way that let me know he was just tugging on my giggle rope a little.
“You might not like what you find underneath,” I answered with a grin that said I was willing to go and get the joke no matter how deeply he buried it.
We kept on walking through the
Fence Woods. I felt a strange attachment to this thatchy scraggle of pine and shaky poplar. These were the woods I’d grown up fishing and hiking and building fall-down forts in, and then one day somebody built themselves up a fence around the woods, all barbed wire and crankiness, with big old KEEP OUT signs and TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. Some of those trespassing signs had been shot up by kids with pea-popping .22’s and hunters with a couple of barrels loaded and half a six pack’s worth of irony swimming in their guts; and I appreciated the chuckles that still rang around those rusted-out bullet holes.
I never did much care for authority, no sir.
“Yuck,” Billy said.
I looked down at what he was yucking at. It was a dead rabbit. Billy had stepped into it, not noticing where he was walking, and his right running shoe had sunk down straight into the softened belly meat of the dead bunny. The smell wasn’t anything you’d want to remember, but I knew we would. Some things just stick for good.
“It’s just a dead rabbit,” I said. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” Billy said, shaking on the rabbit like it was a wet moccasin. “I just can’t get clear of it, is all.”
“Some things are built that way,” I said. “You hold still now.”
I knelt down and tugged his foot clean, working the suck of the guts from off of his sneaker and picking the few stray maggots that had jumped up onto what they thought were greener pastures.
“Take some of these,” I said, picking out a handful. “Maggots are awful good bait if you can find yourself some fat ones.”
Billy knelt down beside me and picked at the crawling meat. He’d never learned the squeamishness that some boys grew, and I was proud of him for that.
“You have to be careful where you step in these woods,” I said. “There are an awful lot of strange things buried in the scrub grass and scratchings out here.”
“What do you think killed him?” Billy asked.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Maybe just old age. Old Granddaddy Death wears awful soft feet.”
I didn’t want to say anything more on that particular matter, so to distract Billy I handed him my Kabar knife knife.
“Here,” I said. “Hang onto this. Any fish we catch, you get to clean.”
He grinned like I’d just knighted him. He shoved the Kabar knife into his belt and his eyes immediately hardened and he stood a little taller. He was Uncas of the Mohicans, Tarzan of the Apes and D’Artagnan, all at once. I had done a good thing, I thought to myself. Might be I’d let him keep that knife, to give him something to remember me by. Old Granddaddy Death would have wear his longest high-walking stilts to catch up to the road that I was running, but sooner or later I knew he’d find me out.
“Careful you don’t cut yourself with that Kabar knife,” I said, not really worried because I’d taught him right.
“I won’t,” He answered. “Do you figure we’ll catch something?”
“We always do, don’t we?”
“And will we eat it?”
“A man has to eat whatever he catches in this old world,” I told him.
“Even if it tastes bad?”
“Even if it tastes worse.”
Cleaned clear of rabbit guts, with our pockets stuffed full of maggots and the half cooked bacon we’d packed earlier for bait, we kept walking towards the stream that had ran through these woods back in my Grandpa Jake’s day, long before the fence had grown up.
We reached the stream, and we baited our hooks, sliding the steel up through the meat of the maggot and a bit of the bacon, hiding the barbed scent beneath a camouflage of gut slime and bacon fat. The fish could tell the smell of metal in the water, but they hungered for the meat and if you dressed the steel up nice and tasty with a wiggle of maggot and a curl of bacon then they’d go for the hook without a thought.
Fish were like that, open and hungry and ready to be fed. So were boys. Boys were open books you told stories to, hungry pages aching for what ever ink they found.
A man’s words wore a long memory coat that he passed on down to his children and grandchildren one sticky thread at a time like a kind of walking trap.
I learned that in Korea, too. I was one of those young men who grew up on the battlefield, learning of the many ways that a man might fall into death. I’d been drilled in gunfire and respect, cast thousands of miles across the ocean into the heart of a jungle that had grown up around other men’s memories. We painted those hot Korean woods with our blood and our tears and some things stayed and took hold and some things just ran away like warm summer rain.
“Grandpa, what did you do in the war?”
I looked over at Billy as if he could hear my memories and for just a half of a half minute I stood there and wondered.
“I mostly ducked down and concentrated on remaining unshot,” I answered, trying to dodge the question one more time, only this time that strategy just wasn’t good enough for the boy.
“That’s what you always say,” Billy noted. “Tell me the real answer, would you? Tell me what really happened. I’m older than when I asked you last and I want to know now.”
What did I do in Korea that I could tell a thirteen year old kid? My thoughts ricocheted backwards, rooting out events long grown cold in the graveyards of recollection, a few clippings jammed into the coffin of a filing cabinet that I never opened, the meat and maggotry of all of my reminiscence clutched as hot as fresh-kill around the charnelled scrapbook of my soul.
*
It was long ago and not so many words away and I was nothing but a puppy still learning how to bark, but the United States Marines saw fit to ticker-tack a little silver-colored bar on my shoulder and call me a First Lieutenant, on account of one of the other Lieutenants got his skull opened by a well-placed enemy rifle shot, and the other retired from service following a creep of jungle rot that ran itself out from crotch to coat hanger, but that shiny steel bar didn’t mean all that much out here in the deep North Korean territory.
So there we were, hunkered down in a North Korean jungle, trying to read a map that looked as if it might have been drawn up by a drunken dyslexic dyspeptic Doberman Pinscher.
“Are we lost, Lieutenant Carmody?” Sergeant Trumble asked.
That is me that Trumble is talking to. I look a whole lot younger in a memory mirror reflecting this far back, and probably prettier too. Lieutenant Battle Carmody, named for the fact that my mother took two whole days to give me the single most painful birthing in the history of civilization.
“It was a battle,” she told my Daddy, as he smiled over her and my squalling upturned shout of a face crying in the afterbirth and spillage of the bed she would die in six days later while she was caught up in the grip of a fever and calling out another man’s name in a fierce and yearning lonely kind of way that told a secret without really saying. I guess people all had a few secrets growing deep inside them, but my Daddy never dreamed that my mother’s heart ever held such a darkness.
“Well, Battle sure sounds like a good enough name for the son of a Carmody,” my Daddy said, and I can still see that fat happy grin of his looking down at me as he figured that he’d seen through the worst of it.
“I said - are we lost, Lieutenant Carmody?”
Sergeant Akerly Trumble was my second in command, and the fellow who had pulled my skinny twenty-two year old ass out of more trouble than could be painted with a thousand devil’s paintbrushes.
“No, we are not lost. We are in Korea. The Pacific Ocean is about two hundred miles that way,” I replied, pointing towards my left and waggling around to my right in a fairly definite uncertain manner. “The moon is directly above our head, and that bright warm thing peeking up over the hills is most likely the sun, and if there’s any god or stranger up there beyond those high-floating clouds looking down at us, I expect he’s laughing his holy old asshole off at us right about now.”
“Then we are lost, aren’t we?” Trumble repeated.
He kept at it
like a dog after a bone. Trumble was a good man and one of the biggest bastards I’d ever met. Yes sir, if the creek ever rose or God decided to break his promise and go Noah on our arkless asses, I am definite-for-sure climbing up on top of Trumble’s yard wide shoulder blades, pitching myself up a pup tent and calling dibs on high ground.
“No Sergeant Trumble,” I said. “We are not lost. I am lost. You are right where you need to be. Following me.”
Trumble gave me a grin.
“That reminds me of a story,” Trumble started to say.
Trumble was a yarn man, made of tales and fabrication, stringing long and thoughtful pointless stories and recollections, filling up the swallow of his days with a padding of carefully sifted memory.
“Everything reminds you of a story,” I said, but I didn’t say anything else because a laugh right now might ease our predicament or at the very least take our minds off of it for a while.
Trumble cracked his grin a little wider, swallowing any sound of complaint as he launched into his magicked up memory tale. It was bullshit of the finest degree, spun from an amalgamation of manmade malarkey and home grown hogwash, and I felt strangely honored to be standing in its presence.
“I had an uncle got lost once,” Trumble began. “Out to Arkansas way. He’d been down to the market to pick himself up a fresh weened calf, when a fog rolled in. By the time the old fart had made it home that calf was full grown, eating its own way clear of the fog. That there calf and my uncle’s sense of direction sure as shit saved us a fortune in feed costs, you bet, and the meat of that there calf possessed the strangest sort of taste. You could eat it all day and never feel your belly filled. One hundred percent calorie-free fog-meat, good for whatever ails you, we lived off of it for years to come.”
“Shh,” I said, gesturing with my left hand palm down, and pointing my M3 carbine with my right. Just that fast our patrol melted down into cover, fading into the foliage with the ease of men who had learned to live with the jungle.