Once upon a time, when women the size of dinosaurs roamed the earth, lived a man named Knee.

Knee lived in a cabin in a forest.  The cabin stood in a small clearing, and was built from trees cut down to make the clearing.  The roof of the cabin was made of planks split from the felled trees, and the floor was made of dirt, full of pits and lumps no amount of time wore smooth.

Knee had done neither cutting nor planing; the cabin was built by another man, who lived as lonely as Knee, and who had succumbed to one of the dangers of the life of a woodsman when he bled quietly to death after a blow from his own axe, thrown by a hard knot in soft wood.

Knee was lively to this kind of danger, and kept himself clean and in good relations with God, but he was also sensitive to another danger.  Sometimes, at the end of a long day, Knee felt around his mind and found it empty, hollow as an old rusted drum.  He sat with his shadow and had conversations; he set out two plates and two cups and he and his shadow drank measure for measure.  At such times, unsteady on the dirt floor, his chair might throw him; in the middle of a broad gesture, Knee would find himself tossed to the ground, or he would wake, cramped and cold, to find himself surrounded by a forest of furniture legs, his shadow close as a lover. On one occasion Knee drew his hunting rifle and was stunned to find his shadow holding a shadow gun on him. 

Once a month, near as he could figure to a Monday, Knee walked seven hours to the store, where he bought coffee and sugar and one glass of wild sarsaparilla tea, which he drank on the porch of the store.  Sitting in a swinging seat, Knee sipped the tea, concentrating on its taste – he could never decide whether it was sweet or bitter – and stared, not out at the blank familiar landscape, but inside, at the shelves stacked with hopeful merchandise, the electric lights, the evidence of daily and promiscuous human activity.  The store owner, Jim, never exactly joined him – Jim kept his apron on and while Knee drank, Jim swept or dusted or served the occasional other customer, to whom Knee would present the top of his carefully combed head – but Jim’s activity soothed Knee.  “You’ve got a real good understanding, Jim,” Knee said, brushing dust from his soft, dust coloured hat, and taking hold of the bundle of sugar and coffee and the handful of coppers Jim gave him for skins. 

Jim looked at Knee’s soft, dusty hands and out at the dusty horizon, thinking how he’d underpaid Knee a little for the pelts. “You’d best be going,” he said, but kindly, and Knee shouldered his goods and in his good old boots retraced the same trackless way he’d come, a way rich with spicy smelling grasses, ticks and chiggers and insects of all varieties, saplings and venerable trees with birds living in them, dirt, stones, and the dung of small animals.  In summer, the sky would still be light when he reached the cabin.

One Monday, Knee came to the store to find the swing seat on the porch already full: full of a thin old person wrapped in thick layers of old clothes, and swaying slightly like a rope bridge someone had walked on a few moments before. 

“Watcher,” said the person.

Knee stopped on the porch steps. 

“Watcher,” again, and Knee didn’t know if it was a statement or question, greeting or warning.  The thin person shifted in the nest of clothes, grunting a little.  Jim came to the door.  “Stop yer,” he addressed the bundle of clothes and old flesh and bones, and said to Knee, “It’ll be molasses tea, then; no more sass’prilla.”

Knee entered the store, taking off his hat to clear the low door, and shyly laying his fare – two dead rabbits, and a few dog-skins – on the counter.  Jim fingered the soft pelts of the rabbits, mid-way in colour between gold and white; a couple of lively fleas leapt where he parted the fur.  “Winter’s coming,” he said.  In a tin cup he poured a thick measure of molasses, dark as engine oil, and from the pot on the stove added water, jumping and chirping from the heat. 

Knee carried his cup outside.  The figure on the swing seat stirred, but didn’t make room.  Knee hovered on the stair.
“’Lasses good for the skin, bad for the teeth,” spoke the figure.  Her grin showed bad temper and gums set with a couple of black stumps; her eyes watched Knee’s eyes like a cat watches a frog: to see which way it jumps. 

Knee looked as his feet, sipped his drink, looked up at the figure to see if she watched him still, slid his eyes away when he saw she did.

He coughed, and went back in to the store.

“I don’t reckon I like molasses tea,” he said.  Jim smiled and said, “Well, that’s all right then,” and “You’ll be taking some salt this time?” 

“No,” said Knee, took his sugar and coffee and turned to go.

The next month Knee set off from his cabin in darkness and reached the store past noon.  The same old woman waited in the swing seat.  Knee took off his hat as he passed, so he didn’t have to meet her eye.  Inside the store, Jim poured him a cup of hot water with whiskey, and said, “What’s keepin’?”

Knee held the cup, hot tin to skin, and hesitated inside the door.  Jim had already taken up a broom and everywhere Knee moved it seemed Jim was about to sweep across his shoes. 

“Reckon it’ll be too cold to sit out soon,” Jim said.

Knee took his cup outside.  Coming or going, the same eyes watched him: the seat faced the space between the doors and stair.  Knee crossed this space with his eyes on his feet; still he stumbled when one boot toe found the other.

“Who you?”

“Cyprus, ma’am,” said Knee.  “They call me Knee, ‘though.”

“They?  You don’t look like you get any too much company.”

Knee looked at his cup.   

A wind, rough as a bumptious dog, came up, stirred the gravel of the road, rustled the old bucket fixed to a post for a mail box, drove one or two stray drops from the pump near the porch rail across Knees pants, and left.

“Maybe you can set this seat to swingin’, then.”  The old woman had shifted to one side; the wood of the swing bench, burnished by countless backsides, showed silver beside her.

Knee looked at his big, rough hands, at the small dark spots on his pants from the pump water, out to the road and back into the store.  With his big knees together and his elbows pressed to his sides, he sat, gripping the tin cup like a handle. 

“Ahahhh,” the old woman rattled, “A strong man beside you is good as a stove. You cut the wind, you do.” She wriggled like someone getting comfortable in front of a fire. 

Knee’s skin burned from his hips to the tip of his ears. 

Knee didn’t make the trip to the store all through the snow months.  All winter long he sat under stockpiled furs, eating dried meat and burning wood.  During the coldest nights and days he even stopped scraping the snow away from the door, so only the chimney and one small hole that led through a chute from a corner near the floor to a gap under the eaves stayed open to the air.  He kept a fire burning on the hearth until not a stick of wood remained: not bed nor chair.

Come the thaw, Knee opened his door.  Snow still lay in the hollows and the skirt of shadow around the house, but elsewhere muddy earth showed, spiked with new grass, and the woods rang with the sound of a thousand trickling streams and the drop of a million drips.  The first birds sang, and everywhere tiny new leaves broke through the limbs and twigs of the shrubs and trees as if their bark had been cut in a million places and the life shone out.  

The ground was littered with dead branches, shed when their weight, loaded with snow and ice, grew too great.  Knee set about gathering these, his hands numb and clumsy and keen for industry.  Most he fed to the fire, using the rags of his quilt to stoke the flames hot enough to burn the wetness from the wood.  But some few he kept aside, and, when his hands grew more pliable with warmth and use, he started whittling the sticks into the posts and staves of a new bed, a table, two new chairs.  To the feet of each chair Knee fixed two pieces of bowed wood; on the uneven floor the rockers might sway, but never tumble.  

***

issue 09:03 | archives by category | archives by author