In the town of Grand Rapids much of the country’s glorious furniture was made. Chairs and tables, cabinets and desks, beds of metal, stools of wood, articles formed from materials that people from other towns didn’t know and couldn’t name. The furniture makers of the river city built with enchantments, with charms and what could only be magic, with techniques unknown. No system of the makers was a knowledge that a customer could have. A fantastical mesh chair set upon rolling wheels, yes, you could have that, but factory procedures? A set of plans? An MSDS? Ha! No. Could not be done. If a buyer from afar, some burg down the river or even a village as far-flung as those which ringed the Great Lakes, if a buyer desired one of those clever, curious, durable, magical cabinets, so much sturdier, stronger, spacier, lighter, prettier, somethinger than any cabinet that could be found at home, if a buyer wanted one of those cabinets, there was no choice but to see the makers in Grand Rapids.

Therefore, Herkimer had come to town.

The weather was not good on his journey; winter had come early, and though Herkimer trucked his largest rig from Laketon all the way to the Cabinetmaker’s shop, he knew that his trip home would be hard going over the miles of snow-blanched roads. Herkimer didn’t want to stay the night, or several, in a Grand Rapids hotel—they were far more expensive than any he slept in on his usual travels—but the likelihood of his coming entrapment rose with each flake and surged with each drift.

And, then, the bridge, the bridge, looming just in sight. Four lanes wide, the largest crossing within a week’s travel, the Bridge on the River Grand had stone arches at each anchorage, but rickety wood and rusted nails between. The River was wide as a town itself and moved far too fast to ever freeze and stayed white as ice in summer by cause of its endless rapids. Its rocks. Depths.

When Herkimer closed upon the River, its crests lighter than the sky, he could hear the creaks of Bridge-the-Grand, as the town dialect called it, the creaks like horses’ screams. He drove to the first plank of wetted wood, paused, then drove on, and he was crossing.

The trip over was death truly, near death, the cut of the wind, the crash of the rapids, the shrieks of the boards beneath Herkimer’s rig. The old wood could fail on any gust, he felt sure. No one else crossed with him, no one in sight. No one stupid enough to give this a try at such a blighted hour. But Herkimer did, and he survived.

When he arrived at the Cabinetmaker’s, the lights were turned down, the shop silent and barren. Herkimer knocked once, twice, and stood back. He kept under the eave with some care. So much snow. So much to cover his thin hat in shards of hard ice.

He felt certain that he’d missed the proprietor. Though the hour was well within the business day, a dark hung about the storefront, and upon those shops nearby, some scrapes of ash upon an untended hearth. Barely a man wandered about the town, save Herkimer. He was alone but for the snow.

At once, the door crashed outwards, its honed edge flashing inches from Herkimer’s nose as it swung past. Within the empty frame, the Cabinetmaker stood huge, his eyes squinched tight and small and suspicious.
“Yes?” he said.

“Apologies,” said Herkimer. “But are you open yet today?”

“Well,” said the man. “My door is.”

Herkimer did not know what to say, and so he didn’t.

“Today,” the man continued. “Tonight, I’m going hunting. It’s already planned. My apprentice and I.”

“I see.”

“We’ll be closing,” the Cabinetmaker offered. “So that we might go together. It’s been planned.”

From somewhere deep in the bowels of the shop, Herkimer heard the ping-slams of a hammer against a metal’s face.

“I see,” he said again. “I’ve come from Laketon. I came over the bridge. I did. I’d like to order a cabinet. I’d hoped to buy one today and turn back for home, if I can.”

“We’ll be closed,” the Cabinetmaker repeated. “For hunting.”

“Yes,” said Herkimer. “But—”

“But you can’t go back tonight. The snow will be too deep. It’s already too deep, you see. You’ll have to stay. The river won’t spare you twice.”

“I had hoped—”

“You’ll stay with me. Here in the shop. I have an extra room. My apprentice sometimes stays the night if there’s work, but tonight, there isn’t. So you’ll stay. We’ll get your cabinet made up and loaded in the morning.”

“Well,” said Herkimer.

He had not anticipated such an offer. Better than a hotel, but he’d surely hoped to be in his own bed by cold evening, not the factory cot of an odd and humorless furniture schmoe. Who even knew if the shop had a furnace for those coldest hours?

“And you’ll go with us hunting,” the Cabinetmaker said. “We could use another man to haul our catch.”

Now this was simply out of the question to Herkimer. No. Impossible. But what was he to say? How was he even to say it? This was such an unreasonable request! He did not know this Cabinetmaker. Herkimer did not hunt. He only rarely ate meat, and not deer at all. Venison did not agree with his temperament. But what was he to do? Here he was, a foreigner in a foreign town, leery of expense, growing mountains of snow upon his shoulders, and scared.

So, he agreed.

+ 

A profound snow, three men, a clearing in the forest. The two who walked ahead stood tall and had large chests, legs that could walk for days. The third was smaller, average really, but he seemed like a toddler in the wake of his companions. The largest man was the Cabinetmaker, a head taller than his nearest companion, and he walked a step in the lead, an arm’s length from the smaller man (though a man still a whale to the shrimp behind). The two wore thick animal skins over their cottons and carried bows made of bent oak. The third huddled close to himself inside his fine wool overcoat.

He had complained for a time of the chill as they crossed from the borders of town into woods, but then stopped. The two did not seem to share his belief in coldness, and they did not respond to him, lost in their relentless hunting. Herkimer sensed his out-of-placeness, yet could still not fathom how he came here. They had taken Herkimer’s own rig from the shop to here, the edge-most edge of town, and how had he allowed that? They would fill the rig with the stink of shit and blood. But they were so large and sure, and he was nothing but one with money and some need.

They aimed for a clearing, a hundred steps off, and already the sun had gone behind the tips of the tall pines like a round slab of butter into a jagged hunk of bread. In summer, this place would be a watering hole; in winter, a deer had come into it to die.

In the center of the windswept field a large stag lay, his antlers wider than a well-made barrel. A carved arrow protruded from his side, piercing the hide at the heart. Red blood ran into the snow.

When they arrived at the tumble of flesh and bone, The Cabinetmaker leaned down until he appeared in the deer’s eye. All but a last sheen of quick and fear had left the buck’s black pupil. Within it, the Cabinetmaker was tiny, reduced, and inverted. He turned to his apprentice, who pulled the arrow from the deer and smiled. The Apprentice nodded to the Cabinetmaker and held out the arrow in his hand.

“Another for you. I’ve taken another.”

Lumps of snow clung to the Apprentice’s red beard and covered his mustache. The Cabinetmaker looked back to his small self contained in the deer’s eye, and he lifted his right arm. He grabbed for the sky, gray like smoke and stone. The Cabinetmaker’s tiny self did the opposite, lifted his left arm and felt for dirt on the ground. Both of them sighed.

The Cabinetmaker straightened to his full height. He was taller than any man of the city but for Rohm the Dressmaker, who had not come on this hunt. Their last trip had been enough for the Cabinetmaker by far, a trip in which Rohm had taken four deer in a single day. On that hunt, the Cabinetmaker had killed none, and the Apprentice three. Rohm had mentioned this to him a dozen times since, sometimes twice a day, always each evening when they passed in the streets. “Four-Three-Zero,” he’d say. “Zero.”

The deer spasmed, a single left rear leg kicking. At this, the Apprentice laughed out loud.

“Look!” he said. “Leg thinks it can go. Oh, he says, oh! I just have to do my usual share of the work, that leg says. Everybody else is still helping. Oh, ho! That’s a good one, Master, that is.”

“It’s not funny,” the Cabinetmaker said. “Stop laughing.”

“Oh, ho! Ho, ho,” said the Apprentice. “I’m sorry. But sure, it’s funny.”

“The leg is wrong,” the Cabinetmaker said.

“Well, of course it is,” the Apprentice then agreed. “Of course.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said his master. “This is nothing here. Nothing. Zero.”

He faced the Apprentice. The little man had served ably for enough years and had never before shamed him in anything. The little man had taken another three deer today, again, and the Cabinetmaker, the master, none. Again. He knew that the others would laugh at him for weeks this time. For a season. It would be summer again, and “Zero” in his brain like a mucky bruise. And was he not the master? This could not be. There was a code for such things, a customer in sight be damned.

He would not, and he would.

Each spasm pushed the deer’s face further into the snow. Pink tint spread over the ice crystals at the corners of his mouth. The deer had twelve points on his antlers, but neither man cared to count them. The Apprentice reached down and grabbed the animal’s rack with both hands, jerking back the head.

From within his furs, the Cabinetmaker produced a sharp blade, the one he used to skim splinters from the sides of smooth boards. The blade moved. No sound over the howl of the wind, and the animal’s throat burst open. The head dislodged, and blood from its open neck coated all the world. 

The Cabinetmaker swung again, and the Apprentice fell into the wet redness alongside the deer, his own head gone from the shoulders.

Herkimer did not move, not once, through the whole of things. He stood mute. Nervous before, terrified next, now cold-frozen to the ground through his boots. How far from town were they, then? Where was his rig? He couldn’t see it through the snow. How could there be so much blood in two beings? This was a place he did not belong.

The Cabinetmaker tossed the deer’s head aside. With the sort of efficiency born of long experience, he gutted the carcass. He packed snow into the animal’s insides, and he worked swiftly, as though hoping to finish before the storm’s dark.

Herkimer thought him large enough to carry a deer all the way back to the shop by himself, but not the body of the Apprentice as well. Two deer, maybe, because the Cabinetmaker was a huge man, but not deer and man. Not two men. The Cabinetmaker would need Herkimer’s rig for all these kills.

The Cabinetmaker sectioned the animal’s flesh into long strips and packed them into hide bags, buried the organs in a drift. The work was completed in minutes, but the sky had changed, getting ready for a great blizzard. The Apprentice lay at the foot of a drift, his face gathering snow as a clean shoe finds dirt. The Cabinetmaker removed the arrow from the dead man’s dead grip, wiped it clean, and stowed it in his own quiver.

He said, “Take another if you get hungry, good hunter.”

The Cabinetmaker turned to Herkimer, and they surveyed each other’s hearts.

The Cabinetmaker looked to where the rig must be, and then the town, his business beyond. He reached into the drift for the deer’s head. He found the antlers and scooped the head up, jostled it from side to side, sweeping low and high through the snow blasts around him.

Herkimer could see not even a fragment of the Apprentice’s humor at the idea of a dead thing returning to life, trying very hard not to let go again. Some times were happier than that. Many times.

As though giving over to exhaustion, the Cabinetmaker fell to his knees. The deer head rutted the snow, but the Cabinetmaker was laughing.

“So,” he said to Herkimer. “What size of cabinet would you like?”

Herkimer shook his head.

“Oak or pine? A good, hard mahogany?”

“I can’t,” said Herkimer. “I can’t possibly.”

“No,” the Cabinetmaker agreed. “You can’t. You’ll have to go without, I’m afraid.”

“This was the wrong day to come,” Herkimer moaned. “I should have stayed home and waited for a clearer sky. I should have stayed and been content with the cabinet I have! And now here I am! Here I am!”

“Yes,” said the Cabinetmaker. “Here you are.”

“Oh,” Herkimer wailed. “Oh, me!”

“Here we are,” the Cabinetmaker said. “On this saddest of days, when my Apprentice has gone and quit, run for the hills, jumped for the clouds. I fear I shall not see his like again.”

“I’ll say nothing!” Herkimer said. “I saw nothing.”

“Would you like to know how I make my furniture?” the Cabinetmaker asked.

“No. No, I don’t need to know!”

“I’ll tell you how I make my furniture. First, I find good wood. Good, hard wood. Then, I soak it. Then, I teach it. I teach it to bend.”

“No, no.”

“One must take the wood, and, once it’s wetted through and through, a good, solid wetting, then one must tie it to something harder than itself until it has learned to curve the long arc of its spine. Something like stone, or some other harder treeflesh.”

The Cabinetmaker stood, scraping snow clumps from his thighs with the edge of his blade.

“I am that second wood,” the Cabinetmaker said. “I tie boards together as they dry, under pressures or glues, tie up with sinew twine, made from animals which I have killed myself. I soak my wood in bile and piss, and anything else I can wring from a carcass, drip it drop after drop into my soaking barrels. The gall. That is what makes good wood into something better than good, more rigid than hard. The blood and gall. Do you understand?”

“I don’t need to know any more.”

“But you do,” said the Cabinetmaker. “You do. You thought my work was magic, you did, but it’s not. My work is gall. Not guile. Obedience. I am the master. I am the master. There is a wall between learned and learning. There is a cost in sacrificing one’s stupidest needs before the wall. Do you see? I am the master. He was not. And you are not.”

The Cabinetmaker came towards Herkimer, slow, but easy, as if there were no inches of snow between his feet and the earth and no feet of air between his chopping arm and Herkimer.

Herkimer saw. Red-blood tarn forming in the snow behind a giant man made of log and force, so large as to block out the sun, what little ball lay frozen in the grayest, most graying clouds Herkimer had ever seen in his life. There was a blade somewhere. There were antlers. Behind the giant man, tall pines, scattered locust trees gnarled in bark, a deep dark. Something deeper and darker, yet. Something there was a word for, a good word.

Herkimer stumbled backwards in the general direction of his truck, falling onto his elbows, rising. Turning his back to the Cabinetmaker, because he had no other choice, Herkimer ran. Perhaps he could make the rig and get it started before the Cabinetmaker caught up. Perhaps not. Only time would tell, as Herkimer’s father loved to say, all those years ago when the world had more seasons and less backbreaking winter, boiling summer.

Herkimer saw the future, and it was not wooden. Maybe wet wood. Bending, and bent. It was not an endless sky, or a taut line of event and event and event. The future was not even a pool of rippling water, with our lives’ works moving as echoes on the surface of the deep and our worldliness flowing outwards with diminishing returns. The future was alive, a part of some living thing, a bladder in the fat hand of somebody else’s god, and he ran a little faster, and a little faster, and if he could just run a little faster, maybe that would be enough.

+++ 

CV is the author of Bad Man Love Stories (Etchings Press/The University of Indianapolis, 2021) and his work has won prizes in the Literal Latte Short Short Contest, the Gateway Review’s Speculative Flash Fiction Contest, and the Press 53 Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Contest. His stories have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, J Journal, the Vestal Review, Western Humanities Review, Hobart, and DIAGRAM, among others, and have been finalists with the Puerto del Sol Fiction Contest, The Laurel Review’s Midwestern Fiction Contest, Harpur Palate’s John Gardner Fiction Contest, the Tusculum Review Fiction Contest, Pulp Literature’s Hummingbird Prize for Flash Fiction, and Passages North’s Neutrino Prize. See curtisvandonkelaar.com for writings and more.