f the Chain
Brian S. Wheeler
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2013 by Brian S. Wheeler
Legacy of the Chain
Many years ago, Harry Harvishier came to know well, the man who fate would write as poor Blaine Woosely’s unknown father. The man had sought Harry after attending one of the old magician’s festival performances, and that young man begged Harry to teach him the magic ways.
Such a summer request was hardly rare. Harry’s magic still tempted enough to entrance the young men who dreamed of fantastic ways to build fame and fortune. Looking over that man’s thin frame and hairless chin however, Harry thought that with a little patience he might meet pupils with better potential. Only a few weeks of small, county fair stages remained that summer, and Harry did not prefer to take a pupil beneath his charge so late in the season, when doing so would demand that he locate lodging for the student through the winter. It was better to accept new students early in the spring, when a full calendar of stops would provide the time for a pupil to learn, and then to leave, Harry’s magical curriculum.
Yet the man who introduced himself as Nikolo Woosely made Harry rethink that wisdom. Harry suspected that much more than coincidence brought that pupil to him. For instantly, the man asked Harry to teach him about the chain, and that was a want so dangerous that it forced teachers to tread cautiously before replying. And Harry smelled something in that young man’s blood that reminded him of a grand, succulent feast of magnificent, golden bull given him not so many years ago. The future was cloudy to even his kind, but Harry smelled enough of a connection between the thin man who requested tutelage and that strong farmer who had given a golden bull not to turn that youth away and risk an ungrateful gesture to the memory of a wonderful meal.
Nikolo Woosely at first found his tutelage beneath ancient Harry disappointing. The audiences which came to his carnival stand were smaller compared to those of the other vendors. Nikolo’s whimsical tricks of transforming yellow cardboard into canaries earned him so much less than those vendor games which required far less talent to supervise. Nikolo growled nightly at his tip jar. His earnings fell so short of his expectations. Nikolo had been born with a penchant to dream, and that became a dreadful curse. For Nikolo dreamed so large that the first goal was always a mountain.
Nikolo dreamed so big that his disappointment manifested itself into the final folds of each of his origami animals Harry asked him to create for the entertainment of the children who congregated to Nikolo's stand. The children sensed such exasperation, and so they hesitated to request the graceful cranes Nikolo’s fingers folded.
Two elements existed in Nikolo Woosely. One stewed a cancerous black fed by Nikolo’s regret that the story of his past was so mundane. His second element wrestled against the first with optimism that the future might bring him something remarkable. One part was no more real than another. They vied against each other, and they stranded Nikolo with an indecision that seeped into everything he attempted.
Nikolo’s parents, Sue and Richard Johnson, had christened their only child with the name of John. It was a careful stratagem of Nikolo’s father to insure, that with a name as conservative as John Johnson, the boy would not have too many, nor too few, of the hardships and the favors that life might bring. It was a good, middle-of-the-road kind of a name.
John displayed chagrin for that moniker early, refusing to properly scribe its letters upon the blackboard during his early school years. Shortly after succumbing to the pressure to write his name properly, John swore on the schoolyard that his real name was Crow Meandercreek, and that he was in truth the last noble blood of a furious Sioux tribe. New names followed with successive years. But no matter how convoluted one fictitious past became when layered atop another, John’s real family never failed to place a roof over his head or a meal upon his table.
Still, John never stopped experimenting to find a new persona, one that might attract the prettiest girl’s eye and frighten the toughest schoolyard bully. He wrote long essays expanding his family lineage into a lost line of North Carolina pirates, and he promised to prove it all by displaying the map his real parents had tattooed across his baby back, only to have the story squandered after the removal of John’s shirt betrayed how badly the black ink he had applied before school had smeared during first hour recess. John claimed that his real father was a Russian tanker during the Second War. For a time, John expounded a new past with every new day.
Slowly, the practice waned as John entered high school, but the young man named John Johnson never stopped dreaming that he might be something more than a boy raised in the healthy boredom of the flatland.
John tried to find greatness in athletics, but he found the wind-sprints too painful. He auditioned for the lead role in the high school musical, but he left the stage ashamed after his cracking voice embarrassed him. He insinuated that the Ivy League visited his family at dinner, though it was no secret how mightily John struggled to maintain a C average in the sciences and math. Each attempt to be wonderful introduced him to failure, and John squirmed when his father’s monotone voice consoled to him that the tallest forms of greatness, with much patience, sprouted from the most routine type of seed. John’s soul possessed too much imagination for that notion, and it was difficult for a boy with such a way of dreaming to comfortably fit into the blistering sneakers fate provided him.
Triumphantly for John, the boy’s conservative father succumbed to a dire weakness in the presence of his only child, and he let it slip that before becoming a slightly above average lawyer that he too once cherished seeing the world through a more fantastic pair of eyes.
Richard Johnson, a man admired by his neighbors for his quiet commitment not to make any decision too rashly, mistakenly believed there would be no harm in attending a summer fair with daydreaming John. Surely, the father thought, the boy had outgrown the final slivers of distracting imagination. Surely by then, good John would be able to better focus on the practical preparations which could carve a secure, though be it common, place for a rapidly approaching day when John would have to support himself as an adult. There might be found a place for John perhaps not too unlike that of his consistent father, not too much unlike that of his quiet grandfather, not too much unlike that of his paternal line that had silently toiled and tied together a dependable family chain.
Still, office hours grew stale to even the most conservative of lawyers. Routine business made such small allowance for vacation, and summer festivals came to their town so rarely. Richard Johnson had heard that summer would indeed bring a festival, and that festival promised a performance of a Shakespearean play, to be given freely on the park lawn. Father Richard had heard such great things about Shakespeare, though he had never read one of those lengthy dramas. The lawyer could surely enjoy with his son a small, graceful moment before pious commerce again demanded the day.
For one moment, that father lowered his guard against his son’s penchant to dream, and it only took
a wink for magic to wind wondrous fibers deep into John’s soul.
John hesitantly accompanied his father to that summer festival. John had no interest in tragedy, comedy or history. He felt no desire to listen to the archaic language of an old, dead poet. Nor did he have much desire to leave that play and play frivolous games of vendor chance, or to sit patiently while an artist sketched his caricature.
John wanted to dream, but he simply felt he had nothing left to imagine. He thought that perhaps all of his father’s training had taken root.
“There’s no future in theater.”
Nikolo Woosely would later tell many variations regarding when he met real magic for the first time. As good as his imagination always remained, it was never fantastic enough to properly tell it.
“Excuse me,” John stammered. There was a dangerous fire beneath the coal black of the