by Drawn Words
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July 11 @ 9:00 p.m. EST
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Drawn Words Brain Plante
"Drawn Words" first appeared in the October 1998 issue.
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Ewen Muir held up the drawing. "It’s a chicken," he said.
"A chicken?" said Ewen’s mother, Mairi, making a puzzled face. "Well, maybe when it’s finished. I don’t see anything there but a few squiggly lines."
"But it is finished. I’ve drawn just enough to see the chicken. All the rest is just details."
Ewen’s mother stared at the paper and shrugged. Why couldn’t she see it, Ewen wondered. At the age of twelve, he was easily the best artist in the county. The drawing he made of his father Gow and older brother Geordie plowing the fields had won a first-place ribbon at the annual summer fair. Even though Ewen’s talent wasn’t much use in the business of farming, his work was so good that his parents could scarcely begrudge him the luxury of that rarity of bartered goods, paper.
"Gow," Mairi called to her husband in the next room, "does this drawing look like a chicken to you?"
Ewen’s father put down the gouge he was carefully honing against a whetstone and came over to look. Gow was a tall man, thin and wiry, with a laugh that belied his slight frame. The seasons of hard toil on the farm had etched his face with wrinkles beyond his forty years and his thick beard was showing traces of gray, but his eyes still sparkled with vigor as he viewed the drawing. "Yes, I do see something that might be a chicken when he’s done with it."
"But I am finished," Ewen said. "See, this pointy bit is the beak, and this loop is the head, and this other one is the wing and the body. The extra little line underneath is supposed to be a leg."
"Nonsense," Gow said. "A line or two can’t be a chicken. You have to add feathers, connect up those open spaces and color it in."
Ewen had been afraid they wouldn’t understand. He had drawn chickens before. Good ones. And cows and horses and trees and houses and people. It was easy to draw things the same way other folks who had the talent did it. He was trying to do something new.
"But you see it, don’t you?" Ewen said. "If you can see the chicken with just a couple of lines, then it’s enough."
Ewen’s brother Geordie came away from the basket-weaving he was working on to see what the fuss was about. "That’s surely no chicken I’ve ever seen, Ewie."
"Yes," Mairi agreed. "I think I can make it out now, but why don’t you fill in the rest of it so it looks like a normal drawing?"
"But that takes too long," Ewen said. "If I draw just a few lines that can represent the whole chicken, without having to draw every single feather, then I can draw it in just a few seconds."
Worry lines appeared on Gow’s forehead.
"Why would you ever want to be able to draw a chicken so quickly?" Mairi asked.
"It’s not just chickens," Ewen said, turning over the paper to show a few more sketches underneath. "See, here I have a shape for a cow, a horse, and a pig. This pointy box is the shape for ‘house’ and this one–"
"It’s a man," said Gow.
"Yes, yes," Ewen said, excited.
"Finish them, boy," Gow said sternly. "These are not proper drawings, and I don’t care how quickly you can render them. A drawing of a man needs a proper face and hair and fingers. This is just a circle and a couple of lines, like a baby would make. There’s no need to skimp on your art. Remember, anything worth doing is worth doing well."
Ewen’s smile was replaced by a puzzled look. "But father, these aren’t regular drawings. I think of them more as words drawn out on paper, and they stand for things just like spoken words stand for things. Instead of saying ‘the cow went into the barn’ I can draw a few shapes like this."
Ewen quickly sketched tiny shapes for "cow" and "barn", with a dashed line between them, and held it up to his mother and father to see.
Mairi’s breath caught in her throat.
Gow snatched the sheaf of papers away from the boy and examined them. "Listen to me well," he said, turning them over, one by one. "You never drew these." When he reached the end of the collection he walked over to the fireplace and dropped the stack on the flaming logs.
Ewen started to rise when he realized what his father was doing, but Mairi held his wrist firmly and gave him a leave-it-be look that he knew better than to challenge. He looked to his brother for support, but Geordie knew when to stay out of it and had quietly gone back to his basketwork.
When Gow was finished at the fireplace, he turned to face his son with a look that was more frightened thanangry.
"Ewen, you have to promise your mother and me that you will never make these drawn words again. Never."
Ewen looked over to his mother, but she nodded in agreement.
"But why? With drawn words I can make a whole story instead of just showing one scene at a time. It’s like talking on paper."
"I know what it’s like, and I won’t allow it in this house."
"But it’s just words. What’s the harm?"
Gow’s face grew very serious. "Drawn words are against the law. It used to be called writing, and it has been banned for over a century."
"Writing," Ewen repeated, trying out the unfamiliar word. "Well, couldn’t I just make the . . . writing . . . for myself? Nobody else has to see them."
"No. Absolutely not. Do you know what they do to people who write?"
"I didn’t even know there was such a thing as writing, so how could I know what the penalty is?"
"Don’t talk back to your father," Mairi said, a trickle of tears beginning in both eyes.
"Writing is a serious offense, with grave consequences," Gow said.
Ewen stared at his father. "For drawing words? But it’s a good thing, isn’t it? Stories could be saved on paper instead of having to remember them. People could trade stories like they trade vegetables and crafts. What’s wrong with that?"
"People used to do just that sort of thing all the time before the Holy War," Gow said. "Men used writing to remember things that were best forgotten, and bartered the sweat of their brow for scraps of paper with writing on them. Writing caused our ancestors nothing but grief, and it was a blessing when their wicked society was destroyed."
Ewen was beginning to cry. "B-b-but I just wanted to draw good words about the farm, and you, and mother. Words aren’t evil!"
Gow put his hands on Ewen’s shoulders and looked him squarely in the eyes, "Ewen, you have to promise me from now on that you will only make proper drawings, or else we just won’t be able to barter for any more paper for you. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir," Ewen said. He couldn’t imagine not having any more paper to work on.
"Do I have your word on it?"
"I g-guess so."
"Good. Now why don’t you draw us a nice, normal chicken with feathers and such?" Gow said, handing Ewen a fresh sheet of the precious paper.
Ewen began working on a meticulously accurate rendering of a Dorking fowl in the barnyard, being extra careful to capture even the most minute of details. No one could argue that the drawing skimped in any way, it was so lifelike. In the background, a chopping block and ax were plainly visible, but the happy chicken seemed oblivious to the danger.
* * *
Ewen tried to keep his promise, but drawing objects the way they appeared in life no longer interested him. For every three conventional drawings he made, mostly to be traded away in town for small items and future obligations,
he squirreled away a fourth sketch. He continued his private work whenever he could steal a few minutes away from the eyes of his family, and his collection of drawn word stories grew. He kept them hidden in the bottom of his clothing chest, and showed them to no one.
Over time, his repertoire of drawn words grew. Imagining that the old people before the Holy War must have had a drawn word for just about everything if they could tell proper stories on paper, Ewen set out to invent a shape for as many words as he could think of. Not just the easy words like "horse" and "tree", but intangible things like "fear" and "love". He made sketches for action words like "walk" and "sew", and modifying words like "fast" and "good". Some of the words didn’t readily suggest pictures that could be stripped down to their barest essentials, so Ewen just made up arbitrary shapes for those. Other words he made from combinations of simpler symbols.
Ewen’s stories were usually transcriptions of the old tales his parents told him. Stories of strong men and women surviving the bad times to build a simpler way of life. Even though he had memorized the stories from hearing them over and over, he was privately happy with the knowledge that he could never forget them now that he had set them down in drawn words.
Over time, Ewen began to think that his own life was a story worth setting down, too. He began making daily progress in an ongoing record of the events that transpired in his life. Sometimes nothing very important happened, and Ewen just wrote down his thoughts and dreams on those days. It surprised him how quickly the story of his life began piling up, and he felt sad for all the other people whose lives just slipped away unremembered.
One day late in his thirteenth year, Ewen was sitting in the outhouse, working on his drawn words in the dim light that seeped through the cracks, when his father opened the door without knocking. Gow immediately apologized when he saw the stall was occupied and turned to go, but he caught a glimpse of the paper on the boy’s lap. Tiny, graceful shapes in long neat rows filled the sheet.
Gow snatched the paper and crumpled it into a tight ball.
"This is the last of these, Ewen Muir," he said, pointing a shaky finger at the boy. "There will be no more paper in this house, do you understand?"
Ewen quickly pulled up his trousers and ran from the outhouse as fast as he could. His father cursed and dropped the wadded up paper into the honey bucket under the outhouse bench.
* * *
It was three days later, early in the morning, when the mayor and town elders burst into the farmhouse, enraged and accusing. Mr. Skene, the weasel-faced man who carted away the night soil and animal waste every week, was three steps behind them entering the house. Ewen’s heart pounded like the blacksmith’s hammer when one of the elders produced a stained, wrinkled sheet of paper bearing long rows of his drawn words.
"Skene here says he got this out of your outhouse, Muir," said the mayor, an older man with a nose ruddy from too many nights of drinking spirits.
"I thought it might be one of the boy’s drawings," Skene said, "but when I flattened it out, I didn’t know what it was."
"It’s writing!" the elders shouted.
Ewen saw the color drain from his father’s face as he tried to calm them down. "Gentlemen, it’s just scribblings, nothing more. Let’s all sit by the fire and share a cup of mead, shall we?"
"Muir, this is no mere scribbling," said the mayor. "We don’t know what it means but the shapes are too consistent."
"Some of the symbols repeat," another man said. "It can’t be meaningless scribble if it’s so regular-like!"
"The Holy War never ends, Muir," said the dour-faced mayor, beckoning to the door. "You have to come with us, before you bring the fire down on all our heads."
Mairi gasped and reached for her husband, but two of the elders held her back. Geordie took a few steps toward the group with his fists raised, but his father waved him off.
"Wait," said Ewen. "You’re right, it is writing. But it’s mine, not my father’s."
The old men turned to face Ewen.
"He’s lying," said Gow, looking frightened for the first time. "All right, I’ll admit it. I have been writing like people did in the old days before the Holy War. Have mercy on me, for my family’s sake."
When the men all turned their attention back to Gow, Ewen grabbed the filthy sheet of paper away from the mayor and held it out in front of him.
"No, it’s mine," Ewen said, "and I’ll prove it. The paper says, ‘My father works so hard to make life good for Mother and Geordie and me. How many fine memories does he have that will be forgotten when he is gone? I will remember as many as I can for him.’"
Gow started to laugh. It was not his usual hearty laugh, Ewen noted, but a sham laugh for the elders. "Gentlemen," he said, "my Ewen is a good son, is he not?"
"God almighty, Muir, he read the writing!" the mayor said.
"He did nothing of the sort," Gow said. "He just made it up to protect me. You have your man, so let’s get on with it."
The elders looked back and forth nervously at one another. Finally, one of them took the paper from Ewen and waved it in front of Gow, saying, "Read it then, if you know how."
Ewen saw his father stiffen as he looked at the paper. Gow cleared his throat nervously, and a few of the elders began eyeing Ewen with suspicion.
"The paper reads as follows," Gow said. "I, Gow Muir, a farmer of the land, believe the written word is a righteous thing."
The elders gasped and murmured. The one nearest Gow took a firm hold of his shirt.
"Before the Holy War, life was surely better than it is today. The townspeople are all fools, and I alone among them have the gift of writing."
"That’s enough," said the mayor. "Gow Muir, you’re coming with us."
"No, no!" Mairi screamed.
The men led Gow to the door. Before they pushed him across the threshold he turned back, and Ewen caught one last look of love in his eyes. Mairi, Geordie, and Ewen tried to follow, but several of the elders pushed them back inside.
"There’s a duty to be done," one of the elders said, "and it’s not a proper sight for women and children."
* * *
The town fathers were decent enough to cut Gow’s body down from the big oak tree behind the house before they left, sparing Mairi and the boys the sight of him hanging. Ewen and Geordie dug the grave and they buried him right there under the tree.
The next morning, Ewen ran away from home. Geordie was a better farmer than he would ever be, and with his mother, the two of them would be able to manage the farm just fine without him. Before he left, in the predawn hours, he worked tearfully above his father’s grave. Around the base of the big oak he carved a series of curves and lines skillfully into the bark. The shapes were subtle, looking almost as if worn into the tree by nature. Only Ewen knew what they spelled: "Father, forgive me."
* * *
Ewen followed the Tweed river west from Selkirk to Peebles, then north to the Firth of Forth and Edinburgh, a journey of four days. He carried a sack of foodstuffs from home, but the long hike increased his appetite, and he soon had to resort to stealing fruits and vegetables from farms along the way.
Edinburgh was the biggest city around, and Ewen only knew it by reputation. There were more people in one place than he had ever seen before–hundreds, perhaps thousands. Not just farmers, but tradesmen of all kind, and the crowded streets were lined with all manner of shops. There were tailors, butchers, woodwrights, blacksmiths, luthiers, and other shops for city things that Ewen didn’t recognize.
By the time he reached the city it was late morning and he was ravenous from the long walk. The smell of cooked food coming from inside a public house drew him in. Ewen stood by the door for a minute before entering the busy room. A matronly serving-woman bid him to be seated, but he was leery of unfamiliar city customs.
"Excuse me, ma’am," Ewen said, holding up one of his drawings, "but how much food could I get in barter for something like this?"
The server glanced at t
he drawing, then back at Ewen, laughing. "That’s a right good ’un, but I’m afraid you won’t get a cracker for it in here. You’re from the southern uplands aren’t you?"
Ewen nodded yes. "Then what manner of barter do you accept?"
"What do you think, you silly bumpkin? We take coins–silver and gold. A quid for a meal, and a quarter for a draught, although I daresay you’re a wee bit young for an ale."
Coins. They didn’t use such things in the farmlands, always trading directly for goods and services. After all, you couldn’t eat a coin, Ewen thought. But for a city like Edinburgh, where most people were not farmers, perhaps it made some sense.
Ewen held out more of his drawings. "I only have these. Is there a marketplace where I could trade something like this for a few of your coins?"