Paul Harding - Tinkers

Sometime after midnight, I saw another head on the water, partially obscured by the grass overgrowing the bank, several yards downstream, just before the pool turned into a brook and turned east. The moon was bright and it illuminated the head. The head faced me. I tried to see its eyes, which I knew were open and were staring at me without blinking, but when I looked straight at them, my vision inked over. It was only by looking to the left or right of them that they became clear, or at least clearly eyes, which I imagined were open and staring. It was an Indian. He had not been there when I sat down in the water. I had not seen him arrive, even though we faced each other. Somehow, I knew that I could not move, that something terrible might happen if I did. I regretted coming to look for reliquaries of my father, at the foolishness of the act. It seemed to me then that my father had been a man of steady and real faith and that I was a foolish, lonely, miserable child. The night passed and the Indian did not move, except for once, when a small trout leapt from the water and down his throat.

I thought that the Indian must be Old Sabbatis. Sabbatis had grown up living on an island in the lake before he went to live with Red in his cabin. He worked as a fishing and hunting guide. Usually, he wore a flannel shirt and pants held up with white suspenders and a floppy wide-brimmed hat. The only traditional part of his costume was his moccasins, which he made himself. Some sportsmen were clearly disappointed when they first saw him, their fantasies of being led through the woods by an Indian clearly having conjured a more exot- is image. Once a year, though, Sabbatis put on an old headdress and buckskin leggings and beaded vest, bought and kept for him by J. T. Saunders, and good naturedly, we thought, played the part of Indian chief in Saunders's display down at the Boston Sportsmen show.

But the head on the water did not look like Sabbatis. Its stillness could have been Sabbatis'. I had often heard stories of sportsmen leaving him at camp early in the morning, after he had made them breakfast, sitting in a certain position, facing a certain direction, and returning several hours later to find him in the same place. He always rose, though, the moment the men returned, and took whatever fish or small game they had caught and began preparing lunch, joking about how all of the big fish must have been hiding from the white men. But this was a different stillness. It seemed terrible, nearly inhuman. When the head's mouth opened, almost before the fish had even broken the surface of the stream, it made a hole, into which the dark water smoothly flowed. Although the head was far away, I was certain I heard the echo of the water funneling down its throat in the instant before the fish leapt. When the fish leapt, it was not like the normal rise of a fish striking a mayfly; the fish, unlikely, impossible, invisible itself, its existence only traced by the water from which it emerged, jumped directly down the Indian's throat. It did not struggle. It did not thrash its tail against any teeth, nor did it worry with the tongue, which might possibly have seemed to it like another fish. It simply dived straight down the open throat, with the mouth closing behind it so quickly that the whole event seemed as if it hadn't actually happened outside of my imagination. In fact, it seemed not to happen at all, but, rather, suddenly, to have happened.

The Indian's face was as it had been before.

Then the face was my own. For an instant, the Indian's face turned to mine and I was looking at myself, as if in a mirror. I noticed the very first light of the day in the tops of the trees. There was a sudden breath of wind and I felt sore and so cold, I thought I might lose consciousness. The head in the water was gone. I could not have looked away for more than an instant, certainly not enough time for the Indian to have risen from the water and disappeared into the woods. The water was undisturbed, too; there wasn't a trace of any body entering or leaving it. My dismay at the head's disappearance is the last thing I remembered before waking up slung in a canvas tent and being carried out of the woods by Ed Titcomb and Rafe Sanders, who had come upon me while hunting and found me, passed out half in and half out of the water in the outlet. The canvas smelled like fish guts and stale smoke and old rain. He's not dead, I guess, Rafe said when he saw my eyes open. He was at my head, Ed at my feet. Should be, Ed said without turning. Rafe's face was directly above me, it and the trees behind it swinging in rhythm to Rafe's and Ed's steps. Their progress was quick but awkward and I am certain they would have preferred to carry me lashed to a birch pole by my wrists and ankles, the way they carried the bears that they shot. Rafe was smoking a cigarette, as always. Might still yet, he said. The ash sagging from his cigarette exploded like a burst of confetti when he said the s in still and it spun down into my hair and onto my face. I looked forward and saw Ed's stooped back covered by his red flannel shirt. His hat covered his wavy black hair but his head was bent forward and his pale neck visible. I thought, He'll be chewing his tobacco, too, and just before I lost consciousness again, I saw a jet of tea-colored juice spurt from his hidden face into the brush alongside the trail.

I remember that my father had a birch canoe when I was very young. Indians made the canoe and my father bought it from them. Every spring, when the ice went out, one of the Indians would appear out of the woods one morning and restore the canoe for the season. I never saw my faher speak with the Indian and I do not know how payment was made or collected or in what currency it was paid. After resewing loose seams and inserting new bark where it was needed, the Indian simply disappeared back into the trees. I remember squatting in the grass several yards from where the Indian worked, trying to learn what I might, which was nothing, but still something I felt compelled to do, as if my lesson was no more than the effort I made. After glancing away for a moment to look at the first robin of spring, I looked back at the canoe and the Indian had vanished without sound, without, seemingly, even movement, but, rather, had been reabsorbed back not only into trunk and root, stone and leaf but into light and shadow and season and time itself.

It may have been Old Sabbatis who repaired my father's canoe every spring, not long after the ice had gone out of the ponds and lakes. He seemed to me as old as light and just as diffuse. I thought about him when the sky filled with files of dark clouds, whose silhouettes were traced by the sun and which were interspersed with the clearest and cleanest blue imaginable. When gold and red and brown leaves blow across paths and are taken up by circles of wind, it seems like the passing of his time. When new buds light up wet black branches, they seem to burst forth from another side of time, which belonged to Sabbatis and men like my father. Of course, Sabbatis is ancient only to me. My father is ancient, too, because both were men who passed from life when I was young. My memories of them are atmospheres. Old Sabbatis was used to scare children or to explain strange weather. Sometimes he was seen in the tops of trees. Sometimes men on the lake saw him dart by in the water deep beneath their boats, chasing salmon. Old Red was famously silent about Sabbatis. Men who used him as a guide regularly asked Red about him and Red would say only that Sabbatis was gone. Even the older men who had used Sabbatis himself as a guide before, the year being sometime around 1896 or 1897-no one could agree; it was somehow just understood that Red was now the guide for fishing and hunting trips-even they would not talk about him, deepening an impression of a nearly prehistoric era, when hunting must have been far more dangerous and brutal, not the least for being orchestrated by a still half-wild Indian, who was old enough to remember his own grandfather's stories of raids not on bear or deer but on men, and who, for that reason, was closely watched and quarantined from the supply of rye and whiskey while on any expedition, in case the spirits should spark some atavistic fury. None of these older white men doubted for a moment that the Indian could slaughter a party of eight or ten armed men should he avail himself of his forefathers' savage wisdom. And, from the talk of theirs I heard when I was a boy, none of them thought for a moment that he actually ever would scalp a party in its sleep or as it was spread out through the woods on a hunt, although none of them seemed to mind that the more they protested Sabbatis' pacific nature, the more people seemed convinced that these men had somehow undertaken to set up camp with the devil himself, and that sleeping and hunting under his direction for weeks on end in the wilderness and coming home afterward, unscathed, to their jobs as bankers and lawyers and managers at the mills was a sign of their deep and true faith and nearly heroic strength of char acter, and they themselves eventually came to seem men who stood astride the old world of fire and flood and the new one of production quotas and commodities markets.