Archive-author: Neil Bernstein
Archive-title: John the Carpenter’s Tale
(c) Neil Bernstein 1993
One Sunday, driving Dolores’ truck back from a provisioning
trip, Pete stopped along the riverbank to watch a crew of panting
scullers labor their way against the current. Their slender craft
slipped around chunks of floating ice smoothly as a ballbearing
sliding down a greased track. Got all the time they need to do
that, he thought bitterly. Men who could go home to adoring wives
and get up the next morning to go to work.
In Lombard’s General Store he met old John buying feed for his
three geldings. The man’s belly nearly split his overalls as he
carried the sacks out to his car. Pete hid a chuckle.
“You come back for coffee now,” John bellowed.
Pete could see no reason to refuse him. He followed John’s
rusty truck up a series of gravel paths, shook hands with his
pretty wife. John eased himself into a great armchair. He bade
her serve them their coffee and an endless succession of snacks:
toast, honey, ham sandwiches, spiced drumsticks, maple candies,
pear cobbler…
When she was done serving she settled back on a kitchen stool
and nursed her baby. Pete watched her play with the suckling,
bouncing him gently on her knee. He knew, feeling the certainty
only the superstitious know, that it could not be John’s child.
John had been a carpenter for twenty years. One morning he
found the work too exerting and gave it up violently, pitching his
toolbox through the window of the house he was building. He tried
a variety of jobs after that, settling on delivering the Weekly
Argus. He sat long hours alone at the head of his kitchen table,
playing solitaire late into the night, gaining ten pounds a year.
He always left a half-finished puzzle set up in the living room.
Pete remembered the last time he’d been out to John’s house.
A selectman was giving Grandpa Goosehair some problems, badmouthing
him in town meeting. The old man wanted Pete to see if John could
dig up any incriminating tax information. John looked over
everyone’s tax forms, considered it his neighborly duty. He got so
he could do the arithmetic so quickly that everyone brought him
their crumpled forms: farmers who could only read with a certain
pair of spectacles they’d lost years and years ago, folks who could
read Latin but couldn’t be bothered with figures.
Pete’d got himself lost on nameless gravel tracks and had
arrived very late. The ex-carpenter’s wife had just finished
showering and now stood before a full-length mirror. Her hips were
swathed in fine linen, her arms left half-bare by a silk-finished
nightgown. She braided her hair and rubbed fine powder and oil
into her tremulous neck. John knelt on the parlor floor, his
…End of the part1. To be continued..
