Paul Harding - Tinkers

Of course, Sabbatis was a man, like any other. It was known that he liked looking at any photographs people were willing to show him, although he refused to have his own taken, unless, strangely enough, it was with a baby. Several photos exist of him standing on the front gallery of Titcomb's general store or on the porch of the North Carry Hotel (where he worked for many summers cutting wood) with a child held in the crook of his arms. These were the only times Sabbatis was known to have smiled. He also had a fondness for saltwater taffy, which he regularly accepted as part of his payment for acting as a guide from sportsmen who came up from Boston. He had no teeth and simply slid a stretch of the candy between his gums and his cheek and let it dissolve. He and Red, who was called Little Red in those days, lived in a cabin just beyond town, behind where Gooding street was made and houses put up for the new managers of the mills, who were hired in anticipation of the increase in business when the trains came through West Cove. No one knew whether Sabbatis and Red were related by blood. Some of the old librarians, who had a sense of the town's history, thought they might be distant cousins, and could easily be provoked into heated arguments about the matter during a slow winter twilight at the checkout desk in the library. It may simply be that Sabbatis and Red lived together because it was better to them to live with even the strangest Indian than the friendliest white man. They were rarely seen together outside of their yard and were never heard speaking with each other at all. Little Red became Old Red only when Sabbatis died, or disappeared, as the case was. In the fall of 1896 or 1897, depending on who was asked, men came to the cabin to arrange for the season's hunting trips, and Sabbatis was not there. Red said, He's gone, and that was that. Red seemed to understand the disappointment of the men-that he was somehow more tame and domesticated than his predecessor. So, Old Red took the men on their trips and did just as well as Sabbatis had, with apparently neither training nor experience. In becoming Old Red, he seemed to relinquish himself as a particular man and become the embodiment of some eternal thing that itself stood outside of time and whose existence as any given person was merely circumstantial.

Ed and Rafe did not want to miss out on a good day's hunting, perhaps because their families depended on it, and they must have decided that I was in no danger of perishing because they dropped me off at the junction of two tote roads, where, they knew, a lumber crew would pass sometime that morning. I must have wakened at some point and wandered back into the woods. This is when I believe I had my first epileptic seizure. When I awoke again, I spent some time lost and I did not return home until after the sun had set. I was wet and chilled through. Blood caked my hair and had run in a line from the corners of my mouth, down along my jawline, and into my ears, where it had collected and thickened. Even though I could hear my own panting as I made my way through the dark, I thought I had gone deaf because I couldn't hear anything outside of me, like my own footsteps or the wind. My tongue was swollen so much from my nearly biting it off that I could not properly close my mouth.

When I entered the kitchen through the back mudroom, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table mending a pair of my socks. She said something to me without looking up or even moving her mouth. This was the way she usually addressed me. There was no reason for her to raise her voice or look me in the eye or say my name, for that matter, in order to get my attention. She and I expected that I would simply always heed her words.

I shouted back to her, I had a spell and went deaf.

She put down her needle and thread and came and took me by the hand and led me to the table. She sat me down and went out to the pump, where she soaked a towel. I could smell the plain soap she used, and the wood burning in the stove, and the food smell of the kitchen, which was vaguely like chicken and butter and bread, although she had not cooked any dinner.

First, she scrubbed the blood out of my ears. The sounds of the world hissed in my head, clearer than I remembered them.

I said you are in a state, she said.

I went looking for Dad.

Then she scrubbed the blood from my face and hair. My skin stung from how hard she scrubbed and it seemed she would pull my hair right from my scalp. She wept as she cleaned me. She did not sob, but must have muted her grief by cleaning me so fiercely that I finally yelped, and she calmed. She took my face in her hands, which were cold and raw and calloused, and told me to open my mouth.

You must not speak for a week.

I began to say, No, I went looking for Father's teeth in tree wood and his hair in the stalks of bushes andbut she clamped my face more tightly and said, Stop. Seven days. Your tongue will fall off if you speak any more. It may have been true, for all I ever knew. It felt forked in my mouth, odd, mangled. I didn't dare to look at it in the mirror.

This was the first night my mother and I spent together in the kitchen without my father, she mostly at the stove preparing food or in the straight chair by the woodstove mending our clothes. On Sunday nights, she ironed the sheets and the curtains and I did my homework to the sound of the hissing steam and the smell of scorched starch. Long after my tongue healed and I was able to speak, my mother and I remained silent.

That first night, however, she made a broth and fed it to me through a tin basting wand, which she inserted into my mouth along the side and down to the back, nearly into my throat, in order not to touch my tongue, like a mother bird feeding a chick. The broth was very hot and salty and it scalded its way down to my stomach. Once its heat was inside me, it radiated out from my middle, until I was finally warmed through. My mother was very patient. The process took nearly an hour. I recall only the gradual exchange of coldness and pain for warmth and exhaustion. The forest had nearly wicked from me that tiny germ of heat allotted to each person and I realized then how slight, how fragile it was, how it almost could not even be properly called heat, as its amount was so small and whatever its source so slight, and how it was just like my father disappearing or the house, when seen from the water, flickering and blinking out.

DURING THE DAYS, GEORGE WAS AWARE OF A large group of people murmuring and flowing in and out of the room as if on tides. At night, though, when he awoke, there was only and always one person sitting on the couch next to his bed, reading by the dim light of a small pewter lamp set on the rolltop desk at the far end of the couch. The person was always familiar to him, but he never knew exactly who it wasif the person was a man or woman, relative or friend. It was as if every time he tried to gather his senses and focus on the person-hair, eyes, cheekbones, nose-in order to recall a name, the person retreated to his peripheral vision, this even though the person remained sitting in full view.

The first night he found the benevolent stranger, he asked, Who are you? And the person looked up from the book and smiled and said, You are awake. He asked, What time is it? The person answered, It is very late. This exchange seemed to occur without him or the person speaking. George could not tell if it was the pills or his normal confusion or if, in fact, he and the person were even communicating at all. It seemed even that when he wondered this to himself, the person answered, You are right here, speaking with me. You are as clear as a chime.

George attempted to see the person clearly by looking away for a moment and concentrating on the stilllife painting at the opposite end of the room and then looking back, concentrating on trying to look straight into the person's eyes. When he did this, the person seemed like a will-o'-the-wisp, seemed not to sit on the couch, but to hover just above its cushions, and, whenever looked at, to dart to the left or right, up or down, without apparent conscious effort, as if the movement was a reflex, some natural defense, so that instead of being observed directly, he or she always presented an elusive vision flickering against a background of curtain, lamp, desk, couch.