A Tangle of Knots - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

 Lisa Graff is an award-winning novelist whose books have been named to a total of 15 state award lists. She has an MFA from The New School in Writing for Children and is an adjunct professor at McDaniel College. She lives in New York City.

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The bookshelf along the far wall of the Owner’s bedroom was lined with jars, top to bottom. To someone who didn’t know any better, they would probably look like simple peanut butter jars. All of them unmarked. All of them empty. But the Owner could tell them apart, and they most certainly were not empty.

This was his collection of Talents. Talents for origami and dog-training and computer-repair and whistling, and dozens of others he’d managed to nab over the years. The Owner had always believed that there was really only one Talent you needed in this world: The Talent for appropriating other people’s Talents.

Selecting a jar from the back, one which had not yet been filled, the Owner—switt-tsk-schwap!—unscrewed the lid. Then he lifted his right hand above the empty jar and squeezed it into a fist. Tighter and tighter he squeezed, until at last . . .

Plunk!

Where just a moment ago there had been nothing, now suddenly there was the Talent the Owner had plucked from the man in the gray suit, clean and condensed and opaque, like an ice cube. The Owner had seen the sight a thousand times, but he never tired of it.

As the Owner reached for the lid to the jar, the Talent began to dissipate, just as the Talents always did if you left them to their own devices. A fine mist rose out of the jar, higher, higher, straight into the air vent above. The Owner thought he heard a soft sniffle escape from the vent, but when he shot his eyes up to check, there was nothing.

Prologue

THE LINE FOR THE NUMBER 36 BUS OUT OF HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI, was the longest at the station. All sorts of folks were making the long trip north. There were slouchers and starers. A few snoozers. Puckered here and there along the row were men stretching their limbs, hoping to catch a hint of a breeze. A woman fanned her daughter with a newspaper whose headline read SCIENTISTS BELIEVE EXTINCT JUPITER BIRD MAY HAVE BEEN LARGEST FLYING ANIMAL. A toddler munched a cracker, sprinkling sticky crumbs across his mother’s chest. No one seemed to have the energy to speak above a grumble.

The air was thick.

Amidst them all sat a young man, exactly one day past his eighteenth birthday, perched carefully atop his powder blue suitcase. His new brown suit was stiff with creases, not yet shaped to fit his angles. He tapped his foot on the ground, breathing in the last few moments before he claimed his inheritance. His Fate. As soon as he climbed aboard that bus, the young man would be on his way.

Next to him, a small girl who had been losing at a game of jacks for some several minutes suddenly snatched up all seven pieces before the ball bounced down, her hand whipping through the air too quickly to follow.

“Hey!” cried the girl’s competitor, a boy at least three years her senior. “No fair! You said you weren’t any good at jacks!”

The girl grinned a sly little grin. “I’m not good,” she replied, tossing the pieces in the air in a whir of jacks-and-ball-and-jacks. She caught them expertly. “I’m Talented.” She pocketed the jacks and held out her hand, where the boy begrudgingly deposited a nickel.

The young man watched as the girl scurried across the line to her mother, who was leafing through a magazine. When the girl proudly produced her nickel, her mother scolded, “Not again, Susan.” But she only tsked as her daughter flipped the coin in the air. The young man couldn’t help but grin at the scene. A Talent is only rewarding if you wield it well. That’s what his mother had always told him. It seemed to him that this little girl was a master wielder.

“That’s a nice suitcase you’ve got there.”

The young man looked up. Standing before him was a man in a gray suit. He might have been forty, he might have been older, and he was, quite easily, the largest man in the bus station, his enormous frame threatening even the brick support posts for sturdiest structure.

“Sorry?” the young man replied.

“Your suitcase. It’s a choice model. Top of the line.”

Instinctively, the young man grasped the sides of the suitcase just a little tighter. It was a very old suitcase, but sturdy and well-loved, boxy and large as a small child, with worn corners and three small dimples near the left clasp. Across the top a cursive scrawl of silver thread spelled out the brand: St. Anthony’s.

Hidden inside the lining was a single slip of paper that constituted the bulk of the young man’s inheritance.

The young man cleared his throat. He’s just a friendly traveler, he told himself, making conversation. “Thanks,” he replied. “It was my mother’s.”

The words had slipped out without his meaning them to—it was—and he hoped that the older fellow hadn’t noticed his use of the past tense. The last thing the young man wanted to talk about was his mother. But the large man in the gray suit merely grinned a sideways sort of grin. It was a grin that suggested he knew more about the world than he was letting on.

As though to thank him for his silence, the young man offered his hand. “Mason Burgess,” he introduced himself.

“Pleasure to meet you, Mason,” the older fellow replied, leaning down to reach Mason’s outstretched hand. The man had a surprisingly firm shake. “Mind if I wait with you?” And with the ease of a man a third his size, he plopped down his worn leather duffel and folded his legs underneath him.

He did not mention his name.

“So,” the fellow said to Mason, lifting his hat from his head to wipe his brow. “Going north, are you?”

“Poughkeepsie,” Mason confirmed.

“New York,” the fellow said, nodding. He seemed not surprised by the information. “Good for you.”

“And you?” Mason asked, making conversation.

“I’m a traveling salesman,” he replied, although it was most certainly not the answer to Mason’s question. “Odds and ends, mostly. I don’t suppose I could interest you in a knot?” He opened the right side of his jacket. Inside, where most salesmen might hang watches or whatnots, the old man had pinned dozens and dozens of knots. There were slipknots and topknots and figure eights, and tens more Mason had no name for.

Mason squinted. “You certainly are Talented,” he told the man graciously. “Do you . . .” He searched for his manners. “. . . sell many knots, then?”

The older fellow dropped shut the side of his jacket. “Heavens, no,” he said, the last of a guffaw trickling over his words. “These are mostly for entertainment. It’s a horribly useless Talent, tying knots. Could have been blessed with a Talent for finance or medicine. Even a log-splitting Talent might have done me some good. But no, I find myself with knot-tying.”

“Well, the only knot I’ve mastered is the one to tie my shoelaces,” Mason admitted. He couldn’t help it; he liked the odd fellow. “Every other knot just looks like a tangled mess to me.”

The man in the gray suit thought about that. “Well, that’s the thing about knots, isn’t it?” he replied after a moment. “If you don’t know the trick, it’s a muddled predicament. But in fact each loop of every knot is carefully placed, one end twisting right into the other in a way you might not have expected. I find them rather beautiful,...