Skaneateles resident and career teacher Bob Comenole is the author of five books. He is now completing work on a screenplay, a sequel to
“It's a Wonderful Life,” and has written a special five-part serial to be published each Sunday in The Citizen for the holiday season.
Chapters are also available online at auburnpub.com/christmas_story, where the full series to date can be viewed. Chapter 2 begins below:
Chapter 2: A Christmas Bandit
Daimy Hunt plugged away long after everyone else had left the shop, an old workshed that had once been a fine boathouse. Noting the time, he lay down his work and swept up. Out of habit he crept up on the finicky boiler and checked the sight gauges. Satisfied that it would slog through another night, he locked the double carriage doors and let himself out through the postern on the dock. Daimy stepped out onto the river, still amazed that it had frozen so thick, so early. The moon was high and the river smooth. Three days of strong winds had swept it clean. This was the widest part of the river, perhaps 200 yards across. And in the distance - toward the center, at a line about even with Ketchin's Hollow - Daimy spotted a figure pulling a heavy sled.
Daimy walked out to the center of the river, where the man had stopped and was now preparing to make some sort of camp. He was a very old man. He looked like a prospector by the way he had tugged against the ropes, leaning out from his odd sled, dogged and steady. What he had been pulling appeared to be a large cedar chest on skis. Daimy came closer. No, it was an old ice fishing kit! A beat-up wooden trunk with gear lashed to the outside: a skimmer, a scoop, an auger, a two-gallon minnow bucket. They jangled as the ragged man lifted the lid of the box and reached in to unpack it. The moonlight lit even the whiskers on the underside of the man's chin. Daimy touched the tip of the hand auger: “Now that's what you call primitive.”
“Thank ye,” said the man, pulling out of the box a gang of wooden poles that looked as though they could have been stilts or crutches. He laid out the poles, saying, “A shanty like this goes up in a hurry. Frame and canvas.”
“Shanty? You don't mean to set up here?”
“You know the river, then. Better places I don't know about?”
“A better place would be any other river. Don't you know that there ain't been fish in this river in 50 years?”
“Fifty years - has it been that long?”
“Anybody within a hundred miles of the dam knows that. So you must be from further than a hundred miles.”
“I reckon I am. But I'm here now. Tell me your name.”
Daimy looked the man over. “That's always the first question, isn't it?”
“Well, it's better than picking a man's pocket to read his tags!”
“I was born Damian; I go by Daimy.”
“Ah, I knew a lad Damian once - true to his name he was.”
“True?”
“It fit. Damian, the Tamer - that's what the name means, you know: a soother. He was a tender boy.”
“And the name on your fishing license?”
“Funny that - they misspelled my name three different ways before they got it right. Would you hold this?” And he gave Daimy a small piece of mirrored glass with framing wire on the back. He then fit one of the poles into slotted brackets on the box. And on that he hung the mirror. “Never try to shave without one,” he said. And he stepped up to Daimy, seeming to observe the growth of his own beard, which was slight. “No,” he muttered, “but when you start in earnest, you'll know.”
Daimy stepped away and saw the pill-white moon reflected in the little mirror. Then he shook his head, “Jigging where there ain't no fish and shaving where they ain't no women! I've seen everything now!”
The old man rummaged undaunted through the trunk. Daimy looked more closely at the mirror and commented on what he saw there, “Of all the stupidest, show-your-money decorations at Christmas. ... Strange I never noticed before...”
“What's that, lad?” the man said, his head inside the great box.
“A lighthouse! Look at it - blowing out Christmas colors. Full-size. ”That's no department store prop. It's been built!“ Before he turned to look at the actual riverbank, he said, ”Figures it'd be on that side of the river.“ He tried to sight the image he'd seen but couldn't spot it.
“Where are you looking, lad?”
“I saw a lighthouse in the glass - huge, a four color beam, red and green and yellow and blue. Now it's gone.”
“In the glass, you say? It probably just caught me lighting up my old pipe,” and he took a draw on it, the embers playing with the black gradients of the air.
“I saw colors, not just red coals.”
The man pulled an ancient pocket lighter from his coat and laid it in Daimy's palm. “With that old thing, ya never know what color will erupt next.” Daimy flicked it. Out of the lighter rose a high orange flame, a ring of blue at the base.
“Orange doesn't pass for yellow.”
“Try it again.”
Daimy flicked the lighter: out grew a red-yellow flame, sputtering white and blue.
“I saw green.”
“Go on,” the man nodded and Daimy flicked it again: the flame cycled blue, orange, red, white - and green.
“For a fellow with a hand auger, I would've thought you a man for matches. Not this.”
“You're right about me, but that beauty I didn't buy. Prize from a fishing derby I won long ago.”
Daimy had been admiring the craftsmanship in the lighter - and significant craftsmanship it was. When he learned it was some award he felt the urge to toss it down an ice hole - thankful, though, in the moment after the thought that none had yet been drilled. “What was your catch?”
“Six pound Walleye.”
“But the fish engraved on this is a - pretty sure it's a sturgeon.”
“Oh, a fellow put that sleeve on for me later. See, I hooked up with some fellows in Watertown and we went out on Lake Ontario for a couple days. On the last day I struck - without meaning to - this giant of a fish. We had to cut the hole four times bigger to haul her in. She weighed easy as much as Carter, who went better than 200 pounds.”
“Yeah, I've heard plenty tales like that,” said Daimy with a slanted eye.
“Oh, it's not a tale: that's why I keep the lighter. That fish: easy about 100 years old, maybe more. Probably more. I figured she had another hundred in her. So I threw her back.”
“Wonder how she#'s looking today?”
Calm went out of the old man's face, giving way to a moment of fretful curiosity, but then it was calm again. “She may be running this very moment, right beneath our feet. God knows, all waterways connect in some form.”
“And that#'s what you#'ve come for. You think that by coming to some wild random river maybe that fish is gonna show up again? With a ring in her gullet? Like capital D destiny.”
The old man chuckled, “Oh, no. The fish I don't expect to see again.” Then he went dreamy, “There are other sights, though. And Christmas is but three days away.”
“What you should ask for for Christmas is a gas-powered auger. Must take you twenty minutes to drill half a foot.”
“Yes, and every second a pleasure. Aren't they the greatest inventions: hand tools?”
Daimy involuntarily adjusted the satchel strung across his shoulder. “Hand tools for some jobs, but nothing beats power. I've made some of my own tools even.”
“Oh, is that your trade: you're a toolmaker?”
“No, I build ice boats. I mean, I've been apprenticing since I dropped out of school. I say because I'm not ashamed of that. I've built all kinds of skeeters and stern-steers by myself. I even won a design contest for a new kinda sloop.”
“That's a feat to celebrate, lad.”
“Not for long. I imagined it, designed it. But some crooked boatbuilder over there,” and he pointed to the western bank of the river, “nabbed the plans and went into production. Some swanky lawyer nabbed up all my rights. It sold like wildfire. They can do that, you know: chisel you out of what#'s yours.”
“I'm sorry, lad. But where one good idea flows, others will follow.”
“Do you know how much I could have raked in?”
“Do you like your work?”
“I love it! I mean, yes, I like it.”
“Do you please those who sail your craft?”
“Sure. But I don't much care to please the people who buy our boats. Listen, Mister, you're not from around here. Lemme give you the scoop: there's the people on our side of the river who make things for people on that side. Just take a look at the houses over there. Now take a look our side.”
“Three days more,” said the old man abstractly. “Christmas must come. Listen, lad, I've been keeping you. You must be a might busier than I am. After all, Christmas is coming.”
“Oh, I got stuff to do - but, you know, if there's anything you need help with before I take off.”
“No, the pleasure's in the work, lad.”
“OK. Don't freeze to death, Pop.”
“Good luck to you, my boy.”
Daimy came off the river and up the bank. He climbed the steeper slope, not worrying about the trace of footprints he was leaving behind; after all, he would return to the iced-over river which would lodge no trails. He considered the art he was about to practice. Choosing a home was childishly simple. He was looking at one now, utterly dark. He mumbled bitterly to himself, “Aruba, Bahamas, Cancun?” The drive had not been shoveled all season, and neither was the walk clear.
Daimy checked the street and then disappeared behind a hedgerow into the backyard. Outside the back door he opened his satchel, keeping his body in shadow but bringing the bag into a shave of moonlight. He eyed the instruments there, most of which could have been those of a dentist. He chose one and slipped it from its pouch. He inserted it into the lock and gently twiggled it, as if working a thin pick into the heartmeat of a nut. He preferred art, and so worked with patience and tenderness, neither of which were vexed by the cold on his thin bare fingers. But it was no good. He would not break glass on principle, especially not in a winter such as this. And so he went for a heavier tool. That, too, did not succeed, and he dourly contemplated the blasted gap between theory and practice. And so, feeling shamefully crude, he brought out the small chisel head crowbar, confirmation of all his failures and frustrations. He cursed the instrument and then jimmied the door open, splintering out the jamb.
Inside he shut up all the shades he came to. Then he flicked on his flashlight. “OK,” he said, “let's see the spoils of the tomb.”
Daimy swung his flashlight across the room. The signs weren't good. The carpet was worn. The furniture was museum age but far from museum quality. And worst of all: the TV, sitting atop a roller cart for god's sakes, had a rotary dial - one of those pre-remote jobs. He kicked at the cart which rolled away. “This has got to be a decoy,” whispered Daimy. Then he noticed the sealed rooms. Daimy cut the first seal along the edge of the jamb, perfectly straight and square, out of habit, unwilling to do sloppy work in anyone else's home. Inside, everything was mauve. On the wall there hung a dusty business school diploma: Pearl Something-or-other. Daimy read the date and liked what he saw: 1937. “Business ought to have paid off in seventy years,” he muttered. And it was not long before he discovered fruit. Not one, but two large jewelry boxes. All in plain sight - no attempt to hide anything at all. In a cynical age, this confused Daimy, but he did not linger on the notion. He shook a pillow from its case and stuffed it full. He was no expert, but he knew instinctively that he was onto a stash that was very old, very genuine and very costly. Even though it would only bring him a fraction of its worth, it was a healthy fraction.
In the next room Daimy heard a muffled thud. He stiffened. And listened. Nothing. He went on. Then he heard a soft groaning. He listened. He did not hear it again.
Daimy went through all seven sealed rooms. Only the dining room offered up as much value as the first, but he already had more than he could carry without suspicion. “This is enough,” he said. Then thought that he may as well have a quick look upstairs. He found the door to the stairway. The staircase, fully enclosed, looked more cavernous than it really was. Daimy poked his flashlight up and down. And there, sitting three quarters of the way up the stairs, was an old woman rubbing her eyes. After dabbing the pain from her face, she said to him, “Danny? Home from school already? Danny?” Daimy switched off the flashlight and then flicked it on again. She was still there.
Next Chapter: “Colloquy on a Narrow Staircase”
will be published Sunday, Dec. 14
By the River Christmas
By Bob Comenole
Skaneateles resident and career teacher Bob Comenole is the author of five books.
He is now completing work on a screenplay, a sequel to “It's a Wonderful Life,” and has written a
special five-part serial to be published each Sunday in The Citizen for the holiday season. Chapter 1 begins below:
Chapter 1: A Forgotten Rose
In those days, Doc Winsor owned the only trampoline outside of Iowa. What they then called the Rebound Tumbler. His own daughter Nellie became a gymnastic wonder, but her best friend Mabel Hazelton was the real draw. Mabel was small for 11, short-legged and bony, but she could propel herself to mind-boggling heights. “No fair,” they teased, “you eat Mexican jumping beans!” On a campaign tour, before he ever became president, Franklin Roosevelt swung by Doc's neighborhood, awash with children. Trying to gain their attention, he joked about which they'd rather see: the planet Pluto, which had just been discovered, or the newly built Empire State Building. And to his great shock, they shouted back, “wouldn't he rather see Mabel fly?”
“Well,” he said, “I'd like to see what the child could manage.” And so everyone made for the tramp. Mabel leaped shyly upon it. She warmed up anxiously. And then sprung higher than anyone had ever seen! At the top of her most powerful bounds she could see into the third story window of the Winsor home. And there she spied Mrs. Winsor lacing up a new corselette. And Mabel thought, “gosh, that's what women have to wear?”
The photo in the next day's paper showed Mr. Roosevelt, a clot of children, the trampoline and a pair of feet, dart-shaped and blurred, rising out of the top of the frame.
One day, without knowing it, Mabel and Nellie hopped off the tramp for the last time and grew up. Its springs rusted; thin vines seized the posts, grew and withered. The tramp was sold; old man Hendrick used the canvas to cover his woodpile and made the wood frame into a bike rack. Years later the rack, all punked and rickety, was split apart. Pieces of it are still in use: as chocks holding steady the wheels of a tractor that hasn't moved in ages.
Old man Winsor died. Nellie married and moved away; she brought four children into the world then she, too, passed away. And so, here was Mabel, 87 years old, trying to remember where she'd put the box of Nellie's Christmas letters.
Mabel watched the snow filling up her backyard. The suncatchers at the kitchen window, crafted by her two sisters, Myrtle and Pearl, strove for light. Red glass, green glass, yellow: all muffled by the dust. Mabel could not extend her arms far enough over the counter to clean them, and she dared not use that grabber gadget with the pistol grip to pull them down. Too risky, too delicate. A step stool was out of the question: she could not raise her feet now more than the few inches needed to put on her slippers.
Like Mabel, her two sisters had never married, and the three spinsters had lived together for nearly half a century. The mortgage was long paid; Myrtle died in '88, Pearl in '98. Or was it the other way around? For 24 years Mabel worked as a hairdresser until arthritis conquered her. And so, at age 42, she went to work as an elevator operator in Kempsall's Department Store. She retired 23 years later. Her entire savings was exhausted by her sisters' illnesses, but Mabel was not overcome: after all, the house was theirs and Social Security provided everything she needed. She had forgotten that in a 5-pound can of White Rose coffee there was a spool of cash that amounted to over $55,000.
At 16, Mabel had won a lyric contest. Her verse prompted a bidding war between no less than Irving Berlin and Sammy Cahn. But neither had prevailed. Instead, Mabel sold her piece to a Syracuse composer who made a minor hit of it. Oh, his eyes, she said! Every year Mabel received a royalty check, a few hundred dollars at first. In 1957, the year of her greatest income, she earned $1,100. As the song's airplay faded the checks dwindled, and ten years ago they ceased altogether. One whole decade and her song had not been played once on the globe. Mabel wasn't the least sour. What she called her poetry can was already stuffed.
“What are you going to do with all those notes?” asked Myrtle.
“Saving it for a snowy day.”
“Been plenty snowy already,” added Pearl.
And Mabel smiled, “Not a hard enough snow yet!”
Long after the checks stopped Mabel completely forgot that she'd ever had such a fund. A luckless lapse of memory, seeing that she still never forgot to turn the stove off and never once misplaced her eyeglasses. Some memories stick, others wander.
As she looked out the window, Mabel recalled the path from the river through their side yard and how many boys she'd seen, fish poles in hand, cut through, weightless in their bare-footed youth. The new reservoir had brought an end to all that. It took half a decade for the path to vanish. “We skated on that river, too,” Mabel whispered in reverie, feeling again the strange comfort of her own tight-laced skates. She remembered, too, the peculiar man in a crushed hat and puckered moccasins who showed up every summer at her back porch, raising high a string of speckled trout: “More than I can eat, Ma'am.” The fish were sublime; no other meal before or after ever tasted so arrestingly good.Why? It was a question Mabel never discharged.
Now she heard a sizzling, and there it was: that smell. Pan-fried trout. But when she looked to the stove she saw only the pilot light: steady, blue and mute. She looked again to the river, and remembered her sister's words: “Time runs like a stream: first fall the leaves, then the tree.”
Someone was knocking at the front door: Mabel plugged in the electric percolator. It could not have been the postman or the old paperboy, her lifelines, for they knew always to come to the rear. Four years earlier, conceding her driving skills, she surrendered her license, and gave her car - a 10-year-old Buick with 4,000 miles - to a deliriously grateful paperboy. He would have to wait to drive it: he was only 14. But he cut her grass, shoveled the walks, brought all her groceries and ran what few errands Mabel ever asked. In segments too small to measure Mabel was becoming unalterably homebound. But Danny, the paperboy, prevented this from becoming an affliction. Before he left for college this fall they laid in an epic amount of supplies. In October the grass went slightly long. And now the snow was knee-deep and unshovelled.
The knock came again. Mabel remembered last year's Christmas. A turkey delivered for shut-ins. Her pride was not wounded. Into the oven went the bird, but when time came to take it out she realized that the strength in her hands had gone; she could not lift what three hours earlier she had lifted without effort. How an instant changes everything. And so she carved her feast right there on the oven rack. No, whoever was at the door would go away.
Mabel left the kitchen and shuffled down the short hallway, past the bath, into the living room. These three rooms, now her universe. In man's coldest state, blood recedes from the extremities. So, too, Mabel had retreated to the center of her house, gathering all the essentials into this core. She set up a cot in front of the TV. She brought out all her house dresses. And on one of her last trips out, in May, she took a taxi to Home Depot for a weatherproofing kit. Then in the seven other rooms she would not use, she turned off the radiators, closed the doors and had Danny seal each with heavy plastic sheeting. A week later she remembered a stack of crosswords and she broke into one of the rooms to retrieve them. Most of the puzzles - perhaps 15 years old - had been half completed, left off when Mabel just didn't know the answers. But now she was filling in the empty blocks without effort.
On Mabel's side table was her will, her bank book, her address book. Of all the names in the address book, none were still living. Her will contained a succession of beneficiaries, each crossed off as they themselves had expired. Inside her bank book was a slip of paper: “if in spring or summer I should die, please bury me in the light blue dress. If in fall or winter, the gray.” The two dresses, inside clear launder's wrap, lay side by side on the pink spread of her well-made bed.
Mabel straightened the TV on its wheeled stand. This set, perpetually tuned to the Weather Channel with the volume muted, was never turned off. Mabel had come to terms with radar and satellites. Doppler images of precipitation were as striking as original art. But what she loved best were the satellite views. The world, steady in its turns, and the wheelmaster always vigilant. Each night she slept serenely beneath the fountain of blue and green reflections shifting over the walls.
Mabel drew open the curtains. There was no poverty on Donner St. for Christmas lights and decorations. She gazed on the colors with a childish awe. Not a gaudy sight among them. “Tasteful” she thought, “joyful.” Mabel felt again that primal urge to light up the house, the season, not out of lack or shame or competition, but because she wanted to contribute to the sense of harmony so evident down the entire length of the street. There was not even a candle in her window. It was the first Christmas her home would go unadorned. Last year she had a modest display, but it pleased her. She'd set it up herself. Then with a wince she remembered the end of the holiday, when she returned the decorations to the attic. It was a slow train: she could tell the petty afflictions of her ankle and knee and hip were turning solemn. It took many trips and she moved insufferably slowly up and down the stairs, but she managed. The job was done. When the next day she realized that she'd left an upstairs light on she tried to go up to turn it off: she could not ascend more than two stairs.
Mabel did not believe in signs, but she didn't need an egg timer to tell her her moments were few. Every sundown a patch of light from that upstairs bulb appeared as a squashed diamond on the front lawn. Mabel would watch it sharpen as the evening grew. She tried the stairs a few more times, but it was pointless. Her joints were singing all the wrong songs. She would sit on the bottom step, sometimes for an hour or more, gently crying. Nine months later the bulb burned out and the diamond disappeared.
Mabel turned the volume up on the TV. They were reporting a ferocious storm in the mountains. The forecast was for another, more crushing one to follow. “Blizzard!” Mabel shouted, as if the word were both friend and foe. And without any false severity - neither firm nor grim - she said, “I will not have my home dark at Christmas.” She pulled her sweater tight and made her way, ever slowly, to the kitchen.
Was the dumbwaiter still working? Mabel pressed the Call button, mildly surprised that it whirled to life. Oh, if only she could fit within. Her first thought was for extension cords. “I'll send them up,” she thought. “What else will I need?” And then, facing what she already knew she had inwardly resolved, she went to the one cupboard that hadn't been opened in forty years.
Even when they called her silly, Mabel had always been full of forethought. Once, on a seashore vacation she'd found an old foot-long wooden sign: “Harbor Springs, 1 Mile” Then came the idea.
“What are you going to do with that old thing?” asked Pearl.
“When the end comes near - if I'm blessed to know ahead, that is - I'm bringing out all this stuff. A send off with all my favorite things!” Mabel fixed the sign - which resembled a fine piece of folk art - to the furthest pantry cupboard. And she placed inside a dozen items that, after long thought, she had reckoned most fundamental, the frivolous and the sacred.
“The end? Good god, you're only 47!”
“What? You think the end will never come?”
“If you're going to put that LP in there, you better put the phonograph, too. There might not be such a thing by the time you kick off, girl.”
Satisfied that her stock was complete, she sealed the cupboard door with wax.
Christmas was now three days away. She would make the climb. Her house would be lit. She reckoned a day to get up the stairs, a day to set up the decorations, a day to prepare for the nativity.
Mabel broke the seal on the cupboard. She'd lost her taste for wine and so set the bottle aside. Everything else went into the dumbwaiter.
She turned off the television. At precisely 3 p.m. that afternoon she began her ascent.
The first leg was staggeringly easy: all she did was simply turn round and sit; it was a hard pitch, but she was already two steps up! She gripped underneath her knees and pulled her feet to the first landing. Three hours later, trembling with exertion, she was now on the fourth step, sitting in complete darkness, amid stabbing pain.
Next Chapter: “A Christmas Bandit”
will be published Sunday, Dec. 6
Chapters are also available online at auburnpub.com/christmas_story, where the full series to date can be viewed. Chapter 2 begins below:
Chapter 2: A Christmas Bandit
Daimy Hunt plugged away long after everyone else had left the shop, an old workshed that had once been a fine boathouse. Noting the time, he lay down his work and swept up. Out of habit he crept up on the finicky boiler and checked the sight gauges. Satisfied that it would slog through another night, he locked the double carriage doors and let himself out through the postern on the dock. Daimy stepped out onto the river, still amazed that it had frozen so thick, so early. The moon was high and the river smooth. Three days of strong winds had swept it clean. This was the widest part of the river, perhaps 200 yards across. And in the distance - toward the center, at a line about even with Ketchin's Hollow - Daimy spotted a figure pulling a heavy sled.
Daimy walked out to the center of the river, where the man had stopped and was now preparing to make some sort of camp. He was a very old man. He looked like a prospector by the way he had tugged against the ropes, leaning out from his odd sled, dogged and steady. What he had been pulling appeared to be a large cedar chest on skis. Daimy came closer. No, it was an old ice fishing kit! A beat-up wooden trunk with gear lashed to the outside: a skimmer, a scoop, an auger, a two-gallon minnow bucket. They jangled as the ragged man lifted the lid of the box and reached in to unpack it. The moonlight lit even the whiskers on the underside of the man's chin. Daimy touched the tip of the hand auger: “Now that's what you call primitive.”
“Thank ye,” said the man, pulling out of the box a gang of wooden poles that looked as though they could have been stilts or crutches. He laid out the poles, saying, “A shanty like this goes up in a hurry. Frame and canvas.”
“Shanty? You don't mean to set up here?”
“You know the river, then. Better places I don't know about?”
“A better place would be any other river. Don't you know that there ain't been fish in this river in 50 years?”
“Fifty years - has it been that long?”
“Anybody within a hundred miles of the dam knows that. So you must be from further than a hundred miles.”
“I reckon I am. But I'm here now. Tell me your name.”
Daimy looked the man over. “That's always the first question, isn't it?”
“Well, it's better than picking a man's pocket to read his tags!”
“I was born Damian; I go by Daimy.”
“Ah, I knew a lad Damian once - true to his name he was.”
“True?”
“It fit. Damian, the Tamer - that's what the name means, you know: a soother. He was a tender boy.”
“And the name on your fishing license?”
“Funny that - they misspelled my name three different ways before they got it right. Would you hold this?” And he gave Daimy a small piece of mirrored glass with framing wire on the back. He then fit one of the poles into slotted brackets on the box. And on that he hung the mirror. “Never try to shave without one,” he said. And he stepped up to Daimy, seeming to observe the growth of his own beard, which was slight. “No,” he muttered, “but when you start in earnest, you'll know.”
Daimy stepped away and saw the pill-white moon reflected in the little mirror. Then he shook his head, “Jigging where there ain't no fish and shaving where they ain't no women! I've seen everything now!”
The old man rummaged undaunted through the trunk. Daimy looked more closely at the mirror and commented on what he saw there, “Of all the stupidest, show-your-money decorations at Christmas. ... Strange I never noticed before...”
“What's that, lad?” the man said, his head inside the great box.
“A lighthouse! Look at it - blowing out Christmas colors. Full-size. ”That's no department store prop. It's been built!“ Before he turned to look at the actual riverbank, he said, ”Figures it'd be on that side of the river.“ He tried to sight the image he'd seen but couldn't spot it.
“Where are you looking, lad?”
“I saw a lighthouse in the glass - huge, a four color beam, red and green and yellow and blue. Now it's gone.”
“In the glass, you say? It probably just caught me lighting up my old pipe,” and he took a draw on it, the embers playing with the black gradients of the air.
“I saw colors, not just red coals.”
The man pulled an ancient pocket lighter from his coat and laid it in Daimy's palm. “With that old thing, ya never know what color will erupt next.” Daimy flicked it. Out of the lighter rose a high orange flame, a ring of blue at the base.
“Orange doesn't pass for yellow.”
“Try it again.”
Daimy flicked the lighter: out grew a red-yellow flame, sputtering white and blue.
“I saw green.”
“Go on,” the man nodded and Daimy flicked it again: the flame cycled blue, orange, red, white - and green.
“For a fellow with a hand auger, I would've thought you a man for matches. Not this.”
“You're right about me, but that beauty I didn't buy. Prize from a fishing derby I won long ago.”
Daimy had been admiring the craftsmanship in the lighter - and significant craftsmanship it was. When he learned it was some award he felt the urge to toss it down an ice hole - thankful, though, in the moment after the thought that none had yet been drilled. “What was your catch?”
“Six pound Walleye.”
“But the fish engraved on this is a - pretty sure it's a sturgeon.”
“Oh, a fellow put that sleeve on for me later. See, I hooked up with some fellows in Watertown and we went out on Lake Ontario for a couple days. On the last day I struck - without meaning to - this giant of a fish. We had to cut the hole four times bigger to haul her in. She weighed easy as much as Carter, who went better than 200 pounds.”
“Yeah, I've heard plenty tales like that,” said Daimy with a slanted eye.
“Oh, it's not a tale: that's why I keep the lighter. That fish: easy about 100 years old, maybe more. Probably more. I figured she had another hundred in her. So I threw her back.”
“Wonder how she#'s looking today?”
Calm went out of the old man's face, giving way to a moment of fretful curiosity, but then it was calm again. “She may be running this very moment, right beneath our feet. God knows, all waterways connect in some form.”
“And that#'s what you#'ve come for. You think that by coming to some wild random river maybe that fish is gonna show up again? With a ring in her gullet? Like capital D destiny.”
The old man chuckled, “Oh, no. The fish I don't expect to see again.” Then he went dreamy, “There are other sights, though. And Christmas is but three days away.”
“What you should ask for for Christmas is a gas-powered auger. Must take you twenty minutes to drill half a foot.”
“Yes, and every second a pleasure. Aren't they the greatest inventions: hand tools?”
Daimy involuntarily adjusted the satchel strung across his shoulder. “Hand tools for some jobs, but nothing beats power. I've made some of my own tools even.”
“Oh, is that your trade: you're a toolmaker?”
“No, I build ice boats. I mean, I've been apprenticing since I dropped out of school. I say because I'm not ashamed of that. I've built all kinds of skeeters and stern-steers by myself. I even won a design contest for a new kinda sloop.”
“That's a feat to celebrate, lad.”
“Not for long. I imagined it, designed it. But some crooked boatbuilder over there,” and he pointed to the western bank of the river, “nabbed the plans and went into production. Some swanky lawyer nabbed up all my rights. It sold like wildfire. They can do that, you know: chisel you out of what#'s yours.”
“I'm sorry, lad. But where one good idea flows, others will follow.”
“Do you know how much I could have raked in?”
“Do you like your work?”
“I love it! I mean, yes, I like it.”
“Do you please those who sail your craft?”
“Sure. But I don't much care to please the people who buy our boats. Listen, Mister, you're not from around here. Lemme give you the scoop: there's the people on our side of the river who make things for people on that side. Just take a look at the houses over there. Now take a look our side.”
“Three days more,” said the old man abstractly. “Christmas must come. Listen, lad, I've been keeping you. You must be a might busier than I am. After all, Christmas is coming.”
“Oh, I got stuff to do - but, you know, if there's anything you need help with before I take off.”
“No, the pleasure's in the work, lad.”
“OK. Don't freeze to death, Pop.”
“Good luck to you, my boy.”
Daimy came off the river and up the bank. He climbed the steeper slope, not worrying about the trace of footprints he was leaving behind; after all, he would return to the iced-over river which would lodge no trails. He considered the art he was about to practice. Choosing a home was childishly simple. He was looking at one now, utterly dark. He mumbled bitterly to himself, “Aruba, Bahamas, Cancun?” The drive had not been shoveled all season, and neither was the walk clear.
Daimy checked the street and then disappeared behind a hedgerow into the backyard. Outside the back door he opened his satchel, keeping his body in shadow but bringing the bag into a shave of moonlight. He eyed the instruments there, most of which could have been those of a dentist. He chose one and slipped it from its pouch. He inserted it into the lock and gently twiggled it, as if working a thin pick into the heartmeat of a nut. He preferred art, and so worked with patience and tenderness, neither of which were vexed by the cold on his thin bare fingers. But it was no good. He would not break glass on principle, especially not in a winter such as this. And so he went for a heavier tool. That, too, did not succeed, and he dourly contemplated the blasted gap between theory and practice. And so, feeling shamefully crude, he brought out the small chisel head crowbar, confirmation of all his failures and frustrations. He cursed the instrument and then jimmied the door open, splintering out the jamb.
Inside he shut up all the shades he came to. Then he flicked on his flashlight. “OK,” he said, “let's see the spoils of the tomb.”
Daimy swung his flashlight across the room. The signs weren't good. The carpet was worn. The furniture was museum age but far from museum quality. And worst of all: the TV, sitting atop a roller cart for god's sakes, had a rotary dial - one of those pre-remote jobs. He kicked at the cart which rolled away. “This has got to be a decoy,” whispered Daimy. Then he noticed the sealed rooms. Daimy cut the first seal along the edge of the jamb, perfectly straight and square, out of habit, unwilling to do sloppy work in anyone else's home. Inside, everything was mauve. On the wall there hung a dusty business school diploma: Pearl Something-or-other. Daimy read the date and liked what he saw: 1937. “Business ought to have paid off in seventy years,” he muttered. And it was not long before he discovered fruit. Not one, but two large jewelry boxes. All in plain sight - no attempt to hide anything at all. In a cynical age, this confused Daimy, but he did not linger on the notion. He shook a pillow from its case and stuffed it full. He was no expert, but he knew instinctively that he was onto a stash that was very old, very genuine and very costly. Even though it would only bring him a fraction of its worth, it was a healthy fraction.
In the next room Daimy heard a muffled thud. He stiffened. And listened. Nothing. He went on. Then he heard a soft groaning. He listened. He did not hear it again.
Daimy went through all seven sealed rooms. Only the dining room offered up as much value as the first, but he already had more than he could carry without suspicion. “This is enough,” he said. Then thought that he may as well have a quick look upstairs. He found the door to the stairway. The staircase, fully enclosed, looked more cavernous than it really was. Daimy poked his flashlight up and down. And there, sitting three quarters of the way up the stairs, was an old woman rubbing her eyes. After dabbing the pain from her face, she said to him, “Danny? Home from school already? Danny?” Daimy switched off the flashlight and then flicked it on again. She was still there.
Next Chapter: “Colloquy on a Narrow Staircase”
will be published Sunday, Dec. 14
By the River Christmas
By Bob Comenole
Skaneateles resident and career teacher Bob Comenole is the author of five books.
He is now completing work on a screenplay, a sequel to “It's a Wonderful Life,” and has written a
special five-part serial to be published each Sunday in The Citizen for the holiday season. Chapter 1 begins below:
Chapter 1: A Forgotten Rose
In those days, Doc Winsor owned the only trampoline outside of Iowa. What they then called the Rebound Tumbler. His own daughter Nellie became a gymnastic wonder, but her best friend Mabel Hazelton was the real draw. Mabel was small for 11, short-legged and bony, but she could propel herself to mind-boggling heights. “No fair,” they teased, “you eat Mexican jumping beans!” On a campaign tour, before he ever became president, Franklin Roosevelt swung by Doc's neighborhood, awash with children. Trying to gain their attention, he joked about which they'd rather see: the planet Pluto, which had just been discovered, or the newly built Empire State Building. And to his great shock, they shouted back, “wouldn't he rather see Mabel fly?”
“Well,” he said, “I'd like to see what the child could manage.” And so everyone made for the tramp. Mabel leaped shyly upon it. She warmed up anxiously. And then sprung higher than anyone had ever seen! At the top of her most powerful bounds she could see into the third story window of the Winsor home. And there she spied Mrs. Winsor lacing up a new corselette. And Mabel thought, “gosh, that's what women have to wear?”
The photo in the next day's paper showed Mr. Roosevelt, a clot of children, the trampoline and a pair of feet, dart-shaped and blurred, rising out of the top of the frame.
One day, without knowing it, Mabel and Nellie hopped off the tramp for the last time and grew up. Its springs rusted; thin vines seized the posts, grew and withered. The tramp was sold; old man Hendrick used the canvas to cover his woodpile and made the wood frame into a bike rack. Years later the rack, all punked and rickety, was split apart. Pieces of it are still in use: as chocks holding steady the wheels of a tractor that hasn't moved in ages.
Old man Winsor died. Nellie married and moved away; she brought four children into the world then she, too, passed away. And so, here was Mabel, 87 years old, trying to remember where she'd put the box of Nellie's Christmas letters.
Mabel watched the snow filling up her backyard. The suncatchers at the kitchen window, crafted by her two sisters, Myrtle and Pearl, strove for light. Red glass, green glass, yellow: all muffled by the dust. Mabel could not extend her arms far enough over the counter to clean them, and she dared not use that grabber gadget with the pistol grip to pull them down. Too risky, too delicate. A step stool was out of the question: she could not raise her feet now more than the few inches needed to put on her slippers.
Like Mabel, her two sisters had never married, and the three spinsters had lived together for nearly half a century. The mortgage was long paid; Myrtle died in '88, Pearl in '98. Or was it the other way around? For 24 years Mabel worked as a hairdresser until arthritis conquered her. And so, at age 42, she went to work as an elevator operator in Kempsall's Department Store. She retired 23 years later. Her entire savings was exhausted by her sisters' illnesses, but Mabel was not overcome: after all, the house was theirs and Social Security provided everything she needed. She had forgotten that in a 5-pound can of White Rose coffee there was a spool of cash that amounted to over $55,000.
At 16, Mabel had won a lyric contest. Her verse prompted a bidding war between no less than Irving Berlin and Sammy Cahn. But neither had prevailed. Instead, Mabel sold her piece to a Syracuse composer who made a minor hit of it. Oh, his eyes, she said! Every year Mabel received a royalty check, a few hundred dollars at first. In 1957, the year of her greatest income, she earned $1,100. As the song's airplay faded the checks dwindled, and ten years ago they ceased altogether. One whole decade and her song had not been played once on the globe. Mabel wasn't the least sour. What she called her poetry can was already stuffed.
“What are you going to do with all those notes?” asked Myrtle.
“Saving it for a snowy day.”
“Been plenty snowy already,” added Pearl.
And Mabel smiled, “Not a hard enough snow yet!”
Long after the checks stopped Mabel completely forgot that she'd ever had such a fund. A luckless lapse of memory, seeing that she still never forgot to turn the stove off and never once misplaced her eyeglasses. Some memories stick, others wander.
As she looked out the window, Mabel recalled the path from the river through their side yard and how many boys she'd seen, fish poles in hand, cut through, weightless in their bare-footed youth. The new reservoir had brought an end to all that. It took half a decade for the path to vanish. “We skated on that river, too,” Mabel whispered in reverie, feeling again the strange comfort of her own tight-laced skates. She remembered, too, the peculiar man in a crushed hat and puckered moccasins who showed up every summer at her back porch, raising high a string of speckled trout: “More than I can eat, Ma'am.” The fish were sublime; no other meal before or after ever tasted so arrestingly good.Why? It was a question Mabel never discharged.
Now she heard a sizzling, and there it was: that smell. Pan-fried trout. But when she looked to the stove she saw only the pilot light: steady, blue and mute. She looked again to the river, and remembered her sister's words: “Time runs like a stream: first fall the leaves, then the tree.”
Someone was knocking at the front door: Mabel plugged in the electric percolator. It could not have been the postman or the old paperboy, her lifelines, for they knew always to come to the rear. Four years earlier, conceding her driving skills, she surrendered her license, and gave her car - a 10-year-old Buick with 4,000 miles - to a deliriously grateful paperboy. He would have to wait to drive it: he was only 14. But he cut her grass, shoveled the walks, brought all her groceries and ran what few errands Mabel ever asked. In segments too small to measure Mabel was becoming unalterably homebound. But Danny, the paperboy, prevented this from becoming an affliction. Before he left for college this fall they laid in an epic amount of supplies. In October the grass went slightly long. And now the snow was knee-deep and unshovelled.
The knock came again. Mabel remembered last year's Christmas. A turkey delivered for shut-ins. Her pride was not wounded. Into the oven went the bird, but when time came to take it out she realized that the strength in her hands had gone; she could not lift what three hours earlier she had lifted without effort. How an instant changes everything. And so she carved her feast right there on the oven rack. No, whoever was at the door would go away.
Mabel left the kitchen and shuffled down the short hallway, past the bath, into the living room. These three rooms, now her universe. In man's coldest state, blood recedes from the extremities. So, too, Mabel had retreated to the center of her house, gathering all the essentials into this core. She set up a cot in front of the TV. She brought out all her house dresses. And on one of her last trips out, in May, she took a taxi to Home Depot for a weatherproofing kit. Then in the seven other rooms she would not use, she turned off the radiators, closed the doors and had Danny seal each with heavy plastic sheeting. A week later she remembered a stack of crosswords and she broke into one of the rooms to retrieve them. Most of the puzzles - perhaps 15 years old - had been half completed, left off when Mabel just didn't know the answers. But now she was filling in the empty blocks without effort.
On Mabel's side table was her will, her bank book, her address book. Of all the names in the address book, none were still living. Her will contained a succession of beneficiaries, each crossed off as they themselves had expired. Inside her bank book was a slip of paper: “if in spring or summer I should die, please bury me in the light blue dress. If in fall or winter, the gray.” The two dresses, inside clear launder's wrap, lay side by side on the pink spread of her well-made bed.
Mabel straightened the TV on its wheeled stand. This set, perpetually tuned to the Weather Channel with the volume muted, was never turned off. Mabel had come to terms with radar and satellites. Doppler images of precipitation were as striking as original art. But what she loved best were the satellite views. The world, steady in its turns, and the wheelmaster always vigilant. Each night she slept serenely beneath the fountain of blue and green reflections shifting over the walls.
Mabel drew open the curtains. There was no poverty on Donner St. for Christmas lights and decorations. She gazed on the colors with a childish awe. Not a gaudy sight among them. “Tasteful” she thought, “joyful.” Mabel felt again that primal urge to light up the house, the season, not out of lack or shame or competition, but because she wanted to contribute to the sense of harmony so evident down the entire length of the street. There was not even a candle in her window. It was the first Christmas her home would go unadorned. Last year she had a modest display, but it pleased her. She'd set it up herself. Then with a wince she remembered the end of the holiday, when she returned the decorations to the attic. It was a slow train: she could tell the petty afflictions of her ankle and knee and hip were turning solemn. It took many trips and she moved insufferably slowly up and down the stairs, but she managed. The job was done. When the next day she realized that she'd left an upstairs light on she tried to go up to turn it off: she could not ascend more than two stairs.
Mabel did not believe in signs, but she didn't need an egg timer to tell her her moments were few. Every sundown a patch of light from that upstairs bulb appeared as a squashed diamond on the front lawn. Mabel would watch it sharpen as the evening grew. She tried the stairs a few more times, but it was pointless. Her joints were singing all the wrong songs. She would sit on the bottom step, sometimes for an hour or more, gently crying. Nine months later the bulb burned out and the diamond disappeared.
Mabel turned the volume up on the TV. They were reporting a ferocious storm in the mountains. The forecast was for another, more crushing one to follow. “Blizzard!” Mabel shouted, as if the word were both friend and foe. And without any false severity - neither firm nor grim - she said, “I will not have my home dark at Christmas.” She pulled her sweater tight and made her way, ever slowly, to the kitchen.
Was the dumbwaiter still working? Mabel pressed the Call button, mildly surprised that it whirled to life. Oh, if only she could fit within. Her first thought was for extension cords. “I'll send them up,” she thought. “What else will I need?” And then, facing what she already knew she had inwardly resolved, she went to the one cupboard that hadn't been opened in forty years.
Even when they called her silly, Mabel had always been full of forethought. Once, on a seashore vacation she'd found an old foot-long wooden sign: “Harbor Springs, 1 Mile” Then came the idea.
“What are you going to do with that old thing?” asked Pearl.
“When the end comes near - if I'm blessed to know ahead, that is - I'm bringing out all this stuff. A send off with all my favorite things!” Mabel fixed the sign - which resembled a fine piece of folk art - to the furthest pantry cupboard. And she placed inside a dozen items that, after long thought, she had reckoned most fundamental, the frivolous and the sacred.
“The end? Good god, you're only 47!”
“What? You think the end will never come?”
“If you're going to put that LP in there, you better put the phonograph, too. There might not be such a thing by the time you kick off, girl.”
Satisfied that her stock was complete, she sealed the cupboard door with wax.
Christmas was now three days away. She would make the climb. Her house would be lit. She reckoned a day to get up the stairs, a day to set up the decorations, a day to prepare for the nativity.
Mabel broke the seal on the cupboard. She'd lost her taste for wine and so set the bottle aside. Everything else went into the dumbwaiter.
She turned off the television. At precisely 3 p.m. that afternoon she began her ascent.
The first leg was staggeringly easy: all she did was simply turn round and sit; it was a hard pitch, but she was already two steps up! She gripped underneath her knees and pulled her feet to the first landing. Three hours later, trembling with exertion, she was now on the fourth step, sitting in complete darkness, amid stabbing pain.
Next Chapter: “A Christmas Bandit”
will be published Sunday, Dec. 6
Citizen
Hot Jobs
New! Off the Menu
The Citizens' Say
Post your comment - click hereThere are No comments posted.