Loading The Stone
Slim Fingers

Given the nature of his information, the personalities he came up with were not comforting. He could imagine kindness and humor for the people of the Rocking Deer and Smoky Hill because they were untouched by rumor, but ‘tall, dark, tattooed cannibals’ created a narrow and menacing portrait. Each time he tried to think of a woman or child engaged in an ordinary activity his teenage love of the bizarre would bring a looming killer on the scene, chewing a suspect piece of gristle. In this way, his imagination denied Quivira humanity until the day a hide scraper caught him unaware, threw a personality at him so quickly the gossip of centuries was useless.

They had started that abundant summer afternoon of flint walking together, assuring each other that many objects were waiting to be discovered, but as each followed his intuition they’d drifted apart. Twice their paths had crossed and they’d examined each other’s finds — a small, white, triangular point and a chip of obsidian for Young Walker; two broken scrapers for his father — before wandering again.

When Young Walker saw the blunt tip of dark red flint sticking out of a furrow, he thought he’d found a larger than usual arrow point. He picked it up and continued walking, keeping his eyes on the ground while his fingers crumbled the dirt clinging to the stone From his father he had picked up the habit of letting his hand discover the form of the stone before he looked at it. It felt fairly thin, curved, and smooth on one side. He ran his thumb over the wide end and felt the worked edge. He had found a hide scraper. Just as he brought it in front of his eyes he shifted it into the working position in his hand. As his fingers curled over the back of the scraper he felt a sudden rush of weakness. The bones of his knees dissolved.

‘Oh, man?’

It had happened instantly, there was no time to rationalize or chide himself for romantic befuddlement of fact; he had fallen in love centuries too late. He knew the feeling; at sixteen he had fallen in love twice and twice been wounded by indifference. He sat down. The feeling was receding, a scrap on the wind. He let the scraper fall into his palm and stared at it.

Many times he had held a flint tool and tried to imagine the person who had held it before, but these experiments in curiosity had been purely mental, a large hide scraper calling up a picture of a big woman with heavy hands, an arrow point suggesting a generic successful hunter. But these were only thoughts of people, silent, odorless, breathless. What he had just experienced was the full impression of a personality that had run through him like a current. There was no picture in his mind, yet he felt he had just made the acquaintance of a smiling and graceful young woman and been stunned with the intensity of her happiness. Twice before he had noticed a girl and his blood had gone quicksilver, every pore on his body startled, his mind had turned into a pudding of confusion, longing, and desperation.

“Oh, man.”

He took hold of the scraper again between thumb and first two fingers. She was still there, not a shock this time, but an echo.

“Don’t be a dope;’ he said out loud, but it changed nothing. He returned the scraper to his palm as if to grasp it too much was the equivalent of staring.

It was maroon, heavily flecked with cream/yellow spots, back only slightly domed, sides tapering gracefully back from the scraping edge. Maybe I’m just freaking out because it’s a good-looking scraper, he thought, and gripped it again. When he felt her this time he realized it was coming from his own hand, that just beneath his two fingers shallow channels ran across the scraper back and because his overflowed those narrow channels he was sensing her slim fingers beneath his own. Yet, if he could say he’d been arrested by the scraper’s suggestion of a delicate hand, he still couldn’t explain how the rush of admiration and desire had arrived before thought, without thought, or why he was filled with regret not to have known her.

At the north end of the field his father wandered, hands behind back, head down. Young Walker whistled. His father looked up, nodded, began walking his way.

“Find something, son?”

“A real nice scraper.’

“Oh yeah. It is.’

“Take it.’

“I can see it okay.’

“No, dad, pick it up and hold it.”

“Oh. Hmm. Yeah.”

“Feel it?”

“It feels real good to hold, doesn’t it? Hmm. Imagine this woman.”

“Exactly, dad.”

“No, it really feels like it gives me a buzz.”

“That’s just what it did to me. A big buzz. I don’t know what she looks like but she’s just...well, dad, I think I’m in love.”

“Wow. Really?”

“Well, I got a grip on that scraper and just something about the way it felt, I got this feeling. I, like, just found myself liking a girl. Don’t ask me how.”

“Yeah. I see what you mean. It’s almost like holding hands.”

“Give it back now, dad.”

“Oh. yeah, here.”

“A girl just really dug this scraper. She liked using it and she had this slim little hand. Have you ever noticed how beautiful girls’ hands are, dad?”

“Well, yeah?’

“She was probably right where we are now. Man. What’s the matter with me, dad — is it a hormone warp? Has this ever happened to you?”

“No. Not like that. Was there any...”

“All I know is I feel a girl in this stone. Jeez, dad, I’ve fallen in love
  with a dead cannibal.” 

“Hey, it could’ve been a live one! And maybe those were just nasty rumors?’

“Well, what about those skulls?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah”

“Those skulls. But so what? A young woman in love with life, they always exist, regardless of other labels.”

Young Walker found another point and two more scrapers that afternoon, but he hardly considered them. He kept fetching what he thought of as ‘her scraper’ out of his pants pocket, holding it as he walked, stopping to examine it. The Jasper site had been transformed; it was now her home. Anything he found there became an object used by someone who might have known her. He returned twice to the place where he’d picked up her scraper and stood thinking: here was her lodge where she slept, ate, dreamed, and thought.
That night while his father struggled to make spaghetti, Young Walker got all the scrapers he’d found in Quivira and laid them out on the rug. It had occurred to him, after studying her elegant maroon-and-cream hide scraper, that he had a rival. The scraper had been made beautiful by a man and, though he could have made it for his own satisfaction, Young Walker knew that if he had been alive when she was, and as stricken with her as he was now, he would have made her just such a scraper to delight her eye and hand. If the gift and gesture made her happy, the stone would be a question, an answer, an invitation, a memory between them. Someone had made that gift and someone had used it; fractures along the scraping edge had been polished and worn. Young Walker thought he had fallen in love with a feeling.

“She was in love, dad:’ If she hadn’t been, he never would have felt her. 

“What’s that? The water’s boiling.”

“You know that scraper I found? What I felt was her happiness.”

“Her happiness?” Walker appeared in the living room with a wet wooden spoon. 

“Hey, these all Quivira scrapers?”

“Thirty-two. And these three are really, really fine.”

“Yeah, the one you found today.”

“And this little pink one, and this high-backed butterscotch one.”

“So let me get this straight You’re gonna feel all the real pretty scrapers?”

“And after supper you can get out all your Quivira scrapers.”

“And then are we going to separate the really fine ones and feel them too?”

 “Yeah.”

“Like, beautiful scrapers belonged to beautiful women? Are you expecting to feel the same thing you felt today?”

“Well, maybe.”  “Mmm. I’ve heard of going to great lengths to pick up chicks son, but, man...”

“So let’s do it.”

“Absolutely. But first you need to come out to the kitchen and throw a spaghetti against the refrigerator.”

Walker had many Quivira scrapers, but it took little time to pick out those of superior work and attractive material. Thirty minutes after supper they had added twenty-five scrapers to Young Walker’s three exceptional ones. All were symmetrical and carefully worked, all were made from stones that were colorful or had a striking banded or mottled pattern. The eleven larger ones, each almost as long as a thumb, tended to be hump-backed rather than flat and the material included a dark, mottled purple, terra cotta red with a yellow lightning line, rhubarb pink looped with darker bands, a shiny cream white, a milky white, a blotch-pattern of pale pink and blue gray, a marbled lavender and white, three mottled with red maroon and nougat yellow, and a speckled red and pink with a blaze of white crystals.

Eight smaller scrapers, half a thumb length, were chipped from a !ght purple mottled with red, a two-tone pink, a dark blood red, marbled yellowish gray, shiny pink, lavender with dark purple stripes arid a large white spot, a gray with a cream-colored mantle, and a gray with a long white blaze down its back.

Six very short scrapers made for the tips of fingers and thumb were all bacon flint, white splashed, banded, and streaked with maroon.

The twenty-five scrapers represented the best of the flint worker’s efforts. Young Walker held them all, one by one, and felt nothing.

“I’m not surprised, dad.”

“No?”

“Really. I’m not even disappointed.” Walker nodded. “If there had been anything like that with these.. well, I remember picking them up, every one of them:”

“Nothing happened?”

“Oh, I felt good that such a thing had been made, that I’d found it, but not like you felt today.”

“1 didn’t imagine it, dad.”

“No, I don’t suppose you did.” 

Walker turned one of the scrapers in his hand. “I dig your idea. I don’t know why I never thought of it before. If I could make scrapers and there was a woman I was crazy about, you bet I’d make her the most gorgeous scraper I could —-hell, three or four. I’d get them to her somehow and I’d make real sure she know they came from me?’

Young Walker had begun making two separate groups of the scrapers, placing some next to the one he’d found that day, and others to one side.

“If she liked you, dad, what would she do with it?”

“If she liked me? Use it all the time. It’d be her main scraper.”

“Like these here?” Young Walker indicated the six scrapers he’d grouped with the one he’d found. “But these nineteen over here, they look sharp, fresh, like they were just made.”

“Let me see those:’ Walker looked carefully at each of the nineteen, ran his thumb across the edges.

“Be damned?’ He was thinking that he should have noticed the crisp new quality of so many of the exotic scrapers. He would have once, he thought. Young Walker, noticing his father’s frustration, allowed himself only an abstract murmur.

“Strange.”

“Very. Always strange to find a scraper that doesn’t look used. I must have noticed that on each of these when I picked them up, but I’ve never looked at them together like this.”

“Then if all these beautiful ones were gifts, some of them never even got used?’

“Uh-huh. Not all women are the same, son, I know that much. It looks like most of these young women tucked these certain ones away. Like they were too special to use. They’d be taking these out in the evenings, looking at them, handling them, thinking about the guy.”

“You’re onto something, dad?”

Walker would always believe he had walked point in the search for the meaning of the perfect, unused scrapers leading his son to understanding and discovery. Young Walker allowed the fiction. His father needed to see himself as a solver, a man who sniffed clues into a trail, a trail into a road, road into destination.

Young Walker accepted that an arrow point, a scraper, a knife, could be made poorly or well, that the way the maker felt at the moment could affect the way the tool turned out, and even that the maker believed the way it looked would influence its efficiency. He had no argument with this, what his father called magic, though he thought the word clumsy, smelling of trickery and illusion. He believed in that link between process and function: he’d made his own walking stick, carving Osage Orange to bring out the golden yellow, smoothing the poll to fit his palm, sanding the stick until it gleamed. Proud of the work he’d one, fond of the product, when he walked with the stick he had absolute faith it would support him it he slipped. It levered him up Flint Hill inclines, parted weeds and overhanging branches in his path, tested muddy ground. At rest, it pleased him with the way the bright grain took light.

But the notion that young men might make beautiful tools as tokens of persuasion, a currency of the heart, hadn’t entered his life until the afternoon he’d picked up the freckled maroon scraper and felt the rush of slim fingers.