Spoonwood (10 page)

“White birch has medium density. It's kind of an all-purpose wood. The bark is oily but aromatic when it's burned, great for starting fires . . .” On and on he goes.

From my place hanging on the tree, I double my fists and swing them at Dad. I'm trying to create some entertaining chaos. Every time Dad talks, I work on speech recognition. I have learned to discriminate between vowels and consonants, but meaning continues to escape me.

“We do everything here with care and reverence and a touch of whimsy,” Dad says. “We cut a tree down, and we apologize to the tree. Our care is our prayer.

“Now about God, I'm vague on the details, which is where, it is said, you'll find the Devil. I don't know if God is a Catholic like your grandmother Elenore, or whether he's just a whisper in my ear from the Universe. That's how your mom used to define her religious belief: the whisper in her ear. She'd say, ‘God speaks to me in the sound of the wind, the sound of water.' Lilith the pagan was as close to God as your grandma Elenore, but in a different way. Or maybe a different god. I don't know. God, if He exists, likes to play with our minds. Even worse, with our hearts. Maybe He has a mean streak. You're going to have to work out the God business for yourself, because that's another one of your dad's weak areas.”

Dad leaves me momentarily to fetch his woodcutter tools from twig shelves built on the porch—chain saw, gas can, chain oil, felling wedge, sledge hammer, and walking stick, which doubles as a rule, because Dad has notched it at various intervals. I must explain that Dad doesn't deal in inches and feet. He's invented his own measurement system, based on my appendages. He discovered that I'm about the length of a piece of firewood
for our stove. He laid me out on the walking stick, and marked a Birch. From there he created other units—a leg, an arm, a forearm, a hand, and finally for the smallest unit of measurement a dink. For example, one of Grandpa Howard's cigarettes is a baby hand long, or about two baby dinks.

By late morning the temperature holds steady into the high teens. The sky is overcast, all the color gone out of it. The wind has risen. The barometer has fallen some more. No doubt it will snow. But how much? Only the radio can tell with any accuracy. I am grateful I do not have a radio. I have learned a little mental alchemy over the last few months, turning worrisome uncertainty into eager anticipation.

Back in the cabin, Dad sticks me in the new playpen. The first months at Forgot Farm I experienced bliss because I accepted my infantile state. But lately I sense changes within myself. I am bigger, stronger, still an infant, that's true, but beginning to hope for better things. There's nothing like hope to make a person unhappy.

I lie on my back looking at my new environment, wooden bars all around me, smell of raw linseed oil. The experience makes me philosophical. I cannot be free unless I am mobile.

My first idea is to fly, for outside I have seen the birds, and their mobility is superior to Dad's. I flap my arms and legs, but I do not fly. I rest, contemplating the matter. Perhaps it is pure will that achieves great desires. I concentrate, seeing myself soaring, but I do not soar. Am I doomed to spend my entire life like this, unable to fly or to change the world to my liking through will power? The answer that comes to me is yes, that is the way things are. I weep with rage.

“What's the matter?” Dad says. “You don't like your playpen?”

The sound of Dad's voice calms me, and I have a moment of clarity. I cannot fly because I am not a bird. I am some kind of creature like Dad.

From what I gather watching Dad, leg propulsion isn't all that difficult, so perhaps I can walk. While still lying on my back I send orders to my brain: walk. Unfortunately, I only succeed in whirly-gurgling my feet. Walking seems as remote a possibility as flying.

However, whirly-gurgling does amuse Dad, because I hear him laugh. Encouraged by his mirth, I ponder the problem more deeply, finally figuring out that you can't walk while you are flat on your back. To walk you have to be on your feet. How to get there? I experiment, reaching upward with my legs, my theory being that if you move the legs the feet will take the hint and start walking. The feet do not take the hint. Another theory dashed to pieces by Reality. I sense Spontaneous Combustion eavesdropping on my thoughts. He's amused.

I'm not discouraged—well, maybe a little. I won't quit, though. If there is one thing I am not it's a quitter. However, I do need a break from mobility training. Accordingly, I embark on another project: handling the fire across the room for possible consumption. I reason that since fire is entertaining, it must also be edible.

“Now what are you doing?” Dad says.

I'm trying to make my hand longer by reaching. I extend my arm and my hand grows smaller in the distance. It's just a matter of extension now. I reach. The hand blocks my view of the fire, so I believe I've touched it. But I don't feel anything but air. Are air and fire one? Won? Are air and fire Juan? As I contemplate these questions I inadvertently grasp one of the bars on my playpen and—whoop!—pull myself vertical. I am standing up.

Dad cheers.

It occurs to me now that I'm on my feet that I should be able to walk. I take a step and fall backward on my bottom. I cry, not out of pain—it does not hurt to fall on your bottom—but for the usual reason of frustrated desires. I will abandon the entire walking venture—I am a failure; I will never walk. I will spend a lifetime brooding on my failures. Naturally, thinking about failure leads to more thinking about failure, such as my vain attempts at speech recognition. Without mobility or speech, all I can do
between feeding and napping is to think, and thinking only leads to anguish.

“You want out. Well, okay.” Dad lifts me from the playpen and puts me on the floor. “Let's see what kind of trouble you can get into.”

I now have a clear view of the fire, and I am optimistic again; out here in the wide open spaces of the floor, away from the bars of my playpen, I believe I can be all that I can be. Be what? I hardly know what I am, let alone what I might become. But this is not the time for introspection. Without bars to hold me in I can expand outward toward the fire far far away. It is moving—the fire is always moving; it's the motion that calls to me. The motion says, Come and eat me. I will be a fire eater. How to get there? I must either lengthen my arms or close the distance between myself and it.

I reach with my right hand. The fire is no closer to the hand than it was in the playpen. The hand, connected to the arm, connected to the body, will never be long enough to reach the fire: a basic truth, as it comes to me now. Previous experience tells me that walking is out of the question. Can't fly, can't walk—what to do? I resolve to devise some unique mode of transportation.

I remember that long ago, long long ago I could swim. I'm not exactly sure what swimming is, because the memory is more a feeling than a picture or an understanding. But the feeling is so strong and so convincing that I know it has to be true—I can swim. I lay on my belly and extend my arms and legs and move them sinuously. I am swimming. It is a very nice feeling. Unfortunately, I am not making any headway.

I struggle over onto my back and swim. No perceivable movement. I fight off a tantrum. I go through the usual difficulties to sit up. Now I see the fire better. Hint: The better you see the fire, the better chance you have of getting to it.

What next? I sit stupefied for quite a while, perhaps six or seven seconds, and study my predicament. My hands have dropped to the floor. My bulk is on my bottom. Experience tells me that the bottom is the most powerful and important body part. Hands on floor, bottom on floor—think, now. Think! I
push with my hands and scoot with my bottom. Forward march! Well, not quite. My feet are in the way. If only I didn't have feet. But I have feet. Therefore feet must be relevant.

I flap the feet. No effect. I hear Spontaneous Combustion in my head. “You've been defeeted,” he laughs. I take a break and suck on my toes. Very satisfying. Invigorated, I work some more with the feet, and by digging in my heels succeed in engaging them with the floor. This technique assists slightly in scooting. I am moving, but slowly and not very straight. Still, scooting is fun, and I practice this motion just for the enjoyment, which takes me away intellectually from my goal of reaching the fire. That ancient memory of swimming comes back to me, mesmerizing me, as I scoot along. Too much reminiscence distracts a person from more important matters. When I snap out of my reverie I realize that I am further away from the fire than ever before.

The problem, I conclude, is turns. I will have to practice turns. It is difficult to turn and scoot at the same time, but turn I do. Wrong direction. Now I cannot see the fire at all. If you cannot see where you want to go, how can you get there? I answer my own question: trial and error.

I scoot, lurching this way and that, and inevitably I overdo it and topple on my side, banging my head on our carpeted floor. Usually the surprise factor combined with frustration would make me cry. Not this time. This time I right myself, not exactly sure how, but I do and find myself on hands and knees. Quite magically, I am moving. Hands and knees seemed to have a mind apart from the command-center head and the industrial bottom.

I have discovered crawling. Partly in exuberance, partly in a mission to test out my new technology, I crawl from one end of the school bus to the other and take stock of my new powers. I turn wherever I want to with accuracy, stop and resume speed at will. Always under control. I have found a means of locomotion that is toppleproof. I can transfer inertia to the other major positions of sitting and reclining with a minimum of effort. I will never have need for flying or walking. I believe that this skill will set me apart, for no one I know crawls.

I am happy but not content. No doubt I have invented a unique method of locomotion, but something is missing in my triumph. Mere success is not enough. I have to know why I succeeded. What is the source of this new power? The answer creeps out from under the question. The bottom propels the hands and knees. Discovering the technique was difficult because the action is counter-intuitive. Logically, one should proceed backside first; in reality, one proceeds backside last. I am, I believe, a theorizing entity. Some day when I have mastered speech recognition I will share my theories with Dad and the rest of the pathetic human race.

Now that I am rested, now that I have basked in my success, now that I have delved into its meaning, now I must exercise the powers given to me, for power that lies dormant is not power at all. It is mere potential. Through this round of thinking, I return to my desire to divine the secrets of the fire. Now I will test the flames for touch and taste.

I go forward on hands and knees. The flames are very pretty to look at. I conclude that they are alive. I want to play with them, but as I get closer to them I feel terrible heat. Just when I decide that this, like most of my experiments, will fail and I'd better back away, I see a shape behind the flames. It's you, Mother. What are you doing there? A moment later you're gone. Then back again. It occurs to me now what the meaning of the fire is. It is the thing between me, here, and you, there. It is a barrier of pain.

“My word,” I say, excited and proud as any father can be. This is one of the rare times since we moved to Forgot Farm that I wish other people were around, so I could shout hey, look, my son is crawling!

He stops about three feet in front of the flames. I swear he sees something in the fire he wants. A toy? I discourage toys on philosophical grounds. I have to teach him not to get too close. The heat should drive him back, but he edges closer.

At the last second I sweep him into my arms. He struggles. He does not wish to be touched.

“Hey, bub, you can't touch fire,” I say, but he fights me. I put him back on the floor and again he crawls toward the flames. I stand behind him, ready to grab him. He's very close and the fire is very hot. My philosophy is to allow Birch to find his way, never to criticize him, to support his every whim, for I believe that ultimately our whims are ourselves. Should I let him be burned? Three more times he attempts to crawl into the fire before I pull him away at the last moment. Finally, he lies on his back and cries in exhaustion.

I put him in the playpen with a bottle, but he knocks it away. He lies on his back, fighting the air with his fists. This is not a tantrum. It's something deeper.

I pull my shirt up and lie with him while he nurses. In his crying I hear an emotion that I'm well-acquainted with, but I cannot understand how a son barely nine months on the planet can feel it—inconsolable grief.

8

THE OLD RULE

E
ventually, Birch calms. I put him on his back in the playpen, and he's soon asleep.

Outside, I freshen the fire in my outdoor cooking grill. Back inside, I fetch the stew pot from the propane refrigerator and put it on the outside fire, along with a pot of well water for washing.

While the stew is warming, I set the table, run the carpet sweeper over the floor, and dust our stick walls. The down side of heating with wood is dust and wood grit. It is all I can do to keep this place picked up. Everything has to be just so, everything has to be clean, or I'll backslide into the person I was.

I check the weather gauges. Temperature twenty-two, barometer holding steady. The great thing about weather is that if you pay attention you can be part of it. It's a comfort, it's like you're not alone.

I wake from my nap, and it's as if it's years later. I feel older, stronger, more able. I expect I'll be able to talk and dance and sing and dress in jeans and wear shoes, and drive my own truck, but I'm a little ahead of myself. Turns out I'm still a damn infant.
Just wiser for the lesson of the fire. After Dad eats his stew we go outside again. We follow the stone wall downslope a short ways. For a fellow who's banned unnecessary conversation, Dad can ramble on. Years later he'll claim he was trying to teach me:

“This wall was built a couple and a half centuries ago as a property line, or maybe it was a fence to hem in the critters, or both. Just imagine this hillside a rocky, grassy pasture and you have an idea of what was here long ago.

“Your grandfather Howard and grandmother Elenore lived on many a farm when they were foster children. One of the places had a rule. Before going to school in the morning—when they were allowed to go to school—they were required to throw a rock from the field into a pile. Coming home same thing. There was no end of this work for the hill farmer of New England, because new rocks would appear in the spring, pushed up by frost, I imagine. Or maybe the Puritans were right, and the rocks were put there by the Devil. If so, thank you, Mister Devil. I like rocks and I like rocks of some size.”

I love to be outside in the cold with Dad, love the sound of his voice ringing in the air, the moisture of his breath, the reassuring jostle of his walking, which reminds me of the bliss of swimming long long ago.

When I stop talking, I feel suddenly pensive and preoccupied, almost forgetting that Birch is attached to me. With his outburst earlier in the day, with my anticipation of the first snow, something subtle in me is changing. I'm not quite sure what it is. In my quest for self-knowledge I'm always a step or two behind my intuition.

Without the amusements of mass media and peer companionship, I have become attuned to the moods of the forest. The way another man anticipates watching an NFL playoff game on television in December, I plan to watch the first snow fall.

There's still work to do. I will build a sled to carry Birch and groceries on the snow, and of course his care is a neverending task. Presently, I'm cutting firewood to season for the following
year and the year after. But I have all winter to do that chore. The fact is I've done the hard work, I and the chain saw. Now I will have some leisure time. I worry about filling the lonely hours in winter.

“I see you and me at Nick's,” Old Crow says. “Picture a glass of beer, a shot of whiskey on the side. Picture the liquor store in Keene, you walking down an aisle, reaching for a quart of me. Picture the glass now, the warm brown whiskey, the swirls, infinity inside. Here's looking up at you from the vortex of time. It will be a Christmas present, from me to you.”

“Why are you back—I'm not even drinking?”

“Cabin fever. Same difference. A drink will ease your mind. You can ration it out. One drink a day. Well, maybe two. Everybody does it around the holidays. Why should you be different? Why deny yourself?”

“Have two, I'll have three.”

“Have three and the toll gate to heaven opens,” says Old Crow.

“Or maybe it's the other place,” I say.

“You still have time to get away. A phone call to Attorney Prell's office that you are giving up the baby to Persephone will set you free. Picture yourself: drinking and driving across the country, alone, free of all duty. Free—Free!”

A few snowflakes begin to fall, which snaps me out of my thoughts. I have been having an unnecessary conversation with myself.

Was it cabin fever? Or just the power of my desire for drink? With all my work, my achievement, as I like to think of what I've done with Forgot Farm, I am still far away from self-mastery. I exist in a perpetual danger zone.

We return to Forgot Farm.

Dad puts me in my high chair, feeds me peach-flavored yogurt, and talks to me. “We live primitive out here, Birch, but nothing like Cooty Patterson back in the old days. He'd pick up roadkill and put it in his stew pot, along with veggies he'd pull out of dumpsters. He never emptied the pot to clean it, just kept adding
to it. Best damn tasting stew I ever ate. Took the pot with him to Texas.”

Dad dips his little finger in the yogurt and licks it. I look at him crossly, trying to tell him to get his grubby paws out of my chow. Dad laughs, and then I laugh, and Dad laughs some more, and I laugh some more. I'm quite proud of my laugh. My first laughs were practice laughs, in order to determine what a laugh is for. I've discovered that the action of laughter often leads one into mirth. The conclusion is obvious: the purpose of laughter is to feel funny.

It is good to laugh with Dad, though in the beginning shared laughter confused me. Laughing as one means we are one. It troubles me that sometimes we laugh separately. I wonder if Dad understands the difference, for he continues to behave in a manner suggesting that he is unaware of our separation of being. Though not always. Such are the ongoing problems of establishing and maintaining a me.

Dad does not laugh very often out of sheer mirth but for purposes that still remain unknown to me, though I suspect they have something to do with food, because when I am eating, Dad often breaks out into laughter.

“Hey, look, Birch,” he says, “it's starting to snow.”

But I'm not interested. I've had a long day, and I want to go to bed.

After I feed Birch and put him in his crib, I make my own supper, popped corn flavored with grated cheddar cheese. I eat at the table, alternately watching the snow fall, or the fire, and reading snippets from this week's library book,
Living the Good Life
by Helen and Scott Nearing. I always read out loud for Birch's benefit, even if he's sleeping. It's a dreamy book that pleases one such as me, though I can't understand how the Nearings make a living boiling off maple sap.

I eat very slowly, one kernel at a time, so that each provides a distinct and separate experience in taste and texture. With my meal I drink Ovaltine.

After I finish, I start some hot water on the outdoor cook grill and clean house while the water is heating. Birch is deep asleep. I undress, give myself a sponge bath, and put on fresh underwear. I wash my soiled clothes and hang them up to dry on sticks in front of the Franklin stove.

It's dark out, but the freshly falling snow captures light and gives everything outside a blue cast, not night, not day, but a magical twilight. I go outside and run in the snow in my bare feet. About an inch has fallen. I dance in the snow until my feet burn with the cold, and then I start back inside. On the way I spot something. It's as if the snow has given me eyes for this object—a beautiful, curved salad spoon. The vision vanishes, and I'm looking at the charred stick I'd pulled out of the fire that first day of our arrival back in June. I'd forgotten about it. Now there it is in the crook of the tree where I had placed it months before. I shake the snow off it and bring it inside.

I put my slippers on and light two candles, placing them on the nightstand beside my couch/bed. I put the night logs on the fire and go over to Birch's crib, kneel, and speak in a whisper, praying for his health and good fortune, not because I believe in the efficacy of prayer but because I believe in the necessity of prayer.

I pick up the charred stick and open the door to the Franklin stove with an idea to toss the stick in, but the stick won't let me. I drop it on the floor and throw some shavings in the fire to give myself more light. I carefully inspect the charred stick, seeing the flow of the grain, the topography of growth rings, feeling my way into thought through the touch of the wood. What to do with this stick? I'm not sure at this moment. I grab my hewing hatchet, hold the wood against a brick and knock off an edge for a better look at the grain. The raw wood, freshly revealed, gives me an idea.

I place the stick perpendicular on the brick, the edge of my hewing hatchet on top of the stick. I tap the head of the hewing hatchet with a wooden mallet until the stick starts to split. I inspect the grain and swing the hewing hatchet—which now holds the wood securely—onto the brick to complete the split.

I straddle the shaving horse, which is called a “horse” because you fit it between your legs like a horse, and I put the stick on it, pressing down with my foot to bring the dumb head firm on the stick to hold it. With the draw knife I hog off wood until the shape I had seen in the shadow outside begins to emerge. I love the draw knife work. It goes fast, and it creates curled shavings lovely as flower petals. I am very careful not to remove wood from the charred end, which I've already decided to incorporate into the work.

After I've done as much as I can with the draw knife, I take the stick out of the shaving horse, use my left hand as a vice, and with my right make finishing cuts with my jackknife.

I open a wooden case of chisels and gouges nested in velvet, remove a spoon gouge, shut the case, and hollow out the bowl of a spoon, again holding the stick in one hand and carving with the other. A good spoon requires a shallow bowl, so I am very careful not to yield to the temptation to cut deeply into the wood. And now that the spoon had taken shape, I know I won't ruin the wood's natural curve, which had been there all along. My only duty as a craftsman is to honor that curve. I choke back a surge of feeling, gratitude and something else I cannot identify. I'm within some better part of myself, a garden where Old Crow has no entry.

After the bowl is gouged out, I look the spoon over. It needs smoothing. I break a bottle and use one of the shards as a scraper. I find a piece of 400-grit sandpaper in my junk pile. The sandpaper reaches places the scraper cannot. I don't like using sandpaper. I imagine that some divine craftsman is spying on me: Frederick—Frederick, you're cheating again.

I put the spoon down, leaning it against a stick-shelf I've built under one of the school bus windows, and I admire my work, a smooth, cream-pink wooden spoon with the top third of the handle charred black, something small and simple and not very important, but something of use, something that has beauty, something that was always there waiting for my touch.

I sweep the floor, hone my tools, and put them away. I close the door to the Franklin stove and retire to my sofa bed. The
candle light flutters as if in speech: Read, the light says. I lie down, pick up the Nearing book, and plunge in. After five pages I am wondering why anyone would want to live in a stone house. One page later I determine that it isn't the stones in the house that put me off, it's the indifference to children in this couple's lifestyle.

It's maybe 8:00
PM,
an hour and a half or so past my winter bedtime. I snuff the candles between thumb and forefinger and drop the book on the floor. I drift off imagining I can hear the whisper of the falling snow. “Better to sleep than to think, better to think while you sleep, better to wile than to slink, better to blather—slink wile you blather—blather to, blather too, blather two, blather tu. Tu? Latour, that's a French name.” And so I fall asleep. Well, not quite. I soon pop fully awake. I've forgotten to oil the spoon.

I rise and light a candle. I pour a little raw linseed oil on my palm and rub it into the spoonwood. Life in the woods has made me a fussy man. Fussy. The realization strikes me with both exaltation and some despair. Self-knowledge is coming to me, if slowly and incompletely. I lie down, content in watching the snow fall. I know what this fussy man will do during the long winter months. I will make spoons and live by the old rule of woodworkers: oil-finish the piece every day for a week, every week for a month, every month for a year, every year forever.