A Snapping Thread

While they find each other for fleeting moments in Paul Harding’s Tinkers, Howard and George are forever disconnected, reaching for everyone but each other until it is too late. They both run away, searching for replacements of the love they share for each other, but it is in vain. They travel to abandoned sheds, and to thick forests, and even all the way to Philadelphia, but by the time Howard reaches out directly twenty-five years after he abandoned his son, the thread connecting the two has stretched far too thin, and it finally snaps.

Howard sees the physical world as products and the miniature versions of them. When making his tapestry, he sees a daffodil as “a bright miniature sun.” George’s “boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves” are miniature “dragon-prow ships” of Viking kings. And George himself is a miniature version of Howard. But miniaturizing shrinks and flattens; it forces George to contort into a cramped box he cannot fit inside; it crushes his bones in the same way Howard’s bite did.

Howard and George are not the same. George is not a miniature version of Howard. While George is “already fading away,” Howard is “lit and used up and then dark. Lit too brightly.” And yet they are intrinsically and intimately connected by the absence of warm, unconditional love. It would appear that both George and Howard grew up in loving families, but Katherine, George’s mother, feels “...no more connected to [her children] than she would to a collection of stones” and Howard’s “father was always in the room upstairs at the walnut desk tucked under the eaves.” They both had to learn to fend for themselves, and, what’s more, they both believed love had to be intertwined with sorrow, or even guilt, to be true. So they run. Maybe they’re running from their families, from the burden that is simply too heavy to bear, but if that’s true, they’re also running to find the love they so desperately need. But while either of them are alive, they never once think to run towards each other. Unconditional love runs both ways. That’s a real, physical experience. If Howard couldn’t be there to find the peace that George might have found, George didn’t truly find him. He found what could have been.

When George runs away, he takes solace in the shed by his “friend Ray Morrell’s farm.” As this turn came up, “George took it without thinking.” It was at this shed that “he and Ray Morrell went and smoked and played cribbage and told stories and jokes.” Ray is “his best friend in the world,” and he unconditionally loves George in the way only a child can. George instinctively comes here because he needs to be reminded that someone loves him. It’s not enough to reminisce. He needs to pinch the cigarette “butt with two or three drags” that they shared. He needs to feel “his bitten hand against the cold wood” of the shed. Because more than love, more than anything, George wants to feel grounded in a world he can’t be sure is real. After all, the hand he puts against the shed that he imagines is “holding back a tremendous fire” is just his imagination, and he must “lower his hand to his lap.”

It’s not Howard’s first time running away. Throughout his life, Howard completes odd jobs “at one time or another on his rounds, sometimes to earn extra money, mostly not.” These jobs consist of things like “shoot[ting] a rabid dog, deliver[ing] a baby, put[ting] out a fire,” and “pull[ing] a rotten tooth.” So if it’s not for extra money, why would he spend his time doing these things? What if that was Howard’s way of running away? Take Gilbert, the man “whose tooth Howard pulled.” Howard visits this “hermit” once a year to tote “on his back the supplies he knew Gilbert required down an old Indian trail that followed the river.” Once the list of supplies had been “refined and finally established, the men no longer spoke at all. For the past seven years, neither man had uttered a single word to the other.” As evidenced by his tapestry weaving in the fields, Howard doesn’t think or express himself through words. Gilbert doesn’t either, and they share an intimate bond they need not discuss. Howard wasn’t running away, really; he was running to someone who loved him. It may seem like Gilbert depends on Howard to deliver his necessities, but Howard depends on Gilbert just as heavily to provide a sense of stability and reality. When Howard pulls Gilbert’s “single black tooth planted in a swollen and bright red throne of flesh,” it’s an excruciatingly physical task. Howard can finally escape the confines of his mind, even just for a moment, to make something happen in the real world. Howard leans on Gilbert… until Gilbert was nowhere to be found the next winter. Howard, and his “troop of mournful flies,” had kept “vigil the previous autumn until the frosts came and they, too, had succumbed.”

Once Gilbert is gone, Howard feels like there’s nowhere left to run. Howard reaches a breaking point once he sees the Eastern Maine State Hospital’s brochure that Kathleen left in “full view on the corner of the top of the bureau.” But it’s not really about that. His entire life, Howard has been searching for unconditional love. In Howard’s mind, how unconditional could Kathleen’s love have been if she felt her only option was to send him away? What about therapy? What about medicine? Was Kathleen’s silence that of the “forbearance of decent, stern people,” or the “quiet of outrage, of bitterness?”

Of course, Howard is not innocent. He was quiet, too. When Howard finds George after he ran away, they “drove back to their house without speaking.” George walks to his father from the shed, desperate for words of reassurance. Howard “put his hand on his son’s shoulder for a moment… seemed about to speak but then smiled and removed his hand.” Just like Kathleen, Howard stayed silent when those around him needed a voice. Silence may have worked for Gilbert, a hermit who survived without social interaction for much of his life, but Howard failed to realize that is devastating for those around him. Howard spent much of his adult life searching for a “deep and secret yes,” which for him, may have been synonymous for unconditional love, and maybe that’s why he stopped talking. Maybe Howard thought a “yes” had to be secret to be true. He didn’t vocalize his feelings to his father or mother, and in turn, he never discussed the way Kathleen made him feel. Maybe Kathleen’s silence wasn’t that of forbearance or outrage—it was the silence of fear. She wasn’t scared of Howard, per se, but she was scared that Howard wouldn’t respond, fearful that if she tried to talk, it wouldn’t resonate.

When Howard runs away for the last time, he meets Megan, a kind and gentle soul who seems to be everything Kathleen wasn’t. But “Megan was never the mother of his children,” and Kathleen’s seemingly “cold silence towards her husband was surely not the character of the woman whom Howard had married” (Himwich). While it seems obvious that Howard ran from his family because it was an “intolerable situation,” maybe he was running to Megan for the same reason he ran to Gilbert. Maybe Megan was a source of unconditional love. Maybe Megan held the “deep and secret yes” that Howard had been searching for for so long. Maybe Megan was a way of making Howard’s world feel real again. Are these all the same?

But while Howard is hundreds of miles away, being consoled by the new love of his life, George and his family have been left in the dust. It’s assumed that George turns out alright in the end, but what of Joey? His sisters? Kathleen? Maybe Howard’s voyage was necessary to fulfill himself, but it wasn’t the voyage he needed to make. All voyages come to an end eventually, and heroes must return to their homeland. Ibn Battuta circled back to Morocco; Columbus came back to Spain; Odysseus arrived home to Ithaca. Howard returned to George, yes, but at the cost of twenty-five years. George’s last living memory is of the Christmas dinner that Howard comes back for. George has been looking for everything Howard has all these years. George, too, wants the warmth of unconditional love. George, too, wants the world to feel real. George, too, has been searching for a “deep and secret yes” to all of his unanswered questions. He hears Howard say the word yes “six times” at Christmas dinner, but is it enough? Howard owed it to his son to to tell him he loves him, that he’s thinking about him, that all he wanted was to visit him, but that he was scared. He owed it to George to say everything he never got to say, starting with the reassurance George never got in the shed. Instead, all George got was a three letter word. If this word was “secret,” and buried so “deep” it takes painfully careful reading of the text, who are we to guess George got everything he had needed for twenty-five years?

Howard and George have always been connected. They’ve wanted the same things, they’ve thought the same things, and there has always been an invisible thread attaching one to the other throughout their lives. But if Howard thinks all it takes to repair their relationship is a “yes,” he’s dead wrong. George deserved more- something explicit, something real. And so did Kathleen. This book isn’t about a son trying to find his father—it’s the tragedy of words left unsaid. This thread snapped long ago.

Goodbye.