Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman Page A

with his health. Even into his fifties he’d been able to drink as long and late as any man, then sing as loud the next morning in church as anyone on a full night’s sleep and a proper breakfast. He could still travel fair distances for even small commissions, happy to sleep on a shop floor with his rolled-up trousers as a pillow if an extra day was required.
    But this had now come to an end. He had always been a large man—as full of guts as he was of life, his friends said. Now sixty years of carrying those guts around had made walking painful. He tired easily. Often he was out of breath, especially on hot afternoons.
    Many of those same friends who had shared with him his youth had now retired—returned to their villages or their children’s compounds. But he had married late, a woman much younger than himself, and had two small girls in school. Times were hard for everyone these days, except for the rich perhaps, and he had never been rich. And so when Festus Ankrah approached him on the matter of taking on his nephew as an apprentice, Big Henry was glad of the opportunity to have somebody in the studio to help.
    A day was set. Uncle and nephew arrived at Big Henry’s house. The signwriter was summoned by his wife from his studio on the second floor. He came down the stairs slowly, smiling, talking through his breathlessness, as his wife went off to get water and food for Festus Ankrah and his nephew. The signwriter’s whole body gathered with a small jerk in preparation for each step, then straightened out as he arranged his weight delicately on the pads of his soft feet.
    “Yes, yes, yes, hello,” he was saying as he descended, while Festus Ankrah and the boy stood formally at the door. “Good morning to you.”
    The signwriter invited his visitors to sit. Festus Ankrah hesitated, explaining that he would have to leave, but sat then nonetheless. The boy remained standing.
    “As for myself, I must have some relief,” the signwriter said, lowering himself into a beaten-up old leather chair.
    Then the boy’s uncle and the signwriter talked. The boy stood quietly at his uncle’s side.
    Only when his uncle took his leave—“You will forgive me for not getting up,” the signwriter said to him, shrugging a self-deprecating shrug—did Big Henry address the boy.
    “O-yeees,”
Big Henry sighed with gratification, then edged off his shoes and shifted in his seat exaggeratedly, as if shaking off the formality of the last five minutes. The two flat clubs of his feet began spinning slowly, like little fins propelling him lazily through the air.
    It was a gesture of complicity with which he hoped to start his relationship with the boy.
    The boy smiled, an uncertain smile, but did not say anything.
    “Very well,” the old man said, and introduced himself.
    At first the signwriter thought the boy was merely shy. Although he made many attempts to put the boy at ease in those first few days, it seemed to make little difference. The boy was quiet, spoke haltingly, uncertainly, when he had to, and in a mixture of English and Twi, since he was not fluent.
    “Something is wrong with him,” Big Henry’s wife said to her husband.
    “As for me, I think he is only sad,” the signwriter replied.
    “What is it that he has to be sad about?” the woman asked.
    The old man didn’t know.
    Though there was more to it than just sadness. There was mistrust too. Not of him. Of everyone. Or everything. Somewhere along the line, the old man guessed, damage had been done. And in his way of seeing the best in people, he looked on the boy’s silence as something apart from the boy, an affliction; and so the apprenticeship continued, when others might have broken it off after a few weeks.
    In the beginning Big Henry would start the morning with the boy at Amaamo timber market, where he’d give instruction in the selection of wood. As they made their way together through the winding alleys of the market, barrow boys would maneuver