“. . . and I clogged all the sinks and the water was overflowing everywhere and everyone was going nuts trying to clean it up and they had no idea it was me and I was trying so hard not to laugh, Vince, but it was so hard. I almost peed. I’ll admit that to you. I almost did.”
Vince laughed where he was supposed to laugh, responded where a response was called for, but what he was really doing on these walks along the perimeter of the property was watching the men outside the gates—anyone in the street passing by or doing roadwork or sitting in an idling car. Without being obvious, he would steal glances at these men, looking for his father in their faces. If he could, he would try to see through their eyes and at the men within. He did this often, wherever he was, at times almost convincing himself that he finally spotted him. Like today. As Anthony informed him about his latest prank, Vince eyed a man descending from a telephone pole, a man who, from behind, looked like he could be a dead ringer for his father. Maybe his father was scoping out the orphanage, planning to bust Vince out. Maybe he was rigging the phone lines or the electricity in preparation for a break-in. Shaking with nerves, Vince followed the man along the gates of the property and back to his truck. He made sure to cough and hum for attention, a certain look, a knowing nod perhaps. Anything.
“You okay?” Anthony asked, patting his friend’s back. “You getting sick?”
It was useless; the man outside the gates was utterly oblivious. Frustrated, Vince let out a tortured scream, a howl of great anguish that could shred the ears and chill the skin of anyone within two miles of the source. Finally, the utility worker turned around, taking notice. But sadly, there was no recognition behind the man’s eyes, just confusion at the sight of a troubled boy.
This was how it always happened, and every time it felt as if a little piece of Vince’s soul had escaped from his mouth, drifting away like a balloon in a breeze, never to return.
Still, for as long as he could remember, he never quit looking inside every car that passed the orphanage, staring at the drivers and passengers alike; every time the doorbell rang or the phone went off, it was Vince who answered; each delivery was closely monitored; the mailman was scrutinized. His tales told him his father was somewhere out there, and if he was, Vince was sure his father would be watching him. It was just a matter of time before he finally revealed himself.
But one could do this for only so long before despair sets in and takes over. The scream Vince screamed this day was one of deep disappointment and grief. He knew the man wasn’t his father; he just needed to let something out. All the pain and sadness, all his uncertainty and fears, yes; but more important, he wanted to be rid of all the foolish hopes and dreams he had relied upon for so long. He wanted to be empty, completely drained, a boy who no longer believed his own tales anymore. His eleventh and twelfth birthdays came and went, and there he still was at the orphanage. No sign of Father, no word.
“I think maybe my father’s really gone,” he told Anthony as they walked back toward the orphanage. He looked up at the cracked walls of the Victorian house. “Maybe this is my home for good. No one is ever going to adopt me. It’s like you said, nobody wants a full-grown boy.” Saying these words aloud made it a sort of reality. Vince made a vow to himself right then and there. He would stop searching for his father in the faces of strangers; he would leave the door and phone unanswered, the attic window abandoned. There was nothing to see through; the world was what it was and nothing more. He believed he no longer had any right to hold out hope. He had become like the rest of them.
“Don’t listen to me. I just say things sometimes. Half the time I don’t even know what comes out of my mouth.”
“No, it’s true. I need to wake up, Anthony. I need to stop fooling myself.”
“Sometimes, if you fool yourself about something long enough, you start to believe it, and if you believe it long enough, sometimes it comes true. Like some kind of circle or something.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been doing that a long time, and not a thing has changed. Here I still am in this orphanage, my dad somewhere out there, my mom . . . No. I’m done. That’s it. I can’t do this the rest of my life. I can’t.” He glanced back at the utility worker loading up his truck. How had he believed it might be his father for even a second? There was nothing even remotely similar between the two men. It was a crushing blow. It always was. Every time he searched for his father and didn’t find him, the pain was far too great, a giant chip out of his heart. He refused to do that to himself anymore. He had to preserve whatever was left. He said it again: “I’m done.” Then he said it again and again and again: “I’m done. I’m done. I’m done.”
That night, when the children asked for one of his tales, Vince said he would no longer tell them. They begged, but he couldn’t bring himself to ever cross his fingers again and tell his stories as he had done last night and every night before. Over the next few weeks, the children continued to plead for the tales, and at first, Vince broke them up into pieces, warping the plots, treating each story recklessly until they amounted to nothing but empty words. They became worse and worse with each telling, shorter and shorter, without any flair for the dramatic, and eventually the children stopped asking for them and Vince truly had trouble even remembering them. When it came time to sleep, everyone went to bed silently, his thoughts barren of hope.
It was a Monday, the weather a bit brisker, and Vince and Anthony walked the grounds again, Vince with his head down the whole time. He didn’t want to look at anyone or anything, not the men changing a flat tire on the side of the road, not the man Rollerblading by, not the mailman walking up the drive. What was the point?
They passed an old man on a ladder, painting the house. He went by M. Nobody knew what the initial stood for, and every time someone inquired, a different name was given. The story was that M was once an orphan here like all the rest and that he never left. He just grew up and got his own room, staying on as a sort of handyman. He did everything from taking out the trash to plumbing to carpentry to gardening. A fixture of the house, he was aware of everything within its walls; the two would forever be connected.
Seeing M always bothered Vince. He wondered if he would share a similar fate, losing everything in the process, even his name. Anthony, however, reacted in a different manner—he had pronounced M his archnemesis—but Vince wondered if it was for the same reasons. Seeing M now, Anthony jutted Vince in the side with his elbow. “Check this out.
“Earthquake,” he screamed, shaking the handyman’s ladder. “Don’t fall!”
“Anthony!” M yelled in a strange accent nobody could ever place, holding on for dear life. “You quit it! I’ve had enough of you! I mean it!”
Anthony was bowled over in hysterics, but Vince continued walking on with his head down.
“What’s with you?” Anthony asked, catching up to him, wiping away tears of laughter. “You didn’t think that was funny?”
Vince spun around, his face full of frustration. “When are you going to stop joking around all the time? Don’t you see where you are? We’ve been abandoned. Nobody wants us. What’s so funny about that?”
“You weren’t abandoned, Vince. Like in your story, you said your father—”
“It’s a tale, Anthony. A made-up story. I have no one. You understand? No one! Get that through your head!”
“Vincent! Vincent, come here!” A voice from the house.
“Mrs. West. Shoot,” Anthony said, spotting the woman who ran the orphanage standing at the front door, glaring in their direction. “Don’t worry. Whatever it is, tell her it was me, Vince. I’ll take the blame.”
Upset with himself for blowing up at his friend, Vince looked at him fondly. Finally he smiled. “It probably was you.”
“Get in here, Vincent,” Mrs. West said. “I have something for you.” In her hand she held up a package.
Vince hesitated, unsure if his eyes were deceiving him. A package? That couldn’t be right. It had to be a mistake. Was it
? Could it be . . . The closer he came to the package, the more his heart began to race, and he immediately regretted the feeling. Don’t get your hopes up, he told himself. Don’t be a fool.
But when one wants something so very desperately, when one has wished for so very long that those dreams could still be heard somewhere out in the ether, floating on wisps of wind or in the vacuum of space, hope can never be suppressed for good. It can always be found; it can always be renewed. And it turned out Vince’s hope came in the form of a letter, the only one he ever received at the Obern House Orphanage.
Once they reached her private office, Mrs. West slapped the package down on her desk, across from Vince. It landed with a thud, fluttering some loose papers that were strewn about. “You forgot to shut the door behind you,” she said.
“Sorry, Mrs. West.” Vince jumped up and closed the door and promptly returned to his seat.
Mrs. West was a very thin, very fragile woman, but the tone of her voice alone managed to put in line the children of the orphanage, even Anthony, in a matter of seconds. This valuable tool of the trade was usually preceded by a death stare no one ever hoped to see twice. She had a difficult time warming up to anyone, including Vince.
At her desk, she adjusted her glasses. “The return address is a very small town many hours north from here. The middle of nowhere. I never even heard of the place before today. Dyerville. Does it mean anything to you?”
Vince raced through his memories, searching for something, anything, that might link him to this town. He tried to pull clues from every corner of his brain, but nothing came. Then a tiny spark.
“I—I think my grandfather was born there.”
“It was sent from a nursing home. I did the research, checked your files.” She pulled Vince’s file from a drawer and plopped it down on the desk. It was thicker than any of the other orphans’ that Vince could see from the drawer, and he wondered what exactly was written in there. “I didn’t know your grandfather was still alive when you came here. That or I had forgotten. I suppose you didn’t go to live under his care because he couldn’t care for himself. It seems he began experiencing the symptoms of senility sometime ago, is that right?”
Vince nodded. “I think so. I—I don’t remember much about him. But I do remember everyone said he was crazy. Especially my dad. I remember he really got fed up with him and told him he wasn’t allowed to visit anymore.”
“His own father.” She said this with a disapproving scowl. Then again, she always scowled.
“Yes, ma’am. I remember feeling sad about that because even if there was a screw or two loose, I loved him. He babysat for me since I was little. He was fun to be around.” Nostalgic, Vince smiled. “He would sing to me in foreign languages, chase me through the apple orchards near the house, teach me games that no one else had ever heard of. He was always correcting people about his age. He’d say, ‘I’m not ninety-eight. I’m one hundred and ninety-eight.’ He’d say it in this really shaggy, time-worn voice too. And there was this big scar on his face, as if a giant chunk of his cheek had been carved out long ago. No one knew for sure how he got it, and everyone shared their hunches, but my grandfather always denied them all. Then he would tell us how it happened, the scar, and the story always changed. And not slightly either. They were completely different and preposterous scenarios. Every time.”
“So, he was losing his mind.”
“I guess. I mean, most of what he said didn’t make much sense, and my parents didn’t really give what he said much consideration.” It got worse as time went on too, he remembered. Almost every utterance was part of some mad rambling or strange tangent. There was a phrase he always shouted: “Umbia Rah.” Every time he saw Vince, it was, “Umbia Rah! Umbia Rah! Umbia Rah!” And he’d raise his arms like a ghost or zombie. Just a whole lot of nonsense. Vince was surprised at how much he actually did remember, but he felt there was more, so much more and that every crazy thing his grandfather said actually made some sense somewhere in this world. And that made him want to find out even more.
“You were named after him. Is that right?”
Vince nodded. “My parents said I looked just like him too. Almost identical. I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”
“Well, this is for you.” She slid the package across her desk.
Vince just stared at it, too frightened to pick it up. It was a severely weather-beaten envelope. It was dirty, ripped, discolored; the edges were battered. It looked like it had traveled years to find him, traveling across distant lands, but according to the postmark date, it had been sent only a few days earlier.
He just continued to stare.
“Well,” Mrs. West said, “open it up.”
As he placed his hands on the package, Vince’s mind began to race. There was nothing he could do to fight it. Maybe his grandfather had gotten better. Maybe he wanted to reunite, to take Vince from this place for good. It was possible, wasn’t it? But the best suspicion of all was, maybe his grandfather knew where Vince’s father was and inside this package was how to find him. A sort of treasure map perhaps.
Excitedly, Vince ripped the package open. Inside, folded very carefully, was a letter, a single page. It was frayed as well, just like the envelope, except not as harshly. The paper was thick with a texture almost like skin, with grooves and indentations throughout. It was like nothing he had ever seen. And the writing, the writing was in script, but it was a perfect script, fanciful and from another place and time. Trembling, and with his mind already racing, he began to read the letter aloud.
Dear Master Elgin,
I regret to inform you that your grandfather, Vincent Michael Elgin, has passed away. His funeral will be in a week’s time, Saturday the 28th at noon, here in Dyerville, and it is hoped that you will attend. Enclosed you will find a book, his only true possession, the only one of any real value to him. He emphatically informed me that upon his death it be sent directly to you. This is your grandfather’s story, young Vincent. I had the pleasure of sitting down with him every day, listening to his tales, writing them down for you. I did not question him. I did not interrupt or interfere in any way. I did not ask why he spoke of himself in the third person or why he waited so long to reveal all this. Your grandfather simply told me his life story, and I listened. And what a story it is. I hope you find some comfort in it. Perhaps you can see through this world of tales and straight to the heart of the man who told them.
My sincerest apologies,
Andrew J. Ennis
He was dead? Vince didn’t know what to feel. Should he be crying? He couldn’t even remember the last time he had seen his grandfather.
He glanced down at the book. It was leather bound, old. Inside were pages without lines and the same beautiful script as was in the accompanying letter. There was no title on the cover, but on the first page it read: The Dyerville Tales: A History of Vincent Elgin.
“These tales,” Mrs. West said, “do they mean anything to you?”
“I—I don’t know. I remember him telling me stories, stories from when he was a young boy, but I don’t quite remember the stories themselves. Is that weird? I remember my father getting angry at him, yelling about filling my head with nonsense. That’s when he started telling me my grandfather was losing his mind, to ignore everything he said. I guess that makes sense, you know, when someone nears one hundred.”
Mrs. West grew wildly uncomfortable in her plush chair. Irritated, she kept shifting and fidgeting. She grabbed at her throat, trying to massage the words free. “It is quite difficult to lose someone, even if you didn’t know them very well—”
Here she went on and on in a very cold and detached manner, like a textbook come to life, speaking to him of all the difficulties of the world, teaching Vince about loss and sadness and grief, all of which he was much too aware of, and so instead, his mind wandered off to where he needed it to go: the letter. Something about it, some small detail that he couldn’t put his finger on, struck him. What was it? He re
read it once, and then again.
“—it breaks the heart a million times over. If you want to cry, cry. But try not to let the other children—” Mrs. West stopped herself, looking closely at Vince’s perplexed face as he scanned the letter. “Now, I know you’ll want to be there at the funeral, but . . . you must understand . . . we don’t have the means to get you there.”
“Wait, what? Are you saying I can’t go?”
“Vincent, I . . . you . . . I didn’t think—”
“What?” he snapped. “Mrs. West, you didn’t think what?”
Mrs. West looked as if she had been punched in the face. She shifted in her chair again. “Vincent, I’m sorry. Like I said, we don’t have the means to get you there. It’s a long ways away, and we don’t have an extra car with which to take you. And even if we did, we don’t have anyone who can spare a few days escorting you to and fro, and we certainly can’t let you go unsupervised. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to grieve your grandfather from here.”
Vince’s head dropped, and he stared down into his lap, the details of the letter momentarily forgotten. All he could think of was his grandfather and how he was gone. Of course he wanted to be at the funeral. It was the least he could do. He wished he could have seen him one more time; after all, he was family, the last family he had. And now he was being told that he couldn’t go? It was beyond unfair.
Mrs. West went rambling on again, pointing out all her responsibilities and repeating her long and ever-growing list of reasons why Vince would not be able to travel to Dyerville in time for the funeral. But through all this, something hit him, and it hit him hard, like a comet to the chest, his body disintegrating into a million pieces and then suddenly being pulled back together again by a force stronger than gravity. His father, he realized. There was that line in the letter, the line about seeing through the world of tales. That was the detail that had sent his mind reeling. How had he missed it? Surely this was a message from his father. In fact, this Andrew person probably was his father. Vince glanced down at the letter again. He couldn’t believe it. Andrew J. Ennis—AJE, the same initials as his father’s. Now his mind really began to roll. His father must have been there in Dyerville those last days. How could he not? Like Vince, he was an only son. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he had to have heard about his father’s impending death. Vince’s heart skipped a beat; it leaped right over it. A letter must have found him, he thought, just as his found me. A carrier pigeon dropped it into his hands in the middle of a dense rain forest somewhere in Southeast Asia. After fighting off giant snakes and frenzied panthers and raging apes, he opened it, read it, and immediately began hacking his way out of the jungle. Although he was tired, weak, sickly, there was no way he wouldn’t be there. He would make it to Dyerville no matter what.
The Dyerville Tales Page 2