Slow Sculpture (25 page)

He was so tired and so winded, and in such pain, that the distant lights blurred and whirled; and yet the simple act of sitting, of actually sitting down and leaning back against something, made him feel favored to the point of luxuriousness.

Then it all disappeared into a black and comfortable slumber before he could get it sorted out in his mind.

When he awoke it was in the gray suggestions of false dawn and fevered dream. For a moment he clutched the earth to right and left, and looked across the valley with vertigo—so far away, those lights, so far down. Then the memory flooded back of those minutes—hours, was it? —when he lay on his back with his head downhill and one hand in a crack in the rock, and he looked around him as he sat with his back against the cliff, and almost smiled.

He rocked back and forth to get the blood circulating in his buttocks and legs, and then pressed and clawed himself upright, grunting
against the stabs of pain. He rested a moment, standing, then fumbled his fly open and urinated. He didn’t push, he just let it happen. There was something very wonderful about the sound of it and the faint, warm, familiar acrid smell. It wasn’t that anything was running out of him; it was more that something alive was happening here, and it was important just because of that.

When he was finished he zipped up and looked to right and left. Tumbling rainwater had carved an angled gully down to the shelf on which he stood. It wasn’t smooth nor wide nor especially safe—some of it looked like loose and crumbling earth rather than rock—and it was steep.

He began to climb it.

He climbed for nearly five hours. It was only about sixty feet. Once he had to stop to build a road—a road of pebbles and root-ends and a rock or two, anything he could reach and pack in, a road all of four feet long. Once he slept for a time, twice he fainted when earth fell away from under him and he had to leap to save himself, twisting his injured leg.

And in the fourth and fifth hours something strange happened to Boyle. He began to hurry.

It was the hurry that caused the second of these faints, and when he recovered he had to crouch there for a time and think it out, and wonder why he had hurried, because if there was no reason, then it wasn’t smart to go on hurrying, right?

All he could think of was that he wanted to make the top before anyone could come to help him. He didn’t understand that at all, so he put it out of his mind, but he stopped pushing quite so hard.

But when he reached the top, he couldn’t make it. There was no way to make it. The little crooked sometimes-there, sometimes-not, sometimes-rock, sometimes-earth gully ended in a narrow crack in an overhang.

Boyle sat down under the overhang and looked out over the valley. It was daylight now and all but a few of the lights were gone. The sun wasn’t up yet but the distant skyline was black and sharp, and the sky above it had turned from gray to pearl and was beginning
to show a cast of pink. He looked up at the underside of that overhang and he suddenly began to get mad.

Among the rubble lying around was a narrow pointed flat stone about eighteen inches long. He picked it up and hefted it, and then began to dig at the overhang. He dug in and up, and earth fell away and went hissing down, and he dug some more. He got expert very quickly on how much he could dig before lumps and clumps of it would fall away. He uncovered some roots and dug around them until, farther in, they weren’t threads and strings, but rods and bleached boughs—something to hold to while he reached further, dug deeper. His arms and his back and the left leg which was bearing all his weight began to ache, and then it was more than an ache, it was something that strove to match the torture of his broken right leg. He seemed to be operating some weird sort of contest to see if he could make the rest of his body hurt as much as that leg. He delved inward making a sort of cave into the cliffside, knowing perfectly well that if he undercut enough he had more than an even chance of bringing the whole thing down on himself and going with it into the valley; but the odds suited him and he wouldn’t quit.

For the hundredth time he looked up to gauge the soft material over his head, and when it happened he almost didn’t see it—didn’t see that the ceiling above him was abruptly lower. It was actually moving when he dropped his stone tool and grasped roots with both hands, twisting them around his wrists and hanging on with all his might.

Almost silently the overhang collapsed, and for a black choking moment he was totally certain he had buried himself. Then the crushing weight slid off his back and he heard the rumble of earth and rocks receding downhill, and shook his head free, and opened his eyes.

There was no more overhang. Where the rain-gully had begun in a narrow slit, there was a wide V, slanting down from the top in a natural 2-to-1 slope, and full of roots. He bellied into it and clawed his way to the top and (with a kind of joy) thirty level feet further before he collapsed.

He lay there for a long time without even trying to think.

Then at last he rolled over, handling his hurt leg as if it was a fragile possession of someone else’s, and sat up to look across the valley at the tip of the sun as it pressed up out of its slot behind the hills. All it said to him was that this was a new day, and he didn’t have to think about that a lot.

What he did think of, as he sat there in his new day waiting for someone to come along, was the two questions he hadn’t asked himself, not for a second, during all those terrible hours:

Why had he jumped?

Why had he climbed?

Just sitting here, watching the sun come up—that was all the answer he needed for the second one.

And the first one just didn’t matter any more. Right? he asked himself. “Right,” he said.

“My God!” I cried, “it’s … it can’t be.” Then, a little awed by the fact that my voice didn’t echo in those wide endless corridors—well hell, they had carpeting an inch and a half thick—I added almost shyly, “Uncle Fremmis?”

“Shore is, son,” he said.

I must say, I was shocked.

Uncle Fremmis—actually he was my mother’s uncle—was a hard-bitten, easy-laughing, gray-headed man when I was merely toddling. When I was grown, and before I left the Lake country (there’s mostly hills there, but they call it the Lake country) Uncle Fremmis was still a hard-bitten, easy-laughing gray-headed man. He lived pretty much by himself at one end of a hogback with a kind of pond—what it was was a crooked wide place in a creek—on one side and a deep foggy valley on the other. It was a valley nobody wanted, I guess—even now it’s the same way it always was, and Uncle Fremmis used to like to watch the light come before the sun did, and the rabbits and all, and squirrels red and gray and bobolinks and the deer that would graze on the steep grass until the sun burned the mist away. He used to hang around town a lot and was a very popular man although as far as I know he was never really close to anybody. When he needed staples he’d turn his hand to everything—splitting wood with a go-devil, or digging wells, or swamping (which means anything you want it to mean) around the lumber mill. Flour and salt and needles—that’s the kind of stuff he’d buy. Yellow soap and Levis and every few years a bucket and an ax, a whetstone, a pitcher.

He made enemies; they were always the same kind of man.

The first one that I remember was a blacksmith. He rightly hated Uncle Fremmis, and came up to him on the street one day with his
hand out, and Uncle Fremmis grinned his quick grin and took it, and the blacksmith snatched him off his feet and stomped him, which didn’t do either one of them any good because folks stopped dealing with him pretty much except when they had to, and when folks like that want to get along without having to, they can go a long way. I recall one farmer used a one-wheeled hay rake for close to three years rather than have that smith fix a busted axle cap. The right side of the rake rode on a skid like a travois, that the farmer made out of old spring leaves. Uncle Fremmis never did anything to get back at the blacksmith except to stand in the middle of the street laughing the day the smith nailed up the F
OR
S
ALE
sign on his shop.

The years rolled by slower in that country, somehow, than other places, but they brought new things all the same. The workhorses went the way of the buggy horses and everybody had a tractor, and it was old Pidgeon, that owned the gas station, who got to bad-mouthing Uncle Fremmis so much. Uncle Fremmis paid that no mind at all until Pidgeon bought into the general store and tried to stop Uncle Fremmis’ credit, because things were up and down with Uncle Fremmis and when they were down the credit made a lot of difference, and never once in his life did he leave a bill unpaid (nor run up more than maybe forty dollars worth of them). When word got around about that, business fell off so bad at the gas station and the tractor shop that was part of it that old Pidgeon was hard put to it to pay his bills. Tractors just didn’t hardly break down any more and when they did, somehow there was always a neighbor to borrow one from, and some of the horses still left around came out of pasture and went back to work again. Before you know it old Pidgeon had to sell out his piece of the general store and then Uncle Fremmis had his credit back again. That gas station and the repair shop never did do real well until old Pidgeon sold out, either.

And when I was in the high school there was a wall-eyed young man name of Skutch who opened up an electric and radio place. He did real good until the second time he tried to hurt Uncle Fremmis. The first time he said it was an accident, when he hired him to help out one afternoon and told him to hold onto a wire and then did something that gave Uncle Fremmis such a shock it laid him out and
he swallowed his tongue, he really did, and that would have been all for Uncle Fremmis if Dr. Weiss hadn’t happened by and hooked the tongue back with his finger and brought him around. The second time Skutch went after Uncle Fremmis with his Essex Terraplane automobile; he said that was an accident too, but if it was it was an accident that went a quarter mile along Beasley Road and out into Roudenbush’s cornfield with Uncle Fremmis jumping and ducking like a jackrabbit until Skutch saw Roudenbush sitting there on his tractor watching, so he quit. After that Skutch’s trade fell off real bad and if you had a business in town and you bought from Skutch, somehow your business would fall off too, so Skutch didn’t last long.

Whenever Uncle Fremmis needed more than just his staples, he would dowse. He was a waterfinder; he’d whittle you a piece of apple (some dowsers use willow, but Uncle Fremmis always cut a little Y off a green apple tree) and walk around with it in his hands, and where it bent down sharp he’d say dig, and there was your well. He only did this three times that I can remember, and it cost five hundred dollars a time, and he got it because his deal was real straight: if he said dig and there was no water, you didn’t pay him. (The price of the digging was your gamble.) All those three times he was right and got his money. He got kind of famous around there for that and had all the offers he could have wanted, but he didn’t want them. He didn’t believe in the income tax and never would earn more than five hundred dollars in a year.

He never did marry that I know of. He visited around a little, and it’s a measure of where he stood in the Lake country that although they like to gossip as much as anybody anywhere, they let Uncle Fremmis’ business be his business, except maybe one or another of the ladies would nudge the latest one a little and slip her a wink and make her blush. So all in all he didn’t need much more than he made helping out here and there, except for something special, or to catch up on the store account after a bed spell.

One of the something specials was a Model I-NC quarter ton panel truck. You probably don’t remember the I-NC. It was the last four-cylinder wheels that Henry ever made. (I don’t count the Jeep because that wasn’t Henry’s to begin with.) The truck had this funny
little corn popper up front and right behind it the biggest four-speed gearbox you ever saw, so that in low-low it would walk up the side of a billboard if you could find some way to make it stick on. The speedometer only went up to sixty which if you ever drove a I-NC is just childish, like little kids betting a million; downhill, flat out, and with a following wind a I-NC could maybe go forty-three. Anyway Uncle Fremmis fell in love with one and found water for some dude over in Clearwater and took the money and bought the truck. He got Ed Varney to take out the corn-popper and put in a rebuilt V-8 from Sears and Roebuck, and a two-speed rear axle off a Reo. He got Ed to do it because with mechanical things Uncle Fremmis was the best water dowser and well digger around, if you see what I mean. Anyway that old I-NC, peeling green paint and rust spots and all, turned into something like a buzz bomb with the wings chopped. Riding in it with Uncle Fremmis was a real hairy experience. The speedo needle would go right away up to the sixty and hit a pin there, and after that you could see it bend. The suspension was narrow-gauge and the tires were 6-15’s and the shocks were long gone and pure decoration. The body was very high and narrow and kind of humped and when it got to swaying a bit it would pick up both left wheels and then both right wheels and you wouldn’t know what that thumping was until you asked Uncle Fremmis and he told you. On the other hand, no matter how useless Uncle Fremmis was with a wrench, he was a fine artist with the wheel and he never did flip that thing. Nobody ever knew how fast it would go. He let it out on the State highway one afternoon and a state patrolman on a hog chased him a ways and then let him go because he was afraid to catch him; he said later that what was sure to happen he just couldn’t bear to see, but anyway he clocked him at eighty-seven and caught him on the way back. Uncle Fremmis, because he was Uncle Fremmis, wound up without a ticket and, for an hour and a half, with the policeman’s head under the hood and down under, looking up at that monstrous rear axle. That cop later won a NASCAR finals, and used to tell about Uncle Fremmis and how he started him on the hot wheels, but that’s another story. Anyway it was that truck that led me to understand about Uncle Fremmis.