Tinkers (17 page)

The wallpaper in George's basement workroom had a pattern of larch branches on a dunn-colored background. Clocks in various states of repair and disrepair hung on wall, some ticking, some not, some in their cases, some no more than naked brass works fitted with their pairs of hands. Cuckoos and Vienna regulators and schoolhouse and old railroad station clocks hung at different heights. There were often twenty-five or thirty clocks on the wall. Some of them were clocks he wanted to sell. None was marked. The closet to the left of his desk was made from raw pine planks and took up the space beneath the stairway. Between the pine planks and the arboreal wallpaper and the wood of the clocks, and the fact that the only windows were two small dry wells high in the wall near the ceiling, one felt one was in some odd, ticking bower. George sat at his desk at all hours of the day, looking down through his bifocals and often through one or two lenses of a clip-on set of jeweler's loops down into the brass guts of clocks, pushing and pulling at arbors and gears and ratchets, humming non-existent melodies, which evaporated as he unconsciously composed them. In this setting, he drove numerous fidgety grandchildren to near madness, insisting that they sit in a hard chair and watch him hum and poke around to no apparent effect. This is the thing to get into, boy. I tell you, this is how you can make some bucks. There was little to do but try to pick out recognizable bits of songs from his humming, which none of the children could do, and listen to the way that the tickings of the different clocks, which not only lined the walls but were also crowded onto several folding card tables, an old cot, and the shelves of a built-in bookcase, fell into and out of beat with one another. On rare occasions, every clock in the room seemed to tick at the same time. By the next tock, however, they all began to drift away from one another again and George's hapless victim would nearly weep at the prospect of having to sit still and listen again for the confluence. The only light in the room was one small wall lamp fitted with a forty-watt bulb and George's flu orescent jeweler's lamp, which was clamped to the desktop and could be pulled into almost any conceivable angle in order to illuminate almost any depths the works of a clock might present. This light provided the only other source of diversion for the child condemned to witness the mysterious, agonizing, glacial, undramatic doings of antique clock repair: watching the dust float. The jeweler's lamp brilliantly lit the dust in the air near whatever clock was being worked on. The rest of the room was dark with clocks and the evergreen wallpaper and so provided a perfect contrast to the front-lit specks of dust that floated down into or across the lamp's halo. The child imagined the flecks were miniaturized ships exploring inner space: The giant is fixing the time machine. We can only hope he doesn't sneeze or make any sudden moves and create a vortex that will send us hopelessly off course. The ship is made only of lamb's wool and dander!

How to Make a Bird's Nest: Take a wafer of tinker's tin. With heavy scissors, cut four triangles. The triangles shall be small, no taller or wider than half an inch, preferably smaller, if possible. Punch holes near the two angles at the base of the triangle, using a small hammer and the slimmest nails or brads possible. A large, sturdy sewing needle is even better, as it will yield a finer hole. Fold each triangle along an imaginary line extending from the top point to the middle of the base. The angle of the fold should be as close to ninety degrees as possible, using only the naked eye (as the utility of the tool does not depend on exact mathematical measurement). Thread each of the pieces with a length of fishing line or kitchen string or strong sewing thread. Now, patience is required; place in turn each piece of shaped tin over the nails of the forefinger and thumb of each hand so that the end point of each piece extends approximately one-quarter of one inch beyond the fingertip. Fasten each piece to the finger by tightly tying the thread around the finger at the first joint (but not so tightly that circulation is lost). This may take practice. Join the thumb and forefinger at their pads. By rolling them together forward and back, the two folded triangles should variously meet and separate; these are your beaks. It is with these that you will pick up grass and twigs and tinsel and stray bits of string and weave them together in the branches of a chosen tree or bush or thicket, depending on the species whose nest you wish to undertake. (This in itself requires preparation and it is suggested that as many examples as possible of the desired type of nest be studied before attempting one's own version. Even more desirable is to spend as many a spring afternoon as manageable watching the birds themselves weave their homes; such observation will help immensely in learning the particular stitch required.) Keep in mind, though, that the materials for the nest must be col lected and woven strand by strand. Birds do not gather their lumber, so to speak, all at once, but, rather, search out each plank and shingle one at a time. Such a birdy method may at first seem absurd to the forwardthinking nest maker, but soon it will be found that the pleasures of the project are not derived from efficiency. (Another desired eventuality is that as one becomes more and more dexterous weaving nests, one will begin to do so with only one beak, as it were. And here, then, too, is another temptation to overcome-keeping one's free hand behind one's back and refraining from giving the birds a helping human hand!)

Once the nest is complete, then what to put in it? Anything your heart desires, of course: acorn eggs plucked from their cups; stones smoothed in a river; a lock of your sweetheart's hair; your firstborn's milk teeth-anything you choose that will fit into the nest and give you pleasure to consider whenever you visit. Over time, one's whole countryside might be fitted out with a constellation of such nests, each holding its own special treasure.

-from a lost pamphlet by Howard Aaron Crosby, with accompanying illustrations and instructional diagrams, 1924

Howard entered North Philadelphia at seven in the morning on a Saturday. By nine, he had sold his cart and wares for twenty dollars and was a bag boy at the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. The manager Harry Miller, asked me my name and I thought, I stole the wagon and all of the supplies and sold it as my own, so my name is no longer Crosby, and I said to him, Lightman, Aaron Lightman, not sure if I should even keep my first name but not wanting to lose my name altogether, not wanting to cut the last thread, so I used my middle name, so here I lie on my bed next to my wife, not Kathleen Crosby, nee Black, but Megan Lightman, nee Finn, Aaron Lightman. He started as a bag boy. He loved the job, the smell of the fresh coarse brown paper, the bundles of bags, sharp blocks of pulp, peeling bags off the piles, snapping them open. And he loved packing the bags-fitting boxes and jars and bottles and cans and the meat snugly in butcher paper, stringed tight, and fresh loaves of bread in their own bags. He took pride in fitting each bag like a puzzle, fitting the most items in that hollow rectangle of a cubic foot or two without making it too heavy for a woman to carry and balancing it perfectly so that the bag would not tear. The moment a woman began to pile her groceries on the checkout counter, Howard began to sort them and order them in his mind, so that by the time the crackers and the pot roasts and the sacks of flour were pushed his way, he already had them bagged in their neat brown wrappings and all that was left to do was embody those bags in his mind out of the actual apples and cans of lard and boxes of salt. Two months after he was hired, he was promoted to head of the produce section and he made a paradise of fruit and vegetables. He made Thebes in oranges and lemons and limes. He made primeval forests of lettuce and broccoli and asparagus. He was enchanted by the smells of wax and cold water and packing crates, of skins and rinds breathing rumors of the sweet pulp beneath. In six months, he was an assistant manager. He worked seven days a week and wrote poems extolling his company over the competition (The floor's a mess and I feel a dope, I scrubbed it down with Red Lantern soap). He married a woman named Megan Finn who talked without pause from the moment she woke-Well the good lord has given me another day! shall I cook eggs and ham or flapjacks and bacon? I have some blueberries left but those eggs will go bad if I don't use them and I can put the blueberries in a cobbler for dessert tonight because I know how much you love cobbler and how the sugar crust soothes you to sleep like warm milk does a crabby baby although I don't know why because I saw somewhere that sugar winds a person up but I'm not going to argue with what works-until she went to sleep: Oh! Another day tucked away and here we are tired and honest and in love and happy as two peas in a pod, two peas in a pod! isn't that silly? peas don't come in pairs! if they did it wouldn't be worth it snapping them open, it'd take too long to even get a spoonful never mind enough to fill from nine o'clock to twelve o'clock, that's how the blind know where the food is on their plates, like a clock, ham at six-thirty! biscuit at four! just like that, that's how Helen Keller did it, I bet, just like that, potatoes at high noon! goodnight my love.

Megan worked as a sorter in a canning factory. Well, I sort the beans and the peas and the carrots.... Oh, it's terribly hard and boring and you have to go so fast! In comes the asparagus and just like that I have to sort it by size, color, and quality into the different bins-and fast, fast, fast!-but it's for a good cause and canned food is better than fresh-I'm sorry, Mr. Produce Man!because more vitamins get cooked away in the steam that comes out of the pot at home than when the wee peas are cooked right in the can. I know because they told us that they know that there are more vitamins in the canned peas because of all the experiments they do on white rats. It takes them five times as little canned food as fresh not to get scurvy!

Howard brought her flowers every day, and oranges. Each night before he left the store, he stopped in the produce section and lingered at the fruit bins, inhaling the clean smells of lemons and oranges, their citrus perfume. These sharp odors invigorated him. He lifted his nose from a crate of limes, refreshed and eager to get home to a wife who spoke words out loud as she thought them up and held nothing to whirl and eddy and collect in brackish silences, silences that broke like thin ice beneath you to announce your drowning.

George woke at night. He could barely speak. One of his grandsons was sitting on the couch. He said his wife's name, Erma. What, Gramp? Erma. No more than a whisper, the name sounded remote in his mouth. He could not shape the air, was unable to make the first syllable with his tongue against his upper back teeth, could only get the second syllable to work-ma -so that it sounded as Uhma. Uhma. Water? Do you want some water? Uhma. Erma? You want Nanny? Uh. Uh. Yes.

His wife came from their bed, where she lay in shallow sleep, alone, for a few hours each night as he died. She wore a light blue cotton robe with darker blue piping. Her slippers scuffed on the wood floor of the hall because she walked with small steps and shuffled a bit with sleep and fatigue. The scuffing stopped when she stepped onto the Persian rug covering the living room floor. She stood by his head and leaned down to him and stroked his face. Oh, George, you are my heart's delight. Haven't we had a wonderful life together? We've been around the whole world together. She gave him a sip of water from a juice glass with painted birds on it. The water helped his mouth and he spoke. Who is reading to me? Who is reading? What is that book? She said, What book, George? Have you been reading to Gramp, Charlie? Charlie said, No, Nan. She turned back to George and said, No one is reading to you, George. George said, The big book. No, my love, there is no book; no one is reading to you. There is no one here at all.

Howard had fewer seizures in Philadelphia. They still left him dazed, still left him feeling acrid and burned, as if an electric fire had swept through him. But afterward he enjoyed the cheerful ministrations of Megan. She led him to bed and rubbed his temples and gave him hot tea. Sometimes she read to him from one of her dime novels. The seizures did not upset her. She had read somewhere that they were considered holy in some cultures. Oh, my sweet, sweet Aaron, what an awful fit that was! I thought you'd break all of our finest china, the way all the cups and plates rattled in the cabinets. My goodness, you must feel terrible. Let's get you into bed and warm you up. What do you smell this time? Do you taste anything? I hope it's pork chops, because that's what's for dinner tonight, or apple pie, because I baked one this morning. I'm so glad there wasn't so much blood this time. You didn't bite your tongue at all, did you? That broomstick works so well. It's just the right size and I don't think you could ever bite through it. It looks like it's been chewed by a dog!

Eventually, she persuaded him to see a doctor, who prescribed bromides, which further lessened the frequency of the seizures. Lordy, I don't know what sort of witch doctors they have up in Canada, but here in the USA they are the best in the world. From the sounds of it, you were lucky they didn't shoot you like a dog with rabies. My dog, Mr. Jiggs, had rabies when I was a girl and he foamed at the mouth and stumbled in circles around the yard and my father rushed home from the mill with Charlie Weaver's shotgun and shot Mr. Jiggs dead right there on the spot and I cried for a week. He was such a free spirit! He chased all the boys and tore their pant cuffs and dug up all the neighbor's flower beds and ate a cat for dinner every day. Poor Mr. Jiggsy!