Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman Page B

through withboards stacked on their heads. The air was filled with the sound of bargaining and shouting and the animal howl of wood being torn by metal, and as they walked, and the signwriter talked, sawdust would fall like snow from the board saws, and gather in piles like river sand at their feet.
    The merchant from whom they bought their boards had his shop at the back of the market. He was a small man with little brown teeth and a scrubby head—an immigrant from Niger in a political suit that was cut from a piece of purple cloth so thin that the collars and lapels hung as loose and flimsily as a shirttail.
    There they would find him standing outside his shed, in a row of identical sheds with tall frontages opening to a passage. All around his merchandise was piled up in stacks, like folded tablecloths, on which the night-shift machinist and porters lay asleep. From a distance the merchant would watch the signwriter and the boy approach, and the boy too would watch the merchant, clearing his ears with the head of a two-inch nail, from which he collected the yellow crust with his teeth and spat into the sand.
    To the doorframe of the wood merchant’s shed a monkey was tied by a rope attached round its waist. It was a pale gray creature with dangling limbs and sky-blue testicles that bounced between its legs like berries. It would take a banana with both hands gently, but it would also bare its teeth and shriek soundlessly at the porters and assistants who harassed it, hopping around the frame of the shack looking for a door in the plank wall where there was none.
    After the lessons of the timber market, the signwriter taught the boy to sand and prime. Later they went through the mixing of colour. The composition of a board. The disciplines of the different fonts, varnishing finishes, and installation.
    The boy followed instructions well. He seemed to take pleasure in his work. The signwriter noticed that having a task to do, with its specific requirements set and understood, gave the boy contentment. Perhaps a lack of structure had been part of his problem, the old man thought. That before there’d been nothing that necessitated the world being one way or another.
    But at the studio there were always things that needed doing. And as time passed Big Henry found the boy a very useful assistant. He treated the boy kindly. The boy’s presence became part of the signwriter’s daily routine. And because the signwriter loved his life—his wife, his girls, his house, his job—the boy became part of his generalized sense of rightness and contentment.
    He began to feel a fondness for the boy, as he noticed in his girls a fondness for anything that was familiar. “Hello sky, hello birds, hello sandy yard,” the younger one, who was six, would say as their mother took them out to school.
    It was something like that for him too—
Hello boy
.
    The signwriter knew that to try to coax the boy into conversation would only make him withdraw further. But it did not stop him from speaking himself through the long days they spent together. He did not think the boy minded. Having somebody around to whom he could pass on his experience brought out of Big Henry all kinds of reminiscences and half-articulated philosophies.
    He talked of the kindness of strangers, and the coincidences that had brought him into the trade, and why he had stuck with it.
    “Long ago,” he told the boy, “when I was young I started reading books about people that have died.
    “The way they started, what they were performing.
    “And one day in a little magazine I read that the former world boxing champion Cassius Clay, the father was a signwriter—
    “Now I say if the father was a signwriter, a prominent man like that, why can you not also follow in his footsteps.
    “Ahaaaaa?
    “Ah!
    “And so what I had to do was to make a small box and put my little paints inside, and then get my brushes and put them into my hair.
    “And moreover the clothes that I