by Melody Clark
Edward shut his eyes, looking away, taking it in. “It’s from Bakunin Industries?”
“Yes, it is.”
Eddie accepted the contents listing from the driver and scanned it over. Under contents it read “everything you were to me.”
“They’re for me,” Edward said, signing the clipboard and handing it back.
Edward thought again of Stonehenge, as he circled the six stacks of boxes. But this sediment was not comprised of alluvium and time, but of hatred, pain, and bitter memories. More than he ever wanted to remember.
“Well, that it seems is that,” Edward said, to the accumulated encapsulation of his old life as the delivery lorry drove away
“Boys, carry the boxes to the storage closet nearest Eddie’s room, will you?” Thomas said to James and Wilse.
Eddie shook his head. “That’s okay, Dad, I can handle it.”
“No, you can’t and you won’t,” Thomas said, “they’re younger and have more energy than is healthy for any of us. They will do as I say.”
James shrugged. “We’ve got it, Eddie,” he said, passing the first box to Wilse. “No worries.”
Edward had reached a hand into a pocket, but Thomas grabbed hold of his wrist. “And leave your petty cash in your pocket, Edward,” his father said, “that’s an order. It’s their family duty. Just like it’s yours to listen to me and put away your money.”
“Yes, sir.” Edward gestured in surrender. “Thanks, guys. I appreciate all the work.”
James grinned up at him for a second. “Oh, yeah, we’re toting a few boxes. We’ll be totes knackered after this.”
After the boys had hauled away the first round of Eddie’s boxes, Thomas turned toward him with a more serious look. “Eddie, you know that I have forced myself to be impartial about this. It’s getting more and more difficult by the day. Now it is taking every bit of reserve I have to keep from striking back at him, but I will follow your course.”
Edward smiled sadly. He shook his head. “Don’t bother. He doesn’t have it in his power to hurt me anymore. I’d have to care about him first. Anyway, I’m sorry for the big delivery and the disturbance.”
“For God’s sakes, Eddie, stop apologizing. It isn’t necessary, son. It is never necessary.”
Eddie shrugged in reply and offered a shy smile. “Okay. I’d apologize for apologizing but I’m afraid that would defeat the purpose.”
“Uncle Eddie!” Stewart’s voice launched up at them from the direction of the road. The boy waved two baseballs gloves in his direction. “Mom dropped me off. Could we maybe play some catch?”
“I guess so, sure,” Edward said, grabbing the mitt that was handed to him.
“Stewart,” Thomas said firmly, “does your father know you’re here?”
The boy drew back two full steps, as if he had just noticed Thomas. His voice reduced to a breathy whisper, he replied, “I don’t know, sir. I just got here. I didn’t call or anything.”
“Stay here, then, I’ll go find him,” Thomas said. “Perhaps you can teach your father how to play catch, hm?”
When the older man walked away, Stewart finally fully exhaled his intake of air. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He always sounds like he doesn’t like me.” He lowered his voice and looked around. “This place scares me. It’s like I’m supposed to know a whole bunch of rules and stuff. Like I’m always breaking them.”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, laughing, “I know the feeling. But I think he likes us. It’s just his way.”
“I’m so glad you’re here, Uncle Eddie,” Stewart said, chuckling a little nervously, “it’s nice to have someone I can talk to other than Mom.”
“You can talk to your dad.”
“It stresses me out though. I spend most of my time in my room, when I used to be out with my posse.”
“You can’t form a posse here?” Eddie asked.
“No. The kids kinda treat me weird. I guess because I’m foreign. Some of them don’t like me because of where I’m from. Mom says it’s my imagination.”
“Being in a new place is scary. It’ll pass.”
“You think?”
“Well, to be honest, I hope so,” Eddie said, laughing. “I’m sort of in your same shoes.”
“I thought I saw your mother’s car pull up!” Tad said as he approached them up the yard and walked around to Stewart’s side. “Why didn’t you tell me you were here?”
“I only just got here,” the boy replied. “It was a last minute kind of deal.”
Tad gestured his conditional surrender. “Very well, what is this thing I am supposed to catch?”
“The opening salvos of your eventual smackdown,” Edward replied. “C’mon, let’s walk down below the mud fence. I don’t think any of us want to answer to Dad for breaking a window.”
They walked out to the backyard, up to where a dried mud fence had been built long ago to guard the rest of the house from any errant game projectiles. The structure bore the scars of stray balls past It jutted out from behind the old house and ran down the hill to the abandoned stables Edward and Tad’s mother had loved. It traveled far enough to protect all nearby windows.
“Firstly, I should school you colonials on the origins of your putative national pastime,” Tad said. “What you call baseball is actually called rounders, and it is played by little girls.”
“And cricket was a game little kids used to play in the forest,” Eddie replied. “However, the game you call rounders, we call softball. It is also played by little girls. The ball that Stewart has brought is, in fact, a softball. However, there’s a grown up women’s version of a softball that you wouldn’t want to get in the way of when they start pitching. It’s dangerous.”
Edward turned toward the mud fence. He drew back his arm and hurled the softball full muscle at the wall. With a loud crack, the ball split the fence – cracking out a foot of dried mud.
“Baseball is even worse,” Eddie added.
Tad smirked broadly. “That’s very impressive, but I’ve seen a baseball game. Like anyone has ever died during one of those unendurable exercises in tedium.”
“Raymond Johnson Chapman, 1920,” Eddie replied.
“Excuse me?”
“Ray Chapman, shortstop for the Cleveland Naps, up to bat. Carl Mays pitched a line drive that went straight for Ray’s head. Boom. Knocked out cold. Twelve hours later, he was dead.”
“You’re joking,” Tad said, grimacing.
“Afraid not. It’s one of the reasons batters wear helmets now,” Eddie said, handing him his glove.
Edward explained the process in a few words and gestures, showing Tad how to hold the mitt. His brother easily dropped the first pitch. He fumbled the second one, too.
“It seems I have no talent for playing catch,” Tad said, handing his mitt back to Stewart.
“You just started to learn,” Edward said. “You didn’t stop after the first five thousand or so chess matches you lost, did you?”
“Very humorous.”
“I thought so.”
Stewart removed his glove too, tossing it down beside the one his father had just surrendered. “I’ve got an idea! Can we play with your computer game, Uncle Eddie? That would be cool! And it’s something we could all play.”
“First, it’s not a game,” Eddie said. “And secondly, you two have to stop being scared of each other.”
“Says the man who turns white as a sheet whenever his father enters the room?” Tad asked, hiking an eyebrow.
“Shut up,” Eddie said.
“Why?”
“Because I hate having my hypocrisy pointed out, don’t you?” Eddie pointed toward the old house. “Come on, I actually had an idea of something we could test on.”
The idea had come to him in pieces in the night, just as his dreams had. He had focused on the idea to e
scape the lingering images that had haunted his night.
Eddie led the way, walking onto the terraced portico that circled up into the old house’s broad entry, where the remnants of most of the ongoing work remained. He stared through the large window that gazed in across the inner expanse.
Staring up into the structural timbers that overarched the great hall, he felt as if he might be gazing up into exoskeletal time. It stared back at him as mutely, as infinitely unknowable as the pockets of his own deferred history.
He touched his fingers to the outside wall, hesitantly, like he was afraid he might scar the surface with the hunger of his curiosity. But did he really want to know? He wanted to turn away from the knowledge he had gained last night as powerfully as he’d sought to escape the nightmares. Would this history be any kinder? And now he was thinking of accessing it directly.
Not that it would work, of course. Of course it wouldn’t work. Silly to even try.
Would this history, their history, devoid as it was of any personal link to him, be equally savage with its coldness? He couldn’t hope to know before it touched him.
“So what do we put the cap on, Uncle Eddie?” Stewart asked brightly.
Eddie turned around sharply, feeling for a moment like the walls had just spoken. To cover his awkwardness, he reached for a huge plank of crown moulding that had come from the upper reaches of the great room.
“This is very old wood,” Eddie explained, showing it sideways. “The upper reaches of the room combined with the moisture creates a kind of semi-permineralization effect. The wood is almost petrified. All the organic materials have been replaced with minerals while the wood still keeps the same structure. If there is any veracity to our theories, this might be a good piece of the past to start with. It might have preserved the memory just as it did the tissue stems.”
“How cool!” Stewart said, his eyes grown wide.
“I cannot believe I’m even entertaining the notion of trying this,” Tad said. “But let’s give this exercise in futility a workout, shall we?
“Sit there, Stewart,” Eddie said, pointing him to a chair. He handed him a unit cap. “Place this on your head. Tad, get over there where you can’t hurt anything.”
“Yes, Brother Septic,” Tad said, perching on a nearby table.
Edward picked up the piece of nearly petrified wood and set it inside the other cap. He adjusted the digital scale. “Watch this. It looks like a heart monitor gauge. When it receives what we call neuro traffic – or indications of information exchange – it registers there. You should pick up something through the unit cap shortly after that.”
“Cool!” Stewart said, sitting back, as if waiting.
Edward adjusted the sensitivity. A flatline maintained.
“Nothing?” Stewart asked. “Maybe the wood isn’t thinking anything. Or maybe it has to be connected to the rest of the house.”
“Or maybe it has a headache,” Tad suggested.
Eddie tossed Tad a smirk. “Let me have both the caps again. I’ll make an adjustment. It may be an error in the calibration load.”
Edward placed the cap from Stewart on his head in order to make the exchange. He removed the petrified wood from the other cap, gently jabbing a fist inside it to flatten out the inner conduits.
Eddie pressed the gauge. “It may have – ”
“It flickered, Uncle Eddie,” Stewart said.
Which was the moment Edward saw it – for the first time. Not so much saw as felt it.
The soft brush of a kiss on his fingers, with a flash of a woman’s pink mouth – and an image of pink lipstick traces on his fingers. But they were baby fingers, banded at the wrist with a tiny white and blue bracelet. As Edward the man pulled his hand from the cap, the sensation and image dissolved.
“Wow,” Edward said, reaching out for the table to hold on for a second.
“What’s wrong?” Tad asked, immediately on his feet.
“Nothing, I –” Eddie shook his head hard. “It must have been, I don’t know, some kind of head rush or flashback or something.”
“Is it over?”
“Yes,” Edward said, staring into the cap as if he might find an explanation there. “It was damned odd, though.”
The boy’s cell phone beeped. He pulled it up to read the text. “Oh, crap, Mom’s here already. I gotta run. See ya, Uncle Eddie! Thanks, Dad!”
“Stewart, your catching equipment,” Tad said, extending to the boy his baseball gloves and softball.
Stewart ran back to grab them and then, thinking a second, he threw his arms around his father and hugged him before he bolted for the car. Tad stood there a moment without moving. He looked shell-shocked.
“That’s the first time he has ever hugged me,” he said softly, as if he didn’t really believe it had happened.
“You’re joking.”
“No. It was. I mean, none of us are huggers in this family. I can count on one hand the number of times Dad has embraced me. He just doesn’t. Neither do I, for that matter. Embrace people, I mean. And that was a first for Stewart. I’m stunned – and chuffed – dead chuffed. That was a rather astonishing step forward. Thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Edward said, shrugging.
Tad shook his head with a genuine look of wonder in his eyes. “No, Eddie, you did, seriously. And now I shall thank you in the ritual way of the Brothers Croftdon. Because you know what today is.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
Edward climbed up through the hole in the floor to reach the front door, followed by Tad and Andrew. As they made their way through the Olde Hole into the inner sanctum, Edward’s attention was taken by the sight of James dragging the full ice chest of bottles into the middle of the room. Wilsey, holding a bottle, had already plunked down on an old chair.
Suddenly, and from behind, cold liquid cascaded over Eddie’s head. Edward quickly put the puzzle together.
“Toad,” Edward snapped, immediately remembering his previous near-miss with the beer baptism. “Do you mean to tell me you saved that pint for three months?
“Of course not,” Tad said, showing Eddie the bottle. “I’ve opened a new one, haven’t I?”
Andrew gave Eddie a towel and a sympathetic smile. “Sorry, Eddie. It was only a matter of time before he got you.”
“I know,” Edward said, sighing, before surrendering to the same corner bean bag chair where he had earlier nearly been doused. He dragged the towel through his hair before mopping the brew off his shoulders. “You’re a menace to society, Toad.”
“Edward, once again for the public record, what is my life’s mission?”
“To make your brothers’ lives a living hell,” Edward said with resignation, exhaling as he finished with the towel.
“Precisely. So I’m not a menace to society, I’m only a perpetual and unrelenting holy terror to my brothers, aren’t I?” He handed Edward a full pint. “Here, that’ll take the piss right out of you.”
Eddie considered the bottle in his hand. “Sarsaparilla?”
“The primordial cola. A very American beverage.”
“In spaghetti westerns maybe,” Eddie said, “I’ve never even seen a bottle of sarsaparilla.”
“So you know how hard it was to come by. It’s as close to an intoxicant as you’re going to get for some time. Show some gratitude,” Tad said, lifting his own bottle. “Drink up, me hearties, the brew is on Brother Edward. I must thank him publicly for his earlier assistance with Stewie. He’s helping me to get over my dread of dealing with my son. Meanwhile, I continue to help Eddie get over his fear of our father. And so we have everything out in the open, the Brothers Croftdon know all about your talk with your therapist, Eddie.”
“Why on earth would I expect discretion from you?” Edward said, as he slowly shut his eyes, and leaned bac
kward into the wall. “That was just icing on the cake.”
Andrew shrugged. “You know we have no secrets here, Eddie.”
Edward smiled thinly. “I know, but I thought, maybe, a private discussion with my therapist might be off the table. Silly me.”
Andrew drank from his own bottle then sputtered out a laugh. “Are you joking? It’s the Toad who heard you. You were dead in the water as soon as it reached his evil ears.”
“I still haven’t told Father, though,” Tad said, grinning.
“Thank God. Let’s keep it that way, okay? At least that’s one public mortification I’ll be spared.”