Brief Candle

                                              “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
                                              Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
                                                  To the last syllable of recorded time.
                                                And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
                                            The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
                                              Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
                                            That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
                                                  And then is heard no more. It is a tale
                                                  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
                                                              Signifying nothing.”
                                                    -Macbeth, William Shakespeare

            Although his image on the page burns deep into my mind, his name seems to

wither and waste away, like neglected crops after a waterless season.
         
            My dad sat reading the New Hampshire Gazette from his rocky grey reclining

chair in the living room as I helped mom wash dishes in the kitchen. After supper was the

only time dad could sit down and read the paper after a long day’s work out in the apple

orchards, and he delighted himself with reading each letter of it by candle light until his

eyes forced shut and the candle went out.

            Usually dad would read silently to himself, but on that particular evening, he

found something unusual in the paper and called into the kitchen for me to listen.

            “Hey son, you knew this boy from school?” my dad inquired from his stony rest.

“His father owns a farm the next town over I used to borrow tools from. Says here he

died yesterday evening.”

            The interminable shadow of silence that lingered on after the announcement was

like death itself, cropping up unexpectedly and then brooding uncomfortably for time to

carry forth.

            The mystery boy’s face on the obituary page waved clumsily from across the

room, but feeling that my soapy hands were too wet to venture the distance, I dared not

move closer to my dad to get a steady view. After only a few seconds, my dad broke in

with his rumbling voice to declare the poor boy’s name. “Will,” he stated. “Will

Chambers was the boy’s name. You knew him?”


            The morning fog lingered around the orchard with the bleak countenance of a

suspected criminal on a suburban sidewalk, sauntering along the open line of grass

where hushed and motionless apple trees hunched over the fog like a million ancient

homes waiting to be plucked of all their precious belongings. Once dawn arrived to escort

the fog away and bring order back to the orchard, the peeling home at the end of the row

began to move in a whisper.

            It was late August then, deep into a dry summer, and everyone for miles was

preparing for the autumn harvest. The father of the house, with red and scratchy eyes,

began to brew his pot of coffee while the mother with her brittle, dusty hands set out the

plates of home fries and bacon for her family to pray on. The young boy and girl at the

table hated that desolate morning hour that preceded each laborious day, but knew in

their hearts that God was good, and that He alone could offer them an afterlife for all

their worldly troubles. Once the family rubbed their bellies full with delay, they took to

their feet and started about their work.
         
            The young boy stepped out onto the creaking porch and peered at the sunrise over

the five mountain ranges of Vermont. When he was much younger, he wished to escape

into those mountains and live nearer to the sky. But he knew even in his more vulnerable

years that life among the boulders would not be easy, so he decided to leave the sky for

God and stick to what he knew best.

         
            He was a strong kid, tall and boyishly handsome. He had full black hair with the

dark eyes of a poet and the rough hands to tell his stories. His talent for lifting came in

building and rebuilding walls, setting stone atop stone until they made a mountain. And

perhaps that’s why he enjoyed the work more than any other kind.

            When he reached the far end of his property where the trees suddenly stopped

like blood in a clotted vein, the boy turned to his work in a content and formal fashion.

Nothing mattered outside his peripheral vision of rock and stone; in a ruminative state of

mind, all other thoughts tend to dissolve away. He labored on in this manner for hours,

occasionally lifting his head to admire the fierce undulation of the mountains that

resembled the intensity of the veins in his working arms and hands. As morning rowed on

leisurely into the distance and the sun anchored itself blazing into the middle of the sky,

the boy heard a stirring motion from behind and turned to ready himself for an attack.

         “Ma said it’s time for lunch. Go wash your hands,” spoke the motion, and just

as mysteriously as it had snuck up on him did it retreat beyond his sight.

         Dropping the hard rock onto the soft and sandy ground, the boy started back

towards the house with a pitiless sound stirring from his stomach. As he sauntered down

the row, his fingers mingled with the green and red and jointed branches of the apple

trees, carelessly caressing only the most prominent clusters of leaves and stems. When he

finally reached the peeling house, the boy stomped the dirt of his boots on the front step

and tramped into the kitchen where his family was already seated.

         “Will you wash your hands like I told you to,” the mother said to the boy as he

sank his body into the seat.

            “Ma, my hands are fine. I haven’t touched nothing but rock all day and they’re

clean.”

            “Who are you kidding? They’re caked with dirt and blood,” said the mother,

wincing to see her boy’s hands cut and bleeding and worn with labor. “Could you please

use gloves next time you’re hauling around rocks?”

         “Ma, my hands are fine. They look how a man’s hands are supposed to look.”

            At that remark, the father peered solemnly into his own palms, then told the boy to

respect his mother’s wishes and wash up for lunch.

            After the boy washed his hands and sat back down at the table and prayed to God,

he started on his food with a beastly brutality as if he’d never eaten before in his life or

felt that he wouldn’t eat again for a very long time. He wanted to get back to his stones,

not because he enjoyed work, but because he hoped he’d finish in time to play some

baseball with the kids down the road before too late.

         “I think you’re done with the wall for today,” the father announced to the boy as

he lunged for the door to meet his rocks again.

         The boy turned back towards his father with a dazed confusion. “I’m done for the

day?” he asked innocently.

         The father looked up into the boy’s face with his sweat beaded eyes, no longer red

from the morning, and he let out a jolly laugh. “No boy, unfortunately not. We’ve still got

plenty of work around here before harvest. I need your help sawing up some wood.”

            The boy hesitated for a moment, and then agreed, “That’s fine, pa. I know how

we’re short on time.”

            “Good boy. The wood is stacked out back. Get to work and there might be some

time for you to play ball.” The boy knew then there’d be no time for ball. He didn’t

want to cut wood, he hated cutting wood, but a boy didn’t disrespect his father’s wishes,

and so with that he set back out to work on the new project.

         
            The hand saw cut with the sound and fury of an attacking force of soldiers and

sheeted the boy’s body in a thin robe of dust. He sawed with a ferocity that rivaled his

eating, trying desperately to save a half an hour for play.

         His mind didn’t slip into the same meditative trance produced from wall building,

but grinded its teeth with anger as it focused on the blade moving front to back along the

boney insides of the tree. But try as he did, the brief sun began to creep and fade behind

the mountains, the same way it had done for billions of years and will continue to do until

its last dying breath, and night began.

         The boy’s sister appeared on the porch draped in her cooking apron, looking like

a ghostly shadow come from the underworld. The boy continued to saw tirelessly though.

Out of pure frustration he refused to stop, until at the moment his sister yelled, “Supper,”

and the saw slipped loose from its fleshy wooden incision to seek revenge on its surgeon.

         The hand was sliced clean from the arm, and looking down at the unreal macabre

in the dirt, the boy knew not what to do except fall. Fall to his knees and try hopelessly to

replace the hand. But as with apple-picking, once the apple’s been plucked it can never

be put back on the branch again.

            Knowing that all was lost, the boy slowly placed his head to the ground, and

wiped his tears with blood.


            The local doctor rode out to the farm as soon as he could and placed the boy

under ether. But the boy was heard no more. His heartbeat faded like the sun behind the

mountains, flickering softly before its final descent. “Will! My boy!” his mother

screamed. “Please don’t take my boy!”

         
            I recount that final day in my mind according to the way I’ve heard the people in

town tell it, filling in the loose ends with my own reactions. I knew the boy; he sat two

seats behind me in math class where I hardly ever saw or heard from him. And yet,

something about his story filled me with such grief and pity and anger after I saw his sad

face in the paper that I somehow felt connected to the boy in a way I’ll never understand.

         My daily life resumes in much the same way, however. My dad still reads his

paper every night, passing his eyes over every simple detail of yesterday’s events, while

my mom and I continue to silently scrub away at the dirt in the kitchen. 

            Five months the boy’s been dead, and I haven’t heard a person utter his name

since that first week. When school resumed for the fall and the crops turned over a good

yield, people seemed to forget everything. That’s the funny and cruel thing about a farm

life. People come and go like the seasons. Good only for what they can produce. And

since his family and friends were not the ones to go they had no other choice but turn

back to their affairs.