Famous That Way

 Famous That Way
     by My Rich Uncle Douglas

    toast is better than the fat
    that hangs on various aging men
    that’s a tether that our mothers
    should have made us out of yarn
    when the tale is told in fullness
    all the angels will cry out
    and full laud the one who comes
    with glory ringing in his triumph

Michelangelo painted David when he was just sixteen, and now it stands displayed in the Musée du Louvre. Which brings me to my point. An old man of my acquaintance informed me once that a story that he had heard from his grandfather, with which he wished to bend my ear, would inspire me to be all that I could be. I declined to hear it if—as he prefaced his telling of the tale—it would contain no female characters. 
    The old man was my Uncle Douglas who began his working life digging basements with a spade and shovel and grew in time into the wealthiest Readymix concrete purveyor in southern Manitoba. At sixteen, Uncle Douglas told grandfather Gorman that the time had come for him (that is, Uncle) to leave the farm and strike out on his own. Grandfather understood such an inclination and did not demure since he himself had found his own family of fourteen overbearing female siblings cloying, so he had left home at fifteen to work as an itinerant and then eventually drifted into the ministry, at which he proved to be successful beyond his father’s expectations. Uncle Douglas kept right on as if he had not heard me, and despite my intentions to shut off my attention, I began to be interested after all.
     “There once was a young boy,” Uncle Douglas began, “whose stepfather intensely disliked him because he seldom spoke and walked with a limp, congenital, and surgically not remediable. Quiet and shy, this lad spent much of his time either lying on his bed upstairs reading books borrowed from a learned neighbour, or doing the same in a shady spot on the yard or in deep grass behind the hedges and windbreaks. Their neighbours all, to a man, kept each to himself and his family, indifferent to the wealth or hardship of those whose lives bordered theirs. 
     “Scotch communal instinct is exactly that, extinct,” Uncle Douglas said, with a small grin and a puff at his pipe. “All that was, except for Isaiah Blatherbee, a recluse of sixty some years whose six acres touched on the corner of the young lad’s father’s property. On the other side, the sea wall kept the wild water out. To the east, an arid stretch of gorse and bog made the land non arable, while to the west the fields sloped gradually, with rises of mound and hill, off to the city of Gradualeema, twelve miles distant. This detail of fierce Scottish antisocialism is only tangentially related to the story of the boy, however.
    “The boy lived secluded and lonely, for in those days, before the motor car, with only horses for transport, winter and summer, the extravagance of a visit to the city was not to be entertained. And the boy bowed to this wisdom, until one unfortunate day in October, after a long season of rebukes  from his stepfather (whose humiliation at his stepson’s ineffable gentleness made him cross about and critical of that individual), he rose one morning to milk the kine, and instead of turning into the barn door, thoughtlessly kept on along the cowpath over the pasture and toward the road half a mile away, which ran crooked toward the city of Gradualeema.”
     Uncle Douglas, now of course  himself an old man and smiling at the memory of the young lad’s misfortunes, continued, drawing a glass of barley beer from the wooden barrel on his wheelchair at his side. “The enthusiasm with which the young man told grandfather about his initiation into city life made me realize that, given the opportunity, he would have done it all over again, and twice if it came to that. 
     “What occurred when he reached Gradualeema must now be described, for it reflects on no one so cruelly as the man who raised him.” Uncle warned me, however: “Do not, by the way, think of me as an invalid. Just because I loiter in this little conveyance. If I were one, I would wish you to take that stout oak post there, the one for fencing, and tap me twice over the skullcap to temporarily put me out of your misery. 
     “No, think no more of me as an invalid then I thought, hearing grandfather’s story, of that coltish, mincing, wisp of a thing that the lad met on his arrival in the strange (for him) metropolis, as one when she made him pay the price for his rustic ignorance. Lord! I thought I’d seen everything when the Clydesdale came to the farmyard to service our Bay! But to hear granddad tell of it? Not even a breath of comparison. Not a whisper of a similarity! That fortnight this young boy became a man about town, and from then on you could not have paid him to think his future in terms of acres and seed. 
     “By the way,” Uncle added, “the painting that I intend to pass on to the next ‘lame’ one this family produces, done by one of the most respected artists in all of the Hebrides, will send its message to the progeny to come that the brush and the pen are welcome among the Gormans for aye and for aye.”
     He finished. He did add, however, the following arresting addendum with a look of mischief in his one good eye. “Now,” he said (and I saw the weariness that the retelling had visited on him), “the exact nature of the initiation that the young fella underwent in Gradualeema that energized both that first day and his days to come, I will not divulge to you at the present moment. Maybe on another day, if I remain hale and hearty and of good mind, and if—mind this ‘if”!—you bring me a little more ale in a barrel of the sort that sits here at my elbow, I will speak further, in clear detail, of the precise falling that he underwent and the colours associated with that falling. But, thank you for this barrel! It is of the best of liquors, my tongue tells me, and I will not let one minute pass in its consumption without remembering who brought it to me!”
      So saying, he wheeled his contraption to the outhouse nearby, the barrel now swivelling on a luggage rack behind him. He dragged himself through the biffy door, whistling. Before long I heard snoring inside. I left, foolishly on tiptoe, and vowed to return the next day with the gift of ale he had requested.
     Despite the playfulness in his eyes, or his eye, I should say, Uncle Douglas had appeared tired, though satisfied with the tale as it had unfolded. He’d become rather quiet towards the end of it. I had explained to him, before he ventured into the outhouse, that I had better get a move on. I needed to start with the work I had been assigned. I vowed to myself to return next day with something in my hand to exchange for more of the saga of the artist who had not known that he would paint and become famous that way.