Tinkers

by Paul Harding

Or her breath would hitch, as if something long hung on a nail or staked to a chain seemed to uncatch, but only for a second.

Beneath the leather was a layer of red velvet. Howard opened the velvet and there, looking as new as the day it was printed, the pages uncut, was a copy of The Scarlet Letter. Howard opened the book. Inscribed on the title page were the words To “Hick” Gilbert: Here is to the shared memories of young men in the prime of their journeys. Yours always in faith and brotherly friendship, Nath’l Hawthorne, 1852.

As he smoked, he listened to the voices in the rapids. They murmured about a place somewhere deep in the woods where a set of bones lay on a bed of moss, above which a troop of mournful flies had kept vigil the previous autumn until the frosts came and they, too, had succumbed.

To Howard, this was the best part of the afternoon, when folds of night mingled with bands of day.

Howard collected buttercups (habitat: old fields, meadows, disturbed areas)

Where is it you toil and drum and fall to the ground and thrash in the weeds?

So, this is what it is; I know what it is now. My father is not a werewolf or a bear or a monster and now I can run away.

She has never recovered from the shock of becoming a wife and then a mother.

She has convinced herself, at least in the light of day, that this is love, that this is the best way she can raise her children to be strong. She could not live with herself if she allowed herself to believe that she treated her own this way because she felt no more connected to them than she would to a collection of stones.

George noticed for the first time that his mother was still a young woman.

He said, I don’t think he’ll get too far. He thought, I hope he makes it.

where I knew his open window was inhaling and exhaling the plain white curtains my mother had insisted on in the name of minimal domestic propriety.

the old songs have shaken our small home to the ground again and we must rebuild.

Watch the water heal itself of your presence—not to repair injury but to offer itself again should you care to risk another strapping, because instead of the sky being dark and the trees and stones bright, the next time the sky will be bright but the world gloomy. Or there will be rain with no wind. Or wind and sun. Or a starry sky laced with clouds that look like cotton thread. You could not do better if you passed a thousand acts of Congress.

He seemed to me as old as light and just as diffuse. I thought about him when the sky filled with files of dark clouds, whose silhouettes were traced by the sun and which were interspersed with the clearest and cleanest blue imaginable. When gold and red and brown leaves blow across paths and are taken up by circles of wind, it seems like the passing of his time.

Without turning the engine off, Howard got out of the car, walked up the walkway, and knocked on his son’s front door.