Three Novellas by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez
Three Novellas:
The Last Long Walk of Noah Brown
The King and the Clockmaker
The Vast Darkness
by
Sandra Shwayder Sanchez
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PUBLISHED BY:
Three Novellas
copyright 2007 by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez
Acknowlegements:
“The Vast Darkness” originally appeared in The Long Story
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Table of Contents
The Last Long Walk of Noah Brown
The King and the Clockmaker
The Vast Darkness
a note about the writer
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The Last Long Walk of Noah Brown
1965 -1975
Noah Brown’s first really long walk started in 1965 from his hometown of Annapolis to a commune in western Maryland on the Pennsylvania border. This journey occurred at a leisurely pace and took the better part of a year. The commune was called “The Free University for Life Skills” and Noah was proud to be accepted as he had always been told, sometimes taunted, that he was a retard.
Noah Brown was a walker, even as a child wandering off and exploring the town where he was born. He was not the youngest of his parents’ six children but he was the last to leave home. A sister, a year younger than Noah, married at sixteen a much older man whom she did not love, but she told Noah the man was a good provider and she ate well. The oldest sister had left early as well. She made good money cutting hair in town. Sometimes she tracked Noah down and tried to slip him a few bucks, telling him to buy something for himself, not to give the money to the folks because she said they would just drink it up. He would give them the money anyway because he couldn’t lie and sure enough they drank it up. His three older brothers had joined the navy and each time one of them went to a new place in the world Noah would get a postcard always with the same message written in large letters easy for him to read: CAN’T COMPLAIN, FOOD IS GOOD AND PLENTY OF IT. Noah could read the words food and good and got the general idea.
Nothing ever came for the folks and the folks did not seem to care. Noah himself could not get into the navy, couldn’t pass the tests. He’d heard it whispered now and then that his mother must have been so drunk so often while she carried him that his brain was doomed before he was born. But what he lacked in conventional intelligence he made up for with a generous and cheerful personality. He would have stayed with the folks tolerating their rude behavior and drunken ways forever but his mother told him one day he had to leave and make his own way because they couldn’t afford to feed him any longer. In point of fact they had stopped feeding him years before and he had been doing odd jobs for people in the town in exchange for meals, hand-me-down clothes and a little civil conversation. He was well liked and trusted in the town. Nonetheless when his mother told him he had to leave he did not seek accommodations with any of the townspeople but began to walk inland. He had some cash his sister had given him. He’d had brains enough to find her and ask for it and she had given him a hug and a wad of $10 bills. She’d explained change to him years before and now told him what shoes should cost and a bus ticket to this town and that one while Noah pretended to listen. She also wrote down her address on a piece of yellow lined notebook paper and told him to send her a postcard when he settled somewhere, told him to ask for help if he needed it though she had long ago taught him to print some.
As it happened, Noah was uncomfortable in shoes and on the Greyhound bus, confinement of any kind making him feel just a bit faint, so he walked barefoot along the side roads through the countryside and made a lot of friends because he had so little to say and could listen indefinitely, not knowing the difference between wisdom and nonsense and having no schedule to keep.
His first day out a fog rolled in and Noah could see only a few steps ahead so he walked slowly, reverently. He enjoyed the blanketed feeling, more secure in wild nature than he’d ever felt in the house with his family. The sun did eventually emerge in time to set in the west casting sideways glances through the trees, causing the green-gold and orangey red of the autumn leaves to lift up and float with a vivid iridescent glow in the dusk.
Before it was completely dark, Noah stopped and found a comfortable place among the trees that lined the highway. He gathered armloads of fallen leaves to make a soft nest and curled up in the embrace of the large sheltering roots of an oak tree. Sometimes in the night he opened his eyes and saw the sky full of stars so he knew it had cleared.
Noah woke with the sun which burned off the morning fog and warmed him. He’d been soaked to the bone by the early evening fog and the early morning dew. Not far away a cow with an overburdened udder was mooing to be milked and the rooster called to the rising sun, the geese that took to arrowed flight, the crows and the magpies who joined in. A child stood in a field looking around at the world and saw Noah and called to him. The child was not afraid of Noah. He marched right up to Noah, asked if he wanted a job and within minutes Noah was hired on to help get the hay in from the field. The child’s mother drove an old tractor pulling a flat bed trailer and Noah helped the small boy and his older sister pitch and haul the rectangular bales up onto the trailer. The boy’s father worked in a factory during the days and with the weather growing ever more damp, his wife and children were rushed to get that precious second cutting into the barn before it got moldy.
“Moldy hay’ll kill the horses” the boy told Noah so Noah would fit his hand in between the sheaves of hay to be sure it had stayed dry inside and felt around the outside to be sure the morning sun had dried up the moisture from the evening fog. Some bales, he told the woman, needed to stay longer in the sun before they were stacked in the dark barn.
“You’d be a good hand” she told Noah and asked if he would like to stay on and help. The family could not afford to pay him but he’d eat well and have a roof over his head.
Noah stayed with the family through the winter and observed and learned many things, some fearsome, some wonderful. He learned how to milk the cows and especially enjoyed that. He chopped wood and shoveled snow, carried groceries and washed dishes. He learned to play some rudimentary tunes on the blues harp. He comforted the little boy when a truck ran over his dog, That was the hardest thing that winter. The most unforgettable was when two cows calved early in the season. A heifer died with her first calf. The vet might have been able to save her but the roads were slick with black ice under the snow and he arrived too late to save the heifer. He saved the calf and they were discussing what other cow might let the orphan suck. Bottle fed calves did not fare well in the damp winters. As fortune would have it, another cow gave birth prematurely to a dead calf that same evening. The vet remarked with some enthusiasm that the odds of that happening in such a small herd were pretty low.
Noah thought it sad to see the cow licking the dead calf as sorrowful as any human mother could be. Then he watched with horrified fascination while the farmer and the vet, after putting the cow up in the barn where she continued to cry out, skinned her dead calf and put the skin over the orphan calf in order to fool the cow into letting it suck as if it were her own. The ruse worked and Noah never forgot the bloody sight of it. He was comforted by the sight of the cow contented at last and relieved when the orphan calf was accepted and could be removed from the bloody skin. Noah began to understand then that life could be both brutal and sweet.
When spring was well established, Noah decided it was time to keep moving and rather than explain his strange aversion to buses, he allowed himself to be driven to the greyhound station in the nearest town. The farmer’s wife wanted to wait with Noah until he was safely on board the bus but her husband said “he’s a grown man, he’ll be OK,” and
As it was back then in the sixties, the whole country seemed to be on the move, young people hitch-hiking or driving vans or buses converted into homes on wheels. Noah didn’t mind riding in a colorfully painted bus equipped with comfortable old armchairs and beds and hot plates. He could stretch out, eat, sleep, not at all like riding the dog. Having nowhere else he needed to be and rather liking the company of the young couple who had stopped to give him a ride, Noah decided to accept their invite to check out the Free University. He told them he had not graduated any high school and they told him that would not matter because this University was free in more ways than one.
A couple of life changing events took place within the first few days of Noah’s stay at the communal University. He learned about his namesake in the bible, a story he vaguely remembered his older sister had told him a long time ago, and he experienced the joy of sexual relations with a lovely young red haired woman who gave him a peacock feather the next morning before she headed on down the road. Noah kept that peacock feather, along with the memory, for the next forty years, packing it carefully in secret places among his sparse belongings each time he took to the road. But it would be another two years before he seriously took to the road again.
During those two years, while all around him people were building shelters of varying types: yurts and tipis and solar heated domes, Noah built an ark. The project started with a dream inspired by a picture in a child’s book of bible stories. There were children at the Free University who were being home schooled by a group of adults who’s responsibility was child care and schooling. When the woman who directed this effort discovered that Noah could only read a few words, she endeavored to teach him this skill using the books that had been donated to the small makeshift school. It had not been her intention to teach him bible stories, rather to help him learn to read but of course he was intrigued by the story of Noah and the Ark.
His teacher had begun with this story so that Noah would be inspired by recognizing one of the words that he could read: his own name. She asked him some questions then about his parents, were they religious? “No” he told her, a bit irritated that she spoke to him as though he were five years old. He told her he thought he might have been named for a boat that used to dock near where his family lived. He knew his brother Will was named for a boat with the words “Sweet William” stenciled on its end. He remembered some boys teasing his brother about being called “sweet” and how his brother had felt compelled to beat them bloody. Will had been sweet to Noah, though, and remembering that made Noah sad. The teacher stopped asking him questions about his family that day, but from time to time she would ask again. He always answered her until he overheard her one night talking about his family to some other people and they all seemed to feel sad for Noah. He did not want anyone to feel sad on his account so after that evening he never again told her anything about his family and for the most part he stopped thinking about them himself.
It was several months before he remembered that he was supposed to write to his sister and then he asked the woman’s help. She seemed so happy that he had a sister he wanted to contact that she took a photograph of him in front of the large log building that served as the community kitchen and dining hall with a few bedrooms in the back for the permanent residents. It had a big porch and she had posed Noah on the porch which looked very grand. They waited to send his letter until they could include this photograph and Noah knew his sister would be happy for him. She sent him a simple printed letter in return and they wrote back and forth every month the entire time Noah lived there.
The dream Noah had about the ark was in vivid color just like the picture in the child’s book. The crested waves from the picture tore loose in his dream with such force that he could hear and smell and feel the roaring salt water and woke up struggling to breath. He realized then that the story could happen again and that he, being Noah after all, should begin immediately to build an ark. He wanted it to be as like the picture as possible and had no idea how he would construct it alone. At first he was afraid if he asked for help he would be laughed at but finally he confided his dream to the oldest man he could find, someone who looked a bit like the biblical Noah himself. His name was Bob, and Bob did not laugh. Bob told Noah he would help him build his ark as well as a nifty little wheeled trailer by which it could be towed to the water someday. Noah kept to himself the thought that the water would be coming to the ark soon enough. For his part, Bob kept to himself that, in point of fact, the boat he would help Noah build would be a canoe.
The building of the canoe that they called Noah’s Ark took two years. This was because Bob guided Noah through a process that began with choosing trees in the woods to cut for the wood and waiting for the wood to cure. Together they wandered the woods and Bob told Noah stories and they talked about the different kinds of trees, the quality of the wood, how to recognize the different kinds of trees by their bark in the winter when they were bare of leaves. Bob made Noah learn to recognize the kinds of trees they would cut for the boat: ash and white oak and walnut, and hemlock for the oars because Bob told Noah, he should have hemlock oars. He spoke lovingly of grains and colors, how beautiful the ark would be, and light. It had to be light enough for Noah to drag behind him even on the wheeled contraption that Bob designed for it.
Sometimes they cut a tree, sometimes not, sometimes two, never more than that. It was a process that took into consideration two objectives, one getting the wood for the ark, the other thinning the forest without cutting too much in any one area. Noah learned respect for the forest, the trees and the animals in it. As they cut the trees they peeled the bark from them with a special tool and this too was a process that involved a lot of patience. Noah and Bob both took much sensual pleasure from the scent of the fresh wood beneath the bark. They kept the long strips of bark and a woman at the school dried those and used them to weave baskets. They took the cut and peeled trees to a man who had a small sawmill on his farm. He made extra money that way, the saw-mill, the hay, the canned goods and selling ginseng to health food coops in Baltimore and Washington. Bob and the sawyer used hand-tools to cut strips of wood, ranging from 16 feet long to a couple inches long, less than an inch wide and, miracle of miracles, only a quarter inch thick to make what they called a strip canoe until Noah trained them to use the proper word for his project: he wanted to build an “ark”. It did not bother him in the least that this sixteen foot long canoe would only carry a couple of adults, perhaps a small child, or maybe a dog. Noah was not crystal clear yet on who would be the occupants of his ark once the great flood hit.
Noah was not as adept as Bob at stapling the long narrow strips to the skeleton that Bob built under a canvas canopy and sometimes, despite the amazing suppleness of the wood strips, he broke one. No matter Bob told him, they would use those pieces lower down on the underbelly of the boat. He wasted nothing and for this Noah was thankful for the thought of wasting the lovely trees made him cry. When Noah learned his task well enough that Bob felt confident leaving him to work alone, Noah came to love the rhythm of the work, slowly smoothing the strips around the bones of the boat, stapling them carefully, then running his hand over the lovely wood again and again. He examined his creation carefully with his eyes and his hands together, like a lover memorizing the body of his beloved, pairing the visual image with the touch of hands as if storing memories for some eventual blindness.
Later Bob and Noah drove all the way back to Annapolis. It was a much shorter trip in Bob’s truck than it had been for Noah, coming from that city, meandering as he had about the countryside on foot, hitching rides that sometimes took him out of the way or even backwards. The visit back to his hometown felt like a trip back in time. Bob asked him if he had family he would like to see and Noah said he’d like to see his sister so they went by the place she used to work but the owner said she had
In Annapolis they visited a chandlery where Bob purchased what he called the boat’s “skin” a gossamer fine cloth that would be used to wrap the boat and the resin they would need to coat it with to protect the beautiful woods that striped his ark with their different shadings and grains. Noah wanted to wait a while to put this skin over his boat, he wanted to run his hands along the naked wood a few more times but Bob warned him they needed to cover the boat with this protective skin before the damp and the blowing rains that had already started began to erode the exquisite wood. In the spirit of protecting his beloved boat, Noah, slowly, reverently stretched the skin over the wood and slowly, reverently stroked on the resin and then he let it sit in the work shed and was not in a rush to take it out for trial run on a nearby river. Noah was content to simply admire his accomplishment that had spanned two of each season. The very last touch made to the boat was the painting of its name. On Bob’s advice, Noah sought the help of one of the residents who was very gifted at painting and this woman carefully painted the words NOAH’S ARK straddling the center of the canoe at each end. She painted it in the color of Noah’s choice: a rust red color like earth and each letter highlighted in green, the same shade as the spiky needles of the hemlock tree that Noah had planed and smoothed into oars while Bob made other items from the wood of that particular tree, lovely carved toys that he would sell at crafts fairs to raise money for their winter supplies.
During the time that Noah worked on his ark many of the residents of the communal University left to go find land of their own. They went to Maine and West Virginia and New Mexico where people were poor and land was cheap and they wrote back from time to time to report on how things were going. One couple went as far as British Columbia in Canada. A group of them went back to Washington D.C to join the protestors who blocked the highway to the Pentagon and demanded that their government get out of Viet Nam. People came from the cities to stay a few nights or a few weeks, no one stayed as long as Bob and the woman who taught Noah to read. Noah learned that these two had at one time been married. They had no children but acted like the parents of all the young people who came through and Noah enjoyed being part of their little core family. Nonetheless, about a month after the ark was finished, Noah felt his wanderlust return and he determined to take another long walk, to see more of the world.
Noah was rightfully proud of his ark and the entire community participated in a special celebration to “launch” it on a lake to which they pulled it behind a pick-up truck with a hitch intended to pull a kind of covered wagon contraption that the owner had built for his family, the family still a dream at that point. The event doubled as Noah’s going away party although, had he changed his mind and decided to stay that would have been fine too.
There was homemade dandelion wine and a beautiful woman in a colorful billowing dress opened a bottle and splashed a little token wine over the craft, cut a ribbon that had been tied across the front and proposed a toast to Noah and his next great adventure. Everyone took turns paddling the ark out on the lake and drinking the dandelion wine and once it got dark they built a fire and sat around talking about where Noah should go next on what was by then being called The Great Exploration. Turns out people had come to The Free University of Life Skills from all over the country and there were a lot of suggestions from Key West, Florida to Taos, New Mexico. The man from New Orleans told the best stories however and he told them so well that, before long, Noah thought that man’s memories were his own and he was longing to get back to a home he had yet to see.
The same woman who had painted Noah’s name on his ark, painted him a beautiful sign with the words New Orleans and lots of flowers on it and Noah set off the next morning, the only person not hung over from too much dandelion wine. He did not know it at the time but it would take Noah several years to get to New Orleans as his journey would be a winding twisting road throughout the southeastern countryside.