#john jeremiah sullivan
When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make—a cedar coffin, because it would smell good, he said. I wasn’t that helpful. I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. My experience in woodworking hadn’t gone past feeding planks through a band saw for shop class, and there’d be no time to redo anything I might botch, so I followed instructions and with rags cut from an undershirt worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life.
FRAGMENTVM “Mr. Lytle: An Essay,”Pulphead
Annos viginti natus homini Andrew Lytle nomine addictus sum, qui certe decem annos Dominus ab omnibus apellatus erat praeter sororem, quae nomine Polly, minus paulum vetus, eum Fratrem appellebat, vel potius littera R ultima numquam sonata, Frateh, filiasque, quae eum Tatam appellebant. Cum haud dubie numquam volebam eum Andrew, vel senecem, vel nomen alium familiarem appellare, me tamen hortatus est ut se appellerem τὸν ἐμὸν γέροντα. Ille me quidem appellebat puerum, amatumque, et semel per litteras “Animam Narium Mearum.” Cum annos prope nonaginta duo natus erat carpisculum eius habitaveram; cum annos prope nonaginta tres natus est proxima hieme sepultus est in arca quam suave odore, ut opinabatur, de cedro structam cum aliis fabricatus sum, quamvis non multum facere possem. Nonnullas noctes in officina sine multa luce algidus tabulas cera terebam cum alii, viri me peritiores, qui toti in re serram ducebant tabulasque runcinabant, qui scalpro perplexa coagmenta fingere potuerunt. Imperitus eram ligni fingendi, quod a puero tabulas in serram non duxeram, et erat non tempus vitiosa corrigere, ut quae essent facienda eruditus cedrum cera in pannis ex tunica laniatis tererem dum nodi cineris colore videntur purpurei, velut vita in memoria.
-
At twenty years old I was adjoined to the man named Andrew Little, who certainly for ten years had been called Master by everyone except his sister, who, named Polly, a little less old, called him Frater, or rather, since the final letter R was never sounded, Frateh, and his daughters, who called him Tata. Although without a doubt I never wanted to call him Andrew, or old man, or another familiar name, he nevertheless urged me to call him τὸν ἐμὸν γέροντα. He even called me boy, beloved, or once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” When he had been ninety-two years old I had lived in his basement; when he was ninety-three the next winter he was buried in a coffin that, constructed from cedar with its sweet smell, as he thought, i built with others, although I wasn’t able to do much. For not just a few nights, cold, in the workshop without much light, I was rubbing the boards with wax alongside the others, men more skilled than me, who guided the saw, fully absorbed in the affair, and planed the boards, who were able to form complicated joints with a chisel. I was unskilled in crafting wood, because I hadn’t led boards under a saw since boyhood, and there wasn’t time to correct faults, so that having been taught what things needed to be done, I rubbed the cedar with wax on cloths torn from a shirt until the knots, the color of ash, seemed purple, like life in memory.
