sharing is fun

I occasionally do writing exercises to 'limber up' before working on... whatever it is I'm currently working on. I was rereading a couple of old exercises and came across one I'd completely forgotten. The exercise is to create a character portrait: start small, with the basic details, then flesh the person out, fill in some back-story. This is what I came up with, or I should say, the person that I met:

Isaiah is a soft-spoken man with large, gentle hands. He is always doing things with those hands: helping people. I’ve seen him cradle infants in them as tenderly as any mother. I’ve seen him lift a happy child into a tree with them, or pluck a frantic cat from the same tree. And he builds things with them of course, as you knew he would. He works wonders with wood, building chairs and tennis tables and beds and planters and anything else the people around him might find useful, for he gives it all away.

You read about people like Isaiah in books or literary magazines, but when you meet the real thing, an angel with human eyes and sloppy hair and a slight limp, you wonder how he came to be. They say that selfless souls are usually born out of great adversity. Now I don’t know all of Isaiah’s story, but I know that he was in the army once, and that he owned his own business, and that he was married. I also know that there’s a quiet anger in him that burns against the injustices of the world. He hides it, most of the time.

One day, when I asked him where he got his limp, he snapped at me. I was so shocked by this uncharacteristic behavior that I said nothing for a moment, and then he apologized, and told me a little bit of the story. Isaiah grew up in the back country, and he got his skill in woodworking from his father. That’s about all he got from him – his father was an angry man, frequently drunk, and he had a great distaste for work. Young Isaiah shouldered the burden of responsibility on the farm, looking after the many chores his father seldom got around too, lending his poor, beleaguered mother a hand, and keeping an eye on his little brother.

Isaiah’s little brother, whose name I didn’t catch, was much more like his father. He delighted in mischief and lacked any sort of a sense of responsibility. Naturally, he was the apple of his father’s eye. Where Isaiah’s efforts brought only criticism, his brother’s antics and even the dangerous and thoughtless stunts he sometimes pulled only made his father laugh. Isaiah got his limp from when his brother shot him in the leg with a hunting rifle. His father insisted he would heal up on his own for three days until he was near death with fever and infection. At last he allowed Isaiah’s mother to drive Isaiah to the hospital in the middle of the night. He says he’s lucky that he can walk at all.

Years later, maybe out of guilt for that and other things, his father loaned him the money to start his own company. Isaiah wanted to get into electronics and had developed some interesting prototypes just by tinkering. With the capital he had from his father, he rented a warehouse, hired a handful of employees and went to work. When the first payroll rolled around his checks started bouncing. It transpired that his father had given his brother access to the money under the theory that what he gave to one son he shouldn’t withhold from the other. Of course his brother took all the money and wasted it in the usual ways. Isaiah was greatly shamed by this.

His father has long passed on and his brother died a few years ago: drug overdose. Isaiah works quietly as an electrician for a large company now. He is content to live out his days without ambition, doing what he can for others. When you look into his eyes you can see a peace that isn’t present in the eyes of other men. Maybe he simply saw too many lives ripped apart by selfish ambition to follow that path himself. But if you ask him about it he’ll just shrug and smile. “I just like to help folks,” he’ll say.