The End (18 page)
“You wonder if he cooked it first,” Enzo said two days after Christmas, knotting his boot strings on the kitchen floor while Lina hastily fried their breakfast eggs.
“No, the papers would have caught fire,” she said authoritatively.
They had slept through the alarm. They ate out of the skillet, standing over the stove and haphazardly pulling on their clothes. They rushed out. At the trolley stop, before Enzo got on the inbound, he reproached her for underdressing.
Lina took a bus to the warehouse in Fort Saint Clair, where she delivered a week of her work wrapped in brown parcel paper and was paid $7.45. The woman who gave her the material for the next job surely didn’t sew herself; she had allowed her nails to grow down over the tips of her fingers.
Because Lina had been late, she had no choice of jobs and was saddled for the ride home with fourteen yards of damask and heavy chenille fabric, which she carried away in a big, awkward, burlap vegetable bag.
The Forest Runner
D
ecades of insomnia have taught him that when he’s tired—and he was up reading past two o’clock this morning, he is terribly tired—the best palliative is to be precise in his appearance. The cowl makes the monk. He shaves along and then against the grain. With tweezers he picks the stray hairs from his coat. He shines his Sunday shoes and threads new laces through the eyelets. He strides soundlessly on the thick carpet of the red stairs, holding the rail firmly while he goes to enforce in his mind this sense of private formality, and he feels the consummateness of one who stands erect although no one sees him. His spirit is a pure, cold gas.
At the breakfast table, his sister pours out his tea. The dining room is suspended in kerosene light and damp heat. It is a redoubt of civilization carved from the barrens of a northern Ohio midwinter morning, hours before sunrise. They live in the house where they were born, on the West Side, on the lakeshore. Great rough-cut, whitewashed stone, four chimneys. He had a gang of Poles in last year to wire it for electric lights, but they haven’t caught the habit of using them. Their father is dead, their mother, too.
The date is December 27, 1936. He is fifty-four. His sister is fifty-five. Neither married. They are homely people, and reserved. He still runs the jewelry store downtown that his grandfather opened in 1886; meantime, his sister tends the house. She was created, he has come to believe, to sustain things; he was created, it appears, for something else.
They keep collections in their respective fields of interest. Hers is buried behind the house, a life’s accumulation of tulip bulbs, many of them quite valuable. His, on the other hand, occupies a single desk drawer and is materially worthless: a little more than two reams of yellow foolscap, each page covered on one side in the same handwriting. They represent the letters home of the Sixty-fourth Confederate Tennessee Infantry, Company K, wiped out, to a man, on September 20, 1863, at Chickamauga, and all of the letters, regrettably, are copies. Even the eight written by his own maternal grandfather are transcriptions he made long ago in secret in his uncle’s cabin in Kentucky while his uncle was out baiting his traps.
Used to be he’d offer to buy the letters themselves once he tracked their owners down, but nobody would part with them, and at last he gave up. You’d think it would be the subject matter they’d want to keep for themselves, but, no, it’s the paper they want. And in his heart he understands. He wanted those old scraps from his uncle, but his uncle wouldn’t give them up, and eventually the cabin burned down with the originals inside. But by then the jeweler had begun the long campaign of reconciling himself to the idea that what he had, the words, the sense of the thing, was more important.
It isn’t so hard to get inside the houses. The offer of one dollar per copied page does all the work. And once he’s curled himself over the kitchen table, triple-checking every line, they believe he’s a scholar; hence the vertical marginalia in his collection denoting what else they had to say, by way of rounding out the personality of the dead, while he scribbled.
When he himself dies, his collection will go to the public library. In the meanwhile, he is assembling a book—the complete concordance of his collection, every word, every spelling, every occurrence—that he does not intend to finish. We are all terrible, and have sworn never to take safety again in the sweet crime that our nature has chosen to make dear to us, and so we give ourselves some work to do instead, and this is his. What does the scripture say?
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
What else does it say?
Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for that is the whole duty of man.
The conclusion of the whole matter—who doesn’t long for that? Who, reading a stranger’s letters, doesn’t finally wish to put the letters away and meet the living stranger himself?
The jeweler finishes his breakfast and drives his car into the frozen city—all deserted at this hour except for the hobos camped in the park. Icicles hang from the drooping trolley wires. The old, narrow mule-cart streets leading to his store are clouded with the steam that leaks from the sewer grates and the manhole covers as though a behemoth is asleep under the pavement.
He is so uncommonly spent this morning that it takes him half an hour to replace a single hairspring in a woman’s wristwatch.
At eight, he closes the office and unlocks the showroom. A passerby who happened in here, missing the sign outside, wouldn’t know immediately that it was a jewelry store. The walls are hung and the sofa and display cases are stacked with all the bric-a-brac he’s picked up in his research. Books, door knockers off dead houses, flintlock rifles in rusted disuse, a twenty-four-carat cocaine straw, an Arap aho headdress. Each of them excites his deep capacity for sentiment in its own way. Their service is not to be materially useful or to speak to him of the past, but to touch him with the past directly, to recall to him the boyhood mind that knew not what a thing was for, nor worth, nor called. They are toys, in the workplace; Father would not have stood for this, but Father is dead.
He seats himself under the bric-a-brac, behind the case of silent watches, and opens a slim red volume that he’s read many times before, a novel for young people,
The Forest Runners,
by Joseph A. Altsheler—its subject, dear to his heart, is the Ohio River valley of long ago—and reads:
Paul stopped in a little open space, and looked around all the circle of the forest. Everywhere it was the same—just the curving wall of red and brown, and beyond, the blue sky, flecked with tiny clouds of white. The wilderness was full of beauty, charged with the glory of peace and silence, and there was naught to indicate that man had ever come. The leaves rippled a little in the gentle west wind, and the crisping grass bowed before it; but Paul saw no living being, save himself, in the vast, empty world.
Later that morning, a soft-spoken young lady needing his aid to remove a ring is standing at his counter, where he has wrapped the swollen finger tightly with sewing thread, first at the tip and then down around the offending knuckle, in a dense coil, forcing the blood back into the hand. With a paper clip he stuffs the thread under the ring, and he’s begun unwinding the coil from the underside of the ring, each turn pulling it farther onto the knuckle, when the woman, wanting something to say, her modesty challenged (it’s an intimate encounter, alone with him in the gray room), gestures with her free hand at the long row of books above his head.
She says, “You got a whole liberry in here.”
His ear did catch that sweet word, yes. And the accent—Kentuckian, eastern. A lot of Company K boys from up around Prestonsburg, where his mother was born. His uncle’s property was a little downriver, near Louisa.
The woman has fine yellow hair, freckles all down the fine white arm. Dreema Hannibal, behind the Big Sandy Crick Baptist Church, in Prestonsburg, used to give him her fingers to squeeze after luncheon.
“To think I’s askeered you’d have to cut it off,” she remarks, watching his work.
Last night he dreamt he went back to Prestonsburg, to Mama’s hollar, and he heard the old folks talk again. Prestonsburg. And he feels the weakness, the woundableness, of a bashful man by the noise of common speech just as he has not heard it spoken in so long. Why today instead of any other day to be weak? Because the jeweler is tired; the concordance is failing him; and the woman says those sweet words not as people say them now, here, but as they used to do in Lawrence County, Kentucky, visiting with Mama’s people when the jeweler was a boy.
Soon after the woman leaves, he is standing at the counter, playing with the little hammer he keeps lying around to give people the idea that he cuts his own stones. With the head of this hammer, he finds himself tapping the countertop glass, as if idly. Then harder, making a sharp, constant tock, like a metronome.
Then the hand that holds the hammer rises above his head, unbidden.
Why does he say it again, aloud this time, but so quietly, hoping to hide behind its skirts like a child, when he is a man?
Prestonsburg.
Glass, many millions of pieces of glass, on the floor, on his shoes, on the watches, on the watch chains in the case.
Look where it comes again. A dog that bit you mercilessly, that you drove deep into the hinterland and kicked onto the snow, that’s found its way back to you. Because it loves you. You could never make it understand that you’ve repudiated it. He has indeed sworn an oath to never, never, never, never again. He wants to be let back into the room in his father’s house, where no lamps are lighted. He has grown old since the time he forsook it. Hello, it says. I love you.
A man in a wide-brimmed hat on the porch, knocking. (That man was him.) He has reason to believe you may be able to assist him with his research. He will pay handsomely for the privilege. His teeth gone brown. Don’t you nor anybody else know how many times inside the house the woman said, “You want a root beer?” and he said no; “You want to eat some crackers, Professor?” and he said no. How many times he told the dog, “This is my true calling—you stay under the table whilst I copy these down.”
The mere finishing stroke is what often appears to create an event which has long been an accomplished thing,
wrote Thomas Hardy, of a man who discovered that what he believed was his sanguine nature was never his nature at all.
The jeweler is more afraid of the man in the hat on the porch, wheezing, than you are.
He’s two blocks down the street before he remembers he hasn’t locked the store, but now he is headed away.
He is brilliantly awake and running. He climbs aboard an east-bound streetcar. All around him people are pressed into one another’s shoulders and asses. Two men are arguing in some Slavic language in the rear of the car. A boy wraps his arms around his mother’s leg. The jeweler wipes off his shoes with his handkerchief as though it will soothe him. But he doesn’t want soothing now.
When the hammer came down, the glass pieces of the countertop sprung up and the case was a bloom of splinters, like the crown of a thistle that’s come open.
The brakeman lets go his brake, and the car rolls down the salted rails through the East Side streets.
The jeweler does not know where he is going.
Later. Dusk. He is seated on a stool in the back corner of a café, waiting. He has a foreign newspaper he’s pretending to read. In his mind, he sounds out each letter of each meaningless word, each piece of gibberish, like a man tasting marbles one by one. There is a window looking out on the avenue, and it lets in a weak, smoky light, and the passersby tap a nail on the glass to get the man behind the bar to raise his chin and acknowledge them. This could easily be the smallest place of business in North America. Foreigners enter in twos. The jeweler can smell them as they come in. He doesn’t try to talk to anybody. The only English words he hears them use are slurs and the names of the makes and models of automobiles. The afternoon progresses into evening.
The jeweler moves his eyes over a string of words beneath a photograph in the newspaper of a kind of demonstration, a strike or a funeral or a Christmas parade—they are carrying a statue of a woman through a street. He has been sitting here for five hours, eating miniature marzipan peaches and watermelons, poisoning himself with sugar, waiting to be found. He’s not hiding, he’s right down the street, he’s right here. And it comforts him to think that the words beneath the photograph, considered as a group, are called a
caption.
He knows that’s what these words are called even if he has no idea what they mean.
As a boy, with his uncle in Louisa, every winter for eight years, he walked through the snow and muck, following the trapping line, and into Prestonsburg on Sundays for church. He was meant to attach himself to the place sentimentally. They stayed in a one-room cabin with a potbelly stove to heat the place and cook on and ate opossum stew for supper, and turnips. How bored he was in the woods, he complained to his mother when he got home. But one time she told him something that he is reminded of by the caption, by the moment of release it brings to call a thing what it is—she said, “You’re bored because you don’t know the names of things.”
Therefore he has developed the habit, in moments like this—when the din of all his selves recriminating one another is more than he can bear—of picking out the objects in a room and naming them to himself.
That piece of furniture holding the spare china is a sideboard. The lower part of the wall with the paneling on it is the dado, the paneling itself is wainscoting. That’s the door.
Some of the men linger. Some of them buy a box of cookies tied up in blue ribbon and throw the silver down and dash out. Some of them are assumed into the others the moment they come in, no greetings exchanged, and the little coffee cups appear on the bar without their even asking. Women knock at the window and call the men by name, but the women don’t come inside.