ISAAC'S QUEST
Novel Portion
By James Robert Smith
Copyright 2012
Before the sun was up, there was a knock on the door. It was very loud,
and you could tell there was a lot of muscle behind the knuckles that were
rapping on the hardwood. Even in my room upstairs I could hear it, although I
was a light sleeper and such noises could easily wake me. I’d slept with my
window open and the room was chilled with the fresh air of a mountain spring morning.
Into my room came the smells of chickens, cats, and our dog Rufus. I could
scent nearby fields where cattle grazed beyond our ten acres of pulpwood trees.
The pine trees were ours; the fields belonged to Mr. Wishon, for whom I often
worked fixing fences, raking hay, and feeding his steers and milk cows.
As I sat in bed, my father was coming up the narrow staircase to my
room. There was nothing on that floor but my bedroom, a crawlspace, and a very
small bathroom with a sink, toilet, and shower stall. My twelve by twelve
bedroom was full of trophies and books and balsa wood airplanes my dad and I
had painstakingly constructed and carefully painted over the years of my
childhood.
I looked at the replicas of World War II –era planes and swung my legs off
the mattress and stood before he could get to the door. Opening it, I caught my
dad as he made the last stair. “I heard him knocking,” I said.
“Good. Get dressed. He isn’t a patient sort. Never was.”
“All right,” I told him. Who was this guy? Why had I never heard them
mention him if we owed him so much?
As quickly as I could, I brushed my teeth and washed my face. I was only
shaving once a week in those days. I pulled on some clean blue jeans, a
short-sleeved shirt, and my hiking boots. When I pulled the boots from under my
bed, there was the faint smell of dried cow shit; I’d forgotten to clean them
the last time I’d taken the flatbed trailer into Mr. Wishon’s field to spread
hay. I took the stairs two at a time, but made hardly a sound as I came to the
bottom of the stairs. My father was sitting in the kitchen, a cup of coffee
steaming in front of him. He nodded his head toward the door and I went through
it and onto the front porch. Isaac was waiting.
He still wore that same black leather jacket. Up close, I could see dark
areas on it where there had once been patches that had been torn off. There
were still a few stringy threads hanging on where the patches had been. I
towered almost a foot over him, but his barrel chest was probably as vast as my
own. He had his hands out of his pockets and his fingers were gnarled, as if
carved from weathered oak. His knuckles seemed almost to be callused. And I
noticed that he had a slightly bow-legged stance that showed through the tight
khaki jeans that were pulled on over thickly muscled legs. He wore what
appeared to be expensive cowboy boots—ostrich leather I later learned. You
could see pucker marks where the feathers had once been anchored to skin.
Isaac tipped his Stetson back and for the first time in my life I had a
good look at his face. He was beyond strange. He was as ugly a human being as I
had ever seen, barring those who are deformed. And I wasn’t certain that he
wasn’t stricken in such a way. Most of his jaw was covered in a reddish-gray
beard that was almost like copper wire. He seemed to be virtually chinless, and
I could understand why such a man would grow a beard to hide that lack of a
feature. Isaac’s eyes were large, wide-set, and very blue: the bluest eyes I’d
ever seen. Under his thick, brushy, unkempt hair was a virtual ridge of bone
that overhung his eyes and made it appear as if he was constantly scowling. His
nose was thick, appeared to have been broken too many times to count, and his
nostrils flared widely.
Offering his hand to me, he said, “I’m Isaac.”
I took it, feeling what seemed to be the
hardest hand I’d ever encountered. And I’m accustomed to shaking hands with men
who lift weights for the better part of the day. “I know. My dad told me.”
Isaac pointed toward the slopes that led up to the top of a small peak
near my father’s house. “Let’s go for a walk in the forest. Away from everyone
else. I have some important things to tell you.” With that he trotted down the
stairs of our porch to the lawn and started marching toward the forest, knowing
I’d be right beside him.
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