Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Note: Absolutely impos. to cite trade-in values via mails, as this depends on age, size, condition of fig., also state of market @ time.

OUR NUMBER 24. Same as above, with musket instead of tomahawk.

OUR NUMBER 36. Turk, male 6 ft. high, for shops which sell the fragrant Ottoman weed, polychrome Turk holding long leaf betw. both hands, choice of any two colors on turban . A. C. P. HENNABERRY SPECIAL: $165. ( with beard & long pipe, $5 extra ).

They went upstairs after Dusty had finished his breakfast, pausing on the third (or second-hand figures) floor, to greet Otto and Larry.

Young Larry was still considered a learner and was not yet allowed to go beyond replacing arms, hands, noses, and other extra parts.

Otto, to be sure, was a master carver, but Otto had several strikes against him. In his youth, in his native Tyrol, Otto had studied sacred iconography; in his maturity, in America, Otto had studied drinking. As a result, when he was mellow, unless he was carefully supervised, his Indians had a certain saintly quality to them, which made purchasers feel somehow guilty. And when, on the other hand, Otto was sobering up, a definite measure of apocalyptic horror invariably appeared in his sachems which frightened buyers away.

As a result, Otto was kept at doing extras — bundles of cigars, boxes of cigars, bundles of tobacco leaf, coils of tobacco leaf, twists of the same, knives, tomahawks, all to be held in the figures’ hands — and at equally safe tasks like stripping off old paint, sanding, repainting, finishing.

He nodded sadly, eyes bloodshot, to Dusty and Charley, as he applied ochre and vermillion to a war bonnet. “Ho, Chesus,” he groaned softly.

Up in the woodloft, they made an inspection of the spars. “Now you needn’t pick the ones I started, of course,” Charley said. “Take fresh ones, if you like. ‘Course, all’s I did was I drawn the outlines and just kind of chiseled ’em in. And put the holes in on top for the bolts.”

Dusty stood back and squinted. “Oh, I guess they’ll be all right, Charley,” he said. “Well, let’s get ’em downstairs.”

This done, Charley went back to work on the Sir Walter, carefully chiseling Virginia Tobacco in bas-relief on the cloak.

Dusty took up his axe and blocked out approximate spaces for the head, the body down to the waist, roughly indicated the division of the legs and feet. Then he inserted the iron bolt into the five-inch hole prepared for it, and tilted back the spar so that the projecting part of the bolt rested on a support. When he had finished head and trunk, he would elevate the lower part of the figures in the same way.

Finally, finished with blocking out, he picked up mallet and chisel.

“I now strike a blow for liberty,” he said.

Smiling happily, he began to chip away. The song he sang was “Aura Lee.”

Don/Dusty Benedict let himself into his studio quietly — but not quietly enough. The sharp sound of a chair grating on the floor told him that his brother-in-law was upstairs. In another second, Walter told him so himself in an accent more richly Southern, probably, than when he had come North as a young boy.

“We’re upstairs, Don.”

“Thank you for the information,” Don muttered.

“We’re upstairs , Don.”

“Yes, Walter. All right. I’m coming.”

Walter welcomed him with a snort. “Why the hell do you always wear those damn cotton-pickin’ clothes when you go away? Not that it matters. I only wish I could just take up and go whenever the spirit moves me. Where was it you went this time?”

“Syracuse,” Don mumbled.

“Syracuse. America’s new vacation land.” Walter laughed, not pleasantly. “Don, you really expect me to believe you? Syracuse! Why not just say to me, frankly,”I’ve got a woman’? That’s all. I wouldn’t say another word.” He poured himself several drams of Don’s Scotch.

Not much you wouldn’t, Don thought. Aloud, “How are you, Mary?” His sister said that she was just fine, sighed, broke off the sigh almost at once, at her husband’s sour look.

Walter said, “Roger Towns was up. Another sale for you, another commission for me. Believe me, I earned it — gave him a big talk on how the Museum of Modern Art was after your latest. So he asked me to use my influence. He’ll be back — he’ll take it. This rate, the Modern Art will be after you before long.”

Don privately thought this unlikely, though anything was possible in this world of no values. He wasn’t a “modern, free-form” artist, or, for that matter, any kind of artist at all. He was a craftsman — In a world which had no need for craftsmen.

“But only —” another one of the many qualities which made Walter highly easy to get along without: Walter was a finger-jabber—“but only if you finish the damned thing. About time, isn’t it? I mean vacations are fine, but the bills …”

Don said, “Well, my affairs are in good hands — namely, yours.”

Walter reared back. “If that’s meant as a dig—! Listen, I can get something else to do any time I want. In fact, I’m looking into something else now that’s damned promising. Firm sells Canadian stocks. Went down to see them yesterday. ‘You’re just the kind of man we’re interested in, Mr. Swift,’ they told me. ‘With your vast experience and your knowledge of human nature…’”

Walt scanned his brother-in-law’s face, defying him to show signs of the complete disbelief he must have known Don felt. Don had long since stopped pretending to respond to these lies. He only ignored them — only put up with Walt at all — for his sister’s sake. It was for her and the kids only that he ever came back.

“I’d like a drink,” Don said, when Walt paused.

Dinner was as dinner always was. Walt talked almost constantly, mostly about Walt. Don found his mind wandering again to the Wooden Indian Society. Derwentwater, ending every speech with “Delendo est Demuth’s!” Gumpert and his eternal “Just one stick of dynamite, Don, just one!” De Giovanetti growling, “Give us the Equation and we’ll do it ourselves!”

Fools! They’d have to learn every name of those who had the hideous metal Indian in mind, conduct a massacre in Canal Street. Impossible. Absurd.

No, Elwell had been right. Not knowing just how the Preservationist work was to be done, he had nonetheless toiled for years to perfect a means to do it. Only when his work was done did he learn the full measure of WIS intransigence. And, after learning, had turned to Don.

“Take up the torch,” he pleaded. “Make each sachem such a labor of love that posterity cannot help but preserve it.”

And Don had tried. The craft had been in him and struggling to get out all the time, and he’d never realized it!

Slowly the sound of Walter’s voice grew more impossible to ignore. “…and you’ll need a new car, too. I can’t drive that heap much longer. It’s two years old, damn it!”

“I’d like a drink,” Don said.

By the time Edgar Feld arrived, unexpectedly, Don had had quite a few drinks.

“I took the liberty not only of calling unheralded, but of bringing a friend, Mr. White,” the art dealer said. He was a well-kept little man. Mr. White was thin and mild.

“Any friend of Edgar’s is someone to be wary of,” Don said. “Getchu a drink?”

Walt said he was sure they’d like to see the studio. There was plenty of time for drinks.

“Time?” Don muttered. “Whaddayu know about time?”

“Just step this way,” Walt said loudly, giving his brother-in-law a deadly look. “We think, we rather think,” he said, taking the wraps off the huge piece, “of calling this the Gemini—”