By James C. Clar
The hammer came down again in my uncle’s arthritic hand as he attempted to straighten another crooked nail. Each blow was tentative, a mere suggestion of force rather than the real thing. The sound was dull and patient in the half-dark of the barn. He had found a small tin bucket full of bent and rusty square nails tucked behind a stack of scrap lumber. The lumber lay unused in the back of the dilapidated structure that served as a garage on his Lake Ontario home. The nails were relics from some earlier project, perhaps from the barn’s own construction. They looked as though they had been waiting decades to be remembered again.
He sat hunched over a scarred workbench, its surface stained with oil, paint, and the faint outlines of tools long since gone missing. A single dusty bulb hung overhead, casting more shadow than light. A vintage Lincoln Continental dominated most of the remaining space in the interior, its long black hood stretched forward like a sleeping leviathan. The car was immaculate despite the dust, polished and preserved with the same care the old man once brought to his writing. My uncle didn’t drive anymore. He was ninety-six and as his memory loss progressed, he had surrendered his license.
As with many seniors, the real problem was his short-term memory. A newspaperman for over forty years, he could still recall nearly every interview he had ever conducted, along with most of the stories he had covered as far back as the thirties and forties. He remembered names and obscure details with unnerving clarity. It was just that he couldn’t remember what he had eaten for breakfast an hour earlier, or sometimes even where he lived. Like the dead, my uncle was gradually being confined to one tense … the past.
“Hey Unk, how are you doing?” I asked as I stepped into the barn, my breath visible in the chilly air.
Looking up from the workbench at the sound of my voice, he turned toward me and smiled.
“Hey yourself,” he said. “I was just straightening these old nails. You never know, we might be able to use them again for something.” Having lived through the Great Depression, my uncle believed in getting a “second use” out of everything.
I moved closer and leaned down to give him a light kiss on the forehead. It looked as though he had shaved earlier that morning, but unevenly. Small tufts of coarse white-gray hair clung stubbornly to his cheeks and jowls; islands missed in a sea he must have thought he had charted successfully.
He set the hammer down and let his eyes wander over the tools hanging in front of him. After a moment, he reached out and took hold of a chisel. Bony fingers traced pitted steel. They lingered there, as if the tool were a key to something he alone could intuit. I could almost feel his mind slipping into reverse.
“I remember a winter back in ‘47,” he began. “They sent me out to the train station because they found some damn fool frozen solid to the side of a boxcar. Seems he hopped the freight somewhere back East, maybe in Utica or Syracuse. Anyhow, he got soaked when the engine took on water. By the time the train rolled in, he was basically encased in ice.”
He paused, eyes unfocused now, seeing something far beyond the barn walls.
“Turns out he was the son of a local politician, that’s what made it news. He’d run off a few years earlier. I guess his luck petered out and he decided to come back home with his tail between his legs, a regular prodigal son. Anyhow, the cops and the railroad men couldn’t decide whether to thaw him out somehow or chip him off the side of the train. They ended up using a chisel a lot like this one right here.”
I took an old windbreaker from the back of the barn door and draped it over his narrow shoulders. He didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps he did and simply folded it away into the background like everything else that belonged to the present. He put the chisel back on its hook and picked up his hammer again. Holding another nail with his left hand, he set it carefully on the bench and brought the tool down with his right.
The truth was he didn’t have enough strength to actually straighten any of those nails. Even if he had, by later that afternoon he’d forget which pile was which and start to work all over again. Bent, straightened, bent again: the distinctions dissolved as easily as his sense of time. Time was, for him, a serpent devouring its own tail.
Those old nails were my uncle’s attempt to create order out of the quiet chaos of his mind, an effort to hammer memory back into submission, into usefulness. But there was too much rust, and he no longer had the energy. The nails, like his memory, were simply too far gone. Still, I hoped he would never stop trying.
“Listen, Unk,” I said as he continued to tap away, “I’m going to head out. I’ve got to go to work. Millie will be out when it’s time for lunch. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon to see how you’re doing.”
He looked over his shoulder at me as though seeing me now for the first time. His expression was open and polite, the way he used to look at strangers before an interview. “It’s really nice of you to take the time to visit with an old man,” he said. “What did you say your name was? You remind me of my nephew.”
He gestured toward the workbench. “Do me a favor, would you? If you run into him, tell him to stop over. I want to let him know about these nails. I think I’m pretty close to finishing.”
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James C. Clar is a writer and retired teacher. Most recently his work has appeared in Flash Digest, The Yard Crime Blog, Sudden Flash Magazine, Flash Phantoms, Antipodean-SF, Freedom Fiction Journal and 365-Tomorrows.