World Made by Hand

Twenty-three

Jane Ann stole into my house, as she always did, without knocking, an hour or so after I’d returned from the meeting. I was sharpening my ripsaw with a file out back in the summer kitchen. In a world without electric powered saws, you had to take care with hand tools. She found me out there, slipped into the rocking chair I had pegged together out of some maple limbs, ash splints, and willow canes, filled a corncob pipe with some marijuana bud that she carried in a little leather pouch on the belt of her long skirt, and lit a splinter of stove wood off my candle to fire up the bowl.

“Want some?” she said, passing the pipe.

“All right.”

The weed was just past green and very resinous. I knew I was getting stoned when I lost track of which saw tooth I was working on.

“Are you just going to keep toiling away on that?” she said.

“Not anymore, I guess.”

“You’ve taken on quite a lot the past couple of days. All these heroics. And now you’re the big pooh-bah around here.”

“I’m hardly a pooh-bah. This sad little town just needs someone with organizational skills.”

“I always pegged you as more of a background kind of person.”

“Are you angry at me?”

She didn’t answer. She relit the splinter and the bowl.

“I don’t know what Loren thinks he can do as constable around here,” she said.

“People look up to him.”

“He’s not the warrior type.”

“There’s no war on around here.”

“Could be, though. Between Karp and this new bunch and everybody else.”

“I think we can get some law going.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said. “Here.” She took a lace napkin out of the big pocket in her skirt and unwrapped a generous square of the walnut cake she was famous for. It was almost all ground nut meats and butter. “For you,” she said.

“Why, thanks.” I was suddenly rather hungry. I put the file and saw aside. “Tell me about your day. What did you do?”

“What didn’t I do? Milked goats. Weeded. Forked compost. Put up rhubarb jam. Walked halfway to Battenville to call on Esther Callie. Her mom finally died.”

“Oh? What of?”

“She was ninety-seven years old, you know.”

“I knew she was very old.”

“I think she’d just finally had enough. She was a nurse in the Second World War. The things she remembered were incredible.”

“The things I remember seem incredible,” I said. “Airconditioning. Cold beer. Baseball on television.” I started to get lost in the maze of my own stoned mind remembering all the things we didn’t have anymore.

“She’d seen so much. I asked her how she could maintain any faith in the human race.” Jane Ann lit the pipe once again.

“Well, what was her view on that?”

“She said on balance she preferred the way things are now.”

“Wow,” I said.

Jane Ann stood and undid the ties along the front of her white blouse revealing her dark-nippled breasts. They shifted liquidly in the flickering candlelight as she swayed to unheard music. “Let’s comfort each other a while,” she said and went inside. That was her code. I knew to follow in a little while with the candle. She was naked when I came to her. We enjoyed our efficient carnal ceremony as we had so many times, and it concluded, as usual, with Jane Ann in tears.

“You know what bothers me most,” she said.

“What.”

“That in the sight of God we don’t matter.”

“Maybe it’s enough that we act as though we do.”

“We can’t even act as if we matter to each other.”

“You mean you and me? Or everybody in general?”

“You and me.”

“Well, we can’t advertise it,” I said.

“No, I’d prefer to pretend it doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe God’s pretending we don’t matter too. He’s got plenty to be pissed off about us.”

In a few minutes she was gone again, leaving me in the dark and the heat with my mind on fire.