I Need a Vacation from Myself

So, I foolishly bumped around from blog to blog again for a few minutes, and have decided to go on a blog fast. Most of them are so self-indulgent. I don't like self-indulgence. I'm worried I'm being self-indulgent. I've got to think about that for a bit, wonder if a little self-indulgence is alright. I'm surrounded by so many damn addicts in my life if I do something more than once I worry about its control over me. Plus, I'm sick of my own voice. Somebody tell that girl to stop yapping.

Anyways. I was working on my latest story tonight which I will post for a change of pace (man, I wish I was more computer savvy so I didn't just have to put the whole damn thing up on my blog) and I'll see you all in a week or two.

Angela


Frederick and The Sparrow

Frederick left Holland with his son in 1946. He took with him to Canada seventy dollars, the carved wooden trunk that The Sparrow had made for him for their wedding and the pieces of shrapnel in his back that the doctors had been unable to remove.
When Frederick was a child, his father had been a butcher in Rotterdam. He smelled of warm animal blood and the chemicals Frederick’s mother used to sanitize the stained aprons every Wednesday and Saturday. He was a powerfully large man with thick fingers that sliced out the grape-like clusters of fat inside the cow carcasses that swayed on hooks in the back room. Frederick would watch in dread as his father worked with determined violence, disassembling the miraculous workings of what had only moments earlier been a living animal.
Slice! went the knife, and the hide popped open with a crack. Slice! went the knife, and the clusters of grapes were tossed with a wriggling slosh in a bucket. Slice! went the knife, and the intestines spilled like snakes onto the floor. Slice! went the knife, and the dark red liver dropped into his father’s waiting hand. Slice! Slice! Slice! The animal disappeared into parts.
“Pay attention Frederick,” his father always said to him. “One day you will grow arms like mine and you will learn to hold this knife and do this work and you will become the best butcher in all of Holland, eh?” But Frederick could not pay attention to the diminishing animal without feeling that he was being sliced and popped and dropped and he longed to gather up the pieces and make the animal whole again.
When Frederick was twelve and heard that his father had been “butchered by those bastard Huns,” he dreamt of his father telling him to “pay attention” as strange bearded men sliced at his chest, neatly cutting out his liver and intestines. He awoke to the sounds of birds singing in the beech tree that grew in the backyard and decided at that moment in his bed, that when he grew-up, he would only work at making beautiful, whole things.
Frederick’s mother sold the butcher shop and two years later Frederick began as an apprentice in a cabinetmaker’s shop. It was rough work, building simple wooden chairs and tables, unimaginative trunks and dressers, all plain and sensible, built to last. But Frederick was happy. Everyday he began with handfuls of pieces and in the evenings, when he hung up his dusty apron, there was something new that had not existed before that day.
After he had learned all he could from the master of the shop of simple wooden pieces, Frederick apprenticed himself out to a master of beauty. He spent the daylight hours shaving off slivers of dark, spicy smelling wood, marking off minuscule measurements, running his hands along sanded edges, searching out imperfections and smoothing them away. Frederick jumped whenever he heard the sound of the bells jingling on the shop door, alarming him to customers that needed tending to, to a world that existed outside of his work. In the evenings he sketched designs for wardrobes, tables, mirrors, bed frames, clocks, trunks, chairs. They came to him like inspiration, like the Holy Spirit to John on the island of Patmos. Frederick lived like a hermit, saving every coin, existing on rye bread and cheese, going out only to church on Sunday morning.
He opened his own shop seven years later. The weight of the key in his hand and the smell of varnish and oak and beech and pine made the space behind his eyes contract and he had to clench his jaw tight for control that warm spring morning in May. They were beautiful - the pieces that had come to him at night- emerging from rough, lifeless planks of wood, into smooth shining forms that reflected the light like liquid and felt whole and safe to his fingertips and palms. When he locked the door that night and stared at the shop from across the street he felt sure that its warmth would draw people inside, calling them to peace and comfort in a chair or table or bed. That they would walk through the doors and sense the spirit that had inspired the pieces and want to take it home with them, into their lives. And so it did. The customers came and left their worries of rumbling Germany and ugly black spiders on white armbands outside. Inside the shop was solid life in wooden strongholds and they grasped for it in relief and desperation.
The shop pulled at her one day, not long after it opened, and she stepped inside and glanced about, looking like a round little sparrow with her fluffy brown hair and slightly curved spine.
She blushed and stammered and stared at his chin when she asked if he would take her on as an apprentice.
“But you are a woman,” Frederick replied, in a confused statement of the obvious.
Her blush spread to her neck and her hands fluttered nervously to her hair. “Yes, I am a woman,” she said. “I don’t see why that should matter.”
“It does matter,” said Frederick. “Cabinetry is not a place for a decent woman. It is a man’s world.” The words sounded harsh and cold to him and they knocked against the warmth of the shop.
“The world is changing,” she replied. “It isn’t a place for decent women anymore. Or decent men.” She looked around the shop again and rubbed at a polished knot in the countertop. “Please,” she said quietly. “I need to be a part of this.”
“Why?” asked Frederick. The lacquered wood shone brighter for a moment and the air grew still and Frederick found that he was holding his breath.
“Because,” she said, “everything outside is falling apart. It’s all in ugly pieces.”
He exhaled.
“Alright,” he replied in a rush and the Sparrow’s hands stilled on the countertop.

At first they worked in almost silence, knocking into each other as they moved around the workroom, reaching for tools that were in use or misplaced, stammering and misunderstanding each other when they tried to speak. The Sparrow knew nothing of woodworking and the reality of creating wholeness was much more difficult than the idea of it. She hadn’t known what questions to ask, and Frederick had not known how to teach. And so, they worked in silence. She, watching how his hands moved along a seam of wood, how they held a knife, sanded an edge, carved a leaf, how they paused in movement when the fingertips found flaws and reached for paper to brush them away.
The Sparrow’s hands were uncooperative and bled and blistered in protest. Frederick started her on small wooden boxes so that there would be less waste when she miscut, as she often did. She was frustrated and disappointed with her efforts and Fredrick was surprised by her stubborn perseverance in the face of her failures. Within months, her hands became a miniature version of his, with thick calluses on the palms and restless, searching fingertips.
They ate lunch together, rye bread and cheese, until The Sparrow brought in a bowl of plums one day and Frederick looked up from his plate of crumbs and saw the bowl.
“Plums,” he said. “I had forgotten about fruit.” They looked at each other and laughed about the plums and their silence and the way in which some things in life had escaped them.
A week later, Frederick brought in oranges for lunch. The shop smelled of holidays as they pulled off the peels and timidly shared stories of Saint Nicholas day and the mad scrambling as father’s dressed like Sinter Klaas threw handfuls of pepernoot in the front door.
“It’s how I got this scar,” The Sparrow said, and she pulled back her fluffy brown hair to show the silver scratch that ran along the edge of her forehead up into the hair line.
“I wanted more pepernoot than my brother, who was older and faster and always stealing the best of everything from me. I was waiting too close to the door when my father flung it open and cracked me on the head with the doorknob. He had to run and fetch the doctor from his dinner. He stitched up my head, scolding me the whole while about what a selfish little girl I was, telling my father that Zwarte Piet should have left coal in my shoe instead of oranges and candies. I was ashamed because he was right. I had been selfish and was paying the price for it, as was my father, who had to pay the doctor in chickens and humility. I was an oddly reasonable child and resigned myself to never discover candies and oranges in my shoes again. I cried the year after to discover that Sinter Klaas had forgiven me and left me gifts despite my selfishness. Years later, I cried again when I realized it had been my father who had forgiven me instead.”
Frederick peeled an orange as she spoke and put the separated segments on her plate. The oil from the peels soaked into their hands as they talked and all afternoon the scent of oranges mixed with the scent of the wood as they worked.
The Sparrow brought in a pineapple for lunch two weeks later. Neither of them had tasted pineapple before and they were silent again for a moment, as she sliced two large rounds off of the fruit. The juice pooled on the table and they laughed in embarrassment and delight as it dripped from their fingers and lips, stinging the cuts on their hands.
After that, they grew into a rhythm of work together. The Sparrow’s boxes became smooth and square and she had taken to carving fruits and birds along the edges. They were at first embarrassing to Frederick in their clumsy representations but she did not seem to mind and continued to carve until the birds were finely feathered and the fruit, round and ripe. He began to show The Sparrow the plans that he had drawn at night and they learned to build the pieces together. They cut and hammered and glued and sanded and varnished, following the plans, watching the pieces daily take shape. The shop filled with their furniture and The Sparrow worked beside him daily, fluffy brown head bent down, gently curved spine rounded over the table. The customers came in even greater numbers and breathed in the air of the place, buying moments of calm before they re-entered the city that squirmed under the fear of the eastern violence that was spreading towards them.
They were married in 1936. The first time they made love they laughed nervously as their calloused fingers moved over each other’s bodies. They were all of a sudden new to each other again, fumbling, silent and learning. She became pregnant a year later. They stayed up late nights, drawing plans for cribs and dressers, miniature tables and chairs, a child-sized workbench. The Sparrow had a little baby boy with fluffy brown hair. The first time Frederick held his son, the space behind his eyes contracted and he clenched his jaw. The tears dripped from his cheeks onto the soft blinking bundle in his hands.
On another warm spring morning, on the fifth year anniversary of opening his shop, the Germans invaded Rotterdam. The air raid sirens screamed out fear on the streets but inside the shop glowed warm and safe, beautiful and whole. Frederick sliced a round off of the celebratory pineapple with deaf determination and The Sparrow held their two-year-old son on her lap, laughing quietly as he made faces at his first taste of the fruit.
When the bomb exploded in the street, shrapnel flew through the shop window and struck The Sparrow in the head, severing the line of her silver scar. It killed her instantly. There was pineapple between her teeth as she fell to the floor cradling her son, her body protecting him from flying debris. Other bits of shrapnel shot about the room, slicing the shining furniture into portions. It carved out chunks of flesh from Frederick’s back and threw him down to the ground beside his wife.
Frederick saw The Sparrow, dead on the floor of his butchered shop. His back was warm and wet with their mixed blood and the air smelt of his father’s work. There was a blue piece of the outside world pushing into the shop through a large hole in the roof and his son’s muffled crying.

In Canada, Frederick works at a slaughterhouse. He spends his days grabbing panicked chickens, slicing at their thin bony necks, his fingers sweating inside bloody gloves that make his hands soft and smell like chemicals.
After work he stops at the park and eats two cheese sandwiches, saving the crusts for the sparrows that he has trained to eat out of his hand. When the birds have finished the bread, he walks home to his son and together they go into their backyard. They clean and refill the birdfeeders and replace the peanuts along the outside ledge of the kitchen window. Inside, they drink mugs of soup at the counter and watch as the birds gather up their nightly courage to feast on the nuts.
Some nights, after the boy has gone to bed, Frederick takes out a piece of plain white paper from his son’s school satchel and stares at it, a pencil held loosely in his motionless hand. When the clock strikes ten, he slips the unmarked paper back among the supplies. On these lonely nights that feel like an empty sky he goes to bed with fine pinpricks of blood soaking through the back of his white undershirt.