The Woodcutter and his Family by Frank McGuinness

Author:Frank McGuinness [Frank McGuinness]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847179890
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2017-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

The stars that shine above

Will light our way to love.

You rule the world with me,

I’m the Sheik of Araby.

When you’re asleep – sleep, sleep. Into your tent, I’ll creep – creep, creep. Wake up, father. I have to tell you this story, about your acolyte, about his habit of walking the streets of Paris hauling a ladder after him and why he does so. His answer surprised me. While some do like to bring their children or dogs, even their cats and lobsters, out for a stroll, he brought a ladder for the exercise of carrying it, and for the company of its conversation. Are you telling me two things? I inquired. First is it always the same ladder we are talking about? And if it is, secondly, do you regard this object as some sort of companion?

He confirmed, yes, it was indeed identical, always the same one, but declined to be so definite as to why it was frequently in his presence. Companion – well, it sounded not quite right. Too intimate? Perhaps. And yet he had come to depend on this ladder as a comfort much as one would a beloved pet that stands close by in times of need. Do you have a particular reason for bringing it with us on the day that’s in it? I demanded to know. Yes, I do, he softly whispered, as a romantic gesture, I would like us to climb the Eiffel Tower.

There are times that individual knows exactly the way to my heart. Had I somehow, somewhere, let slip that this artifice, this miracle of French engineering, this most elegant masterpiece, I have long adored it as an object of brilliant genius? Ask me what it is I most covet in the great city of Paris. It is not the prized tapestries of the Virgin and the Unicorn in the Musée de Cluny, although as a child I did see a unicorn in a field – where was it? Normandy, a little village called Boisny – but on investigation it proved to be nothing more than a pedlar’s goat, milked near to extinction to sate his permanent thirst and offered to us to buy for the price of a bottle of wine and a plate of venison stew? We declined the offer, my parents did, despite the protestation of Archie and myself. He put me in here, in this hotel, my brother. Why? Perhaps in revenge that I informed him his precious unicorn was nothing more than a shitty farmyard beast.

No, not the Cluny and all its treasures, these I would decline, as I would the grave of Napoleon, and all the silks and laces of the ladies wandering serenely through the Sundays of the racecourse at Longchamp, nervous as newborn fillies, highly strung like my good self, in most urgent need of minding. I would reject the delicate motorcars that could be most severely crushed by collision with their own like or swerving suddenly to miss a pack of

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