So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away by Richard Brautigan

Author:Richard Brautigan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781847677488
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-12-05T04:00:00+00:00

‘It’s not a sword,’ I said. ‘It’s a huge pepper shaker.’

The kid didn’t understand that, but he was very impressed anyway with what I had done.

I returned to visit the old man many times after that and to take apart and put back together his life like a huge puzzle in my mind, examining very carefully each piece and the totality of their effect.

The old man had been in World War I and was gassed by the Germans. Needless to say, when he mentioned the word gas, I was instantly fascinated and then he told me that it wasn’t automobile gas or cooking gas, but poison gas and the Germans were sons-of-bitches for doing that to him because now he had only one lung and he couldn’t do very much with his life except live here by the pond until one day the sheriff would come and tell him to move on and he’d have to find another pond somewhere.

The old man lived off a small pension that he got from The Government because he’d lost a lung in World War I. Other than this fact I didn’t know anything else about him. He never talked about his family or ever being married or current and long-ago friends. I didn’t know where he was born or anything about him. In his little packing-crate shack there were no personal items that gave a single clue to his past.

The old man had only things that he could use: clothing, cooking utensils, dishes and silverware, jars for storing food and some tools. He didn’t have anything else.

He didn’t have any old letters or a catfish postcard exploiting the possibilities of photography. He had made all his own furniture except for his stove out of packing crates and scraps of odd lumber.

The inside of his shack was so simple and honest that it was almost like a glorified kids playhouse. He was living the kind of hermit life kids dream about living. He was an ancient breathing statue of Huckleberry Finn.

The old man measured carefully every movement that he made. He didn’t ever waste a single gesture. Maybe it was only having one lung that made him so premeditated. I don’t think he even blinked without first thinking about whether or not it was necessary.

Sometimes for reasons that were completely unknown to me I wished that he had a calendar. I had a feeling that he didn’t know what day, month or year it was. I thought that he should at least know what year it was.

What was wrong with that?

It wouldn’t hurt him to know that it was 1947.

The two things that he took the most pleasure in and that were the only incongruity in the personal history that he acted out at the end of a tiny bay on a small obscure pond were his dock and his boat.

Perhaps once he had something to do with the sea.

But I would never find out because he never spoke of it.

The dock was a thing of beauty to behold.

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