This Census-Taker(3)

There was supposed to be a holy old woman or man living in a cave no more than an hour’s walk from our door, just below the zenith, and I remember once glimpsing the beat of a brown cape like a shaken sheet but whether that cloth was worn on bony vatic shoulders I can’t say. I can’t even say if I truly saw it.

I’ve observed real ascetics since, their mortifications and their dens, and I know now how pinchbeck was the self-exile I saw, if I saw anything, if there was anything to see.

The most common trace of those who lived closest to us was the smoke from their fires, from when they made food, or destroyed their rubbish, which was not how we disposed of ours.





My father was a very tall pale man who seemed endlessly startled, who moved in jerks as if trying not to be caught out. He made keys. His customers would come up from the town and ask for the things for which people usually ask—love, money, to open things, to know the future, to fix animals, to fix things, to be stronger, to hurt someone or save someone, to fly—and he’d make them a key.

I was put out of the house during these transactions but would often creep around the perimeter to crouch by the window of his workroom to hear the discussions, and even to peek in. More than once my mother, prodding at her plots, her hair up in the yellow scarf that was the brightest thing I ever saw her wear, observed me huddled by the sill. She never stopped me eavesdropping.

My father would take notes as people falteringly told him their needs. On rough brown paper he would start to sketch the outlines of a key’s tines and troughs in graphite and ink, correcting the lines as his customers spoke. He’d continue when the visitors had left, sometimes drawing for hours, almost always finishing his rendition in a single sitting, even if it meant he was working until sunup.

The next day he’d go and start our generator droning, and, returning, would pin the finished image by his table, pinch slats of metal in his vise and with minute movements and slow care, stopping frequently to refer to the picture, cut them with a screaming electric blade run for a few seconds at a time, dimming the downstairs lights, or by hand with the taut steel-wire saws I was also forbidden to touch. My father was strong despite his scrawny arms. He cut and shaped.

Behind his workbench he kept glass jars containing handfuls of various dusts. A few were deep colors; most were varieties of brown and dirt gray. He’d dip his fingers in one at a time, rub the emerging keys, polishing them with the powders and with the sweat on his thumb. I never saw him replenish any containers: he only ever used a trace.

The work exhausted him, even more than you might think. When he finished he’d hold up what he’d made and blow it clean and eye it thoughtfully, the key shining, he a dirty mess.

Sometimes days later those who’d commissioned him would come back to take what they must have paid for, though often not in the tin and paper money of the town, of which there was rarely much in our house; sometimes he would descend to bring the key to them. I never saw any customer more than once.

When my mother cooked mostly she did not talk, planning her garden, I think, neither meeting nor avoiding my eye. When he made supper, my father would step around the little kitchen and pass me food, smiling like a man trying to remember how to do it. He’d look eagerly at my mother and me, and she would not look back, and I would, though also without a word, and he’d try to ask us things and tell us stories.

—

“It’s best to live up here,” my father told me. “Where the air’s good and thin, not too heavy. It doesn’t get in the way.”

That’s a brief memory. When he said that he and I were walking together down the path on an errand I don’t remember. I hadn’t realized it yet but I wasn’t often alone in his company like that; my mother placed herself at the periphery of most of our interactions. I would go walking on my own, though, which she didn’t stop, and so would he, and then I might see him, even follow him, though I tried not to let him see me.

On some days bigger and more intricate things than birds passed over us through that thin air, bustling and busy too high for me to make them out. If I was in his sight when they did so, my father would try that smile again so I thought he wanted to explain something to me, but he never did.

I grew up with the constant wind of the hill whispering to me and pushing back my dark fringe. Behind its sounds were the faint and far-off and occasional shouts of animals and the clack of rock-fall. Sometimes there was an engine or the percussion of a distant shotgun.

I’d seen my father’s furies before the day of that murder when his face and my mother’s face flickered together. I call them furies but in those moments he was unmoved and unmoving: he looked as if he was distracted and thinking deeply.

When I was seven he killed a dog while I watched. It was not our dog. We didn’t then keep any living thing.

I was upslope from my mother’s garden in a splayed tree with roots tangling in the hill dirt. I remember the day as caustically bright, and I remember things overlooking me and gusting at the limits of the flat and open sky. So there I was: the boy, stroked by leaves, not knowing where his mother was, watching his father.

The man sat smoking on an outcrop below. He was unaware of the boy’s attention.

That small red dog came down from nowhere in particular in the heights. It had lived, I suppose, as after weaning all the semi-wild animals on the hill must, by stealing and begging, by luck, as well as by its hunting.