CHAPTER SIX: GEORGIE, 1878

Memories. They may bless or they may curse, but they may never go away. Not completely. For years, buried leagues below the seas of our forgetfulness, memories suddenly, inexplicably, return like Paradise itself, and when that happens we bask in the pleasure. Often the case is contrary, however. At those times the memories swirl beneath the dark waters like the shadows of circling sharks, or they loom suddenly, as soul-shattering reefs. At the age of 12 T.J. struck one such “reef.”

“You are not to play with Georgie any more,” his mother said. T.J.’s face went white. “But …“ The boy’s trembling lips began to stammer a protest. That protest, however, stopped short when the front door jerked open. “Sam’s home,“ T.J.‘s mother said. Her tall, strong husband filled the doorway briefly before he entered the room, and the scent of pines filled the air; as always, his trousers and shirt carried the aroma of sawdust. Sam’s calloused hand forced the door shut behind him with a tug that rattled the windows. “Swollen wood. I’ll fix that door when the rain stops,” he said. T.J.‘s father, Samuel Walden (a carpenter by trade), could easily fix the door, if only he could only take some time off from his carpentry contracts. Most recently had built a hangman’s scaffold and a birching triangle, the town’s remedies for crimes large and small. Justice was set for the next day: Execution and public beating. Sam slung his jacket on a handcrafted, wooden coat hook next to the door, and removed his hat. He had hand-made the hat and coat racks.

When Sam entered the room, the defiance instantly left the boy’s face, but the anger already had its grip, refused to let the boy loose, so he turned away in tears, attempted wiping his eyes on his sleeve. His father stared. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He doesn’t understand why he can’t play with Georgie.” The freckled young woman rinsed a dish and placed it on a towel next to the sink. “They have been best friends all their lives. Like brothers.” She poured coffee.

“Well, by this time tomorrow he will damn sure understand why he cannot play with Georgie.“ A pause, then, “The Golden Boy, they are calling Georgie now.“ Samuel had sneered, slurring the word “golden” in contempt. “By this time tomorrow that gold color will change to the color of excrement, I can assure you of that. I just came from building the birching triangle.” His contempt for Georgie was so obvious. Or was it shame? “Embarrassment,” Georgie‘s mother decided. Sam’s nephew had embarrassed him. “Georgie the Golden Boy,” the big man repeated with a snort.

Far from being “golden,“ Georgie and his mother were dirt poor, but after the theft, all the neighbors had begun to call him “Golden Boy” in view of the assumedly large value of the coins that had disappeared. With every re-telling of the story, the imagined value of the stolen coins mounted higher until the petty theft had grown to a felonious size, a buried treasure, for Georgie had hidden the money and refused to say where. Georgina’s stifled a cry. “Surely you don’t mean to go through with this! You can’t. Please, Sam, don’t.” She pleaded. “Don’t let him see that, Sam. Do something. Use your influence at the church!“ She attempted forcing her voice to lower, to sound calm and controlled, but instead the question came out low, throaty, like a growl: “And how could you possibly have agreed build the triangle on which they plan to whip my sister’s child?” The word “whip” hardly conveyed the meaning, for what they were discussing was no mere swat with a twig; it was a public birching, designed to inflict both excruciating pain and public humiliation. As everyone knew, even grown men would and plead for mercy during a public birching … besides, their buttocks were exposed to public view! And Georgie was but a child. “It will do him good,” the father said.

Walden frequently told himself -- and anyone else who would listen -- that he was a law-and-order man. “It’s my job,“ he now told his wife. “I am a carpenter. Whatever they need built, what the government requires, I build it. Sometime’s it’s a chapel and sometimes it’s a scaffold.” His wife frowned. “All authority is given by God,” he reminded her from scripture. “The power is ordained by the Almighty.” Her frown remained and he tried a different tack: “I can’t be so choosey you know… not unless you want to starve, or to work in the cotton mills like Georgina.” She stiffened at the mention of her sister’s name. “So, that’s it? We have to do whatever the judge wants, no matter what or whom it affects?”

“No matter whom. Justice is justice. Keep your nose clean and you don’t need to fear the king.“ A carpenter by trade, Sam Walden had not only built the birching triangle. Sam had also constructed the scaffold for the hanging. Public hangings were already prohibited by law, of course. People hung now in private, but with legal witnesses. Having built the scaffold himself, however Samuel would be allowed attend, and be planned to try to sneak in a guest as well;. he hoped to bring T.J. to the hanging. Of course, he had not told Georgina of this plan.

Observing the whipping alone would not be enough, given T.J.’s love for his cousin. “Perhaps viewing a hanging will help T.J.. Harden him. Help him to resign himelf to power. Accept and understand the authority of the king, and the consequences of sin as well. Sam glanced at his wife and away again. No better time than now to cast a hint of his intentions. Test his wife‘s reaction. “In the olden times, everybody took children to public hangings, and they had a lot less crime back then.” T.J.’s mother knew the unspoken rest of the spiel; she had heard it often: The softening of society toward criminals had caused a current crime wave, society was going to collapse with the weight of sin, the government was too easy on crime and on criminals etc. etc..

When it struck home with her what Sam was implying, that he might take T.J. to a hanging, T.J.’s mother looked appalled, horrified. At that moment, for the first time in their relationship, she realized something completely: Although he was a good man and a good provider, at times like this she absolutely loathed her husband. Crime, as Georgina had gradually come to believe, resulted from affliction and poverty. People with no other means to survive would resort to crime. Children with no one to supervise them. “Everybody had potatoes before the potato blight, and there was less crime back then too,” she retorted.

Brushing sawdust from his corduroy pants with one hand, he took the cup in the other. “Not every poor person is dishonest.“ Cradling the hot cup in his hands, he felt the comfort of its warmth penetrating through his calluses. “Feed the criminals better, and they will reform of their own? How ridiculous! The world has gone soft on ruffians, thieves, vandals. Tomorrow may convince T.J. to keep his nose clean.” He walked to the kitchen table. Sat down. T.J. had sidled away, toward the stairway but Samuel noticed him now. “Where do you think you’re going?“ T.J. had hoped to escape to his bedroom, and now he stood still, his eyes lowered out of respect, or fear.

. “Rebellion is serious business.” Sam turned back to his wife, “We should have laid the law down long ago about his playing with Georgie. Bad influence that Georgie. A single bad apple that spoils the barrel.”

“Georgie is not a bad apple, he is just a hungry child with a poor mother who was abandoned by that lousy jerk of a husband.” (She had emphasized the word “jerk.)“ She paused. She had already said too much, she knew that, but out of control now she continued anyway, “that jerk of a husband … your brother John.”

Samuel blanched but stayed seated. John had disgraced the family by deserting his family, and Sam knew it, but that did not justify Georgie‘s thievery, not in Sam‘s view. “I have to try to save T.J. from the likes of George. What T.J. needs is the wholesome feeling of work. Of holding a mason’s trowel. He needs calluses on his hands.” He unconsciously fingered the calluses on his own palms, enjoying the rough feel of them, then became aware of what he was doing and held his palms out toward T.J.’s mother. “These calluses are the marks of manliness! I want to give T.J. this incredible gift, to give him the satisfaction of looking back at the end of the day -- at the end of a lifetime even -- and seeing what he has accomplished.“ Samuel stood up then, trying to appear calm and in control, but his body betrayed his frustration. His movements had become jerky and abrupt so that, when he stood, his thigh bumped the table and spilled his coffee. Georgina resisted the impulse to run over and clean up the mess. The steaming coffee poured over the edge of the tabletop, ran off the table leg and soaked the front of Samuel’s corduroy trousers. He felt the searing, burning result of his anger, but forced himself not to notice, not to react to the pain. “Next month I am going to send T.J. to his uncle Bob’s … to start an apprenticeship.”

At that, T.J. cried out in alarm. “Papa, please, I don’t want to be a brick mason. I hate bricks. I hate mortar. I hate the bricklayers. They are so mean.” Sam looked at him in amazement, but for the first time T.J. had been moved to openly resist his father’s will. His voice weakening, he went on. “Papa, please, just let Bobby do it, Bobby wants to be a brick layer!” Sam’s oldest son, Robert, had wanted to become a brick mason but when Robert had become old enough for an apprenticeship, Sam had needed another carpenter instead, a right hand man that he could train, and could trust, and so he had invested four years in that Bobby, training him until he had become a master carpenter, competent (if uninspired) in all phases of building.

Georgina spoke next. Came to the rescue. “T.J., I thought you had gone to your room,” she said. And T.J. ran, glad to escape the scene. But in the bedroom he threw himself on the bed sobbing, but silently so that his father might not hear. And Georgina lowered her voice so that T.J. might not hear her either. “He’s not interested in bricklaying.”

“”He is too young to know that. Look how good Bobby turned out. Once T.J. has finished the apprenticeship … once he gets the feeling.“

“My son … our son is not going to be a brick mason, for your brother or for anyone else. Can‘t you see that?”

Samuel noticed the once hot coffee turning cold on his damp pant leg, and began to pick at the trouser material with his fingers. “You know, after you build something you look back at it and it gives you this tremendous feeling of pride.”

Her voice was softer now, pleading, “You can lead a horse to water, but …”

“I want to pass the legacy of self-satisfaction on to him,” he interjected, “to teach him pride. I sometimes go back to the old neighborhoods just to look at houses I have built. I stand there and stare at them. Knowing they will be there ten years, fifty years, a hundred years from now; my God, it feels good. Feels good to know that people will still be living in them.”

She tried again. “But he is so soft, he is too delicate for that. He should be a poet or a writer or … a philosopher.”

He grunted. “Soft. Delicate. Listen to you. He is not a woman. This boy is tough. He is almost a man. Why when he was only nine he hopped a barge …”

“Yes, he hopped a barge, for which you punished him.”

“He was supposed to be in church.”

“ But he did it for the adventure, he only wanted to taste the salt of life.”

“Well, I hope it tasted good; he got the taste of a birch twig when I caught up with him.” Samuel’s neck burned as it turned red. For the For the first time in his adult life, Samuel Walden had lied. He had felt that he should whip the boy, had taken the birch twig in his hand and held it before the boy’s face, but then had laid it down.

“The birch?” T.J.’s Mom was aghast. “He never mentioned it to me.”

Samuel elaborated on his lie: “Of course not. He’s a tough boy. Needs the devil beat out of him from time to time. Some day he will thank me for it.”

“The whip makes its victims bitter, not better,” she asserted. “Is the whip the only kind of discipline you know how to use? I wish they would outlaw the birch.”

Samuel frowned. “As long as his feet swing under my table he is not too big for the birch.” But even as he spoke the words, he knew they were no longer true. He had lost control over his son. Was powerless to change him. To save him from himself.

She began setting the table for dinner while talking. “Can’t you see that he thrives on his own imagination? Why, he has a stage inside himself. In his mind. He creates entire worlds out of his nothing but his thoughts. Have you heard him inventing stories for his sister? And she loves to listen to them.”

Frustrated, Sam began scoffing: “A writer. A teller of tales. Of outrageous lies!“

Convinced she was right, T.J./s mother persisted: “But sometimes a simple story can convey more truth than one of your engineering manuals. Even Jesus told stories.”

“Jesus was a carpenter and bricklayer, a builder like me! And he never went to college. Never wrote no books either. No one in our family has ever even gone to college. No one ever will, least of all T.J..“

“He won’t lay bricks. He’ll die first. He will … “ Her voice broke. She was pleading now with a little sob in the middle of each sentence: “He will … run away from home.“

“Let him run then. Where would I get the money to send him to college? Once he gets used to the feel of a brick in his hands he will grow to love it.”

“He needs to be always creating things in his mind!”

“Then let him create real things … factories … real cotton mills out of brick, not imaginary scenes on paper. Industrial plants where real people, like Georgina, can work and earn a living.”

“It’s not a living! How can you call what Georgina does living? Sweating away in a clothing factory from six in the morning to six at night, six days and more a week while her son runs in the streets? Afraid to be five minutes late to work? Afraid to stay home, even when she is ill from the cotton dust? That’s not living.”

He raised his voice. “At least it’s honest work. If Georgina’s son had been working in the factory with other good fourteen year olds he might not have gotten in all this trouble.”

“But T.J. is a Sagittarius! He needs to travel and to explore; he needs to seek out and develop ideas. Or travel. Perhaps he will become a merchant sailor and travel the world, gathering ideas.

. “No, are you crazy? A lousy, drunken seaman?” Samuel reached into a wooden box next to the back door and jerked out a masonry pointer-trowel. A worn pointer tool that had seen decades of brick masonry. Now he held the trowel up before his own eyes, admiring it with an almost worshipful stare. “The sign of the trowel is the sign that will guide his life. Will provide for his own wife and children some day. Building. Construction.“ Sam suddenly scowled. He had been mulling when to inject his theological perspective on astrology: “His astrological sign? You are resorting to that? The science of Satan? I am offended that you would be showing an interest in such occult nonsense.”

After that she was silent. He waited for a few seconds but when she made no further comments, his voice lowered and so did the trowel. “T.J. will soon be thirteen.” Sam’s emotions were calmer now, but his body went rigid, his mind, coldly rational. “If he keeps on going like he has been I might have to turn him out of the house.” She gasped, but he continued. “When I was thirteen I was doing a man’s work.”

She turned to the sink. Chin to her breast, trying to choke back the tears, but they came anyway and she could not stifle a little wail of anguish. Sam stood. The coffee and conversation had activated his intestines and he needed to use the latrine, the little outhouse in the back yard. He moved toward the door. “As for the birching, my mind is made up,” he said, and shut the door between them as she stood crying at the sink.