Shadow Baby (12 page)

After the old man was gone, I found an old Sears Roebuck catalogue at the Back of the Barn Antiques on Route 12 north of Remsen. I went there with Tamar once, so she could visit her friend who works there. Tamar’s friend owns a bird who sits on her shoulder all day long. The bird is silent. It is neither a talking nor a singing bird. For a while I thought it was a clip-on bird. That was before it blinked its eye at me and yawned.

In the catalogue there was a picture of a forge and a vise that looked like the old man’s forge and vise. Here is the description of the forge from the Sears, Roebuck & Co., Cheapest Supply House on Earth, Chicago, Catalogue No. 111, page 613:

The vise and the forge came with a complete set of tools, and altogether the complete set cost $25. I asked Mr. Jewell how much the old man had paid for his forge and vise at the auction.

“I wouldn’t know, Miss Clara,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

The old man had been gone for months by then.

Why did I ask? I wouldn’t know.

N
ext time I went to the old man’s, on a Saturday afternoon, the tin-snipped pieces of olive oil can had disappeared from the table. The old man had screwed in large cup hooks all along the top of the far kitchen window frame. Hanging on the hooks were new cookie cutters. If you looked closely, and if you had personal knowledge of their previous life as a dented olive oil can, you might be able to tell that what were now cookie cutters had once been broken pieces of metal.

The olive oil can had been reincarnated as objects of light. One was in the shape of a decorative tin lantern, another was a candelier, another was a candlestick with a cutout of a burning candle in it.

“But soft!” I said. “What light from yonder window breaks? It is the east, and cookie cutters are the sun.”

The old man smiled.

“Juliet,” he said. “
Juliet
is the sun.”

Did the old man listen to Shakespeare in his own language, back in his country that doesn’t exist anymore? Is it possible that in his small village, there was a troupe of traveling actors who passed through the countryside every year, performing a different Shakespearean play each time? Is it possible that the old man loved the poetry of William Shakespeare and never missed a performance? Did he crouch as a small boy behind the cloth-curtained stage of the traveling troupe and absorb every word they spoke so that the language of Shakespeare became part of every fiber of his being?

I will never know.

I studied the former olive oil can carefully. This is something you must do when you’re an apprentice. You must look at all finished objects with the knowledge that they came from something unfinished, something in an unbegun state. You need to consider all their states of being, all their transformations.

Each cutter had been created in the image of something that already existed: a lantern, a candelier, a candlestick. There was a theme to all three cookie cutters: they were all objects of light, they were all objects that had been most often used in a previous era, they were all objects most often constructed of tin.

The old man wanted me to learn how to find consistency. That was why he taught me by example. That is what it means to be an apprentice to the art of possibility.

A breeze gusted through the trailer and set the cookie cutters jostling and tinkling together. The noise that the cookie cutters made was like the noise of a thousand soda can tops strung together with string and shaken gently. Sunlight glinted
off the metal. It was the same kind of beauty that you see in a sunshower, light broken to shards through rain.

Shards. How I love that word.

“There was a time,” the old man said, “when most cookies were made with cutters.”

The drop cookie is a modern invention, according to the old man. Cookies used to take time and care. They were not beaten together and immediately dropped onto a metal sheet and baked. They were not patted into a pan and called bar cookies. They were mixed, chilled, rolled, formed, cut, baked, dipped, powdered, sprinkled, iced, decorated. They were delicately sugared and a trifle brown around the edges. They were thin, not thick.

“Lemon peel,” the old man said. “Always put lemon peel in your sugar cookies.”

You wouldn’t think that the old man would have known that much about baking. To look at his Jewell’s shopping list you would never have guessed that the old man was a master cookie baker.

It’s possible that the old man once baked sugar cookies with lemon peel for someone he loved, back when he lived in his country that doesn’t exist anymore.

Did Tamar ever do anything like that?

I could come right out and ask Tamar some of my answer-demanding questions, such as, “Did you ever bake cookies for someone you once loved, such as my father? What is my father’s name? Where did you meet him? Where is he now? Did he love you, and did you love him more than words can say?”

But I don’t.

“How did you get pregnant?” is what I ask.

Tamar doesn’t mind questions that sound scientific. She likes science, except when it runs amok as in the case of margarine.

“In the usual way,” Tamar said.

Tamar knew what I was really asking. I was asking about my father. I was asking about love.

I should have asked the old man.

There’s a chance that when the old man was seventeen and still living in his village that doesn’t exist anymore, he fell in love. People grew up fast in the olden days. By ten you could be considered close to an adult. When the old man was a young man, fifteen or sixteen, did he meet a girl? Was she a girl that he had grown up with but had never noticed until she was a young woman with brown curls and he was a young man?

He saw her one day, walking down the road in the spring wearing a dress with yellow flowers printed on it, running upstairs to the stone house above the bakery where she lived with her family.

She was a graceful girl. She was singing, or humming, as she ran up the stairs. She was wearing brown leather sandals. The smell of yeast rising in the bakery below her home came to the young man’s nose, and he breathed in and watched her run and listened to her humming.

Did the old man foreverafter associate the smell of baking bread with the image of a pretty, running girl?

When she got to the top of the stairs the young girl sensed something, and turned around, and saw the old-man-as-a-young-man. She met his brown eyes with her own. She looked right back at him. She knew his name.

She whispered it to herself:
Georg
.

She smoothed the skirt of her dress with the yellow flowers printed on it. She was just about to push open the door of her home—her mother had left it ajar for her—and her hand was suspended in the air while she gazed back at the young man. She stared for a moment, maybe two seconds, then laughed and pushed her hand at the air and opened the heavy wooden door and disappeared. The old man stared for a few minutes more and said her name to himself.

What was her name?

Was it Juliet?

Juliet
, he might have thought. The sound of her name, unspoken, hung in the invisible air before him.
Juliet, Juliet, Juliet
.

Did the young Georg make cookie cutters for Juliet? Did he make her beautiful objects that were also useful? Did he bake sugar cookies for her and teach her the secret of adding lemon peel to the batter?

When I first met the old man I dreamed up a life for him, back in his country that doesn’t exist anymore. His father, his mother, his younger brother Eli, all of them living together in their warm thatched hut, cornmeal mush or hot gruel for breakfast, a black iron pot of stew for dinner, the mother beating clothes white against the rocks, the father teaching his sons the art of the forge, how to turn heated metal into objects of use and beauty. I dreamed of the old man as a hero, rescuing tiny babies from floodwater, surviving ten years of unjustly sentenced solitary confinement.

Before he was gone I learned more about the old man’s real life, but not all. You can’t ever know all there is to know about a life. There will be gaps.

There may well have been a girl named Juliet. It’s possible. She may have lived and breathed in the old man’s village. The first time the old man ever saw that girl, she may have been running up the steps above the bakery, wearing a dress printed with tiny yellow flowers. Maybe the old man never forgot the sight. Maybe the old man thought of her every day of his life. He might have loved her more than words can say.

My only hope is that she loved him, too.

O
ne day last fall Tiny pulled up to CJ’s trailer just as CJ’s white Camaro screeched off the road, up over the grass, and around the bus. The top was down. There was a man in a red flannel shirt behind the wheel. He gave Tiny the finger.

“Jesus H Christ,” Tiny said.

I looked over at CJ. There was a look on his face.

“Who’s that driving your car, CJ—your dad?” one of the North Sterns boys said.

“Yeah, is that the famous Chucky Luck?”

“No that ain’t my dad,” CJ said. “I told you about my dad. Does that guy out there look like a professional wrestler to
you?
”

The boys looked out the window.

“I guess not.”

“Well there’s your answer,” CJ said.

“How about your mother? Is she a professional wrestler too?” one of the boys said.

Everyone was quiet. No one talks about CJ’s mother. CJ Wilson’s mother has never been seen that I know of. Were it not a law of nature, you might wonder if CJ even has a
mother. CJ looked at the boy who asked the question. The boy looked right back at him.

“I’m asking about your mother, CJ.”

CJ turned around and pointed to me.

“And I’m asking about Wipe’s father. Wipe? Where’s your father at?”

All the boys turned and looked at me. The boy who asked about CJ’s mother laughed.

“Maybe he ran off with CJ’s mother.”

“Yeah. CJ’s mother and Wipe’s father!”

CJ looked at me while the boys laughed. Didn’t say a word.

There must have been something CJ’s mother loved about CJ’s father. There must have been something Tamar saw in my father, something she loved, even though she won’t talk about him. CJ may well wonder about his mother the way I wonder about my father and grandfather.

There was a time when I would have given anything to know about my grandfather, Tamar’s father, that man living the life of a hermit in a patch of primeval forest near the Vermont border. I used to ask Tamar about him. One time I asked her when she was rubbing the once-frostbitten toes of her right foot with mineral oil.

“Is your foot hurting?” I said.

“No,” she said. She wiggled it in my face, to prove how non-hurting her foot was.

“Do you think, Ma, that a hermit could survive on about fifty dollars a year?” I said.

“Absolutely not.”

“How much then? How much do you think a hermit who does all his own trapping and food-gathering would need to survive with just the bare essentials?”

“At least five hundred,” said Tamar.

She knows. She always has an idea.

“Why five hundred?”

“Food staples. Candles and waterproof matches. The occasional tool. One Greyhound bus ticket per year. Books.”

Books. Would a hermit read books? Is that something a hermit would do?

“Are you sure about the books?” I said.

“All hermits read books.”

“But he wouldn’t have to spend money on them,” I said. “He could hike into the nearest village and use the library.”

“He could not use the library. To use a library, you must obtain a library card, and to obtain a library card you need a permanent address. A hermit does not have what would be considered a permanent address. Also, a hermit would not return to a village often enough to avoid huge overdue fines, which he could not afford to pay.”

She made sense.

“A bus ticket?” I said.

“All hermits must leave their hermit dwellings once a year. It’s an unwritten rule among hermits. It’s part of the Hermit Bill of Rights. As a hermit expert, I would’ve thought you already knew that.”

I took my roll of adding-machine paper and started out of the kitchen.

“Don’t be mad,” Tamar said.

“Then don’t humor me. Good-bye.”

“Where are you going?”

“To visit a friend.”

“Which friend?”

“Georg Kominsky: American Immigrant,” I said.

“That’s seven miles, Clara.”

“It’s early in the day,” I said. “I’m a good walker. I’ll be there by lunchtime.”

I put my roll of adding-machine paper in its tin holder and zipped it into my backpack.

“Be careful,” Tamar said. “Watch for cars.”

D
o not ever walk seven miles in sandals without socks. I knew this before I was half a mile down Route 274 but I did not turn back. I refused to give Tamar the satisfaction. By the time I was at the intersection of Crill Road and 274 my feet were not in good shape. I took my sandals off and wound dandelion leaves around my toes so that they would stop rubbing up against each other. Every quarter mile or so the dandelion leaves would grind themselves into a pulp and I had to wipe them off and start over again. After a while blood from the blisters started mixing with the green dandelion leaf pulp. I wished desperately that it was fall, so that the milkweed pods along the road were ready to burst, and I could line my feet with the silky down inside them. For the last three miles I dreamed about the softness of milkweed in the fall.

The old man was working in his onion garden when I got there. By then I was barefoot, despite the possibility of rusty nails and broken glass on the road.