The Parable of the Toymaker

by Jarvy Jared

Chapter Four

Argyle made it a weekly habit to come and check up on us and the project itself. He came in the evenings so as to avoid interrupting our business and Easel seeing him. Each time, he came bearing gifts: stories from the old days of Equestria that I greedily ate like they were some divine fruit, a smile that could never waver in the face of uncertainty, and notes for whenever my father needed extra information. The same things would occur as they had the first time he’d returned: while my father worked, Argyle joined me at the other table, and it was there that he would tell more about what he had researched and discovered.

The past had never interested me all that much beforehand. My one significant connection to it was in the faceless form of my mother, and that had never quite bothered or interested me. The present, with all of its idiosyncrasies and rituals, kept my attention. But with Argyle it was different. I doubt I can say I was as interested as he was in unearthing old ruins and finding the truth to the mystery, but I know for certain that his passion for what came before spread to me. Sometimes, as I painted, we’d simply discuss ideas we had for why things had changed, and though these conversations were never substantiated by great amounts of evidence, I found them just as enthralling as the stories themselves. I looked forward to them and to him, and I wanted to think he felt the same way.

Yet privately I wondered what would happen after we had finished the work. Would Argyle visit regularly, perhaps during the day? Easel might take offense to that, of course, but there was also the question of why Argyle ought to visit afterwards in the first place. Several times I came to the point of posing the question to him, but each time, I hesitated, afraid, I think, of becoming crestfallen. It was far better to enjoy the moment while it lasted, and at the very least, I had the comfort of good company.

One evening, however, he told us he would be away for much longer this time around. “I’ve discovered something,” he said. He spoke with far more seriousness than I’d ever heard from him. “Something big. And I’ll need time to thoroughly explore it—time that, unfortunately, would cut into these visits.”

My father, who had been cleaning his hand-saw again, paused to consider what Argyle had said. “How long do you think you’ll be gone?”

Argyle’s smile was apologetic. “I really can’t say. I hope it isn’t for too long.”

“Then there is a chance we shall have completed the job before you get back.”

“That would make my return all the more sweeter, wouldn't it?”

“Indeed. My daughter, I am sure, would rather you not leave.” He looked conspiratorially at me.

“Dad!” I exclaimed with laughter—laughter that, I could tell, was far too nervous to be taken at face value. “You can’t just say that!”

“Because it’s true?”

“Never mind him,” I told Argyle quickly. “You can tell that he’s getting old. Senility always begins with the signs of somepony seeing things that aren’t there.”

Argyle’s smile became mischievous. “Oh? Then I suppose you don’t really look forward to my return?”

“That’s not—I mean, it’s not like that! You've got to go because, well—I—” And I continued to stammer out half-baked rebuttals, much to both stallions’ amusement.

“It’s fine, Maple,” Argyle said once he was done laughing. “But I will miss you. I’ve come to enjoy our little talks. It’s… it’s nice to have somepony who cares. Who believes, or wants to.”

Have somepony. Those two words made me feel light-headed, and I grinned despite knowing my father would endlessly tease me for it.

This, however, was not the only shocking decision Argyle left us with. Turning to my father once more, he placed down the journal containing all of his notes. “Master Mallet, I leave this in your care until my safe return.”

My father raised an eyebrow. “Your notes are in here, Argyle. You’ll need them.”

“I have other journals,” Argyle said dismissively. “Besides, I believe you and your daughter will need this more than me, at least for the time being.”

Though one hoof was poised over the journal, about to take it, my father would not move. “This is your life’s work. It could very well be your legacy. Parting with it, even momentarily… there is a potential sorrow here. It is not a matter to be taken lightly.”

“I am aware of that. Still, I’d like you to have it, to keep it safe while I’m away.”

“Why us? Why me?”

“Because you understand: this is my life’s work, my legacy, as you put it. You understand what it could mean, and does mean.” Argyle glanced briefly at me, then looked back at my father. “I don’t take you for a pony who would toss another’s vision aside just because it’s different. I’d like to believe you’re still the same stallion I met all those days ago, who did not say I was crazy simply because I believe in something better.”

Argyle sighed. “I won’t pretend to know all the reasons why you chose to listen, to work on my request—I won’t ask, since I believe they are yours to keep. But, I think I can depend on you. I can trust you. You, and your daughter. I’ve had no reason to think I’m wrong. I hope I never will.”

It was rare for my father to look at somepony else as though they were on equal footing with him. He was a massive stallion, after all. Rarer still were the times he could say he admired somepony else. His workers, customers, and clientele earned his respect, but only the polite, distant, obligatory kind—and it was not always the case that that respect could curtail his frustrations towards others and their perceived incompetency. Many ponies, he believed, did not truly know what they wanted, either out of him or his works, and so most ponies bothered him with their inconsiderate meekness and procrastination, their obstinate insistence on “ooh-ing” and “aah-ing” over simple, direct discourse. Most ponies, then, he privately frowned upon.

Argyle was not most ponies. When my father looked at him, it was with a steady, resolute gaze, calm, keen eyes, and the faint strings of a smile tugging at his lips. And if I allowed myself to entertain the notion, I would have believed he was looking at him with a great deal of pride and love—the kind a father has for his son.

“You are not wrong,” he said. He gathered the journal in his hoof, nodding. “Thank you for entrusting us with this, Argyle.”

“And thank you for making my trust worthwhile.”

He left shortly after, a strange spring in his step—excited, I think, in the same vein as my father, by the prospect of work. I watched him go, and though it was with sadness, there was also a measure of joy in me.

His final words about my father’s reasons, however, brought our first conversation rushing back. I had told him mine, but hadn’t thought about what my father’s might be. I hadn’t thought to ask. Like Argyle, I believed them to be his own and therefore none of my business.

But when I thought about my father’s reaction—how his eyes shone with some deeper emotion—I could not deny my curiosity.

And it was with good timing, too. That night, as I lay in bed, I heard my father get out of his and walk down the stairs. The definitive sound of the workshop door opening and closing followed shortly after. Now, I believed, was a good time to ask him.

I went down quietly, the whole shop encased in a soft darkness. When I came to the door, I paused only for a second to consider knocking, before I decided not to.

Inside, my father was inspecting our combined work. All six pony models had been carved into complete existence. Five of the ponies had been fully painted. The hardest for me had been Rainbow Dash, on account of her prismatic mane necessitating a far more careful consideration of her colors.

I watched as he bent low so as to examine her up close. He had Argyle’s journal open, and consulted the pages with the model. He nodded in approval at my work, and I felt myself swell with pride.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he said.

I was sheepish only for a moment. Then I went and joined him at the table. Above us, the light was starting to flicker, and a thought—We should change that soon—came and went.

“We can never show these off,” my father said. He sounded sad, but in the way that one is when one realizes a sweet candy will never be as sweet as it is in the mind.

“Even so,” he continued, “we can be proud of them. Of what we did.”

That brought to mind Argyle’s words. Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “Why do you care so much?”

He looked at me, mouth agape, and I worked quickly to redeem myself. “I-I mean, I care, too! It’s not that I think it’s wrong or—”

My father’s laugh, booming and heartfelt, filled the workshop like an expanding hot air balloon. For a while, it seemed all he could do was laugh. I would have been embarrassed, maybe even hurt by him laughing at me, were I not so rendered surprised by the whole event.

Finally, though, he did calm down. Wiping his eyes, he looked at me, and though he still had that thick, white mass of a mane, for some odd reason he looked twenty years younger, as though laughter had transformed him into the stallion who, in a time far beyond the scope of my understanding, had fallen in love with my mother.

“Don’t tell me Argyle put you up to this,” he said, still smiling.

“He didn’t!”

“Well, I suppose it was inevitable that you would ask me that. I had expected you to ever since I said yes to this project. But you never did, so I assumed you just didn’t even entertain the question. Until now, of course.”

The sixth figure was of Twilight Sparkle—the “alicorn,” I remembered Argyle saying. Unpainted, she stood out from the colored rest, her eyes blank and staring without purpose. My father took her into his hooves in order to wipe off a bit of sawdust using the edge of his apron, and he did so with a great deal of caution and timidity, the kind, I think, reserved for convalescence homes to cleanse patients suffering from age. He put her down, still silent.

“I’ll paint her tomorrow,” I said, but all I received was a terse nod. It appeared he would not answer my initial question. Disappointed, I began to turn away.

“Your mother was a very special pony,” he then said, causing me to stop. “Have I told you that before?”

“Um. A bit, yeah.”

“I think I can’t express exactly what I mean by that, though. ‘Special’ does not come close to fully rendering her.” He narrowed his eyes, staring into Twilight’s eyes as though the past lay truly in there. “You have her eyes, though, so that may help you imagine partially what I mean.”

“Dad?” I was confused, but decided to let him keep talking. This did not sound quite like all the other allusions to my mother he’d seldom given.

“That ability you have? The one that Easel doesn’t believe in? Your mother had that, too, though it seems to me to have been to a far lesser extent. I think it’s something that skips a generation, at least in terms of intensity.”

“You mean, she also could feel…?”

My father nodded. “Actually, I think that’s how she figured out I loved her before I worked up the nerve to tell her. It made it easier for the both of us to say yes, though, which is good.”

He looked up at the ceiling, letting out a sentimental sigh. “So long ago… What is time if not life passing? Ah, what am I saying…” He shook his head, paused for thought, then looked back down. “The point, or the one that I’m trying to make, is that your mother wasn’t just special to me; she was just a special pony overall. And she had some special things to say about the world.”

My father left Twilight alone and walked over to the other figurines, inspecting them again. He was restless, no doubt because he recognized this was the most he’d ever spoken of my mother, and did not want to mince his words. “I heard and have been hearing what Argyle’s been telling you. About the past, Equestria, friendship between the tribes, harmony. It’s all very unbelievable, as I’m sure you and he know.”

“Oh.” My ears wilted. “I guess… I guess you don’t believe in that kind of stuff?”

But my father, to my surprise, shook his head rapidly. “I do, actually. Not because I’ve met pegasi or unicorns who don’t want to abduct me or fry my brain, but because this kind of talk was something your mother had said, too.”

My eyes went wide. “Really? You mean, she believed in those stories, too?”

“Oh, no. I doubt she ever heard of the stuff Argyle’s been sharing. I certainly hadn’t until he came. But, she believed in the idea that… that something was wrong about what we’d been told. Maybe it was because her ability to feel others’ emotions meant she could understand the difference between a fear supported by reality and a fear that’s nothing more than an empty yawn.” He frowned, furrowing his brow; his own wording confused him. “Or, something to that extent. Do you understand?”

“I think so…”

“Your mother, she—she believed in something else that the ponies of our time did not. That although all of us were different, deep down, we really weren’t. We are all afraid. And we all want not to be. And she told me this every night after we’d confessed our feelings for one another, like it was some kind of prayer. ‘We can’t have been meant to be separated forever,’ she’d say. ‘Why else are we so capable of love? If there is so much potential in us, it makes no sense just to keep that love to ourselves. We must love the world. We ought to try and love each other.’”

A pang of regret entered his voice. “I can’t say I’d always felt the same, or that I could say I did. If you think I’m poor with my words, your mother could speak in riddles derived from cookbooks. I don’t think I always understood her. Just that I felt I could, one day. But I’m an old stallion, though. It’s hard for me to understand new things. I’m old, old, old, and always have been, even when I was young. I can’t always see into the future when I’m stuck in the past of the present.”

“You’re not that old.”

“Mmm.” He looked at me strangely. He was smiling, but an unsettling sadness tinted his smile. “How often do children think their parents immortal? Or unaging? Forever young? I wish I could say that and believe in it, too.”

He turned away from the workbench. He went into the closet and emerged with a broom. Standing on his hind legs, he began to sweep, and as he did so, he continued talking. “I guess I never forgot what your mother believed in, even if it never made sense to me. I could never forget your mother, mind, but that sentiment—it’s been stuck in my skin since then. When Argyle came in and started talking, it was… almost like hearing her words one more time.”

He fell silent, fell into the simple work of cleaning. After a moment’s pause, I went into the closet, grabbed the dust pan, and fell into the routine, too. He would sweep a little section, gathering the chips and flakes in a little pile, and then I would come and collect them to throw them away. After a time, my father grew tired, and so we switched tasks. I would sweep, he would collect the remains and dispose of them. In this way we managed to clean the whole workshop, without a word shared between us, the night growing darker as seen through the single window, the copper light flickering intermittently, and the wooden figures just as quiet, looking over us, eternally.

When we had finished, we stood in the center of the room, looking over our work. I felt a great deal of satisfaction, in both the cleaning and the painting, and I could tell my father was feeling similarly.

When I glanced at him, I thought, for whatever reason, that he looked different—or rather, that he seemed to have several different appearances all at once. One was how I’d always viewed him: that sober, grumpy, thick-tongued toymaker who cycled through clients and assistants like the seasons themselves. Another was new: young, fresh, a vision of who my father had been, one that I could see through the glimpses which rarely, if ever, broke through his stoic shell. And still, there was yet another one: one that I could not truly see fully, nor understand, yet which, I felt, was the one that Argyle had seen all those days ago, the one that had convinced him to entrust this impossible dream to a stranger and his daughter.

“Thank you, Maple,” my father abruptly said. I looked at him. In the galaxy of his eyes I saw the wooden figures looking back at him. I thought, all of a sudden, of a telescope that stretched straight and true into the past.

“For what, Dad?” I managed to ask.

“For giving me a chance to talk about this. About her.” My father rubbed the back of his head. “I think I’d always wanted to—talk about whatever your mother believed in. But I could never find the right words.”

He touched the back of my head, then, with somewhat awkward strength, pulled me close for a hug. It was natural that I should reciprocate.

***

I think it was that night when I realized I loved Argyle. It was a simple admission, made only in the silence of my heart, and that simplicity and voiceless nature was what surprised me. The old stories—not the ones that powered Argyle’s dream, but the older ones, the first stories—said love was a powerful and all-encompassing force. They said when it was found, it was like a certain kind of magic took hold—a magic different from the kind that made fearsome monsters of unicorns and loathsome predators of pegasi. A purer magic, in some ways.

I didn’t believe those stories, because I knew what love was. It was the thing that had brought my parents together, and the thing which, upon my mother’s passing, had silvered my father’s hair. Their love had kept each other young, and my father’s love for my mother had kept him grounded. But love was also just a chemical. A series of reactions concocted in the brain of a pony as though it were an oven. And as with any chemical reaction, if improperly doled out, the reaction could prove volatile. When the old stories spoke of how one love drove a pony into madness, or had felled an entire kingdom, I did not believe them when they explained it was because love had magical properties. It was all chemical, and in those poor characters’ cases, all tragic, too.

But Argyle, as was always the case with him, challenged that belief. If he had a hidden talent for being a storyteller, then I also thought he had one for turning impossibilities into eventualities. That was what love was—an impossibility always tending towards eventuality. And it was all so simple! I loved him—and that was that. There was no need to rationalize it, nor provide a reason for it. I loved him because I loved him, without understanding, without needing to fully understand, in the same way that my mother had loved my father, and vice versa. And as I lay in my bed, looking up at the ceiling, at the dark outline of the light fixtures, I repeated that admission to myself until it had, impossibly, both lost and gained its meaning.

But it wasn’t enough just to keep that to myself, was it? Somepony had to know. Why else do we love the world, and all the things in it that make us happy?

A bold thought came to me—I would tell Argyle when he returned. Yes! He would come by the sea, as he had, as he always had. He would come to the shop under my guidance. He would see the completed set and be absolutely delighted. And then, then I would tell him!

Oh, it is easy to get swept up in those romantic notions, even when you are aware of their superficiality. But maybe that does not matter. Maybe it is those grandiose prophecies that tell us what love is. An impossibility tending towards eventuality. Like a vision of a past out of our reach for now, until we let ourselves believe in it for a moment, perhaps not forever—if we let ourselves live in the impossibilities of our lives until they become realities themselves.

I loved Argyle. I didn’t care to wonder if he felt the same about me. I loved him, and, yes—I would tell him so the next time I saw him. The thought warmed me, and so I settled in for a comfy sleep.

Comments

[Xanderfox]

Friendship is a kind of Love... Friendship is Magic.. so Love is..