Read Online The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks - Free Book Online Page A

George Tole. He had spent months carving his own crazy-angled version of a town and city, Franklin and New York and environs, a hybrid creature. This work took up most of his floor space—on the ground and on low tables he’d built for it. Now he looked at it and wondered why he ever bothered. In its regularity it seemed a horror.
    Through the window in the south wall, over his wood-and-clay version of the town square, he could see through several yards to the cobbler’s shop. He tried to pray, but he’d lost the rhythm of prayer, the sound of it. His prayer was straight wishing and pleading and waiting for a sign. He prayed for time not only to stop, but also to circle back on itself before certain decisions had been made, permanent and eternal.
    When he fled New York he thought he would forget, but there was no forgetting. Mariah Reddick would know this fact soon enough. He knew the guilt would catch her, the helplessness, the not knowing, the growing suspicion that it could have been anyone who had put that bullet in her son and, therefore, by the logic of the grieving, that it had been everyone .
    He thought he should flee again. Sure as day there would be men after him, maybe not that day, but soon. Dixon would be nervous, at the very least, about letting a Negro have so much knowledge of what happened and how it had been botched. That alone would get Dixon’s men lurking around with their knives and torches. Lord knew what story Dixon would invent, but Tole knew he would be blaming a Negro sure as hell. Or all the Negroes, perhaps.
    But the urge to run was weak. The idea of running exhausted him.
    All that long night he sat on that stool. He was not crazy. If he made it through the night without incident, he would stay. He would stay, and then he would try to discover what he was supposed to do next. He wanted control again, he wanted to understand the world and his place in it. The tiny town he had created made no sense anymore; he needed more knowledge to bring it back in line with the world.
    While he waited for the things to happen, he took out a piece of old oak flooring no bigger than his palm and began to carve a house with an attic. In the attic, he painted two eyes peering out from that window up under the eaves.
    *  *  *
    It was not true, as others assumed, that what existed in Tole’s house was an elaborate display of carvings . It was much more than carving. Some of the figures—horses and people and houses, small dark shacks, fences (split rail and picket), stone walls, rifles—were carved from wood, yes, but this was by no means the only way Tole made his figures. Some were of wire wrapped tightly around nails and shaped, others were newspaper cartoons cut out and pasted to scrap pieces of wood, some were marbles glued to clothespins, and some were silhouettes cut with tin snips from coffee cans. Tole had no particular instinct to use one thing over another; he used what he could find.
    But every figure, at least every human figure, was delicately painted, every detail down to the piping on trousers and the particular agitation of curl in an old man’s hair. But none of them had faces. Or, rather, they had color but no features. They were white and black, in every shade from chalk white through the ivories and tans to the browns and blue-blacks. Every figure had been given its own shade; no two seemed alike. Sometimes when he looked at them he saw each grain of sand on a river bar. It occurred to him that he had much, much more work to do on his creation.
    Tole poured his coffee and turned upon his chair toward the part of the diorama that portrayed the town square (in maple twigs, tobacco twine, clay, broken glass, and a gross of hatpins), where it appeared some men in hats and dark suits (carved cork, old lemon drops he’d painted white, and red clay) had gathered. There was a stage there against one side of the square, and the little men had begun to gather in front.
    Tole stood up and