by John Benditt
In spite of his low station, the boatmaker is, in his way, content. He eats well. He has a place to lay his head down at night. And six days of the week he is at the compound at seven o’clock, ready to work. He has never worked in a place where so much reverence is paid to wood, where each piece—from a board of precious African rosewood to a plain pine plank—is seen for what it holds within. This reverence makes it easier to bear being an apprentice in a short coat, easier to work without the obliterating fire of alcohol as the days shrink, darkness expands and winter conquers the sky. The first flakes are yet to fall, but the air already smells of snow. Those who have warm beds are grateful.
Soon the first snow dusts the city; it will not be long before the ground is covered. As he walks to work in the morning or home at night, the boatmaker can imagine what is happening on the New Land: the harvest in, livestock in the barns, the ground turning hard and cold, life narrowing down to reading and prayer as the winter solstice approaches.
When he thinks about the New Land, it is always with a small note of fear. He is sure Father Robert is still looking for him. He doesn’t know whether the priest wants him to return and resume his role as Number IV in the New Christ or whether he would like to hang the boatmaker on a telegraph pole for all the New Land to see. In either case, he needs to avoid anyone from that community, especially Neck and the priest. He is surprised they haven’t found him yet. He assumes one day there will be a knock on his door in the middle of the night and Father Robert and Neck will be there to march him away.
As he thinks it over, day after day, he concludes that Crow and White must not have told the priest where he lives. Perhaps, he thinks, the thieves never spoke directly to Father Robert. It is a reassuring thought. Still, he never feels completely safe. He has repaired his sealskin bag and it rides on his chest under his jacket at all times, much of his money inside. If he sees Father Robert or Neck—or anyone he recognizes from the New Land—he will turn and run without looking back.
As winter begins, the boatmaker moves up one short rung on the ladder that leads slowly to mastery of the Lippsted craft. In addition to carrying boards and sweeping, he is now allowed to make the pegs that hold much of the furniture together. Many of the joints require no fastenings: They are just one piece of wood fitted cannily into another. But some require wooden fasteners, pegs carved from the same wood as the furniture itself. To make these pegs, a journeyman first turns out dowels of a specified diameter. Then the dowels are sawn to the right length. Only after they have been sawn is the boatmaker allowed to take an old wicker basket filled with the raw pegs and use a knife and sandpaper to round them into the correct shape.
From time to time Eriksson looks in on him, but most of his contact is with the journeymen who make the dowels. These journeymen never praise. They tell him what needs improving. Anything done correctly is passed over in silence. It seems the road to being a master in the House of Lippsted is endless: Praise would be nothing more than time wasted on an infinite journey.
The boatmaker attends to their correction without protest. He does not need to be corrected often—and never for the same fault twice. As he works, he makes a discovery that pleases him: His gift is more than something that flows directly from the wood into his hands. When he entered the compound, he was drawn to being part of a tradition. But having learned everything about his craft on his own, he was afraid he could not begin at the bottom and learn from others without destroying his gift. Once inside the walls he finds this is not so. He is learning from the others—and his skills are improving. Like the reverence for wood he sees around him, it makes his status as an apprentice easier to bear.
The days grow shorter. His apprentice tasks now begin and end in darkness. Each trip from one building to another requires the boatmaker to button up and make his way through drifts of snow, feeling with his toes for solid footing. He knows from experience that if he falls, there will be little sympathy for his bumps and bruises and much concern for the precious wood.
One day, as he carries a basket of his pegs through the falling snow to be inspected, the main gates swing in. A carriage clips and rattles through, drawn by a pair of glossy black horses with plumes of the same shade rising from their foreheads. The carriage, a two-wheeler, luggage strapped to its roof, pulls to a stop, and the heavily bundled driver steps down. He opens the door and extends a hand to a small, elegant woman with a fur over her shoulders, her hands in a muff of the same fur. Holding his basket of pegs, the boatmaker sees that it is the woman who lectured the workingmen of the Mainland about money.
Rachel Lippsted is concerned about her footing. She does not look up to see an apprentice in a canvas jacket holding a basket of pegs, snow melting on his thinning hair and thick mustache. A man with a dark beard edging his jaw steps out of the carriage behind her without a hand from the driver. He is compact and wiry. He and the boatmaker could be brothers, though this man’s hair and skin are darker. He wears a black overcoat worth more than the boatmaker has ever been paid for any job. The man of Small Island carries his basket across the yard through a curtain of white flakes to a workshop where he finds the others buzzing with the news that Jacob Lippsted and his sister have returned to the townhouse after many months in Europe.
CHAPTER 18
After the boatmaker sees Jacob and Rachel Lippsted, they do not appear in the courtyard for many weeks. But the two of them are in his mind as he lies on his narrow bed, smoking and watching the moonlight move across ancient flowered wallpaper.
Even in the brief moment he saw them, something emanated from Jacob Lippsted and his sister that adds to the puzzles the boatmaker has been accumulating since he arrived on the Mainland. On the New Land, as he prepared for the task Father Robert offered him, he had let those questions go. But now that he is back in the capital—and working in the House of Lippsted—his questions have returned full force, with Jacob Lippsted and his sister at the center.
As they stepped out of the carriage into the falling snow, there was something powerful about them. They looked infinitely well cared for, as if they had never had a material need that could not be satisfied by lifting a hand, if not at once, then with little trouble, the outcome assured no matter where in the world the object of their need was to be found. And yet the boatmaker thought he also saw a tentative quality, as if the power on which their luxury rested, though generations deep, could not be fully relied upon. In these elegant, luxuried creatures the boatmaker thought he saw a wariness that he never saw in Father Robert. The priest never stopped to worry about the obstacles that lay before him: He strode into the world with complete assurance, always ready to deal the first blow.
Lying on his bed smoking, the boatmaker finds that his feelings for this pair, particularly the sister, are strong and complicated. Perhaps these feelings have been germinating ever since his visit to the Royal Mint. He feels a desire to protect the slender figure with the dark curls, along with a desire to overwhelm and take her. And now he works in the compound where she lives, glimpsing her in comfort and luxury, while he wears the short canvas coat of an apprentice, carrying baskets of pegs for the furniture her family’s business makes. He pushes his feelings down and crushes out his cigarette. Then he concentrates on falling asleep, on what he must do the next day to continue learning the secrets of the Lippsted craft.
One evening as he sits on his bed he remembers what his landlady told him about Crow and White’s belongings. It’s a cold night, one of the longest of the year. The streets are quiet. A soft layer of new snow covers everything. Underneath it are the crusted layers that make up the history of the season. The boatmaker gets up and looks out his window down at the alley, at the cobblestones covered in white. The alley is empty, not even a cat or a rat scurrying through the snow.
Down there, he thinks, is where White bashed him with his huge fists. But why didn’t they find his cache? He still doesn’t understand that. Surely it was his money Crow was asking about while White beat him. An
d if they had searched, they would have found it. Yet apparently they didn’t bother to look very hard. The question of why they didn’t tear his room apart to find his money takes its place among the riddles, once left behind, that are returning with a new intensity.
Suddenly, he needs to see Crow and White’s belongings—immediately. Somewhere in this house is everything that remains of the two men he thought were his friends. When he last saw them, their eyes were wide, staring. Perhaps they were held down and strangled in this house. That might account for the commotion the landlady said she heard in their room the night they disappeared. It would have taken more than one man to strangle White. The huge man would have fought desperately to prevent them from hurting Crow.
The boatmaker takes his candlestick and goes down the stairs past the landlady’s ancestors, descending from the current century of progress to the darker centuries before. He stops for a moment at a portrait that reminds him of Father Robert. The painting, in a square frame, is of a young man, seated, wearing a white ruff over a steel breastplate, helmet in his lap. The man is young—fair and strongly built. He has the priest’s blond hair, his stabbing eyes, rounded face, high cheekbones and snub nose.
The boatmaker examines the painting in the flickering light from his candle. Then he goes down to his landlady’s door on the first floor in the rear. She comes to the door in her robe, wiry hair askew, book in hand, cigarette burning.
The landlady is never surprised when lodgers appear at her door. Her attitude is neither cold nor welcoming. Boarders have their rights; she has hers. She has her station; they have theirs. Her lodgers are simply part of what her life has become. With time and change, the landlady has shed many of the mental habits of her caste, but some of those habits go so deep they will be buried with her when she is placed between her mother and her father in the cemetery across the river reserved for Mainlanders of ancient and noble blood.
Two black-and-white cats twine between her legs. The cats have the run of the house—and more privileges than the lodgers. Crow hated them. He insisted cats are unclean.
“You said my friends left some things here.”
“Yes, I put them down in the cellar.”
“I’d like to look at them.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“I need to see them now.”
The landlady sighs. To any of her other lodgers she would have refused without a second thought and gone back to her cigarettes and the anxious Dane. But the boatmaker paid a year’s rent without being obliged to.
She closes the door, then comes out, cigarette burning, without Kierkegaard but with a candlestick of her own and a big iron keyring. The cats follow at her ankles, avoiding contact with the boatmaker.
She leads this little band to the back of the house, opens a door, and they go down rough stairs. The air is damp and musty between the stone walls. At the bottom of the stairs is a landing with old wooden doors left and right. The landlady pauses and draws on her cigarette before dropping it and crushing it in the dirt.
“On the right, I think,” she says, examining one iron key after the other while the boatmaker holds both candlesticks. The cats circle, thinking of juicy mice and rats in the storerooms, which they are rarely allowed to visit.
The landlady finds the key she wants. The lock groans and gives way. Inside, the room is filled with ancient dark furniture, huge crates. There are cobwebs over everything. Mice scurry in the darkness. The boatmaker thinks he sees some Lippsted pieces against the rear wall, but in the dark he can’t be sure.
After inspecting the piled belongings, the landlady realizes she’s in the wrong cellar. They back out, shooing the cats, before repeating the procedure and entering the opposite storeroom. Here there is also furniture, though it looks smaller and more recent. The boatmaker sees no Lippsted pieces. The cats squeeze between their legs and disappear into the center of the room, where lamps, boxes, old shoes, clothes, a chandelier, trunks and suitcases are piled.
“They must be in here somewhere. I’m not staying to look.”
She takes the key off the big iron ring and hands it to him. The boatmaker hopes his friends’ belongings are somewhere near the top.
“Make sure you don’t lock Castor and Pollux in here. You’re a good tenant—when you’re not disappearing without giving notice. Better than those friends of yours. At least you came back. But if you lock my cats in here, there will be Hell to pay. Do you understand me, young man?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The boatmaker takes the key and steps into the room. In the light of his candle shadows dance up the walls then slide down behind the furniture, taunting him. The black-and-white cats slink through the piled goods as if they are hunting through underbrush, alone, then together.
The boatmaker advances slowly, moving boxes, shoes, lamps and suitcases. Everything is coated in layers of dust, deeper or thinner depending on how long ago the goods were stored. By the time he reaches the center of the room, the cats are in a frenzy near the walls, snapping at vanishing mice.
In the center, on top of the pile, is a cardboard valise, held together by twine, which the boatmaker recognizes as Crow’s. The little man was secretive about its contents, as he was about his notebook, his money—and everything to do with his affairs.
The boatmaker picks up the valise. It is light. Inside, a few items rattle against cardboard.
The boatmaker puts the valise aside and looks for anything else that might have belonged to them. He finds a couple of old nightshirts that smell of Crow’s cologne and a bundle of newspapers tied with string, which might have belonged to Crow; White could not read. On top is a copy of The Brotherhood. He finds nothing else in the storeroom that might be connected to two boarders of this house who wound up staring from telegraph poles on the New Land.
The boatmaker is ready to leave, but Castor and Pollux have gone silent, missing. He sets Crow’s valise outside the door and calls the cats. It takes an hour of rooting through the remnants of lodgers’ lives, and scratches on both hands, to get the cats outside with the door closed. One of them—the boatmaker can’t tell the cats apart and doesn’t care—has a fat mouse, nearly dead, in its mouth and is not sharing. He gets back to his room torn and bleeding, valise in hand.
By now there is little left of the night, but he feels no need for sleep. He lays the valise on the bed and unties the twine. Inside, neatly folded, are two of the white shirts with ruffled fronts Crow favored: shirts only a man who never worked at any honest trade would have chosen.
Lifting them up, the boatmaker sees the silver flask, recalling the hundreds of times the little man reached inside his jacket and pulled it out, offering it occasionally to the boatmaker, less often to White, who mostly drank beer. Perhaps Crow made White drink beer because it was cheaper than whiskey. The flask is thin and curved, its surface striped, matte finish alternating with shining polished stripes. Engraved on two of the matte stripes are the initials A. K.
Other than the shirts and flask, the only item in the valise is Crow’s black notebook. It is much like the one Sven Eriksson carries, although in every other way the two men could hardly have been more different. Sitting on his narrow bed, the first hints of daylight at the window, the boatmaker holds the notebook, trying to decide whether to open it and read. He does not believe in spirits or an afterlife. But there is something about the way Crow died that makes the boatmaker hesitate before opening his book. He holds it on his lap for a while. Then he begins.
An hour later the candle flame makes flapping sounds as it dies. The boatmaker gets up to replace the candle, sits down on his bed and continues reading, looking for answers as he enters the secret life of the man who was his friend, then his assailant and finally a riddle stuck on a pole like a handbill. Daylight begins to open his room to the outside world for inspection. He does not have much time before the landlady will knock, offer him coffee and a soft roll with butter and he will have to leave for the compound.
Crow’s legal name inside the cover is the clearest entry in the entire notebook. The rest is a jumble, the writing large and crude, almost printing, in whatever implement came to Crow’s small, clever hand. Much is written in pencil. The boatmaker remembers seeing Crow suck on a pencil stub, pursing his face and wetting the lead before writing.
The book is not a story, or even a string of sentences. It is a tangle of financial dealings: money coming in and going out, much of it from people indicated only by single letters. The record is not in chronological order, though the dates of transactions are noted, along with dates and places of meetings. Reading through these entries brings the boatmaker back to the beginning of his time with Crow and White, when he enjoyed their friendship. He had wanted the unfamiliar sensation to continue.
In Crow’s notebook are three different kinds of entries for sums received or paid out. Though not large sums, they are more than adequate for the life Crow and White lived. In fact, based on the amounts flowing through his ledgers, Crow was a man of means, at least from the boatmaker’s point of view. Or would have been, had it not been for the fact that one category of entries consists of what are obviously winnings—and much larger losses—at the racetrack.