Salvatore Scibona - The End

Later that morning, a soft-spoken young lady needing his aid to remove a ring is standing at his counter, where he has wrapped the swollen finger tightly with sewing thread, first at the tip and then down around the offending knuckle, in a dense coil, forcing the blood back into the hand. With a paper clip he stuffs the thread under the ring, and he’s begun unwinding the coil from the underside of the ring, each turn pulling it farther onto the knuckle, when the woman, wanting something to say, her modesty challenged (it’s an intimate encounter, alone with him in the gray room), gestures with her free hand at the long row of books above his head.

She says, “You got a whole liberry in here.”

His ear did catch that sweet word, yes. And the accent — Kentuckian, eastern. A lot of Company K boys from up around Prestonsburg, where his mother was born. His uncle’s property was a little downriver, near Louisa.

The woman has fine yellow hair, freckles all down the fine white arm. Dreema Hannibal, behind the Big Sandy Crick Baptist Church, in Prestonsburg, used to give him her fingers to squeeze after luncheon.

“To think I’s askeered you’d have to cut it off,” she remarks, watching his work.

Last night he dreamt he went back to Prestonsburg, to Mama’s hollar, and he heard the old folks talk again. Prestonsburg. And he feels the weakness, the woundableness, of a bashful man by the noise of common speech just as he has not heard it spoken in so long. Why today instead of any other day to be weak? Because the jeweler is tired; the concordance is failing him; and the woman says those sweet words not as people say them now, here, but as they used to do in Lawrence County, Kentucky, visiting with Mama’s people when the jeweler was a boy.

Soon after the woman leaves, he is standing at the counter, playing with the little hammer he keeps lying around to give people the idea that he cuts his own stones. With the head of this hammer, he finds himself tapping the countertop glass, as if idly. Then harder, making a sharp, constant tock, like a metronome.

Then the hand that holds the hammer rises above his head, unbidden.

Why does he say it again, aloud this time, but so quietly, hoping to hide behind its skirts like a child, when he is a man?

Prestonsburg.

Glass, many millions of pieces of glass, on the floor, on his shoes, on the watches, on the watch chains in the case.

Look where it comes again. A dog that bit you mercilessly, that you drove deep into the hinterland and kicked onto the snow, that’s found its way back to you. Because it loves you. You could never make it understand that you’ve repudiated it. He has indeed sworn an oath to never, never, never, never again. He wants to be let back into the room in his father’s house, where no lamps are lighted. He has grown old since the time he forsook it. Hello, it says. I love you.

A man in a wide-brimmed hat on the porch, knocking. (That man was him.) He has reason to believe you may be able to assist him with his research. He will pay handsomely for the privilege. His teeth gone brown. Don’t you nor anybody else know how many times inside the house the woman said, “You want a root beer?” and he said no; “You want to eat some crackers, Professor?” and he said no. How many times he told the dog, “This is my true calling — you stay under the table whilst I copy these down.”

The mere finishing stroke is what often appears to create an event which has long been an accomplished thing, wrote Thomas Hardy, of a man who discovered that what he believed was his sanguine nature was never his nature at all.

The jeweler is more afraid of the man in the hat on the porch, wheezing, than you are.

He’s two blocks down the street before he remembers he hasn’t locked the store, but now he is headed away.

He is brilliantly awake and running. He climbs aboard an east-bound streetcar. All around him people are pressed into one another’s shoulders and asses. Two men are arguing in some Slavic language in the rear of the car. A boy wraps his arms around his mother’s leg. The jeweler wipes off his shoes with his handkerchief as though it will soothe him. But he doesn’t want soothing now.

When the hammer came down, the glass pieces of the countertop sprung up and the case was a bloom of splinters, like the crown of a thistle that’s come open.

The brakeman lets go his brake, and the car rolls down the salted rails through the East Side streets.

The jeweler does not know where he is going.

Later. Dusk. He is seated on a stool in the back corner of a café, waiting. He has a foreign newspaper he’s pretending to read. In his mind, he sounds out each letter of each meaningless word, each piece of gibberish, like a man tasting marbles one by one. There is a window looking out on the avenue, and it lets in a weak, smoky light, and the passersby tap a nail on the glass to get the man behind the bar to raise his chin and acknowledge them. This could easily be the smallest place of business in North America. Foreigners enter in twos. The jeweler can smell them as they come in. He doesn’t try to talk to anybody. The only English words he hears them use are slurs and the names of the makes and models of automobiles. The afternoon progresses into evening.

The jeweler moves his eyes over a string of words beneath a photograph in the newspaper of a kind of demonstration, a strike or a funeral or a Christmas parade — they are carrying a statue of a woman through a street. He has been sitting here for five hours, eating miniature marzipan peaches and watermelons, poisoning himself with sugar, waiting to be found. He’s not hiding, he’s right down the street, he’s right here. And it comforts him to think that the words beneath the photograph, considered as a group, are called a caption. He knows that’s what these words are called even if he has no idea what they mean.

As a boy, with his uncle in Louisa, every winter for eight years, he walked through the snow and muck, following the trapping line, and into Prestonsburg on Sundays for church. He was meant to attach himself to the place sentimentally. They stayed in a one-room cabin with a potbelly stove to heat the place and cook on and ate opossum stew for supper, and turnips. How bored he was in the woods, he complained to his mother when he got home. But one time she told him something that he is reminded of by the caption, by the moment of release it brings to call a thing what it is — she said, “You’re bored because you don’t know the names of things.”

Therefore he has developed the habit, in moments like this — when the din of all his selves recriminating one another is more than he can bear — of picking out the objects in a room and naming them to himself.

That piece of furniture holding the spare china is a sideboard. The lower part of the wall with the paneling on it is the dado, the paneling itself is wainscoting. That’s the door.

Some of the men linger. Some of them buy a box of cookies tied up in blue ribbon and throw the silver down and dash out. Some of them are assumed into the others the moment they come in, no greetings exchanged, and the little coffee cups appear on the bar without their even asking. Women knock at the window and call the men by name, but the women don’t come inside.

The jeweler turns a page of the inscrutable newspaper.

The woman’s blood is under his fingernails. Before he left, he washed his hands in her kitchen sink, then dried them, then washed them again. He washed the water glass he’d used. He left it to dry on the dish rack and went back into the parlor, where the woman lay on the floor. He introduced himself again, it was at least the third time, and asked again what her name was, but again she didn’t respond, or even stir, half-naked there under the coffee table. He couldn’t find a nailbrush, so there is still some blood under his fingernails. He tries not to look at the blood under his fingernails. He resists the temptation to smell them.