Hieroglyphics Read online

  Thank you, Miss Lil.

  Even thou you smoke like a chimbly. The general says STOP!

  Your friend, Lisa

  Oh, I know I romanticize. I know there were nights I rushed, needed to hurry, nights when I was worried, one of you upset about something and not saying what, and your dad and I trying to figure out what to do, how to handle it. I ran errands for my father more and more as his health worsened. One of you had the flu or a virus or a sprained ankle, broken arm. Your dad didn’t get tenure that first time, or he dreaded visiting his stepfather, or he told me he hated the drapes I had ordered or (“No offense”) whatever it was I’d cooked last night. There were all those days. But now, time allows me pure silent joy. Even with (or perhaps thanks to) this awful oxygen tank, I breathe in and I breathe out. I breathe in and I breathe out. I marvel at the snow and ice, the silence there with each cold breath. I want every breath I can get.

  Frank

  After the accident, Frank had moved to be with his mother in eastern North Carolina, a place below sea level, with a river once known as Drowning Creek. No wonder he had begun collecting those things offering protection or luck: rabbit’s feet and found pennies, horseshoes and wishbones. Although he has always professed no belief in superstition, Frank still kisses his finger and touches the windshield when going through a yellow light, doesn’t walk under ladders, and on and on.

  An old woman—a midwife of sorts—who checked on his mother in the aftermath of the accident and then after Frank’s brother was born, told him that anyone who washed clothes on New Year’s Day would wash (she said “warsh”) for the dead in the coming year. Frank’s mother looked at him when the woman said this, as if intending to put his mind at ease, even though her own eyes were filled with a look of worry. “I’ve seen it happen many a time,” the woman said, her gum bulging with snuff, and the oversized pockets of her apron filled with all kinds of rags and strings and collard leaves she said she would bind to Frank’s mother’s breasts “if they got heated and the milk wasn’t flowing good.”

  His mother’s face blanched with the information, or maybe it was at the rendered beef fat the woman had offered to smooth on chapped or torn skin—“A cure for what ails you,” she had said—or maybe Frank’s mother was wondering if she had washed clothes the New Year’s before, the answer likely yes if Frank’s father had worked that day or the night before and come home, as he always did, with various stains on the sleeves of his white coat.

  “How’s he sucking?” the woman said, and pointed to Horace, red and squirmy in Frank’s mother’s arms. “And how’s your hurts up the leg and your shoulder?”

  Frank watched and listened, thinking surely his mother would be ready to go back to Lowell soon, back to where she had a real doctor and it didn’t smell like a butcher shop, back to where they had a life, but his mother assured him that there were fine doctors here and that she had seen several of them, that this woman, Mrs. Brewster, was there simply as a neighbor, trying to offer a helping hand.

  Frank had told Lil this story, trying to remind both of them that people often mean well even when what they offer you is the last thing you would ever want to see. He said this after a neighbor tried to share with Lil her stash of coupons for denture gel and Depends. “No, thank you,” Lil told him when he had tried to encourage her to add that extra line of politeness so many people in this part of the world do: How sweet of you to think of me, though. So nice of you.

  “But I don’t think it’s sweet,” Lil said. “These are my teeth, and my bladder is nobody’s business.”

  He told how Mrs. Brewster once showed up at their old back door with a plate of chicken feet on rice, everything boiled to a thick, goopy white, which Frank’s mother accepted graciously. “Say thank you, Frank,” she had said, while the old woman was encouraging him to take a bite, but he just stared at the gelatinous bones with horror. Surely, he thought, we will go home soon, only to later watch the man who would become his stepfather gnaw on those spindly, rough bones and pronounce that he’d had better but they weren’t terrible.

  By then, it seemed his mother brightened whenever Preston was around, thanking him as well for his great generosity. How could she have ever managed her recovery and those early months with a newborn without him? And for him to make room for Frank to join them when school got out. “So generous, so very generous,” she kept saying. Preston had stayed across town with his sister so that there was no mistaking his intentions, allowing his home to serve as a convalescent spot for several survivors in those first months after the crash, and then just Frank’s mother.

  “Preston was the last person to speak to your father,” she whispered to Frank that night in early summer when he was shown the small cot in the corner of what Preston called the parlor, the dark floral wallpaper making it feel like a jungle, the horsehair sofa itchy on his legs if he tried to sit there to read. The window looked on to the front porch where there was a swing, and past that the street, then a dusty dirt road with a field. He had stood there many times, looking out, willing a taxi to pull up and his mother to emerge in her traveling clothes and tell him they were going home—no, not on the train, they would take the bus—but a year later, when her leg and shoulder were healed and when Horace was crawling and into everything, it became clearer and clearer that wasn’t going to happen.

  His mother’s life seemed to dead-end like that broken track, and by then his grandmother had left Lowell and moved to Worcester to live with Frank’s aunt and her husband. She missed them, but she was doing very well. She wrote to Frank that she had a little garden and cooked a lot; a black cat had taken up there, and she had decided to let him stay. She named him Midnight, after the radio show Frank liked to listen to, and she looked forward to him visiting.

  Part of him is afraid to go inside Preston’s house, afraid he will be disappointed that none of the things he hopes to see will still be there: the nicks and cracks and clues that give proof of that long-ago life. The front yard is no longer neat and manicured, as it is in the photo with his mother. It was probably taken before his graduation or maybe a dance, because he’s in a suit, his mother smiling.

  In the root cellar, he had a stash of old pennies, flattened by the train, and marbles and matchbooks, and a coin his stepfather gave him from when he was in France in the war—the kinds of things Frank has spent a lifetime encouraging students to talk about, the objects that they hid or that defined them, the tokens that they felt brought good luck or protection from evil: an Eye of Horus, an ankh, a cross, a star, Saint Christopher medallions, four-leaf clovers, a mezuzah on the doorframe, a witch ball in the window.

  On December 15, 1943, Frank was safely housed in his childhood home in Lowell, Massachusetts—632 Andover Street. He was ten years old and had spent the day, and night before, anticipating his parents’ return. The window shade in his room had a bone ring he would hook his finger in and raise, once the room was dark and his eyes had adjusted, to look out over the neighborhood. His grandmother was there with him; she had stayed often after the death of his grandfather, and they were both looking forward to the next day, when his parents would pull into the station.

  When darkness fell that late afternoon, his parents were already beginning their journey home, and he felt jealous of the trip that had not included him. His father had volunteered his skills and was working at a base in Miami Beach; he was coming home for the holidays and hoped he would not need to return. In every letter he wrote, he had mentioned how he felt both lucky and guilty to have not had to leave the country.

  Frank’s mother had gone to meet him, and to spend a couple of days in the warm sunshine before coming home to the New England winter. She said it was a good time because things were about to change. “Soon you will have a little brother or sister,” she had told Frank; she was already wearing different clothes, a full blouse, like an artist’s smock, with a bow at the neck. For years he had begged for a sibling but at age seven had given up and stopped asking. At ten,
he found the news embarrassing, given the things he had learned—how this would have happened—and he fought hard not to let any imaginings of his parents doing anything like that enter his mind. The situation was especially complicated by his father having already been away from home so much; his visits had not been long enough to fully get beyond the awkward readjustment and go back to the way life had always been.

  Before going to bed, Frank had listened to his favorite show, Captain Midnight. He lay on the living room floor while the sound of airplane engines filled the room. Captain Midnight could fly anything, and though Frank was drawn to the fantasy of being him, he was more comfortable as the young Chuck Ramsey, his charge and underling. That’s what Frank had been to his grandfather, and he was missing him in ways he didn’t know how to articulate.

  Lil had said that maybe he had had a premonition of what was to come, but what would it have mattered anyway? What he knew was that his dad had promised to take him the next week to get his junior flight badge with the secret decoder. They were going to do that, and they were going into Boston to see the Christmas lights, like they always did, and they were going to Jordan Marsh, to get all that he needed for Boy Scouts—the canteen, compass, mess kit. But the most important was the badge, because each episode ended with a clue to decipher, and every kid with a decoder who solved the message would be entered in a special drawing. Then there was always an ad telling you to drink Ovaltine. It used to be the one about antifreeze, something Frank’s dad quoted whenever he took the car to be serviced. Kids, tell Mom and Dad to take you to Skelly Oil . . . it’s time for antifreeze. Remember to remind your dad that it is cheaper to prepare than repair!

  Captain Midnight and Chuck Ramsey were once again having to battle Ivan Shark and his mean daughter, Fury; Mr. Jones, which was a code name for the president, was depending on them. During the breaks, a salesman kept begging kids to drink their Ovaltine and to get their badges, which Frank swore to the radio that he would do.

  His grandmother had gone to bed soon after dinner, but she let him stay up to listen, and he lay there on the floor, hands clasped behind his head, his sock feet up on the footstool in front of his father’s chair, until the last sounds of Captain Midnight’s engine faded away with one final message about how to get your badge—Don’t miss out, boys and girls! Don’t miss your chance! Frank was wearing a sweater his grandmother had knit, in shades of brown and olive and tan, a sweater he dreaded outgrowing, the sleeves already too short. That was the before of his life—there he was on firm ground with so many things to look forward to—and then he was free-falling.

  The radio switched to music, and he’d turned it off and walked upstairs, not noticing then what a nice home he lived in. He tiptoed past the room where his grandmother slept and stood in the cold bathroom to brush his teeth, noting with alarm, as he always did, the glass with his grandmother’s teeth floating there like some kind of exotic fish. Then he looped his finger in that bone ring in his bedroom and lifted the shade to see the icy street below: an occasional car, a light here and there in windows of other houses. His sheets were turned back, warmed by the hot water bottle his grandmother had placed there, a heap of blankets on top. And then he slept. Perhaps he imagined the view from Captain Midnight’s plane. Perhaps he imagined the warm sandy beaches his father had written about, or the palm trees. Maybe he just imagined himself there on the Tamiami Champion, seated with his parents while the dark night and all that lay beyond the tracks sped past the windows.

  He had sometimes allowed himself to imagine the life that might have been if his father and mother had arrived that December morning. They would have gone to get his badge. And then they would have gone and gotten his canteen, and they would have chosen their tree at the lot where they always went—Wood Brothers, over on Bridge Street—and it would have stood there in the living room window so that he could see it as soon as he turned the corner coming home from school. He would have seen his mother laughing, hands clasped together in absolute joy when the lights were strung and the ornaments in place.

  But he never saw her look that way again. There was happiness in her life in the years to follow, sure, there was goodness, and even times she laughed, but it was never the way it was before that night; that expression was another thing that got left behind in the house on Andover Street, cemented in his mind as firmly as his own initials in the concrete foundation of the porch. He once tried to explain all of this to his younger brother, but they didn’t get very far, their histories so different. Horace grew up with a mother who was serious and quiet, the pensive and kind wife of a farmer in eastern North Carolina, and Frank’s mother was the cheerful, bright-faced wife of a surgeon in New England. Horace was his whole brother, but only DNA could prove such a thing, because they’d grown up in two separate families.

  The facts were simple when written down, and Frank had been called upon to tell them for years. The simpler and faster the better when someone said, “Oh no, I am so sorry. What happened?” It was the middle of the night, and the southbound train derailed and landed on the northbound track between small southern towns, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, on a night when snow covered the ground, there in a part of the world where such was a rare occurrence. The people got off, only one person seriously harmed, and huddled there, waiting for help and relieved that the accident had not been worse. But it was dark and icy, and the man sent ahead to issue a warning slipped and broke the fusee he had intended to light to alert the other engineer, and on and on—one thing leading to another and another, mistakes and missteps and human error leading to the crash that shook those early morning hours, barely past midnight, jolting passengers, many of them soldiers like his father, who had managed to stay alive in the war and then were on their way home for Christmas, perhaps waking just in time to realize their lives were over.

  Even now, Frank imagines the screams and the twisted steel, the cold parallel rails stretching from north to south while cars jumped and plowed forward a length of two football fields through tobacco fields and stands of pines. The sound was deafening. The thin glaze of snow that would bring a rare white Christmas was an additional hindrance to those working to find the dead and injured in the darkness. The scene was beyond comprehension to those there, devastating, while seven hundred miles north, Frank was swaddled in sleep and the anticipation of daylight and all that it would bring to his life—a Captain Midnight badge, a canteen, a Christmas tree. His greatest worry was the inevitable shy distance he would once again feel when his father got home. “Hi, Pops,” he had practiced, imitating a boy in his grade, who always said that to his dad, who was a teacher in the school, but it embarrassed Frank to even try that out, not his voice at all. Hello, Father. Daddy. Dad. Hi, Dad. Welcome home!

  A car honks. More golfers in fluorescent pants pass, and a glaring sun blinds him as he steers toward that place one more time, to stand where seventy-four years ago daylight had come not as a gift but as a glaring beacon of truth of all that had come to an end. He had read the accounts of what people saw there in the cold morning light: blood-soaked clothing and shoes strewn up and down the tracks, a wedding veil hanging from a tree, Christmas gifts and purses and luggage ripped and emptied, buttons and cigarettes and eyeglasses and watches. People would continue to find and pick up the pieces for months after, and even now, he knows that if one were to excavate beneath those tracks, there would be so much found, traces of lives that were turned over and buried, the lost meaningful detail someone had once attended, a hook on the neck of a dress or a necklace, a clasp to hold a tie, a penny returned when buying that day’s paper. He needs to stand there in that place; he needs to stand and allow himself the vision—of loss and destruction and of himself, ten years old, curled under a blanket in a comfortable house, his eyes closed against the cold northern night sky while waiting for all the good things promised with his parents’ return home. The canteen, the Captain Midnight badge, the Christmas tree he and his father would have dragged along the ic
y streets. Now it is hard to place himself back in his childhood bed and not think of how only twenty miles away, Lil had lain sleeping in her father’s house. What were the odds that they would find each other?

  And why does he feel so close to that part of himself now? The young boy part. That ignorant, grieving part.

  Lil

  October 11, 2017

  Southern Pines

  Things I want you to know:

  My father often asked where my mother got all the crazy language she used; who did she think she was?

  “I read,” she said. “I read a lot.” And she pointed to her stack of fashion and movie magazines. She talked about “dead hoofers” and “ducky shincrackers,” and told me she hoped I wasn’t going to be “khaki wacky,” which she then explained meant “boy crazy.”

  “She’s only ten!” I remember my father saying, only to have her say how it’s never too soon to teach a girl not to be an “able Grable” or a “sharecropper.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but she said things like that often. She said of my father’s sister, my aunt Cammy, whom we only saw once a year: “Mutton dressed up to look like lamb.” And my father said, “It takes one to know one.” She bleated and went back to what she was doing, which was teaching me to braid my own pigtails. The funny sound made my father laugh. They did laugh (sometimes at the expense of others, but they did).

  You knew a different man in those later years. You two knew him as a sweet man under a crocheted lap blanket watching Walter Cronkite or old reruns of “Gunsmoke.” He even liked that silly “Gong Show,” remember that? But that wasn’t the real him; that was just a shadow, something soft and worn.