The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter (5 page)

“You hated your father?”

“What kind of father abandons his family and takes off to have sex with other men?”

“That's a very cruel thing to say.”

“But,” he says, “it's a fact.”

“We were never partners, your father and me. I was a single mom and he was incredibly supportive.”

“I was a ‘happy accident.'”

“Well, you were. Simon used to say you were a ‘hippie accident.'”

Then Ryan says, “The irresponsibility of it all makes me crazy.”

“Well I'm sorry. But if we hadn't been irresponsible that night, you wouldn't be sitting here right now.”

“I'm sitting here right now,” he said, “because God saved my life.”

“He saved your life? When did God save your life?”

And he says, “When He stopped you from having an abortion.”

I'm so angry, I can't believe how angry I am. “No,” I say, “I saved your life—if you want to look at it that way.”

“You wanted Elaine to have an abortion.”

“I did not. I said that you two should consider all options available before you got married. That's what I said.”

And he goes, “Meaning, get an abortion. Meaning, kill your granddaughter. You wanted us to kill Martha.”

If I'd gotten up at that moment and left the room, what might've happened?

Maybe I wouldn't have lost them.

But I didn't. I couldn't. I said, “What a little shit you are to say that to me.”

And after that I know I told him he could fuck right off! Then something containing the words Christian and sanctimonious and narrow-minded. And things got worse from there. Much worse.

And I am no longer welcome in his house.

I am no longer a part of my granddaughters' lives.

She slams the copper plates onto the floor.

And you're useless to me, because you're dead! But there's no one else—everyone else seems trivial. Everyone alive seems trivial because we aren't dead. And life seems so pointless and not worth living at all.

Was everything that was so wonderful worth all this sadness?

Was having you so wonderful that it's worth all the pain of not having you ever again?

How did this happen? How did I end up here? Abandoned. The atheist hippie dinosaur abandoned. I've spent most of my life thinking that we were all moving towards a rational, enlightened future, but instead I've ended up all alone in the Middle Ages! Stuck in the Crusades, for chrissakes! Religious fanatics on all sides! Crackpots and zealots that we used to think were the lunatic fringe are now in charge of the world. And not just terrorists, not just fundamentalists, but the presidents and prime ministers of the countries where we live! The people we elect! The people our children marry and become! They all use their God to turn one people against another, turn families against themselves, turn sons against their mothers.

All those shepherd gods and gods of shepherds, Ra and Mohammed and Jesus and Yahweh, all those gods that go back to the first time someone herded goats in the Fertile Crescent, back and back—past the little stick man at Lascaux, past the first awareness of our grandparents—those gods go back and back to the first bright apes who tried to figure out why day followed night, and summer followed winter, and why oh why, without any rhyme or reason, do the ones we love have to die.

And I know that this is why people need God, this is why people came up with God, so that there'd be someone to talk to who's bigger than death, so that there'll be the comfort of “the Lord works in mysterious ways,” so that times like these when everything is so sad, so unbearably sad, there's a reason to believe that life is worth living. There's a future, a reward in death.

People who ignore history are doomed to forget that human beings invented religion to make sense of the world, but then they let religion replace the world.

People who ignore history are like my mother, living completely in the present. She has no sense of the past, no sense of the future, she's a greedy, needy eighty-eight-year-old three-year-old.

Alice B. Toklas became a Catholic in her old age because she thought that if she belonged to a faith that believed in Heaven, it would be possible to be with Gertrude Stein again.

And they are together, for us, the ones who are still living. All of you are! Stein and Toklas and Simon and Grammy and Dad and Steph and Eva Hesse. Everyone who ever died. The first person who ever tried to paint a deer on a rock wall.

And you, Pete. And you. You're with them now, too.

And is it because a part of me can't escape being the little girl who was told that Grammy's dead and watching over her? The way I imagine you can hear me still?

Only now, I want you to hear me, and I want to talk to you.

Why go on living, why go on?

She waits. There's no answer.

Is life worth living? Is it?

No answer.

Is my life worth living?

I'm stuck here in this terrible time when I don't see how I can get on with my life, this terrible time when all I want is to be with you. To be with the dead.

But when I cross over into the land of the dead to join you, I'll just be dead. I want us to be together. But the dead only seem to be together to the living because they're gone.

She is in her studio, looking at the scarab pin and the bone on her work table.

The last thing I want is false comfort. The last thing.

Why is life worth living?

She waits. She looks at the pin and the bone.

Seventy thousand years ago—seventy thousand—a boy lived for nine years. A boy with a head full of teeth ready to erupt. There would've been something strange about the look of him because he was not us, he was other. He would've had a mother, and there would've been a father, and their lives would've been rough and hard. What would the world have been to them? The sun moving across the sky? The stars? The herd of deer fording a river? The loss of a boy?

Where would they look for comfort? What would they do?

I can't imagine not making marks on a page, not trying to make sense of the world by making marks on a page. How can you not want to try to understand the world? How can you not?

Very faintly, in the distance, Peggy Lee is singing “Mr. Wonderful.” The song has already begun. She picks up the scarab pin.

They're such inquisitive little things, Maggie and Martha. Our granddaughters. So bright.

She listens. The music is clearer.

And they'll look back on fingerpainting. Collages.

They'll grow up, and look back, and…

There I'll be.

She starts pinning the pin to her shirt.

Here, right here.

She listens to the singing. The light grows.

End.

For Scott

Foreword

Some smart critic, way back when, wrote that Don Hannah had the best ear for dialogue in the country. The play being reviewed was Rubber Dolly—the first play Don wrote—and I think I saw it a half-dozen times. Now a quarter century or so later, with his fabulous ears still intact, Don has written his first one-person show. I know he's been busy writing other plays and novels but I still don't know why it took him this long to try a monologue. It's a form that seems like the most obvious and natural fit for a writer with his particular set of skills and this particular story—that pitch-perfect voice, that organic blend of narrative storytelling and real dramatic scenes, the way the past and the present bleed into each other, and all this woven in with a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel.”

From the moment Ted staggers onto the stage—small, wiry, rough-looking… a bantam—we are with him as he tells his utterly unique story. And a desperate story it is as well. Times up! he announces as he begins and then takes us back, way back through his life, a tragic life that is surely nearing its end out here in this long dark night, in the lonely woods, a million miles from nowhere. You ever feel this bad? Ted asks and then answers for us a moment later—I didn't think so. But part of what's miraculous about this play is the range of emotions that Ted's story is able to provoke within us. It's everything good drama is meant to be. We are on Ted's side despite the biggest odds out there. One moment we want to gather him up in our arms and the next moment we want to be done with him forever. It's a very odd balancing act. Ted's scattered and rough life, the act of telling it, is also an act of hope. And by the time Ted confesses the simplest and saddest words he'll ever say—I did that—an even more extraordinary balancing act is taking place; even though our sense of horror is overwhelming, the sense of compassion we have for this character is too strong to abandon him. Is it forgiveness? Perhaps. It's tricky to try and pin down after the fact. What I felt most keenly at the end of this play is that I didn't want my time with Ted to be over.

And that's because The Woodcutter is trademark Don Hannah. Every word feels true. It's dark and it's gritty. It breaks your heart and makes you laugh in the same breath. It does what Don always does—gives voice to someone almost everyone in the world would much rather forget. And although Don states in his notes that all his life, he has been seen as the least memorable person in the room, in the end, of course, Ted's story is unforgettable.

—Joan MacLeod

The Woodcutter was first produced in Edmonton by the Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation at the Working Title 2 Festival. The play premiered in May 2010 with the following cast and crew:

Ted: Mark Jenkins

Director: Kim McCaw

Set and costume design: Victoria Zimski

Lighting design: Guido Tondino

Sound design: Matthew Skopyk

Stage manager: Emma Deobald

Notes

The Woodcutter is set in a clearing in the deep woods, evening into night.

Ted is in his early thirties; small, wiry, rough-looking. All his life he has been seen as the least memorable person in the room.

He is dressed modestly and poorly, a jacket and jeans, old shoes inappropriate for walking. He is not dressed for a night in the woods.

In the one-person show there is always the question, “Who is he talking to?” In this show there is a very simple answer: himself. This is a one-man show with no direct address. Ted arrives exhausted, but as he talks, he needs to be exploring his immediate world, to be fully engaged with the clearing. He talks to trees, pine cones, stones, to the objects at hand. He talks as he works, as he paces. He only raises his voice as indicated in the text. The audience needs to believe that they are overhearing him, as if watching him through a gap in the trees.

There is more than one hymn called “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.” The one that Ted knows was written by William H. Parker, with music by Frederick A. Challinor.

Dusk. A small opening in the woods with conifers—pine, spruce, fir, larch—thick all around and above it. Brief snatches of sky through branches. On the ground, brown evergreen needles, sticks, small rocks, forest debris. The end of a grey day late in October. Crows cawing, sounding both angry and annoying.

TED lurches, staggers, into the opening, nearly falling. He's a short man, scrawny—a bantam—unshaven, scruffy and dirty. He's wearing a worn coat, a bit too big, and holding a sturdy branch as a walking stick. He's exhausted.

TED

Jesus Murphy asshole trees!

He trips on a stick, nearly falling flat on his face. He catches himself—

Frig!

—turns and starts to beat at the stick that tripped him with the stick he's holding—

Stupid woods! Stupid ugly woods—

—when he loses his balance and falls on his butt.

Stupid stick!

A crow calls, “Caw caw caw,” as if mocking him. He kicks out at the stick that tripped him.

Goddamn stupid asshole stick!

For a moment he's a five-year-old having a temper tantrum.

Ugly stupid woods fulla asshole sticks! What good are ya! Stupid sticks, stupid woods! I hate ya! Hate ev'ry frickin' asshole stick in the whole frickin' woods!

He starts to get up but he doesn't have the energy. He sits, defeated. The crow mocks him again.

Y're lost. Got yerself good'n lost. Not a hope of findin' ya!

And they're lookin' right now. Didn't know where ta start, but they're out there lookin' right now somewhere.

Nobody knows where y'are, not a clue, nothin'.

Needle in a frickin' haystack you are.

And you!

He's crawled over to the stick that he tripped over. He grabs it and starts slamming it against the ground over and over.

Asshole. Asshole stick!

He stops and holds what's left of the stick in his hand.

What'd I ever do ta you?

What'd I ever…

What'd I…

He's moved to the verge of tears, but then he sighs, sits up straight and starts looking all around him, checking out the clearing. The crow calls are in the distance, flying away.

Well now. Dandy.

Like Gram useta say. “Ain't this just dandy!”

'Cause it weren't. Weren't dandy at all.

Middle a goddamn nowhere.

Just frickin' dandy.

Let this be it then.

Let this be it in the middle a goddamn nowhere.

He's starting to get up when he hears a coyote in the distance. He listens.

Oh, that's a comfort, that is.

He listens. Coyote wails again.

A real comfort that, with the night comin' on.

Those fellas steer clear if they hear ya comin'?

Bears do. S'why ya wear the bells.

He's still holding the stick, looking at it.

Ya think a snake'd hear them bells?

They even got ears, snakes?

Or they just lie around deaf. Just lie around.

Like sticks. Just lie around like asshole sticks waitin' to get ya.

He drops it.

No goddamn wonder ya always hated the woods.

Sighs.

Useta tell the kids about'm. Animal stories and that.

“Tell me a story. Tell me a story. Tell me a…”

He angrily whacks the ground with his walking stick. Then he sighs.

That father left his kids out in a woods like this. Took'm out there and just walked away. Deserted'm.

Ya tell'm that and they just go, “Then what happened? What happens next?” Don't question it at all. 'Cause it's a story.

Jesus Murphy it's cold.

He picks up the broken stick again and glares at it.

Asshole!

He drops the stick to one side. Looks around.

Find ya here as well as anywhere else.

That's right. Here's as good as anywhere else. All the same anyway.

Good a place as any.

That's what he'd a said to himself, too, I s'pose, that father. “Good a place as any.” And then he left those kids. He and his wife.

He's rubbing his hands together.

(
mimics
) “Then what happened? Then what happened?”

He puts his hands in his coat pockets. He pulls out a crumpled photograph, looks at it.

Their mother. Stepmother, I mean.

He puts it back in his pocket.

Real mother was dead. They must a been real small when she died.

But that stepmother, she was somethin' else! “We got nothin' ta feed'm,” she says. “Can't go on like this, we'll all starve.”

He worked in the woods. Not much money there. Hard work, too.

At Mrs. Conrad's there, I useta chop her wood—split it and stack it by the side of the kitchen door. “Wear yer mittens,” she'd say, “Or you'll ruin yer hands.” I didn't need no mittens. Had tough little hands, me.

S'damn cold.

I'd take things out on it. Like if you're mad or upset. Bein' picked on. Just take that old axe and go at it. Mike now, he was faster. He could chop wood, stack it neat and solid as could be, and lickety-split no time. And good with the cars and that. Real smart back then, Mike.

He's looking about in the dim light.

Middle a goddamn nowhere.

How far away is this from everything? Should a brought a watch or…

For what? Should a brought a watch for what?

Time's up, Ted!

Time's up, asshole!

(
shaking his head
) “Nothin' ta feed'm,” she says. “Nothin' ta feed'm.”

But ya know how Gram ustea tell it? Tell us why she come up with that idea a dumpin' those kids?

“She was rotten, that one—horrible mean selfish and rotten, no other reason. Too lazy to look after them, wanted it all for herself.”

But I don't know. Lookin' back, I'd hafta say, comin' from Gram, ya take that version with a grain a salt. I think she did it 'cause they're poor and can't feed'm.

That Gram.

After Dad died, we was off ta Gram and Fa. Never lived with Mom much, just stayed over there sometimes. Couple a Christmases I think, and…

So Mike told me.

But first thing I remember ever, ever-ever, goin' way way back, was Mom blowin' on my tummy. I must a been real small, way before school, and her mouth on me, makin' a funny noise and the both of us bein' happy.

Ha. Just goes ta show ya…

Gram and Mom—no love lost there. And Gram had no time for my brother hardly, no patience with Mike at all.

Mom, she just couldn't cope.

She useta call a chicken a “chooky.” “I'm gonna cook us up some chooky.” I'm sittin' on the counter by the sink while she washed it. “Like givin' a baby a bath,” she says. “Just like I useta wash you.” After she dried it off, she'd hold it by the wings and jiggle it there beside me. “Wanna dance with Miss Chooky?”

People like bein' silly around kids, makes'm feel good. When little Bobby first arrived, I was silly like that, I was as happy as happy…

I was…

TED slams the ground with his fist.

Changed my life. He did that. Little Bobby changed my life.

Starts to slam his fist on the ground again but stops himself. He takes hold of his walking stick and stands.

We was at that place—Mrs. Allen her name was, and she was somethin', “cleanliness is next ta godliness” and that—that's the word she used for my thing, my penis, calls it a chooky.

First night there I'm lyin' in the tub and she come thunderin' in, “Have you scrubbed your chooky!” Then gets all mad 'cause I'm mixed up. How'm I s'posed ta know? I'm like what—maybe ten?

“You make sure that chooky's good and clean!”

Cripes.

We had no use for that one, Mike and me. Glad ta see the end a that friggin' place!

“Know how I'd clean her chooky?” Mike says.

“How?”

“I'd kick it clean out the window!”

Then he goes, “Kick it clean across town!”

Then he's, “Let's kick that asshole chooky a hers clean ta Thunder Bay!”

He's looking about, sizing the place up. He talks as if he's explaining things to objects—trees, branches, pebbles, pinecones, etc.—that are close by.

S'why I says to Angie, “We're havin' no cutesy-pie names in this house. Don't want'm growin' up stupid like me, havin' folks laugh at'm for no good reason. It's a penis, what Bobby has, and Brittie's got a vagina. No cutesy-pie words or dirty talk, we're bringin'm up smart as we can. No skippin' school, and we're taken'm ta Sunday school—Bible stories and the hymns and that. Gettin'm help for the homework when it starts up. Not brought up like us.”

“Good,” she says, “that we'll do.”

'Cause Angie had a hard time of it growin' up, too. She knew all about bein' picked on in that family. Her mother, she's somethin' else, that damn thing. The mouth on her. And a real hard-lookin' ticket, too. Face like a…

Well, scare ya, she would.

The moustache on her!

Useta call her Geraldo.

But behind her back.

Say it to her face, she'd kill ya.

No, Angie knew all about bein' picked on when y're growin' up, bein' picked on, and…

Times, she said, she and her sisters had it so bad with her folks' drinkin'—partyin' and that. Mean drunks, the both a them, all sarcastic and that, makin' fun a the kids, puttin'm down. And fightin'. And that kid brother a hers, that little Kevin, had it worst of all, she says. Says that—

Ah, whatta I care about him? (
angry
) Tattooed little prick, he can go straight ta hell !

So why go back, eh? Why go back?

A moment, and then a coyote is heard in the distance. TED listens. Another coyote.

Those kids, all alone. All alone out there in the woods.

Sometimes now, sometimes they have the wife say this—“If we leave those kids out in the wood, chances are that someone rich might come along and find'm, and take'm in, give'm a better life.”

Mike says, “Who'd she think'd just come strollin' by way out there in the middle a nowhere? Some millionaire movie star?”

“A rich hunter,” I says. “Or maybe like a sport fisherman.”

But he's got a point.

But ya can't imagine the father goin' along with her plan fer no good reason, ya think he had ta believe someone'd come along and give'm a better life.

More coyote sounds further away.

TED starts to clear a space on the ground. He doesn't set out to do it, it evolves as a task. First, he bats some stones and twigs out of the way with his walking stick. Later he will get down on his hands and knees. The cleared area will be about eight by three feet.

Back then, fathers was good usually, but weak. Mothers was either real good or evil. And there's no such thing as a good stepmother, not ever. Impossible. She's like a bull with tits, not gonna happen.

He was good. Just couldn't stand up to her.

It's hard sometimes. Standin' up. It's a hard thing ta do. Standin' up ain't easy.

It's damn fuckin' hard!

He takes a swipe at a stone with the walking stick, then stands very still, calms down.

So the father and his wife takes'm out ta the woods, lights a fire and tells'm ta wait. “You two stay put. We're gonna get some more wood cut, then we'll come back and get ya, and take yas home.”

But they knew those grown-ups was up ta somethin', those kids. They knew. So before they left the house that mornin', Hansel fills up his pockets with gravel, and when they're bein' led off he's droppin' them all the way along. So, nighttime, fire's all burnt down and the moon come up, they was white and shiny in the moonlight.

“Look, Gretel, see? Those'll lead us back ta Father.”

So Hansel takes his sister by the hand there, and they follow the trail, walkin' all through the night, till they're out a the woods and back at the house.

If ya leave a dog somewheres, just dump'm far off ta try and be rid of him, he's so faithful, trustin' as can be, that he'll do whatever it takes ta get home. Hundreds a miles even. Might take weeks. One mornin' at the back door, there he'll be, all skin and bones, waggin' his tail. Those two kids're like that. Most kids are. Even though they know somethin's up and things aren't so good at home, they'll head straight back. Just like Walt Disney there, The Incredible Journey.

And the stepmother's goin', “Ya bad kids! Where ya been? Ya had yer poor father and me worried sick!”

Like it's all their fault. Next day, when they get dumped in the woods again, all they had was a scrap a bread. Dropped pieces of it behind'm. Little pieces of it, little… like even smaller than what they give ya at communion. No bigger than the end of your baby finger.

Gram and Fa useta be in charge a that sometimes for the church. Store-bought bread. Stack it, trim off the crusts, slice it up tiny, puny little squares. Give us the crusts to play with and eat.

And that seemed like a treat back then. Don't take much ta make a kid happy sometimes. Don't always need the Game Boys and the PlayStations and Barbie's new waterslide.

Now, I liked it when they dragged us off ta Sunday school. Mike, though, “I'm too big fer this nonsense. And I'm not singin'! I'm no fruit, me.”

“Me either!”

But I liked the singin'. I always liked bein' part of everybody when we all sang together, all of us goin' “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.”

Makes ya feel good. Angie and me singin' it with the kids…

(
sings, tentatively
) Tell me the stories of… Jesus…

A pause. He's shaking his head. Then he goes back to his clearing.

The stories, see, Mike liked them. They weren't fruity ta him at all, just the singin'. He's always got time for stories. Me too.

I always say ta those kids, “Listen up at Sunday school and ya can learn somethin'.” (
nods
) That's what I always say. “Listen up, Bobby, listen up, Brittie, and ya can—”