by Jack Cady
Failing, and I am forty. I went to see my aunt.
The apartment was hardly changed since I was a child. The picture of a battleship with curling spray from a rainbow was yellow with time. It hung over my uncle’s bed. His souvenir mugs stood on a strangely feminine whatnot that had been the high school shop project of the son. A framed good conduct medal was glassed over but was still dusty and faded. It hung beside the picture. Painted sea shells with brave mottos, bits of coral . . . the man lay flat on his back, pale and thin, a neon of tattoos with breath as light as the passage of a ghost. My uncle was already a spectre, but my aunt still lived.
She made instant coffee with trembling hands. She was so thin. The enormous bosom gone. The strong hands faded, but still somehow alive, like weak light through waxed paper. She had not recognized me at first and was ashamed.
"How is he?" I stopped, silently cursing myself for the stupidest of all questions. The man was dying. Fool. Fool to ask such a question.
She was not offended. The coffee cups were dimestore ironware. Plain. The coffee was bitter because trembling hands had spilled some, added more.
"Jimmy, Jimmy." She looked at me. Proud. I, who have violated scruples she held dear. Then she remembered my question.
"I pray for one thing," she said. "I never asked for much . . . no, sometimes I asked for a lot, but I pray that Justin dies first."
I could not answer. She knew. All along she knew. For her whole life of submission she knew.
"No one . . . they would not take care of him," she said. "He’s not the easiest man."
She knew. Maybe she even loved him, but she was not fooled about the man. She was not fooled about the idiot chase of an ignorant’s repetitious ethic over a lifetime. She had forgiven herself. She had forgiven him.
I sat holding the cup, the bitterness of the coffee as immediate and vital as sharp words. A question rose in my mind, stood like anguish in my head because I could say nothing, could of course not ask that question.
I took both her hands and spoke innocuously around the question which was, of course, "Dear aunt, dearest lady, what can I do for you before you die?"
Later that evening I changed my plane reservations and lost a business day. The next morning, just before dawn, I drove along country roads that were gravel when I was a child, that are now clean-surfaced macadam.
It was not easy to find. The entrance was different, and on the slightly rolling slopes the new section of the cemetery changed the perspective. I parked the car, opened the trunk, stood watching the early glow of dawn over the distant fields that year after year expressed vegetables and occasional wildflowers. The practical, hard-working American land.
A swarm of birds crossed the beginning day like salt superstitiously flung backward over the shoulder of the fields, and dew-heavy bushes crowded fencerows and over-grew old graves. The bottom of a ditch was mudsodden, with occasional shallow pools of stagnant water. I walked through tall weeds, searched, found it.
The marker was smaller than I remembered, and the base was sunk in earth; the curling horn-like ears canted forward increasing the kneeling and submissive posture. I rocked the marker back and forth. It came free, the base mud-clotted.
A hundred pounds, perhaps. No more. It was possible to get it to the trunk of the car, close the trunk, and leave. There is little more to tell.
My uncle died a month ago. My aunt died yesterday, and the circle is closed. The family will erect a marker, and the family will continue its various judgments and forgiveness, its successes and errors . . . as I will continue mine.
My judgment is this: I dropped the marker into a deep but muddy river that runs through tamed land and beside tight-fisted and narrow minded towns. It will never, through the rest of time, interrupt the wind that blows cold over that finally unmarked grave.
Tinker
There were troubled Augusts once, back when our grandmothers were still alive, and when dog days panted slowly toward busy Septembers. Narrow roads overlaid old Indian trails, cutting through squared-off fields. The roads were white gravel. In midwest August dawns, the roads turned orange. Later in the day, they flowed like strips of light between green and yellow crops. Along these roads the tinker followed his trade.
We would see his wagon a mile off. Children began to holler. Women on the farm, mothers and grandmothers and cousins, exchanged glad looks behind the backs of any men who happened to be around. The tinker was a ladies’ man, but not in the usual sense.
This was the time of the Great Depression. Farms were flattened. People were broke. Gasoline was used only for the tractor, or, once a week, taking the Ford to town. In those days horses were not spoiled little darlings. They worked the same as everyone else. Our people lived on hope, religion, the kitchen garden, a few slaughtered swine; and chicken after chicken after chicken. Even now, fifty years later, I cannot look a roasting hen in the eye.
The tinker had a regular route through the county. We saw him twice a year. Most tinkers were older men, but this one was middling young. My mother claimed he was a gypsy, my grandmother claimed him Italian, and the menfolk claimed him an Indian/mulatto who was after someone’s white daughter. But, I’d best explain about tinkers. In today’s throwaway world they are extinct.
The tinker’s wagon was a repair shop on wheels. It resembled a crossbreed between farm wagon and Conestoga, but light enough for hauling by two horses. It carried torches for brazing, patches of sheet metal, patches of copper. It held soles for shoes, and grinders for knives and scissors. It was a-clank with cooking pans hanging along its sides. The tinker repaired worn pots, glued broken china so skillfully one could hardly find the crack, fixed stalled clocks; in fact, repaired anything that required a fine hand. This tinker also repaired worn dreams. That was the seat of his trouble. And ours.
I remember all this, not only through the eyes of a child, but through the eyes of a historian. I sit in my comfortable workroom where carpet is unstained, unstainable, and unremarkable. I look at it and remember wool rugs of a farmhouse. The rugs carried stains as coherent as a textbook: the darkness of blood when a younger cousin lost a finger in the pulley of a pump; a light space from spilled bleach; or unfaded bright spots beneath chairs—the signs of living, or (as the poet says) "all the appurtenances of home." I type on an old, old typewriter that was made in the 30s. At least that much respect can be shown the story.
When the tinker’s wagon appeared on the road it caused a temporary stop in the work. That August when the trouble arose was as tricky as all Augusts. In August the last cut of hay comes in. Farmers gauge the weather sign, cut quickly, watch the horizon for storm as the hay dries. The baler comes through, the men following the tractor and wagon. They buck the bales. In the August when I was nine, the tinker appeared along the dusty road. I was too small to buck hay, was thus driving the tractor.
"Jim," my father said to me, "get the hell up to the house." He stood beside the wagon, shirt sodden with sweat, and sweat darkening the band of his straw hat. My father was a big man with English-blue eyes. He could be kind when he was unworried, but, what with the depression, he had not been unworried for years. My uncle and a cousin stood beside him. My uncle was from my mother’s side. He was German, with eyes a thinner blue, and face a little starchy. Another cousin, my eldest, perched on top of the wagon where he stacked bales.
"I’d have thought," my uncle said about the tinker, "that the bastard would have hit jail by now. Or made a little stop out there at the cemetery."
"Bullshit," my eldest cousin said from the top of the load. "He’s working. He ain’t a tramp." This was a cousin from dad’s side. He was known for a smart mouth and radical notions.
"Bullshit back at you," my other cousin said. "Best you can say about him is that he might be a dago." This was a cousin from mom’s side, and he was defending his father, who didn’t need it.
I climbed from the tractor and headed across twenty acres to the house.
In the days before Wo
rld War II a boy of nine was not a man, but he was treated as if he soon would be. He had responsibilities, and most boys that age took themselves seriously. If the tinker suddenly decided to rape and pillage there was not a whole lot I could do. That, however, was not the point. The point was that I represented a male presence.
Manhood comes in peculiar ways depending on where you grow. I recall walking across that field of hay stubble in bare feet. No town kid could have done it, although in the small towns boys shed their shoes with the last frost. By August their feet were as tough as mine. The difference was that they had no feel for the land. They did not know that land is supposed to hurt you a little. Weather the same. A farm is real, not pastoral.
An apparition stood at the edge of that twenty-acre hay field. Even today you occasionally see them in the midwest. Solitary black walnuts stand like intricately carved windmills. They spread against the sky, trees spared when the land was cleared. They grow slowly, and spare themselves. No other tree can root within their drip lines. Black walnuts spread poison through the soil.
This tree was a youngster when men and their families forged through the Cumberland Gap, or spread along rivers from a backwoods settlement called Chicago. Now it had a bole thirty feet in circumference. The first branches began at forty feet, and the total height was over a hundred. It ruled the fields, too majestic for human use. It would not serve for a children’s swing, or for a hanging tree. Before first snow, when the guns came out for hunting season, we always gathered walnuts beneath spectral branches.
The tinker’s wagon pulled into the lane as I passed the back door of the house. My grandmother saw me, looked toward the hayfield, and murmured to herself, probably a verse from Isaiah. At age nine I had small appreciation of women, did not understand that my grandmother was the most beautiful woman I would ever know. She was a storyteller, and she was tall in a time when most women were not. Her white hair fell below her waist when she brushed it. During the day she had it ‘done up.’ Her worn housedresses were always pressed by flatirons. Her dresses fell to the tops of her shoes. My grandmother had been a young wife on the Oklahoma frontier when Indians roamed. The depression of the 1880s brought her back to Indiana.
The tinker’s horses were wide from summer’s roadside grass. One was bay, the other black. Color radiated from the wagon, red, white, and blue paint, green canvas, sun leaping from polished pans that clanked at every jolt in the rutted lane. Sun sparkled and danced against colors. My mother stepped from the house, my least cousin beside her, a girl of fifteen.
Did I understand what was going on? I doubt it, although I surely felt the men’s displeasure and the women’s pleasure. For my own part, the tinker’s visit was exciting. Days on the farm are long. We had a telephone party line, but we had neither radio nor electricity. Townfolk had both.
It was a shy welcome the tinker faced, although he was accustomed to it. Since he moved from farm to farm, he met such welcomes all the time. Families learned how to comfortably handle each other. They had little experience with strangers.
"Missus," the tinker said to my grandmother, "I think of you last night and turn the horses this-a-way." His smile was a generalization among the sun-flashing pans, but he tipped his hat exactly toward my grandmother. His face was dark from either summer or blood. His brown eyes might have been those of a young Mediterranean girl. His eyes held no guile, and his face was—no more, no less—permanently relaxed and happy. In memory he seems a man without needs, an enlightened monk.
Even before he climbed from the wagon my least cousin passed him a dipper of water. Her young breasts moved beneath her housedress, her bobbed hair (which scandalized my grandmother) shone almost golden in sunlight. She had a pretty but puckish face, and lips that sometimes tied themselves with confusion. Although I had little appreciation of women, I was fascinated with what was happening to my cousin. Her body seemed to change every day. No doubt she was self-conscious as she became a woman, but to me she moved with confusing mystery.
"There’s marriages all over," the tinker said. "From here to the county line." He drank, then climbed from the wagon. His horses stood placid as a puddle. The tinker not only repaired things, he also served as the county’s newspaper. "The Baptists over in Warren bought a bell for the church. You can never tell what a Baptist is going to do." He said this last with a sort of wonder, but with no malice. He passed the dipper back to my least cousin and thanked her.
In the hayfield the men reached the end of a row. The tractor turned, headed back toward the house. I recall noting that another row would make a wagonload. The men would bring the load to the barn. Leaves of the black walnut looked ragged this late in August. The leaves carried no dust because the tree stood tall.
"It sounds like a busy winter," my mother said, and smiled at my least cousin.
"She was raised better," my grandmother said about my mother.
I had not the least notion what was meant. Now, of course, I understand that my mother spoke of the marriages.
"If this isn’t the prettiest place on earth, then the Lord is fooling me." The tinker looked across fields toward the hardwood grove. Beyond the grove the river wound among rushes. At this time of year the river ran nearly clear. In spring, or after August storms, it ran brown with rich mud. The tinker looked toward our small farmhouse, then toward the barn. There was no hunger in his eyes, only happiness. He busied himself at repairing dreams.
The Great Depression, in spite of the softening that comes with years, was gray. We were an ambitious people, but ambitions were set aside as we struggled against hard times. Grayness arrived because hard times did not end. Women lost color and men lost creative fire.
The tinker owned only his wagon and team, yet he magically wished for nothing. Because of this he allowed us to see our lives with new eyes. That was at least part of his magic. He did not want what we had, but he showed us how to want it. Looking back, I almost understand the other part of his magic.
"There’s so much time for thinking," he said to my grandmother. "I wonder after your quilt while I drive." Copper-bottomed pans reflected sun, and the wagon seemed alight with the warmth of mighty candles. The black walnut stood indifferent as a tower. In mid-afternoon it threw a shadow shorter than itself. "Quilts take such a fine hand." The tinker did not say that he also had a fine hand.
"Margaret is growing up," my grandmother said about my least cousin. "She helps. Some day she’ll be teaching me."
"She has a delicate way. That’s a sign."
My cousin, strong enough to help with the heavy work of slaughtering, looked at her feet and blushed. In the everyday life of the farm my least cousin was no more delicate than a post, but that is not what the tinker meant. "Times are changing, but a lady will always show herself a lady." He turned to my mother, who had just made that unladylike and licentious comment about marriages. "She is also musical?" he asked about my least cousin. At the turn of the century farms had gained a few luxuries. Many farmhouses had pianos, but in the whole county only my mother excelled at music. She had a warm touch better suited for blues than for church. However, in those days we knew nothing about the musical blues.
"It takes a while to learn," my mother said. She did not say that my cousin took little interest. My mother actually blushed. Somehow she had been taken back into the fold of respectability, and the how of the matter seemed beyond explanation.
"There’s so much to learn," the tinker said to my cousin. "Takes a year, anyway, to rightly do a quilt."
Looking back, I understand that the tinker’s magic truly was magic. At least it was magic in any terms we knew then, and certainly in any terms since.
I recall standing there, my bare feet as hard-soled as soil and callus could make them. I recall feeling that mysterious matters lived around me. The values of a farm are stern. I understood clean fencerows and upright dealing. I had been shown no other values. The word ‘grace’ had never entered my thought beyond its use in sermons.
&nbs
p; The tinker’s magic was to restore mystery and value to farmwomen. No small undertaking.
Imagine a Depression farm. People lived close. A tyranny of custom was our only defense against wide knowledge of each other. When we dressed beside the kitchen woodstove on cold mornings the women dressed first. Then the men entered and dressed while the women went to the parlor. In unheated bedrooms temperatures might fall below zero.
It takes time and privacy to be a lady. The farm offers only hog butchering, kitchen gardens, interminable days of canning, the tedious daily round of cooking and splitting wood and cleaning poultry sheds. Men’s work is brutally hard. Women’s work begins before dawn and ends with a nightly reading from the Bible.
"I saved back some mending," my grandmother said. "It’s only a little."
In those days pots and pans were continually pushed from the hot to the cool side of the stove. Pans wore thin through years. We did not throw away a leaky pan.
I watched the tinker apply the patch, while from the barn came sounds of work as the men began to unload hay. The three women surrounded the tinker. The tinker drilled a clean hole through the leak, snapped on the pan patch, and worked to flatten it on an upright anvil. Deft fingers smoothed that patch into the pan with the skill of a carpenter using a finely set plane. As he worked he spoke about a book of pictures from California. He tsked, then smiled. He mended a boot, and told about a new preacher. The preacher’s wife was winning over the congregation, not the preacher. My memory calls back sunlight and quiet, above all, courtesy—an old-fashioned word.
"The sewing machine needs tinkering," my cousin said.
"I’ll be but a minute," the tinker told his horses. He followed the three women toward the house. The horses stood almost as solidly as the black walnut. Shade spread dark beneath the wagon. My mother’s shoulders did not slump as she walked. My grandmother, always busy, now seemed to stroll. My least cousin, clumsy with her growing up, was lithe in her movement. My heart pounded like rifle shots. I stood knowing I should follow, yet was somehow daunted. Even at age nine I understood that privacy lived in this encounter. A loud curse came from the barn. I looked to see my German cousin leap from the hay wagon and stride toward me.