Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (17 page)

The Branch

A young man, while hiking, found a crooked branch that had fallen from a dying tree. The branch was nicely balanced, with a fine heft and a stout base that did not sink into the ground as he walked. He held it just above a knot in the wood, and used it to steady himself when he encountered difficult terrain or a steep grade.

When he was through hiking, he paused, considering whether he should toss the branch back into the woods. After some deliberation, he decided to bring it home with him.

One bright afternoon some months later, the young man found the branch and decided to put some additional work into it. He sawed off the cracked shaft above the knot and carved the knot into a handle; then he sanded the entire branch. He hiked with the branch a few more times, then forgot about it. It only crossed his mind when he moved from one apartment to another, and had to pack it with his other belongings.

The young man married and had children, and the children grew to school age. One day they found the branch lying in the attic, and with help from their mother cleaned it up, stained and varnished it, and gave it to their father for his birthday. He was pleased to see that the branch had been so lovingly finished, and for several years used it whenever he went hiking. For a few weeks, after he injured his knee playing touch football, the man used the branch to help him navigate sidewalks and the hallways of his office. When a few co-workers commented on what a nice cane he had, he corrected them, saying that it was simply a walking stick.

After a while, the man grew old, and his knee injury, from which he had never fully recovered, began to give him more trouble. He took to using the branch again. On some days his knee hurt less than on others, but even on these days he carried the walking stick, as it had become a kind of personal trademark, and he would have felt more self-conscious without it than he did with it. People still commented that he had a nice cane and asked him where he had gotten it, and while he was always pleased to tell them the story, he was nonetheless compelled to correct them, saying that it was a walking stick, not a cane.

Then one day the branch slipped on a wet patch of pavement while the old man was getting into his car, and he fell and bruised his hip. On his lunch hour he limped to the hardware store and found a bin filled with rubber caps, and rooted through them until he found one that fit snugly on the base of the branch.

Since then, he has invariably referred to the branch as his cane. We know this man, and can confirm that he corrects people with considerable vehemence whenever they mistakenly call it a walking stick.

Kiss

Our daughter attended a preschool overseen by an attractive, friendly young woman, a professional caregiver who, far from considering her job a burden, seemed to regard the children she supervised with genuine affection, even love. When I dropped my daughter off in the morning, the caregiver welcomed her with open arms, enthusiastically shouting her name; and when I picked her up in the afternoon, she hugged the caregiver and told her she would miss her when they were apart. In addition, I truly liked the caregiver and was always pleased to know that my daughter was with her.

One busy afternoon I arrived flustered and late to pick up my daughter, and after thanking the caregiver for waiting, I kissed her full on the mouth. As if this wasn’t enough, I put a firm hand on the small of her back and pulled her close while doing so. It was a fine kiss, sensuous and arousing, but only when I noticed the unfamiliar smell of the caregiver’s hair did I realize that, momentarily confused by her obvious regard for my daughter, I had mistaken her for my wife. I released the caregiver, embarrassed, and took my daughter’s hand.

To my surprise, the caregiver acted as if nothing unusual had happened. She said bye-bye to my daughter, told me she would see me in the morning, and turned back to her remaining students, who had continued their play oblivious to my gaffe. My daughter, far from confirming my suspicion that she would relate the incident to her mother, also behaved in typical fashion, and showed no signs of emotional distress. My subsequent encounters with the caregiver were cordial, and the kiss was never mentioned again. My only conclusion can be that this sort of thing happens all the time, though when I think about the incident, as I often do, it is generally with enormous guilt and shame.

Coupon

When we thought my mother was dying, my sister and I established a system of shifts in the hospital whereby one of us would be with her at all times, while the other could relax or straighten our mother’s affairs, staying within reach, of course, of a telephone. The hospital room itself was gray and bleak, with a television always on and silent nurses moving ominously about, and our mother slipped in and out of consciousness there for several days.

One night my sister fell asleep on her shift, and when she woke, our mother was conscious and lucid and engaged her in conversation. Her surprising recovery was swift, and within a week she was home again. She would live another four years in reasonably good health.

Soon after she was released from the hospital, she told my sister and me that it was because of us that she had returned from the edge. The night before she regained consciousness, she said, she heard us talking to one another in bright, youthful voices, and our optimistic tone had convinced her that she should fight for life. She described our conversation. My sister was said to have greeted me, and I apparently told her she looked wonderful and commented on her clothing, and she then told me about a party she was planning on attending, and I said that I, too, was going to that same party. Our mother attached special significance to the party; she laughed and recalled wanting to attend it too. Aghast, we thanked her for acknowledging us. We didn’t tell her the truth, that my sister had been asleep and that I had been at home on the telephone, calling caterers for what we thought would be her funeral.

Some time after my mother did die, I watched a television movie I’d videotaped around the time of her illness. During a commercial break there was an ad for laundry detergent. Two good-looking young people, and man and a woman, engaged in some flirtatious banter at a public laundromat, and I recognized their conversation as the one my mother had attributed to my sister and me on the eve of her recovery.

I promptly wrote a letter to the detergent company, telling them the entire story. Not long afterward I received a coupon good for a free box of detergent. No other reply was provided.

The Obelisk of Interlaken

Some years ago an article appeared in the newspaper of a village a few miles north of here, claiming that a local farmer had unearthed a large object believed to have originated with a pre-Columbian Indian tribe, or even possibly with the Vikings. The story was generally thought to be improbable, but many of us made the short drive to the village to see for ourselves. Though most came away from the object convinced of its fraudulence, few were disappointed to have seen it. Particularly satisfying was meeting its caretaker, a diminutive, knobbly man of about seventy, who enthusiastically told the story of its discovery beneath his potato patch, and even displayed a piece of metal from his tractor that he claimed the object damaged as he turned it up. The object itself was a four-sided column standing more than twenty-five feet high, the corners converging to a point at the top, which the farmer had marked with a customized brass plaque reading
THE OBELISK OF INTERLAKEN
.

It did not take long for the obelisk to capture the attention of a pair of academics from our university, an anthropologist and a historian, both renowned for their work at home and abroad, and for their books, considered by others in their fields to be excellent. The two traveled to the nearby village and were dismayed to find that the obelisk was composed of poured concrete. Furthermore, the anthropologist, upon walking out behind the barn to urinate, discovered the plywood molds the farmer had used to make the obelisk, and surreptitiously took photos of them.

The professors’ exposé was received, to their surprise, with derision, and our own local paper proclaimed the farmer a folk hero, running a front-page story on the man and his creation that included a large color photograph of the two. In fact, the professors’ attempt to discredit the farmer only seemed to fuel his popularity. When the professors persisted in their smear campaign, a protest was staged outside their building, in which students and local residents alike demanded their dual resignation.

Mortified, the professors begged the protesters to listen to reason. They had meant no harm, they said; they only wanted to set the record straight. The farmer, after all, had lied.

The protesters, however, replied that the farmer was nice, whereas the two professors were spoilers. Upon hearing this, the professors gave up their campaign, and the protesters left them alone. Today, the farmer is a local celebrity, much loved by the residents of our county, while the professors, abhorred throughout the region, have continued their careers in much the way they had before the obelisk was discovered.