The Wood Worker

Sometimes you can taste the river if the day is muggy and the shadows seem to move more slowly than living things. The sky holds a look of burnt haze, far too close to your skin, and your breathing…god, your breathing can be more labor than what it seems to be worth. You become very aware of your clothes, and the way they smell of the afternoon and of the thick gray clay of the marsh bottoms. The flies make an abundance of noise in their own right, doing whatever it is that instinctual creatures do. My mother used to define those kinds of days as “feeling like molasses”.

I used to sit and watch Mr. Landon work the wood, his hands coaxing shapes out of oak and popular that seemed to be symbols of the narrative of his life. I would leave school and walk down by the river front to hear the fisherman calling oaths back and forth at one another. The restaurants were always busy…men throwing out the garbage, people calling to one another from across the street, and women scolding children for playing too close to the water. The Sheriff in his Sunday jacket would go about shaking hands as required of him while his plump little wife fanned herself and gossiped notoriously.

Crossing in front of Grant’s fish house I could always hear the nets slapping against the dock. Blue crabs scuttle towards one another, claws raised, mighty creatures for their bravery but if you draw too near their battle field they will forget their squabble and unite to pinch and wave at the toe of your shoe. The men speak roughly to one another but at the sight of me they would always drop their heads and mumble beneath their breath.

I used to like to watch Mr. Landon working the wood, as I have said.

Just after passing the hardware store I would crane my neck to see if I could catch the scent of freshly cut wood in the air. I would have to pick my way through the field carefully so as to not rip my hand-me-down Levi’s on a thistle, or stump of old abandoned rose bush and run the risk of being caught.

I never knocked at his open door, the way I’ve seen impatient men do and he would continue his practiced movements as though I were not there at all. He never spoke directly to me, but would sometimes sing bits of the old slave hymns in a surprisingly elegant tenor. Looking back on it now, I suppose that even in that time it was a dangerous thing for a black man to be alone with a white girl of no more than sixteen. I had never once given a thought to it, but now, I wish that I had. He never uttered a cross word to me, not even if only to protect himself from the men of my home town and never once did he do anything inappropriate.

As a matter of fact, he barely took notice of me at all.

He had the darkest face I had ever seen, with the lines of age etched into it like one of his own wood carvings. They didn’t seem to be the lines of worry like those of my grandfather, rather they were the markings of the sun on a craftsman. They were from long days of hard work in the heat but a life of contentment to be doing so. His eyes were always squinted, large, and black, set high in his face.

But I remember his hands most of all. They didn’t look as though they belonged to a man his age, though they were as lined as his face and calloused thick through the pads of his fingers. His hands looked strong, and capable, the skin still taut across the backs of them. His nails were broken but clean, and he wore no wedding ring or any other jewelry of any kind.

I would take to my stool at the corner of his work bench and would watch, my sketch pad and pencil in hand. He turned the handle on the clamp to hold the wood steady, and without the use of any power tools of any kind he would carve birds, and fish, and women with babies and incredibly ornate little boxes of every size…he would carve things from memory, the wood guiding his hands and not the other way around. And I never figured out how he decided which piece of wood he would turn into what, or if he was ever put off by my presence.

I would begin to sketch carelessly…hardly taking my eyes off his hands and the things he was creating. Once I watched him carve a group of stampeding horses out of a single block of maple, so detailed and fine that you could see the lines of the hair in their manes and tails, their minuscule hooves and nearly imagine them running right off the end of the table. When he finished it he held it up for me to inspect with a slight touch of pride in his face and smiled a toothy grin without saying a single word. He had perfectly white little teeth unlike most of the men I knew.

I would sketch carelessly, as I said, and I hardly lifted the end of the pencil from the paper.

I could never linger nearly as long as I would have liked. I was expected at home to help with the washing and child rearing. I was expected to be a dutiful daughter, whose only mission was the betterment of my grandfather’s and father’s name. I was expected to marry soon, and wouldn’t have even been permitted to attend school had it not been for my mother’s insistence. The clap board house out on Winery Road was so very depressing after looking at such beautiful things in Mr. Landon’s shop that I dreaded the walk home more than I ever dreaded anything else in my life.

The old hound would run out to meet me, her ears hanging so low it seemed an impossible feat for her to be able to hear anything at all, followed by a chubby little toddler in little more than a diaper. I would rub the old hound under the chin the way she liked, swing the baby up onto my hip and step up onto the porch where Daddy sat smoking his pipe in the evening.

“Where you been at, girl?” he would say, looking at me askance as though he were trying to rattle an admission of guilt from me. “Down by the river, daddy, finishing up my assignments before I got home.” I would smile weakly, and he knew I was lying. I was so sure he could smell it above the scent of his whiskey that I would shift the baby from one hip to the other and pretend to wipe something from his face so I wouldn’t have to look at the old man. Finally he would give up. “Alright then, best get in there, your Mama can’t make a biscuit to save her life and I’ll not stand for burnt bread this evening.” he’d say and turn his attention back to his bottle.

And I would do as I was told.

Later on after the baby had been put to bed and Lee and the rest of my brothers had come in from the river for the night I could steal away a few minutes before sun down to sit on the back porch and look into my sketch pad.

I had to work diligently to hide my pencils from my brothers, though none of them cared to write anything at all. They would have broken them just to spite.

But in the evenings I could steal a half hour and look over my sketch of the day. Over and over I would find myself surprised that I hadn’t actually drawn what Mr. Landon had been making that day, but rather I had drawn Mr. Landon himself. I had sketched him standing at the bench, turning back the water jug for a drink, inspecting his tools in his hands, crouched down at eye level with the wood to see if it was warped…

A hundred different positions for a man to get himself into working and I had rendered them all in the cheap paper. I would use my charcoal to fill in the places in my drawings that didn’t look quite right, and would give his skin a natural tone with shading.

Smearing the charcoal on the page to make shadow and light and different textures, I tried to imagine someone watching me while I worked as I had watched him.

On one particular day, someone was.

I had not known, or had not realized how it would be taken if the men in my family ever found my pictures of Mr. Landon. Perhaps their perverse ideas as to my motivation were just projections of their own sick and twisted natures. Daddy struck me harder than I have ever been struck that day. I fell from the edge of the porch where I had been dangling my legs a minute before and felt something sticky in my mouth. He had snatched my sketchbook, torn out one of the pages as proof and shredded the rest to pieces.

Lee stood over me with that mean look on his face he would always have after a long night out in Wilmington, drinking and whoring with the rest of the young men. I couldn’t say anything, so I laid there on my side until I felt his boot in my ribs as he turned me onto my back. “Just lookit how you’ve shamed your own people.” he whispered through clenched teeth. “Drawin fancy pictures of that old coon and probably bellowin like a whore for him every chance you git.” I couldn‘t believe the things he was saying to me. “But I haven’t…I swear, I haven’t…it’s not…” “Shut the hell up!” he was suddenly inches from my face and screaming.

After that, I don’t remember what happened. Just that no one would speak to me. The side of my face stayed bruised for nearly a month, sore to the touch. Lee would draw back his boot and take a kick at me every time I passed him. Still I cooked and cleaned and cared for my brothers as I was expected to do. I was taken out of school and promised to a man out of Jacksonville on my sixteenth birthday. A man who would not have heard of the “accident” that had taken place. The “accident” that marred my reputation and caused every other available man in the area to shudder at my daddy’s offerings of my hand.

Mr. Landon’s shop was closed, the windows dim, and me nor any one else on Snead’s Ferry ever saw him again.