GoldenHandcuffsReview.com

In the year 1990 I tell this to a woman who is on a job with me, and we 

share an issue of justice, I believe, but at that moment of first 

meeting, little more. A recollection of hers inspires mine, and she 

hears me out.  She happens to be an expert on sound.

               One summertime I dreamt of varnishes.  I was a boy. "Dream" in the 

sense of eat, sleep, think varnish, thin, mix, and apply again. And 

varnish remover.

               I carved a model whaleboat.  Chiseled it, I hear the split and scrape, 

gouged it out of a slab of stained hardwood that had been lying on the 

toolshed floor for weeks - for years. A base, a stand for a trophy, I 

can't imagine what. The wood had this deep and independent gravity to 

it, and the finish brought up a richer, plum band or stripe across the 

top side like the dark gap between the good creamy rings of Saturn in 

my book.  And I -  who knew where the rakes were, three trowels, the 

pink skull of (I think) a cat at the foot of the neighbor's 

termite-ridden fence post, a rusted little handsaw, the tuning fork my 

mother had left beside the kitchen sink, the wintergreen-tasting twigs 

and dirty red bark of the woodpecker's preferred tree on the far side 

of the house, my sister's bike covered by me with a plastic tarp when 

she went to camp, and here behind a blue coffee can (kerosene-smelling) 

of nails (to be used as a target when my town friend brought his air 

rifle out) my sister's zippered kit of bike tools and an unused train 

ticket on the shelf above the workbench in this shed where I had 

learned for myself the carpenter's rule  Measure twice, cut once -  I 

who (as my father put it) kept track as much as anyone around this 

joint had left where I'd seen it the middle of June this eighteen-inch 

block of maple inherited like the tool shed itself from the previous 

owner. Part of something else.  Noticing it now I took it up off the 

floor and felt it and  was drawn to it by a force of ownership.

               For the first time I thought vaguely, What is going on around here?  

In fact, I loathed myself as a boy, despised the balsa wood of my 

old-fashioned model kits - can you imagine? These had been procured for 

me by my great-uncle, a Warrant Officer in the Coast Guard, and they 

were specialty items even in those days. I don't know where he found 

them. A heavy cruiser, an aircraft carrier, slim destroyers side by 

side, a buoy tender, an old scale-model 83-foot harbor patrol boat. 

Today it's all pre-cut plastic, and was even then.  Whereas my 

great-uncle  thought plastic an abomination. Granted it repels "ship 

worms" on a real boat, but then you get chronic barnacles and you need 

to apply anti-fouling paint. Plastic come to think of it may have been 

just about all he felt himself in extreme opposition to - such a quaint 

objection it seems now. I could cut a hull from a length of balsa when 

I was nine. A double-ended Macao junk had my blood on it.  Airy as 

cork, completely dispensable  meringue-light balsa wood for kids to 

carve like cheese.

               I'd had other kits that required no cutting to speak of.  Old friend 

bass wood, for a Union Pacific locomotive, a Patton tank with treads 

that moved. But not to be compared to what I found on the floor of the 

toolshed, our toolshed now (for we had bought this place cheap after 

renting it the previous summer. Now what was that like?).  I was almost 

twelve. In that instant, balsa seemed soft as styrofoam, the crust of a 

loaf, as flesh, I didn't know what, an avocado, and I would try my hand 

upon this ill-advised hardwood - my knife and the dented chisel that I 

had come upon by chance striking it with my rake in a pile of rotten 

leaves. It said -  this chisel, but more this curious dent or uncannily 

retooled minute trough in it, no more than a wicked little groove in 

the middle of the blade,  Get started, get going.

               You see my mood, Humming all the time in fact.

               Instead of breathing.

               Remembering little things the way you can't not remember some larger 

ones - now that's confusing, the way I put it. Animal smell of the sun 

on the earth at the exposed root of an outstanding sweet white oak that 

now belonged to us; or on the other hand my mother and father's 

parallel love of life, I suppose.

               The woman I'm telling this to more clearly than it could have been 

told or thought twenty-five years before narrows her eyes, she has a 

look of attention and polite impatience, she wants to hear what's 

coming, understanding that this isn't a story maybe. How could there be 

passion in her interest, impertinence?

               Kneeling among shingles, splintered shims, and hard rice grains and 

kernels of horse corn and preferring the bottom of a yellow milk crate 

to rest the block of maple on, I took the handsaw to its corners, and 

soon had a crude oval, kerosene-smelling because of the saw.

               But not an oval. God!, a many-sided mess on my hands to take me until 

I had to go back to school -  the rest of the damn summer to finish the 

boat, the wood implacable, or until my sister got home from camp.

               But not a mess, when I blinked and saw my crude cuts now as one sweep 

of gunwale either side and found my pencil in the clanking can of 

nails. This thing I made would be a model of an old double-ender 

whaleboat, not quite the flared, sea-steep prow and stern of a 

Portuguese fisherman's "half-moon" but steadier and stronger. But 

maple?

               Next morning I began to shape the gunwales and hollow out the hull on 

the ground outside. Holding my breath, and with awful slips and stops, 

holding the mad tool down one-handed with the whole half of me bearing 

down on the damnably minerally resistant block.

               My gouge-marks looked like fingertips working another matter trying to 

get somewhere and there was a war on and I'm right here ensconced in a 

summertime state with no coastline. Jazz in my throat, my unconscious 

humming a frequency set to a secret future that was my own, and hoping 

to take up the saxophone. But ruining my fingers on the wood. Cutting 

myself on the blade. Muttering "Deeyum!" bringing to life this piece of 

a petrified forest which maybe remembered in my gougings the leafy tree 

it came from.  By this time they were casting hulls out of cement, so 

here was hope for me, hollowing out my hull, holding ( my great-uncle 

said)  the line  (for the Coast Guard had turned to steel and 

fiberglass).

               Wood calms.

               My sister at camp, perhaps I'm not like the people at this summer 

place -  my parents -  their mysterious routines: I was like the place 

itself I now think -  that was what I was like -  this close little 

toolshed and nine and a half acres around the house to do with what we 

wanted.

               And I was getting somewhere, because for some reason I didn't have 

much time.

               It was quiet there, said the woman I was telling this to; but that's 

going to end. I touched her hand. It had no effect on her.

               I worked the oval length of the thing deeper. I created a barrelly 

roominess. Gunwales flaring emerged from the inside out - and I had 

even carved  (I can't believe it today years later)  a miniature cradle 

of passable gunwale ribs. Till one day (floor-planks maybe to come) I 

had nowhere to go almost yet kept faithfully sanding and finely 

shaving. Wanting to show the boat to Liz, the neighbor's younger 

daughter whom I loved;  and happy as a "free man" not to be interrupted 

by her, prizing the dark, plum vein straight through the block 

unplanable and of a natural- weight. Quiet around here? Not always, as 

even the neighbors know. My father's a famous talker, a public speaker, 

and he and my mother have a way of speaking to each other that's very 

audible.

               The toolshed, though, is conceded to me. At almost twelve I'm not your 

skilled woodworker.  But I am taken for thirteen.  Secret and 

determined - for I go into what I don't know.  I know enough to try, 

and am cruelly inspired some days, tall for my age,  proud of the 

papery-tiered gray-plastered-cone hornet nest just outside the door up 

under the overhang of my shed roof, a generation of long brown wasps, a 

power I lived with and thought I could arouse from this nest to do some 

bidding I was not fiendish enough to yet know.  I'm somebody. That was 

it.

               Till one day, to music, the unwavering, final sound of a cello, taking 

something from my humming you would swear (or coming in on it) the 

rough-cut, gouged and gunwaled and resanded hull of my whaleboat with a 

tiny, carved, not-glued-on keel and stem and stern post, when I held it 

by the gunwales rose almost from my fingers it was now comparatively so 

light - though hardwood maple as I had learned from my mother 

appropriately, whose cello far away inside the house it was. It was a 

particular day, expectant, unwise;  I knew this piece of wood, and we 

were expecting an important friend of my father's in the late afternoon 

and my father had left for an appointment in town but was coming back, 

an embarrassment of riches as I saw it and saw it then, and I was not a 

person with ever nothing to do, though my father had an opinion on that 

score who himself thought being holed up in a tool shed or finding a 

weasel's,  probably a marten's, little S-curved scat on the far side of 

the river was O.K. for a kid or some other types but not greatly 

thrilling. Or a question like my humming, sometimes loud, stood next to 

me if I could identify its appointment with me, this question. Which 

was, What did I know was going on, if anything?

               My mother, doubtless alone but don't assume anything around here, was 

not doing something silent but was practicing somewhere inside our 

land-embedded, landscape-lost cottage today, private in that wooded, 

stony-spined, hilly province of Vermont. Audible strangely in memory 

too, the faraway, heart-breaking throat-gripping authority of that 

instrument's tone said,  Listen, listen, bring the boat inside and test 

it in the bathtub. I saw it manned and rocking, I saw it passengered, 

did I hear music coming from it? - I was strung myself enough to 

concentrate so hard I might not hear tires on the driveway.

               I ask as of a not quite real nightmare: and  who was the woman under 

the bed telling a long, almost funny, frighteningly unrememberable 

story, and who were the much-decorated twin Marines adrift in 

slow-motion orbit about the Moon?  Yet I kept scraping, and with 

practically new sheets of coarse and fine left by the previous owner 

sandpapering down to the rubbed-pale, somehow distinguished paper that 

had been coarse-  and  fine-sand. Now sounding an eerie thinness of 

bottom that I would rap proudly, and wishing my mother or someone would 

come here by chance and only for a minute and look at what I  had to 

show. It was her college cello she was playing this July day we found 

ourselves apparently alone, she with a touch, a lostness and sweep of 

elbow enough to make you smile (I could see her), it was comical,  a 

fineness of face I could see in the wood I worked never imagining that 

I was being watched; and "not a musician," she said, for she "never" 

played her cello; dragged it up here (in the car) along with her high 

school clarinet, "the easiest reed to know" (though a weakie next to 

piano and sax), plus her plastic recorder from primary school.  Why 

does she play only when she "has time"? I am told I said, because I 

would say things.

               To my father this summer of 1966: If you could find a war you liked 

would you go fight in it?

               Grownups laughed, so my sister I believe laughed too but didn't like 

it. So what has changed?  (For this has not.)  Say things and people 

will hate you.   Go to your enemies for the truth, for justice. Say 

things and many people will pretty much love you. My father with much 

talk about American police state freedom I recall didn't seem to expect 

much of me. I am finding the words; they, really, me. He was for 

freedom. He saw you as being set for life with your abilities. I mean 

that you couldn't do much, you were pretty ordinary but the struggle 

for freedom would make it OK.  But what has changed?

               The woman listening nods almost imperceptibly.

               From that time, that day? I add.

               My mother had a policy of more or less not going into town, whereas I 

had two friends in town, one with a Buck air rifle that shot .177  BBs  

who had plans for us, and one with a real bow who fletched his own 

arrows (whose father coached hockey at the high school), and a thick 

red blue and white target with a stand.  My mother's wariness became 

mine, I weighed her words.  (Why don't I think of the house as ours?  

Feeling like a lodge as you went foreignly through the front door - and 

who knew where you would wind up, is there an undiscovered annex? what 

was unfixed about it, if anything?  We had bought the place after 

renting it one summer, and I was nearly twelve and believed in 

owner-ship down to the faintly harsh or peppery peppermint smell of my  

mother in the hall, "extremely independent" (my father described her 

but it didn't sound right).

               Until, this morning, on my knees on the shed floor, tapping the flat 

bottom of my boat, fighting it, pampering it, blowing on it, caressing 

it, and fine-sanding the inside, so that with proud unconcern I heard 

the ajar door creak and knew someone was in the doorway of this tool 

shed behind me (did I need a sweep-oar instead of a tiller?), I heard 

the faraway inside-the-house cello and turned with my sandpaper block 

in my hand to see a man in green perfectly familiar to me but 

unexpected, ambushed (both of us), so that I looked at his dark green 

workshirt, a tiny American flag pin in the pocket button-hole, and 

turned back to my work as if he visited me often or weren't there, or I 

had contempt for him or respect.

               I recall because perhaps from just about that time (because it came 

from this very man),  I had learned that no one could touch me.

               It was my friend's, my play-mate's, father, our neighbor, and he asked 

me if I had seen Liz. (But why was he over here?)  He came and stood. 

"Sand and varnish, varnish and sand," he said. "Makin' a boat?" he 

said. What can you say to that?  "Where'd ya find the wood?"  he asked, 

as if he knew. Right here on the floor he was standing on, I told him 

and  he said my toolshed looked just like when the owner his friend had 

lived here. Former owner, I said.  "Too bad he had to sell."  I didn't 

mind, I said. "You don't mind," this man said methodically. "He was a 

nice fella. Not enough work around here, it's gone down statewide."

               Continuing with my own work, I asked what work his friend, our last 

summer's landlord, did.  "Whatever needed doing,"  Liz's father said.  

"Somebody's playin' the violin," he said. I looked up at him and I 

nodded, and in some way new to me smiled and continued my work. But I 

heard the distant distant cello's throat-grip-ping, wide, biting, 

caressing (I believe), string-rubbing stroke of tune deep-drawn by the 

bow and hung along the layers of flattened color and absorbed 

mid-summer day.

               But suddenly succeeded this time by my mother's voice, the way the 

cello gives itself over to the winds, for she was singing way inside 

that house, and I wondered if Rob was there, her bosom buddy - could I 

have missed the cutting sound of his tires in the driveway coming to 

keep her company?  I looked up at Liz's father -  his name was Whelan - 

  who had turned toward the door hearing the singer now. Was this why he 

had come, though I had never heard her do just this?

               Women - I thought of her as women for the first time I believe -  had 

a bodily distance from us that we are to accept; hence, to be 

importantly apart from: which gives you the distance to understand them 

and what they and you have to lose.

               The woman listening to me laughs.

               Or, to bear this after all bodily reasoning still further, that this 

Vermont man (though Vermonters are more intelligent, my father had 

said) could not tell a cello from a violin because he was not from the 

city; and so he did things more slowly and painstakingly; that  my 

father did not change the oil in our car himself like this man flat on 

his back; that city people controlled large things they did not need to 

understand.     

               I thought I did Liz's father an injustice. But what?

               Or that we were having a visitor from a foreign country today though 

he was American, and that the man with me in this toolshed had had a 

flag July 4th which would have been fun to fly, that they had a cousin 

whose son had come home wounded and sick -  one was like a cut, the 

other was like a disease inside: country people sent more men to the 

war than city people because country people could do things but the 

things they could do kept them from seeing that the war was, according 

to my father and mother and their friends, wrong;  and this morning 

Liz's father (though he said, Don't tell her I was looking for her, he 

squinched up his nose in a friendly look) had really come to see or 

scout out my mother whom he hardly knew, or the place, because my 

father was not here. Though now he asked if I was going over to 

Montpellier with my father, burn some cloth (it sticks in my hearing 

much more than Whelan's ugly, interesting face) -  and I said my dad 

had already gone -  Oh, Liz's father knew that -  and it wasn't 

Montpellier, it was into town. "Oh, we know all about that too," said 

my visitor, as if I were a free citizen - he was a builder, a local 

contractor, and there were some who disagreed with him about the war 

but not about flag-burning, and my father was taking the briefest time 

out from a heavy schedule of rallies and raising money. He had been 

written up.

               Yet this man, for some reason in my toolshed, was the father of Liz 

whose mother mine could never be. I leaned back on my heels and held up 

my boat, turned it over, ran my finger all over it, and I know the man 

with the much too pink face and positively golden pale crewcut said, 

"Taking justice into your own hands." "How'd you know it was a boat?" I 

said.

               "Keel."

               I said I had some work to do. I meant Still to do. "Varnishing, 

sanding," I said.

               "You just do your work," said the man. He was not favorably disposed 

toward my father and was said to include him among flag-burners. "You 

like to go fishing?"

               I said we had fished the brook. He knew I meant with Liz.  I bore down 

on my hunk of maple, which was how I suddenly saw it.  "We go over 

t'the lake one night, got the outboard."  Liz's father meant they would 

take me. I wondered how many in the boat. Liz's older sister Naomi who 

was fourteen who I was sometimes preoccupied with. The mother ...  My 

country neighbors who knew all about my father having a little brush 

with another car in the covered bridge the other night that was not his 

fault.

               My mother Claire's elbow and shoulder bending across for the far A 

string, her wrist,  the station of her knees, the amber-varnished belly 

of the cello inside which was a spruce patch she'd had me feel with my 

fingers -  I witness her though I'm not there -  and who cares about 

these little things that come with an entire day and night in one long 

blink of someone's eyelids, these signs of Nothing? (I'm no musician!) 

but I have a reason to recall because the cellist broke off playing and 

for a second, as I stopped too at my woodwork (called that by my 

great-uncle who wrote me letters on USCG stationery) nothing came next. 

Yet now without missing a beat she was singing, but with no real, no 

fleshly severing from the long-drawn pressure across the string which 

hadn't reached the end of the bow but passed it on to her voice. Funny 

or something, except it wasn't -  I heard it on my knees like sound 

meant for me, or someone.  Mexican or what my dad called 

"south-of-the-border," her song was inviting -  not like the deep and 

aggravated solo I could hum that she'd been practicing so you couldn't 

tell if the patient practicer were going back to get it right or Bach 

had written it like that. But now that I heard it, both voices against 

the presence of Liz's father's slightly threatening presence, I think 

the Mexican-sounding serenade was a lot like the Bach -  who am I to 

say? -  the way Caribbean Spanish from the Korean grocery or on the 

taxi radio follows syllable upon syllable so steadily, Liz's father 

with me in my tool shed, then gone. Had I been rude?

               Yet having latched my door and turning the whaleboat over and over, I 

knew I could have approached my mother even with company if I had 

thought fit, my mother and her way of speaking.                                                                                                         

***

I think it stimulates the woman I'm telling this to (it stopped her in 

the middle of a sentence she had to give it some thought, this natural