Edited by, p.56
Edited By, page 56
They hit halting, fluttering notes, punctuated by Rooster Joe’s hammered ripsaw, and then the bucksaw went rolling behind it, Felix pumping up and down on the handle, Cave Canem bowing away. It sounded like flutes and violins and clarinets and mandolins. It sounded a thousand years old, but not like moonshine mountain music; it was from another time and another land.
Something is wrong, for Chris is standing very still, like he is already in the old oak kimono, and I can see he is not going to be giving me the High Sign.
I see that Little Willie, who never does anything on his own, is motioning to me and Large Jake to come over. So over I trot, and the music really washes over me. I know it in my bones, for it is the music of the old neighborhood where all of us but Miss Millie grew up.
I am coming up on Chris the Shoemaker and I see he has turned on the waterworks. He is transfixed, for here, one thousand miles from home he is being caught up in the mighty coils of memory and transfiguration.
I am hearing with his ears, and what the saws are making is not the Abe Schwartz Orchestra but Itzikel Kramtweiss of Philadelphia, or perhaps Naftalie Brandwein, who used to play bar mitzvahs and weddings with his back to the audience so rival clarinet players couldn’t see his hands and how he made those notes.
There is maybe ten thousand years behind that noise, and it is calling all the way across the Kentucky hills from the Land of Gaza.
And while they are still playing, we walk with Chris the Shoemaker back to the jalopy, and pile in around Miss Millie Dee Chantpie, who, when she sees Chris crying, begins herself, and I confess I, too, am a little blurry-eyed at the poignance of the moment.
And we pull out of Brimmytown, the saws still whining and screeching their jazzy ancient tune, and as it is fading and we are going up the hill, Chris the Shoemaker speaks for us all, and what he says is:
“God Damn. You cannot be going anywhere these days without you run into a bunch of half-assed klezmorim.”
For Arthur Hunnicutt and the late Sheldon Leonard.
Glossary to “The Sawing Boys”
Balonies—tires
Bargain Day—court time set aside for sentencing plea-bargain cases
Beezer—the face, sometimes especially the nose
Bleaso!—1. an interjection—Careful! You are being overheard! Some chump is wise to the deal! 2. verb—to forgo something, change plans, etc.
The Cherry-colored Cat—an old con game
Cicero Lightning and Illinois Thunder—the muzzle flashes from machine guns and the sound of hand grenades going off
Do a minute—thirty days
Dogs are barking—feet are hurting
Fall Togs—the suit you wear going into, and coming out of, jail
Flit—prison coffee, from its resemblance to the popular fly spray of the time
Flivver—a jalopy
Frammus—a thingamajig or doohickey
Geetas—money, of any kind or amount
Glim Drop—con game involving leaving a glass eye as security for an amount of money;at least one of the con men should have a glass eye…
Glims—eyes
Goozle—mouth
Hooverize—(pre-Depression)—Hoover had been Allied Food Commissioner during the Great War, and was responsible for people getting the most use out of whatever foods they had; the standard command from parents was “Hooverize that plate!”; possibly a secondary reference to vacuum cleaners of the time.
Irish buggy (also Irish surrey)—a wheelbarrow
Jalopy—a flivver
Lizzie—a flivver
Mazuma—money, of any kind or amount
Mook—face
Motorman’s gloves—any especially large cut of meat
Nugging—porking
The Old Hydrophoby Lay—con game involving pretending to be bitten by someone’s (possibly mad) dog
Piping Some Doll’s Stems—looking at some woman’s legs
Push and Pull—gas and oil
Sammys—the Feds
Zex—Quiet (as in bleaso), cut it out, jiggies! Beat it!
Laying zex—keeping lookout
Rules of pig Latin: initial consonants are moved to the end of the word and -ay is added to the consonant; initial vowels are moved to the end of the word and -way is added to the vowel
Afterword
Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling did a series of anthologies of retold fairy tales in the mid and late ’90s, and they wanted me in them.
I said “I’ll do the Brementown Musicians” without thinking much about what I was saying.
Well, now. Go read “The Brementown Musicians”: I’ll wait.
Back already? Tell me what happens in the tale.
Not much, you say. Well, that’s what struck me, too, on rereading it for the first time in 40-some-odd years.
A bunch of animals who want to be musicians go to Brementown, meet up with a bunch of robbers, make a lot of noise, and scare them off. The end.
Now tell me that’s not what happens in “The Sawing Boys”?
Writing like Damon Runyan is not as easy as it looks; present tense for one thing is counter to how we think; we tell stories in the past tense—they’ve already happened as they’re being told. Runyan wrote as if the story hadn’t happened yet, was taking place as he wrote it. What you have to do is, you write a part for the late Sheldon Leonard to say out of the side of his mouth. The other part—the Sawing Boys part—I wanted to write for the late Denver Pyle to speak in his role as the father of the band (played by the Dillards) on the old Andy Griffith Show set in Mayberry RFD.
I think I did a swell job on both counts.
There are some philology/fairy-tale collecting references here, but pretty subtle (not as many as in my later contribution to the series—“Our Mortal Span”—which came from an epiphanic moment as the Middle Billy-Goat-Gruff in a second-grade play.)
When I tell people what this story is really about—the spread of mass communications (radio and gramophone records) in the early 20th Century, they don’t believe me.
The Sawing Boys
Black Thorn, White Rose was the second of Terri and my adult re-told fairy tale anthologies. It came out in 1994.
Howard Waldrop has one of the most fertile minds in the field of sf/f, deftly weaving his knowledge of history with the present, reality and fantasy. If you haven’t read his work, you must. You can either guess what tale he’s retelling in “The Sawing Boys” or jump to the back of this story (which also has a glossary).
Shay Corsham Worsted
by Garth Nix
(From Fearful Symmetries, 2014)
The young man came in one of the windows, because the back door had proved surprisingly tough. He’d kicked it a few times, without effect, before looking for an easier way to get in. The windows were barred, but the bars were rusted almost through, so he had no difficulty pulling them away. The window was locked as well, but he just smashed the glass with a half brick pried out of the garden wall. He didn’t care about the noise. He knew there was only the old man in the house, the garden was large and screened by trees, and the evening traffic was streaming past on the road out front. That was plenty loud enough to cloak any noise he might make.
Or any quavering cries for help from the old man, thought the intruder, as he climbed through. He went to the back door first, intending to open it for a quick getaway, but it was deadlocked. More afraid of getting robbed than dying in a fire, thought the young man. That made it easier. He liked the frightened old people, the power he had over them with his youth and strength and anger.
When he turned around, the old man was standing behind him. Just standing there, not doing a thing. It was dim in the corridor, the only light a weak bulb hanging from the ceiling, its pallid glow falling on the bald head of the little man, the ancient slight figure in his brown cardigan and brown corduroy trousers and brown slippers, just a little old man that could be picked up and broken like a stick and then whatever pathetic treasures were in the house could be—
A little old man whose eyes were silver.
And what was in his hands?
Those gnarled hands had been empty, the intruder was sure of it, but now the old bloke held long blades, though he wasn’t exactly holding the blades…they were growing, growing from his fingers, the flesh fusing together and turning silver…silver as those eyes!
The young man had turned half an inch towards the window and escape when the first of those silvery blades penetrated his throat, destroying his voice box, changing the scream that rose there to a dull, choking cough. The second blade went straight through his heart, back out, and through again.
Pock! Pock!
Blood geysered, but not on the old man’s brown cardigan. He had moved back almost in the same instant as he struck and was now ten feet away, watching with those silver eyes as the young man fell writhing on the floor, his feet drumming for eighteen seconds before he became still.
The blades retreated, became fingers once again. The old man considered the body, the pooling blood, the mess.
“Shay Marazion Velvet,” he said to himself, and walked to the spray of blood farthest from the body, head-high on the peeling wallpaper of green lilies. He poked out his tongue, which grew longer and became as silver as the blades.
He began to lick, tongue moving rhythmically, head tilted as required. There was no expression on his face, no sign of physical excitement. This was not some fetish.
He was simply cleaning up.
“You’ll never guess who I saw walking up and down outside, Father,” said Mary Shires, as she bustled in with her ludicrously enormous basket filled with the weekly tribute of home-made foods and little luxuries that were generally unwanted and wholly unappreciated by her father, Sir David Shires.
“Who?” grunted Sir David. He was sitting at his kitchen table, scrawling notes on the front page of the Times, below the big headlines with the latest from the war with Argentina over the Falklands, and enjoying the sun that was briefly flooding the whole room through the open doors to the garden.
“That funny little Mister Shea,” said Mary, putting the basket down on the table.
Sir David’s pencil broke. He let it fall and concentrated on keeping his hand still, on making his voice sound normal. He shouldn’t be surprised, he told himself. It was why he was here, after all. But after so many years, even though every day he told himself this could be the day, it was a terrible, shocking surprise.
“Really, dear?” he said. He thought his voice sounded mild enough. “Going down to the supermarket like he normally does, I suppose? Getting his bread and milk?”
“No, that’s just the thing,” said Mary. She took out a packet of some kind of biscuit and put it in front of her father. “These are very good. Oatmeal and some kind of North African citrus. You’ll like them.”
“Mister Shea,” prompted Sir David.
“Oh, yes. He’s just walking backwards and forwards along the footpath from his house to the corner. Backwards and forwards! I suppose he’s gone ga-ga. He’s old enough. He must be ninety if he’s a day, surely?”
She looked at him, without guile, both of them knowing he was eighty himself. But not going ga-ga, thank god, even if his knees were weak reeds and he couldn’t sleep at night, remembering things that he had forced himself to forget in his younger days.
But Shay was much older than ninety, thought Sir David. Shay was much, much older than that.
He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“I might go and…and have a word with the old chap,” he said carefully. “You stay here, Mary.”
“Perhaps I should come—”
“No!”
He grimaced, acknowledging he had spoken with too much emphasis. He didn’t want to alarm Mary. But then again, in the worst case…no, not the worst case, but in a quite plausible minor escalation…
“In fact, I think you should go out the back way and get home,” said Sir David.
“Really, Father, why on—”
“Because I am ordering you to,” snapped Sir David. He still had the voice, the tone that expected to be obeyed, deployed very rarely with the family, but quite often to the many who had served under him, first in the Navy and then for considerably longer in the Department, where he had ended up as the Deputy Chief. Almost fifteen years gone, but it wasn’t the sort of job where you ever completely left, and the command voice was the least of the things that had stayed with him.
Mary sniffed, but she obeyed, slamming the garden gate on her way out. It would be a few years yet, he thought, before she began to question everything he did, perhaps start bringing brochures for retirement homes along with her special biscuits and herbal teas she believed to be good for reducing the chance of dementia.
Dementia. There was an apposite word. He’d spent some time thinking he might be suffering from dementia or some close cousin of it, thirty years ago, in direct connection to “funny old Mister Shea.” Who was not at all funny, not in any sense of the word. They had all wondered if they were demented, for a time.
He paused near his front door, wondering for a moment if he should make the call first, or even press his hand against the wood paneling just so, and flip it open to take out the .38 Colt Police revolver cached there. He had a 9mm Browning automatic upstairs, but a revolver was better for a cached weapon. You wouldn’t want to bet your life on magazine springs in a weapon that had sat too long. He checked all his armament every month, but still…a revolver was more certain.
But automatic or revolver, neither would be any use. He’d learned that before, from direct observation, and had been lucky to survive. Very lucky, because the other two members of the team hadn’t had the fortune to slip in the mud and hit themselves on the head and be forced to lie still. They’d gone in shooting, and kept shooting, unable to believe the evidence of their eyes, until it was too late…
Sir David grimaced. This was one of the memories he’d managed to push aside for a long, long time. But like all the others, it wasn’t far below the surface. It didn’t take much to bring it up, that afternoon in 1953, the Department’s secure storage on the fringe of RAF Bicester…
He did take a walking stick out of the stand. A solid bog oak stick, with a pommel of bronze worked in the shape of a spaniel’s head. Not for use as a weapon, but simply because he didn’t walk as well as he once did. He couldn’t afford a fall now. Or at any time really, but particularly not now.
The sun was still shining outside. It was a beautiful day, the sky as blue as a bird’s egg, with hardly a cloud in sight. It was the kind of day you only saw in films, evoking some fabulous summer time that never really existed, or not for more than half an hour at a time.
It was a good day to die, if it came to that, if you were eighty and getting tired of the necessary props to a continued existence. The medicines and interventions, the careful calculation of probabilities before anything resembling activity, calculations that Sir David would never have undertaken at a younger age.
He swung out on to the footpath, a military stride, necessarily adjusted by age and a back that would no longer entirely straighten. He paused by the kerb and looked left and right, surveying the street, head back, shoulders close to straight, sandy eyebrows raised, hair no longer quite so regulation short, catching a little of the breeze, the soft breeze that added to the day’s delights.
Shay was there, as Mary had said. It was wearing the same clothes as always, the brown cardigan and corduroy. They’d put fifty pairs in the safe house, at the beginning, uncertain whether Shay would buy more or not, though its daily purchase of bread, milk and other basics was well established. It could mimic human behavior very well.
It looked like a little old man, a bald little man of some great age. Wrinkled skin, hooded eyes, head bent as if the neck could no longer entirely support the weight of years. But Sir David knew it didn’t always move like an old man. It could move fluidly, like an insect, faster than you ever thought at first sighting.
Right now Shay was walking along the footpath, away from Sir David. Halfway to the corner, it turned back. It must have seen him, but as usual, it gave no outward sign of recognition or reception. There would be no such sign, until it decided to do whatever it was going to do next.
Sir David shuffled forward. Best to get it over with. His hand was already sweating, slippery on the bronze dog handle of his stick, his heart hammering in a fashion bound to be at odds with a cardio-pulmonary system past its best. He knew the feeling well, though it had been an age since he’d felt it more than fleetingly.
Fear. Unalloyed fear, that must be conquered, or he could do nothing, and that was not an option. Shay had broken free of its programming. It could be about to do anything, anything at all, perhaps reliving some of its more minor exploits like the Whitechapel murders of 1888, or a major one like the massacre at Slapton Sands in 1944.
Or something greater still.
Not that Sir David was sure he could do anything. He’d only ever been told two of the command phrases, and lesser ones at that, a pair of two word groups. They were embossed on his mind, bright as new brass. But it was never known exactly what they meant, or how Shay understood them.
There was also the question of which command to use. Or to try and use both command phrases, though that might somehow have the effect of one of the four word command groups. An unknown effect, very likely fatal to Sir David and everyone for miles, perhaps more.
It was not inconceivable that whatever he said in the next two minutes might doom everyone in London, or even the United Kingdom.
Perhaps even the world.
The first command would be best, Sir David thought, watching Shay approach. They were out in public, the second would attract attention, besides its other significant drawback. Public attention was anathema to Sir David, even in such dire circumstances. He straightened his tie unconsciously as he thought about publicity. It was a plain green tie, as his suit was an inconspicuous grey flannel, off the rack. No club or regimental ties for Sir David, no identifying signet rings, no ring, no earring, no tattoos, no unusual facial hair. He worked to look a type that had once been excellent camouflage, the retired military officer. It still worked, though less well, there being fewer of the type to hide amongst. Perhaps the Falklands War would help in this regard.
