The Clockwork Toymaker and Other Fables

The Song

It was into a war torn and ravaged world that a baby boy was born. His father was a soldier and had died, far away, many months before the child's birth. It had fallen to the boy's mother to raise the child alone. She loved her son, and wanted only good things for him.

Although she was poor, she endeavoured to give him everything he needed, and to love him with all her heart.

She was a truly caring soul. During the day she would journey into the streets to help people less fortunate than herself, women whose husbands had died, or soldiers who had returned from the war, desperate and mad. She would bathe the sick and tend the wounded. Because she could not bear to be apart from him, she carried her son upon her back. And as she worked, she would sing to the boy, songs of love and life and truth.

The boy's mother was a woman possessed of a wonderful voice. Her sonorous melodies carried with them such subtleties of emotional prescience that people would gasp when they heard them. They were rich and complicated; masterpieces of honesty and humanity.

These were songs she had learned while growing up, taught to her by family members, offered by strangers, granted to her by life, in the knowledge that she would use them well.

They had helped her, and nurtured her, and kept her strong as life had run its course. The strength she'd gained from them had, in no small part, given her the resolve to help others.

And now she wanted to teach them to her son.

She was not protective of the songs and didn't mind who heard them. Indeed, it gave her pleasure to think that others might pick up the melodies, and might begin to sing them for themselves. 

But, there was one particular song which she would only sing to her son at night, when she was certain they were alone.

This song was the most complicated of all, an opera in many parts. It was a song that could not be sung in a single sitting, an innumerable epic with soaring highs and desolate lows. A piece of music both balanced and sprawling; confusing, yet entirely complete. If such a song could exist, then there was no other way to describe it: this was the song of life itself. And each night, before he fell asleep, she would sing a little of it to her son.

The first few verses were light: rich with promise, pregnant with humour and expectation.

The boy would giggle when he heard them, hum along with the upbeat melody. Clap his hands to the lilting beat. His mother sung of flowers, of summer skies, and happy times.

The boy loved these verses, and asked to hear them over and over again. And his mother would oblige him, confident they would stick in his mind.

But she knew that she would have to sing the other parts as well. And not all of the song was happy. Much of it was unrelentingly sad. The boy's mother was almost reluctant to sing these parts. She remembered, vividly, how sad they had made her feel when they had first been sung to her. A little older than her son at the time, she had cried in her room for days, lost in great fits of despair, certain that she could not continue to live in a world which allowed such pain.

But she also remembered the relief she had felt when the contour of the song had shifted yet again, when it had become clear that the sadness could be set into relief and she had first experienced the quality of joy and freedom that arose when released from these earthly fears. And so she breathed deeply and began to sing the saddest parts.

During the day, she continued to help the sick. She would walk the streets, her son upon her back, knocking on doors, offering food, helping to change bandages. But her mood was heavy. The melancholy of the song had made her morose. And it was even worse for her son, whose face bore a mask of inexpressible pain. She would have stopped helping people, had it not been so apparent that they needed her. Even as she walked around in sadness, they smiled, and thanked her for all that she was doing.