He stands at the medicine cabinet mirror, shaving. He, as we all have done in our mortal attempts to look through the looking glass, is introspecting. “Who am I?” we ask.
Appearances are easy; we see the mole or gray hairs, the flaws and odd facets, our inferred imperfections. It is that beauty beneath the skin for which we struggle to celebrate, in living with ourselves. William Wallace Caldwell is no exception, and like all of us, no simple explanation would be true if the reader chose to fathom his true character within, of any soul, including our own. But, truth be told, we are busy here in Warhaven, full of business, weeds to pull and accouterments to purchase. We could do worse than slowing down to recognize our neighbors and those with whom we brush shoulders in the aisles and streets during our brief tenure on this planet. In an hour he has a meeting to attend, the Warhaven Cemetery Board, a committee Gus Chapman had convinced him to join five year ago.
Bill Caldwell lives in the foothills of the Craggies in the West Hills district on five acres, which is nearly all woodlot. He and his wife Doty stick pretty much to themselves. She works as a stenographer and typist down at Lyon Chapman Bat and Casket Company; he’s a millwright there. Of course, it’s all computer work now, for the both of them. His father Peter had moved away from Warhaven after he had graduated from high school and then spent the remainder of his frustrated life job-jumping in the mining industry in Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. Peter was descended from one of Warhaven’s founding fathers, Wallace Caldwell, and was the second cousin once removed from Dr. Bill, William Caldwell, the man responsible for leading Warhaven Hospital and Warhaven Care Center into modern medicine.
Bill met Doty Moray in Tonopah, Nev., in high school, and they have stuck close since. A couple decades back they moved to Warhaven to settle down. She raises a most marvelous vegetable garden. And her roses could win blue ribbons at the New Hope County Fair, but she keeps her distance from showiness and that competitive spirit in horticulture for which Warhaven is known. Nor was Bill any kind of bragger; he makes curious, naïve masks from log rounds which he crafts with a router and oil paints, all of them stored in the barn, never in his lifetime to see the light of day.
This morning, shaving away at his upper lip, Bill remembered his father, running in the yard after him and his brothers, the belt he raised cracked like a whip when it connected with thigh or buttock. Bill stares at himself, thinking, ‘I learned to be invisible, to blend into the earth. I was like the Clay Men in Flash Gordon.’ He touches the scar on his cheekbone, wincing, for the time the old man turned the buckle on them. For his melting into the landscape, his father had nicknamed him Wilt. Bill finished high school in a foster home, living with a reformed prostitute named Myrtle Burl. She was kind and generous to him and demonstrative with caring, feeding him good food and encouragements for self-confidence.
Bill and Doty have developed something of a telepathy between them; they both prefer silence to chatting. And as he grabs his chin, pulling the safety razor around, he was sitting in various schools as a kind of collage of memories, always listening, never venturing the answer, which he usually knew. Some teacher had told him, “He who hesitates is lost,” an adage he, at last, applied when he finally noticed Doty’s charms and intelligence.
He trims the sideburns, careful to avoid the scar. “How did I end up so lucky, so fortunate to live so well with someone so fine?” he mumbles aloud. He wipes the remnant traces of shaving cream away and splashes on some bay rum, a scent favored by his father.
This evening after work he would haul the wood splitter out with the tractor to the knoll in the woodlot to split the white oak, yellow cedar, and lodgepole pine he had logged, bucked, and yarded the past winter. He enjoyed working in the woods in winter. Mostly it was quiet, and especially so if there was snow on the ground and he was working with hand tools. He felt that if there were a time and place he knew himself best, it was in the woods for his tasks of self-sufficiency. And it was no small joy for him that Doty always stated her appreciation when he would return home. And it was there walking back to the barn, in putting the tools of logging away that Bill often heard complementing voices, the tales of valor from the old men of the woods — and silence, the best kind of talk.
•••
The City Council is a work of fiction, written by Jim Tindall, appearing every other week in Columbia Gorge News.
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