Keith Newstead makes… things.
Things like that have a name, of course. They’re automata. It’s the basis for the word automaton. There’s a very long tradition of making things that do things without doing anything. They’re just meant to capture the imagination in an ingenious way. Mission accomplished.
The sumac has gone golden and crimson already. There was no summer. There was a hint of June in August, smothered in its cradle. The tree swallows have come and gone a second year. They set up housekeeping again in the birdhouse the experts say won’t work. It is funny to never be the expert. Everything I say has to be true or else. An expert can say what he pleases.
The weather came weeks ago with Sturm und Drang like I’ve never seen and tore the landscape to bits. The hair on my arms stood at attention when the bolts landed, and there was a misdirected freight train outside the kitchen window. It blew out the windows and it rained indoors until we sat the little fellow on a chair in the center of the house, the last redoubt. We watched trees like battleship masts give up their ghosts and fly by the window like Dorothy’s relatives. I went from place to place in my house like a captain in a sub beset by depth charges, wondering if it could hold. It couldn’t. The next day I found window glass forty-five feet from where it belonged, returned to its long-lost brethren among the sand. The place I work was made a shambles while the very walls of the house inhaled and exhaled like a bellows.
I wondered for a moment about a dread God that would take everything, even from those who have nothing, then snapped out of it immediately when I saw the little face in the chair in the center of the house, reading a book with a flashlight.
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He just sort of appeared there. I never saw any motion; any coming or going.
I must admit, he shook me a little. He was sitting in the pouting chair. That’s what we called the battered settle by the door where we’d sit and smoke and think a bit about what we were doing. Collect your thoughts.
“When in doubt, sweep the floor,” my boss would say. I didn’t understand that fully, then. I thought I was his inferior, and it was all I was good for. But I’d see him doing it, so that couldn’t be it. Even one as dumb as me understood after a while. He was up against it, somehow. Joint wouldn’t pull tight. Glue pot gone cold unexpectedly. A dull blade splintering an edge. Something. He’d sweep like an automaton, and I’d see him turning it over in his mind. Then I understood.
The boss was worms and forgotten. The pouting chair was my place to sort it out. The sun would sneak in the door, open a crack; the sheriff of a breeze would evict my smoke after a while; and I watched the motes of dust drifting through the beam like krill in the sea. The grain ran out. The board had a shake. The wane would rob two inches off the sound edge. Something. It would always come to you –what to do– in the chair.
God, that little round face there in the chair. He couldn’t be more than ten. Strike that. The little heathens in the street always looked years younger than they were. They might be a race of giants sent by our Creator to rule over us all, but who would know? They’d never eaten two meals in the same day.
He sat there all day and said nothing. He didn’t even sniffle. It was as if we had a bargain, unsaid; he didn’t move and I pretended not to notice him. I’d pull off a prodigious curl with jack plane, and wonder if he saw it. Can he pay attention at all? I couldn’t look at him, it would ruin it.
He sat there for four hours, and never moved or spoke. When I got there the next day, he was sitting there again. That boy. That boy is the one.
Pop knew everybody. Didn’t have a dime but took me everywhere. We’d pull up to the Garden parking lot in our old beater. No hope. It was full when I was born, and now I’m in grammar school. I cringed until the face leans out of the booth and it’s his nephew in there. Right over there, Uncle Buddy. Where the players park.
You couldn’t buy a ticket with money. The Garden would thrum with excitement and no one would miss it for filthy lucre. Pop had four. Conjured them like a wizard at work because the boss was already wearing white shoes for the season and wouldn’t sweat in a seat in that hellhole when he could be on the Vineyard. Pop says he’ll sit behind the pole and stare at the big rusty rivets but I’d always end up there because I fit.
Uncle Smokey would come and puff his Tiparillos and jape with Dad and I was in the company of men and stood in awe like at the foot of marble Lincolns.
There was weather inside there. Cumulus clouds of smoke would meet the smog from the drunken exhalations and clash with the cold front coming up from Bobby Orr’s ice under the rickety parquet wood floor.
Then we’d stand and the floor was lost to me, nothing but the boles of men in an endless forest swaying in the breeze of excitement.
I’d kill ten innocent men to go back there for ten minutes.
A strange and foreign place lost in a reverie and you walk nowhere or
anywhere and think nothing. You’re prepared to see any sort of
wonder or gape like an imbecile at the most mundane thing because it’s
news to you. Wogs or supermen or ghosts or something live here. And the
stone is not just stone but hard stone and
your foot wears it away like Caesar and Michelangelo and Savonarola and
all the nobodies did. You look like you belong here but you don’t. You
walk and you look at everyone and everything and here you’re the child
who can’t even ask for what you want and don’t know what anything is for
and everyone is your friend and a stranger all at once and you are in
in their thrall.
Then there’s this carousel in the middle of
nowhere if this is nowhere how would I know with no one on it and it’s
just there with no hint of a reason for it there are no children. There
it is a world spinning empty. It doesn’t belong there and you don’t
belong there and you stand there accusing one another of nothing. It
serves only to remind you that your children are out of sight across an
ocean and you weep for yourself and you weep for a whole goddamn
continent that sent its children across an ocean never to return.
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