Tinkers (4 page)

To his right, past the right end of the dining table and the chair next to it, was the small entryway, which consisted of the doorway into the living room, the front door on the right, the door to the coat closet on the far side, and the door to the unfinished attic (which, when he had built the house fifty years before, George had fitted for plumbing and electricity, with the intention of eventually making the space into a single large family room) on the left. To the right of that was a rolltop desk, in which George kept bills and receipts and unused ledger books. There was another oil painting hanging above the desk, this one of a packet schooner sailing out of Gloucester in stormy weather. It was a scene of roiling dark greens and blues and grays swarming around the lines of the ship, which was seen from the rear. The insides of the very tips of the waves were illuminated from within by a sourceless light. If you watched the straight lines of the schooner's masts and rigging (storm up, the ship was not under sail) long enough in the dim light of an early evening or on a rainy day, the sea would begin to move at the corners of your vision. They would stop the moment you looked directly at them, only to slither and snake again when you returned your gaze to the ship.

Directly to George's right was the blue couch and its end tables, where his grandson sat, now looking at him, book in lap. Behind the couch, there was a large bay window, which looked out onto the front lawn and the street behind the couch, but heavy curtains, which his wife had kept closed day and night since he had come home to die, obscured it. The curtains were as thick and heavy as those of a theater. They were creamcolored, with broad vertical pillars of a maroon so dark it was almost black. The pillars were festooned with leafy tendrils that spiraled up and down their lengths. In between the diagonals of the bunting were alternating images of songbirds with scraps of ribbon or grass in their beaks and of marble urns. Looking at the curtains, it seemed to George that his grandson sat in front of a small, obscured stage and that he might at any moment stand up, step aside, and, with arm outstretched in introduction, present some sort of puppet show.

Instead, the grandson said again, You okay, Gramp?

Awful damn quiet.

When he could not turn his head any farther, he had to imagine the rest of the room behind him. There was the console television, the red velvet love seat, the hand-colored photograph of his wife taken when she was seventeen, set in an oval rosewood frame, and there was the grandfather's clock.

That was it, he realized; the clock had run down. All of the clocks in the room had wound down-the tambours and carriage clocks on the mantel, the banjo and mirror and Viennese regulator on the walls, the Chelsea ship's bells on the rolltop desk, the ogee on the end table, and the seven-foot walnut-cased Stevenson grandfather's clock, made in Nottingham in 1801, with its moon-phase window on the dial and pair of robins threading flowery buntings around the Roman numerals. When he imagined inside the case of that clock, dark and dry and hollow, and the still pendulum hanging down its length, he felt the inside of his own chest and had a sudden panic that it, too, had wound down.

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.

When he realized that the silence by which he had been confused was that of all of his clocks having been allowed to wind down, he understood that he was going to die in the bed where he lay.

Clocks are all stopped, he croaked to his grandson.

Nana said it would drive you mad.

(In truth, his wife had said that the ticking, never mind the chimes, drove her mad and that she could not bear the vigil with all of that clatter. In actual truth, his wife was soothed by the sound of ticking clocks and their chimes, and for many years after her husband's death, in the condominium she bought at a retirement complex with the cash he had hidden away for her in the basement and in half a dozen safety-deposit boxes located around the North Shore, she kept a dozen of the finest pieces from his collection running and arranged around her living room in such a way that they seemed, in their precise alignment, with which she fussed and fine-tuned for months, to strike a chord that nearly conjured her dead husband, almost invoked him in the room; he always seemed just out of sight among the ticks and tocks and, at midnight, when she lay alone in her canopy bed and all of the clocks struck twelve at the same time, she knew without a doubt that her fastidious ghost of a husband was drifting around in the living room, inspecting each machine through his bifocals, making sure that they were all even of beat, adjusted and precise.)

Drive me mad nothing, he said. Get up and wind them. And so the young person, whose name he could not recall, moved from clock to clock and wound each one.

But not the striking trains, the young person said. It'd be too loud; we'd raise hell if all of these things struck; Nana would kill us.

George said, Okay, okay, and the blood in his veins and the breath in his chest seemed to go easier as he heard the ratchet and click of the springs being wound and the rising chorus of clocks, which did not seem to him to tick but to breathe and to give one another comfort by merely being in one another's presence, like a gathering of people at a church dinner or at a slide show held in the local library.

Besides fixing pots and selling soap, these are some of the things that Howard did at one time or another on his rounds, sometimes to earn extra money, mostly not: shoot a rabid dog, deliver a baby, put out a fire, pull a rotten tooth, cut a man's hair, sell five gallons of homemade whiskey for a backwoods bootlegger named Potts, fish a drowned child from a creek.

The drowned child was the daughter of a widow named La Rose. She had been playing at the edge of the creek and slipped on a wet stone and split her head and passed out facedown in the water. The current had tugged her farther into the water, carried her for several hundred feet, and then deposited her on a sandbar in the middle of the creek. Howard took his shoes off and rolled up his trouser legs and waded out to the child. When he first bent to lift her, he did so as if to hoist an errant lamb onto his hip, but when he put his arms under the little body and felt its cold and saw its hair trailing in the current and thought of the child's mother standing behind him on the bank, he turned her face up and raised her and carried her as if she were asleep and he taking her from the back of a wagon to her pallet bed near the woodstove after returning from a trip visiting relatives.

The man whose hair he cut was named Melish. He was nineteen years old and due to be married in an hour and a half. His mother was dead; his sisters and brothers, all much older than he, were married off already and gone to Canada or New Hampshire or south to Woonsocket. His father was plowing their fifteen acres of potatoes and would have just as soon scalped the boy as cut his hair, because him getting married meant the last helping hands were abandoning the farm. Howard took a pair of shears and a medium-size tin pot from his wagon. He fitted the pot over the boy's head and cut in a circle around its circumference. When he was done, he took a hand mirror from its wrapping paper and gave it to the boy. The boy turned his head left and then right and handed the mirror back to Howard. He said, I guess that looks pretty smart, Mr. Crosby.

The man whose tooth he pulled was named Gilbert. Gilbert was a hermit who lived deep in the woods along the Penobscot River. He seemed not to live in any shelter other than the woods themselves, although some men who hunted in the woods for deer and bear and moose speculated that he might live in some forgotten trapper's cabin. Others thought he might live in a tree house of some sort, or at least a lean-to. In all the years he was known to live in the forest, never had a winter hunting party seen so much as the ashes from a fire or a single footprint. No one could imagine how a man could survive one winter alone and exposed in the woods, never mind decades of them. Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.

Gilbert was a graduate of Bowdoin College. According to the stories, he had liked to boast that he had been a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne's. Although he would have to be nearly 120 years old for the rumor to be true, no one cared to refute the claim, because they found too delightful an image to dispel the notion that the local hermit, dressed in animal skins, muttering litanies (as often as not in Latin), and, in warmer seasons, attended by a small but avid swarm of flies, which constantly buzzed around his head, crawled over his nose, and sipped the tears from the corners of his eyes, had once been a clean-faced, well-ironed acquaintance of the author of The Scarlet Letter. Gilbert was apparently not his real name and no one really knew when he had been born so the people left it at that.

People liked to speculate and tell stories about Gilbert the Hermit, especially when they sat around their woodstoves on winter nights with a blizzard howling outside; the thought of him out there in the maelstrom gave them a comforting thrill.

Howard supplied Gilbert. Gilbert's needs from the world of men were few, but he did require needles and thread, twine, and tobacco. Once a year, on the first day that the ice went out of the ponds, sometime in May, Howard rode his wagon to the Camp Comfort Club hunting cabin, itself remote, and from there toted on his back the supplies he knew Gilbert required down an old Indian trail that followed the river. Somewhere along the way, Howard would meet Gilbert. The men would greet one another with nods of their heads. They struggled through the bushes down to the river's edge, Howard with his bundle, Gilbert with his court of flies and a buckskin bag. There they would each find a rock or a dry tuft of grass to sit on. Howard took a tin of tobacco from the bundle of supplies he had brought for Gilbert and handed it to the hermit. Gilbert held the open tin to his nose and inhaled slowly, savoring the rich, sweet near dampness of the new tobacco; by the time he met Howard each year, he was down to the last flakes of his supply. Howard imagined that the fragrance of new tobacco was a sort of confirmation to Gilbert that he had indeed lived another year, endured another winter in the woods. After smelling the tobacco and looking out at the river for a moment, Gilbert held out his hand to Howard. Howard took a pipe from one of his jacket pockets and gave it to the hermit. Howard did not otherwise smoke and kept the pipe for this one bowlful a year. Gilbert packed Howard's pipe and then his own (which was beautiful-carved from a burl of dark red wood and which Howard imagined belonging once, long ago, in a brass stand on a dean's desk) and the two men smoked together in silence and watched the waters rush. While he smoked, Gilbert's flock of flies temporarily dispersed, but seemingly without rancor or resentment. When the pipes were spent, each man tapped the ashes out against his rock and put his pipe away. The flies settled back in their orbit around the hermit's head (Circum capit, he muttered) and he opened his buckskin bag and produced two crude wooden carvings, one which seemed to be a moose, the other a beaver, or perhaps a woodchuck, or even a groundhog. The work was so poor that Howard could only say for sure that the little raw wooden lumps that the hermit placed in the winter-dead grass between them were supposed to be animals of some kind. Next to the carvings, Gilbert then lay a beautifully skinned fox fur, head included, that smelled like rotting meat. There was a moment of panic for the flies as they decided which was more rancid, the hermit or the skin. In the end, they were loyal to their more pungent, living host. Howard placed the bundle of supplies on the grass and each man collected his goods. The men had exchanged few words during the first few years of this spring ritual and these only to refine the order of Gilbert's supplies. One year he said, More needles. Another year he said, No more tea-coffee now. Once the list had been refined and finally established, the men no longer spoke at all. For the past seven years, neither man had uttered a single word to the other.

The last year Howard met Gilbert in the woods, though, the men spoke. When he came upon the hermit, he saw that the man's left cheek was as swollen and as shiny as a ripe apple. Gilbert shuffled his feet and stared at the ground and held his hand against the cheek. Even the flies were solicitous of their sponsor's pain and seemed to buzz more gingerly about him. Howard cocked his head in a silent question.

Gilbert whispered, Tooth.

Howard could not imagine that this old husk of a man, this recluse who seemed not much more than a sour hank of hair and rags, had a tooth left in his head to ache. Nevertheless, it was true. Stepping closer, Gilbert opened his mouth and Howard, squinting to get a good look, saw in that dank, ruined purple cavern, stuck way in the back of an otherwise-empty levy of gums, a single black tooth planted in a swollen and bright red throne of flesh. A breeze caught the hermit's breath and Howard gasped and saw visions of slaughterhouses and dead pets under porches.

Tooth, the hermit said again, and pointed into his mouth.

Oh, yes, awful thing, Howard said, and smiled in sympathy.

The hermit said, No! Tooth! and continued pointing. Howard realized that the poor afflicted man wanted him to take the tooth out.

Oh, no, no! he said. I have no idea-

Gilbert cut him off. No! Tooth! he squeaked, an octave higher than before.

But I haven't any- Again the hermit cut him off, shooing him back toward where his wagon stood, three miles away at the Comfort Camp Club cabin.

Howard returned two and a half hours later with a small flask of corn whiskey from Potts's mountainside still and a pair of long-handled pliers he used when he had to solder small pieces of tin to leaky pots. At first, Gilbert refused any liquor, but when Howard grabbed the tooth with the pliers, the old man passed out. Howard dashed a handful of cold river water on Gilbert's face. The hermit came to and motioned for the whiskey, which he drank in a single draft, then passed out again from the alcohol on the bedeviled tooth. Another splash of water revived Gilbert, and the two men sat for a time watching a pair of sparrows chase a crow above the fir trees on the other side of the river.