Excerpt: "Tinkers" by Paul Harding

t i n k e r sP a u l H a r d i n g

BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESSNEW YORK

Tinkers - 4rd pass 4/14/10 10:41 AM Page 3

First published in the United States in 2009 byBellevue Literary Press, New York

FOR INFORMATION ADDRESS:Bellevue Literary Press

NYU School of Medicine550 First Avenue

OBV 640New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 2009 by Paul Harding

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording, or any information storage andretrieval system now known or to be invented without permission inwriting from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote

brief passages in connection with a review written forinclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

This book was published with the generous support of Bellevue Literary Press’s founding donor the Arnold Simon Family Trust,

the Bernard & Irene Schwartz Foundation and the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation.

The author wishes to thank the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown,Massachusetts for support during the writing of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHarding, Paul, 1967-

Tinkers / Paul Harding. — 1st ed.p. cm.

1. Reminiscing in old age—Fiction. 2. Identity (Psychology) in old age—Fiction. 3. Dementia—Patients—Fiction.

4. Psychological fiction. I. Title. PS3608.A72535T56 2008 813’.6—dc22 2008039887

Book design and type formatting by Bernard SchleiferManufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-934137-12-3 pbk3 5 7 9 8 6 4


An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surround-ed by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer’s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and PEN / Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers Award, Tinkers was also named a 2010 American Library Association Notable Book and shortlisted for the American Booksellers Association’s Best Book of the Year Award.

Paul Harding graduated from the University of Massachusetts and earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard and the University of Iowa. A 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, Harding now lives near Boston with his wife and two sons, and is working on his second novel.

EXCERPTED FROM PAUL HARDING’S TINKERS. COPYRIGHT © 2009 BY PAUL HARDING.PUBLISHED BY BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS: WWW.BLPBOOKS.ORG USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

creek and slipped on a wet stone and split her headand passed out facedown in the water. The current hadtugged her farther into the water, carried her for sev-eral hundred feet, and then deposited her on a sandbarin the middle of the creek. Howard took his shoes offand rolled up his trouser legs and waded out to thechild. When he first bent to lift her, he did so as if tohoist an errant lamb onto his hip, but when he put hisarms under the little body and felt its cold and saw itshair trailing in the current and thought of the child’smother standing behind him on the bank, he turned herface up and raised her and carried her as if she wereasleep and he taking her from the back of a wagon toher pallet bed near the woodstove after returning froma trip visiting relatives.

The man whose hair he cut was named Melish. Hewas nineteen years old and due to be married in an hourand a half. His mother was dead; his sisters and broth-ers, all much older than he, were married off alreadyand gone to Canada or New Hampshire or south toWoonsocket. His father was plowing their fifteen acresof potatoes and would have just as soon scalped the boyas cut his hair, because him getting married meant thelast helping hands were abandoning the farm. Howardtook a pair of shears and a medium-size tin pot from hiswagon. He fitted the pot over the boy’s head and cut ina circle around its circumference. When he was done,he took a hand mirror from its wrapping paper and gave

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it to the boy. The boy turned his head left and thenright and handed the mirror back to Howard. He said,I guess that looks pretty smart, Mr. Crosby.

The man whose tooth he pulled was named Gilbert.Gilbert was a hermit who lived deep in the woods alongthe Penobscot River. He seemed not to live in any shel-ter other than the woods themselves, although somemen who hunted in the woods for deer and bear andmoose speculated that he might live in some forgottentrapper’s cabin. Others thought he might live in a treehouse of some sort, or at least a lean-to. In all the yearshe was known to live in the forest, never had a winterhunting party seen so much as the ashes from a fire or asingle footprint. No one could imagine how a mancould survive one winter alone and exposed in thewoods, never mind decades of them. Howard, instead oftrying to explain the hermit’s existence in terms ofhearth fires and trappers’ shacks, preferred the blankspace the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he likedto think of some fold in the woods, some seam that onlythe hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice andsnow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept himand he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, butinstead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbslike cold wood and blood like frigid sap.

Gilbert was a graduate of Bowdoin College. Accord-ing to the stories, he had liked to boast that he had been aclassmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s. Although he would

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have to be nearly 120 years old for the rumor to be true,no one cared to refute the claim, because they found toodelightful to dispel the notion that the local hermit,dressed in animal skins, muttering litanies (as often asnot in Latin), and, in warmer seasons, attended by asmall but avid swarm of flies, which constantly buzzedaround his head, crawled over his nose, and sipped thetears from the corners of his eyes, had once been aclean-faced, well-ironed acquaintance of the author ofThe Scarlet Letter. Gilbert was apparently not his realname and no one really knew when he had been born sothe people left it at that.

People liked to speculate and tell stories about Gilbertthe Hermit, especially when they sat around their wood-stoves on winter nights with a blizzard howling outside;the thought of him out there in the maelstrom gavethem a comforting thrill.

Howard supplied Gilbert. Gilbert’s needs from theworld of men were few, but he did require needles andthread, twine, and tobacco. Once a year, on the first daythat the ice went out of the ponds, sometime in May,Howard rode his wagon to the Camp Comfort Clubhunting cabin, itself remote, and from there toted on hisback the supplies he knew Gilbert required down an oldIndian trail that followed the river. Somewhere along theway, Howard would meet Gilbert. The men would greetone another with nods of their heads. They struggledthrough the bushes down to the river’s edge, Howard



with his bundle, Gilbert with his court of flies and abuckskin bag. There they would each find a rock or a drytuft of grass to sit on. Howard took a tin of tobacco fromthe bundle of supplies he had brought for Gilbert andhanded it to the hermit. Gilbert held the open tin to hisnose and inhaled slowly, savoring the rich, sweet neardampness of the new tobacco; by the time he metHoward each year, he was down to the last flakes of hissupply. Howard imagined that the fragrance of newtobacco was a sort of confirmation to Gilbert that he hadindeed lived another year, endured another winter in thewoods. After smelling the tobacco and looking out at theriver for a moment, Gilbert held out his hand to Howard.Howard took a pipe from one of his jacket pockets andgave it to the hermit. Howard did not otherwise smokeand kept the pipe for this one bowlful a year. Gilbertpacked Howard’s pipe and then his own (which wasbeautiful—carved from a burl of dark red wood andwhich Howard imagined belonging once, long ago, in abrass stand on a dean’s desk) and the two men smokedtogether in silence and watched the waters rush. Whilehe smoked, Gilbert’s flock of flies temporarily dispersed,but seemingly without rancor or resentment. When thepipes were spent, each man tapped the ashes out againsthis rock and put his pipe away. The flies settled back intheir orbit around the hermit’s head (Circum capit, hemuttered) and he opened his buckskin bag and producedtwo crude wooden carvings, one which seemed to be a

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moose, the other a beaver, or perhaps a woodchuck, oreven a groundhog. The work was so poor that Howardcould only say for sure that the little raw wooden lumpsthat the hermit placed in the winter-dead grass betweenthem were supposed to be animals of some kind. Next tothe carvings, Gilbert then lay a beautifully skinned foxfur, head included, that smelled like rotting meat. Therewas a moment of panic for the flies as they decidedwhich was more rancid, the hermit or the skin. In theend, they were loyal to their more pungent, living host.Howard placed the bundle of supplies on the grass andeach man collected his goods. The men had exchangedfew words during the first few years of this spring ritualand these only to refine the order of Gilbert’s supplies.One year he said, More needles. Another year he said,No more tea—coffee now. Once the list had beenrefined and finally established, the men no longer spokeat all. For the past seven years, neither man had uttereda single word to the other.

The last year Howard met Gilbert in the woods,though, the men spoke. When he came upon the her-mit, he saw that the man’s left cheek was as swollen andas shiny as a ripe apple. Gilbert shuffled his feet andstared at the ground and held his hand against thecheek. Even the flies were solicitous of their sponsor’spain and seemed to buzz more gingerly about him.Howard cocked his head in a silent question.

Gilbert whispered, Tooth.



Howard could not imagine that this old husk of aman, this recluse who seemed not much more than asour hank of hair and rags, had a tooth left in his headto ache. Nevertheless, it was true. Stepping closer,Gilbert opened his mouth and Howard, squinting to geta good look, saw in that dank, ruined purple cavern,stuck way in the back of an otherwise-empty levy ofgums, a single black tooth planted in a swollen andbright red throne of flesh. A breeze caught the hermit’sbreath and Howard gasped and saw visions of slaughter-houses and dead pets under porches.

Tooth, the hermit said again, and pointed into hismouth.

Oh, yes, awful thing, Howard said, and smiled insympathy.

The hermit said, No! Tooth! and continued pointing.Howard realized that the poor afflicted man wanted himto take the tooth out.

Oh, no, no! he said. I have no idea—Gilbert cut him off. No! Tooth! he squeaked, an

octave higher than before. But I haven’t any— Again the hermit cut him off,

shooing him back toward where his wagon stood, threemiles away at the Comfort Camp Club cabin.

Howard returned two and a half hours later with asmall flask of corn whiskey from Potts’s mountainsidestill and a pair of long-handled pliers he used when hehad to solder small pieces of tin to leaky pots. At first,

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Gilbert refused any liquor, but when Howard grabbedthe tooth with the pliers, the old man passed out.Howard dashed a handful of cold river water onGilbert’s face. The hermit came to and motioned for thewhiskey, which he drank in a single draft, then passedout again from the alcohol on the bedeviled tooth.Another splash of water revived Gilbert, and the twomen sat for a time watching a pair of sparrows chase acrow above the fir trees on the other side of the river.

The river was high after an early, fast melt, andloud. Voices seemed to mingle in the water, as if therewere a race of men who dwelled among the rapids.When Gilbert began to list and recite Virgil, Uerenouo, gelidus canis cum montibus humor liquitur, Howardreached into the hermit’s mouth with the pliers,grabbed the fetid tooth, and pulled with all of hisstrength. The tooth did not budge. Howard let go.Gilbert looked baffled for a moment and then passedout again, flat on his back, the flies neatly following himfrom upright to laid out. Howard was convinced at firstthat his customer was dead, but a damp whistle from thehermit’s fly-rimmed nose indicated that he could still becounted among the relatively quick.

The old man’s mouth hung wide open. Howardstraddled his shoulders and grabbed the tooth with thepliers. When he finally succeeded in excavating thetooth, Gilbert’s face and beard were covered in blood.Another splash of river water revived the patient. When



he saw Howard standing before him with the gory pli-ers in one hand and a tooth extraordinarily long of rootin the other, Gilbert fainted.

Two weeks later, Buddy the Dog’s barking wakenedHoward. He rose from bed and went to the kitchendoor to see if there was a bear or stray cow in the yard.Placed on the doorstep was a package wrapped ingreasy, foul-smelling leather and tied with twine whichHoward recognized as the type he sold. Standing in themoonlight, he untied the twine and unfolded theleather. Beneath the leather was a layer of red velvet.Howard opened the velvet and there, looking as new asthe day it was printed, the pages uncut, was a copy ofThe Scarlet Letter. Howard opened the book. Inscribedon the title page were the words To “Hick” Gilbert: Hereis to the shared memories of young men in the prime of theirjourneys. Yours always in faith and brotherly friendship,Nath’l Hawthorne, 1852.

When the ice went out the next year, Howard tookhis pipe from its drawer in the wagon and rubbed itacross the thigh of his pants and blew into the bowl andput it in his jacket pocket. He made up a bundle ofGilbert’s supplies and hiked along the Indian trail.There was no sign of the hermit. Howard made the hikeevery day for a week, but Gilbert never appeared. Onthe seventh day, Howard turned off the trail and sat bythe river and smoked a pipeful of the tobacco that hehad packed for the hermit. As he smoked, he listened to

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Excerpt: "Tinkers" by Paul Harding