The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [3]
“He’s not working out,” Krahe says now, of Eyke, who has moved just out of earshot. “I shouldn’t hire locals.”
I tell him that I resent his use of the word “local.” After all, I am one, although I qualify in his mind as both local and of the larger world since I spent several years in London, living in fearful solitude on the edge of Soho, failing my degree, and also because he senses that I’ve had a life he knows nothing about, which is true, but I never talk about who I really am with him. The work I do with mother takes us into an extremity of places and lives, too, and I suppose this also exempts me from the “local” tag.
“You wouldn’t have to hire anybody if you used smaller rocks,” I answer, my voice falsely dismissive.
“This guy’s a brainless punk,” Krahe continues.
“I thought you knew that when you hired him.”
“I suppose I could have told by looking at him, but I didn’t really look.”
“The only job he’s ever had was cutting grass, and half the time he broke the lawn mower. He broke so many on this road that people knew enough not to hire him. Still,” I tell Krahe, “he’s not a bad person, not even close to bad. He’s just…” I try to get at the thing about Eyke, but there just isn’t much to get. “…he could learn a lot from you.” My defense is lame and my lover does not buy it.
“I was desperate. I was working on Construction Number Twenty.”
That is the working title of a piece commissioned many years ago by a large Minneapolis cereal company to rise on the corporate grounds. It is still not finished. Krahe slowly flips the mail along his arm, frowning at each envelope as though it holds a secret outrage. In contrast to those sprightly hands and feet, his body is thick, he favors the heavy plaid woolens sold by mail, and his movements are ponderous and considered. His black hair is cut in a brushy crew cut, the same hairdo Uncle Sam once gave him. At fifty-six, he hasn’t lost his strength, and though he complains about his loss of energy, when I see him and my heart charges up, it is like being near a power source. When he speaks of Kendra coming home for a weekend, his voice is tender, almost dreamy. In those times there is a kind of yearning I’d do anything to hear directed toward me—I think I also love him because I want to know this side of him. Kendra doesn’t seem to have a complicated view of her father. And he sees Kendra, I tell myself, partly as the incarnation of his lost wife and not as his actual self-absorbed and petulant daughter. I don’t like her and she doesn’t like me.
I stay and watch the two men wrestle steel and stone. Davan Eyke is slight by contrast. He doesn’t look in fact as though he can lift as much weight as his boss. Together, though, they haul stones from the woods, drag and lever blocks of pale marble delivered from the Rutland quarries and farther away, too. His studio contains German Jurassic limestone, ammonite fossil-bearing rock, a granite shot with bits of hot blue. If Davan himself was artistic, this would be an ideal job, a chance to live close and learn from a master. As it is, Davan’s enthusiasm dwindles in proportion to the resentment he quickly transfers from his father to his boss.
Elsie sighs and makes a face when I tell her Kendra Krahe is visiting her father, and that he has invited us to dinner. I laugh at her eye-rolling. Krahe often invites us to dinners that do not materialize once Kendra becomes involved. She rails against me;