Carp Yodeling Sins and Mandkind Suction

FICTION Carp Yodeling Sins and Mandkind Suction____________________________ Ralph Price A HANDYMAND NEED NOT BE HANDY. I am proof of that, for when Uncle John Willis lost out to his cirrhosis, he left me his tools and his job to go with it. The tools, the beautiful tools, were passed on to me, as there was no one else to take them. The hammers, the saws, the furniture clamps, the chisels and planes, the punches and drills and braces and bits and the levels and files were mine by default—these tools and a hundred others that I began to handle and polish, even as the old man was still breathing. "Do not take up trades you don't wish to practice," were almost his last words to me, for we had discussed it up, down and crossways. "Don't take a job you don't want to work at. Don't get into the cab of a truck unless you want to live there. They'll give you a raise, and they'll tell you nobody else knows your route. And don't go into the mills if you don't plan to stay. They'll pay you good money to spit on the wall and give you the day off on Lucifer's birthday. You'll never get out of that. And don't hire on at a sawmill. Sometimes a log has a snake inside, goes through the blade as slick a veneer. You'll lie in your bed counting board feet, and after you've been at it for a week you'll be deaf from the noise and dumb from the lifting, and you'll be missing some of your fingers, and you'll think about quittin' but you won't be able to, 'cause saw-millin' will be all that you know." "A good barrel maker can float a navy!" were his actual last words to me, but at that point I think he was already half way to where he was headed. It might seem now like the wrong way to look at it, but I liked the tools that were my inheritance more for how they looked and felt than for what they might be used for. He, my Uncle John, left me equipped for a thousand things, from joining to planing to mitering to dovetailing to shaping, but I had not the head for any of it. I tell you in truth that in those days I could not join a joint without slipping, I could not plane without going too deep, I could not glue without spilling glue, I could not miter without sanding and filling, I could not dovetail without splitting the feathers. But owning the tools was a 77 pleasure to me, and I began to make a few things—pigeon crates, dog coffins. With John Willis gone, there was no one else to do these little odd jobs, and so they would come to me. They would come to me because I was there with a shop full of tools and because they had always come to Uncle John. I like being asked and so began taking jobs I was not prepared for, because they asked me to, and because I loved showing up with the tools. I practiced until I could whistle, because my Uncle had been a whistling man. I went about in brown bibbed overalls, for that had been his style. I guess I thought that if I could make myself more like him, then maybe I'd start to get things right, the way he did. Sometimes I succeeded, or so it seemed to me, and sometimes I failed and my employers would turn on me, as sour a soldering flux. The women who would hire me were more forgiving than their husbands, and often they would thank me for my efforts, even when my repairs needed more repairs before my glue was dry, even when my nails split whatever I was nailing, even when my drill missed its mark and turned clean, pine boards to Swiss cheese. The women, the kind old women, would thank me and pay me sometimes with a bonus...