And suddenly I couldn't let it die.
It was a number of years later, when I returned to Cottonwood for a family reunion, that I met again with Mrs. Hollerman and she finally told me the truth about Michael's death.
“He came in late that night, after sundown,” she said, her eyes faraway with the memory. We were sitting on her back porch, her in an old rocker, me on a nearby bench. Mr. Hollerman had died the year before, after a long bout with lung cancer.
“It wasn't like him,” she was saying. “Coming home late, not saying a word, then hiding himself in his room. You knew him, Lenny. He was all full of fun and life, that boy.”
Always running one step ahead, I thought.
“There was this music coming from his room ...”
Ice songs, Mrs. Hollerman. You were hearing the ice songs.
“And it kind of pulled us along, Michael's father and me, up the stairs until we were standing right outside the boy's bedroom.” Mrs. Hollerman stopped her rocker then, and she sat forward, elbows on knees, eyes still faraway. “The door opened by itself, Lenny. And there was Michael, standing in the middle of his room, glowing like one of those fluorescent necklaces they sell at the County Fair, and looking like something cut from a block of ice. All pale, he was. And his arms, they were outstretched the way Jesus always has His arms open to welcome in the lost.
“And Michael, his eyes all alight, said, `I was the first, mom. I found it, I heard its icy song before the notes touched another human ear. Can you imagine it? Can you?'
“There was this music playing somewhere, his icy song I suppose, and it was filling up the room with its noise. `I love you!' he screamed. `Don't ever forget that, mom. I love you!'“
Mrs. Hollerman shuddered, her voice caught, and she sat back in her rocker again. “It wasn't pneumonia that took him, Lenny. It wasn't anything as natural as that.
“When Michael reached a hand out to me, I guess I couldn't resist taking hold. So bad was my wanting to pull him out of that room, away from that music, and into my bosom. But when our hands touched...
“He was so cold, so brittle and cold ...
“He simply ... shattered ... like a dropped mirror, cracks running up his arm and down his body, head-to-toe, until he suddenly shattered into a thousand jumbled pieces with no sense at all to them.
“And I tried to piece them back together again.
“I tried.”
Mrs. Hollerman buried her face in her hands then, and when she cried I thought they were the tears she had kept cooped-up inside her ever since that chilly summer night when Michael—as withered and brittle as a marrowless bone—had shattered with her embrace.
I cried with her.
That was more than ten years ago, and I never told Mrs. Hollerman that Michael still came to visit me. On hot August nights, he comes. Still icy-cold. Still looking eleven years old, coughing out a white vapory mist. And he always asks the same question, Hear it, Lenny? Can you hear it? Singing like the Christ Our Savior Choir on Sunday mornings, a thousand voices all happening at once! Enough to send a chill right through you!” Then he smiles a smile that says, It's not too late, Lenny, and he reaches out a wax-like hand, and I hear him say, brothers of the blood and moon, Lenny, because that's what we were supposed to be, Michael and me, and I catch myself wondering if the ice song is a death song or a life song or a song from some other side, some inside, and what it would be like to be inside there with him, and I fight against that part of me that's curious enough to want to know, the same as I fought against it twenty-some years ago.
(but maybe no longer)
I want to hear angels instead of air bubbles, I want to know what it's like to feel excitement burning in my veins like hot cinnamon blood, like Michael always felt—(still feels)—because even a death song is better than no song at all, Michael knows that, no one could know better, and he's the only one who knows if the ice song I heard yesterday, pouring out of that chunk of ice I saved from a melting death on Labor Day 1961 is the same cold song that sung to him with a voice like the Christ Our Savior Choir ... it's the song I imagined, the same song I've heard in my head a thousand times since, and if I really heard it yesterday ... then maybe it means it's my turn ... and maybe when Michael reaches out for me tomorrow night, saying, Can you hear it, Lenny? saying, brothers of the blood and moon, Lenny? maybe if I take hold of that wax-like hand of his, maybe then the laughter will come back to me, like when we were eleven, and we used to play baseball in the pasture out behind the Hollerman house.
Because the laughter died after that day.
Because I Could
1.
I turned fourteen in 1970. My parents separated that year, in late August, and after a bout with emphysema and a stroke, Grandpa Myles died in bed. I remember that year for both of those reasons, though one more than the other, because it's the one that won't let me forget.
We lived in the north state where the biggest event of the year was the annual County Fair Demolition Derby at Three Gates Park on the other side of the river. My grandfather took me there once, when I was eight or nine years old. I got sick on cotton candy and threw up on an elderly woman who was sitting next to me in the grandstands. That was the last time we ever went to the Derby together. Grandpa Myles never took me back.
Doesn't matter, I guess.
That was a long, long time ago.
I just wish it would let me be.
2.
My earliest memory of Grandpa Myles was at a dime store called The Depot which sat at the edge of town, just before you hit pasture. Kids liked to hang out there after school, maybe read the newest Superman, maybe toss around a Frisbee in the parking lot. Most of the time, they just liked to hang out.
Grandpa Myles stopped there to pick up some groceries on the way out to Aunt Trudy's place for Sunday supper. I was with him because Mom and Dad had gone down the state to attend a wedding. I was eight years old, and it was the first time I had ever been alone with my grandfather. It was also the first of two trips to my Aunt's house that I'll never forget. The reason for that being this: it was the day I realized I wasn't alone in what I could do.
"You stay put," he said as he climbed out of the Corvair. He slammed the door, then leaned in through the open window to say something else. He had just started wearing glasses with gold, wire-rim frames that appeared to trim an inch or two off the width of his face. He hadn't shaved that morning, or the morning or two before, and the stubble that had shown up was silvery-gray and white and patchy in places. "I'll be right back, so don't go tootin' the horn or playing with the brake, you hear?"
“I won't."
When he returned, he pulled an Eskimo Pie out of the bag of groceries, handed it to me, then thought better of it. "No, you better let me fix that for you."
I let him take it back. He tore off the wrapper, fashioned it into a paper cone, then pushed the ice cream stick through the bottom. Before he handed it back to me, he stole a bite out of one corner.
"There you go," he said with a grin.
His voice had changed recently. Mom and Dad had both commented on it after hanging up the phone the last time they had talked to him. The sounds he made came from somewhere deep in his throat, peppered and incredibly low. I didn't know it at the time—I don't think he did either—but eventually the doctors would tell him the huskiness in his voice was an early symptom of the emphysema.
"What do you say?"
"Thank you."
"You're welcome, Lee. You're mighty welcome."
Aunt Trudy's place was a thirty mile drive. You could make it in twenty-five minutes if you took Deschutes and missed the after school rush at the middle school in Palo Cedro. After that, it was pasture north and south, then foothills and scrub oak, and finally – in some magnificent whim of Mother Nature – you were traveling through miles and miles of pines and cedars and giant white oaks.
I don't remember how long it took us to get there, but it didn't seem long at all. Not like the usual tr
ip, with Dad driving and Mom sitting next to him in the front seat, staring out the window, occasionally engaging in short snippets of conversation when it seemed unavoidable.
Grandpa Myles wasn't much of a talker either, I decided. After we had left The Depot, he had grown quiet, staring off into the horizon, driving on automatic, like he had something on his mind that he wanted to share but just didn't quite know how to go about it.
Over the years, he had learned to keep his secrets.
I understand that now.
I tried to sneak a borrow—the only word I knew at the time that seemed to say what it was I did ... sort of like borrowing his thoughts for a moment—but all I came away with was a lonely feeling, like the way I sometimes felt when it was raining outside and I had to stay in the house.
(Later, near dusk, when we were sitting on the back porch of Aunt Trudy's, just the two of us, he said, "Some things aren't for sharing, Lee. You understand that? Everyone has his secrets. You hold yours close to you, and you stay away from those that belong to someone else." He looked at me. "Is that something an eight-year-old boy can understand?" I nodded, understanding only a little, but thinking back to how I had tried borrowing from him, and feeling ashamed.)
I finished my Eskimo Pie, did the stick up tight and proper in the wrapper, and placed it in the ashtray. We were approaching the foothills now, near the slight incline where brown grass gradually gave way to sparse patches of green foliage.
Coming the other way, I watched a logging truck accelerate out of the bend at the bottom of the foothills. A blue International. He was hauling a full load of Monterey pine, a familiar sight this time of year. The truck blew past us. A gust of warm summer air whistled through the windows.
I closed my eyes, feeling the warm, peaceful breath against my face, and suddenly the borrow I had tried to pull out of my grandfather just a few miles back was playing inside my head:
It's night, the sky crisp and clear, stars shimmering across a long stretch of railroad track. Grandpa Myles is up ahead, standing at the side of the track, a dimly-lit lantern on the ground next to him. In the shallow sphere of the light, I can see the dim outline of another man. He's kneeling, in the middle of the tracks, struggling to get his pants leg loose from a tie.
"Myles, you can't leave me here like this."
"That's the thing, you see, I can."
"But why?"
"Because ... it's a good time, a good place."
In the distance, a rumbling sound rises out of the still night,
"Time to be on my way, Larry."
"Jesus, Myles, please ..."
The whistling wind died away. I opened my eyes. Across the seat from me, Grandpa Myles had both hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, as if he were trying to hold onto something – anything – that was solid and real. I stared at him, overwhelmed, realizing he had shared something with me that I only partially understood, and knowing without a doubt I would never be able to forget the face of the man I had seen struggling on the tracks. It had been the face of someone who knew he was about to die.
I gazed at my grandfather for a long time, then asked the only question I could think to ask, “Why?"
"You and me, we have a gift," he said softly, a slight tremor in his voice. He still hadn't managed to unlock his hands from the steering wheel; the knuckles had turned nearly white. "You see things, don't you? You close your eyes sometimes, and ... and you just see things."
I nodded uneasily.
"What's that word you like to use?"
"Borrow."
"Yeah," he said, as if it was a good word for him too. "You close your eyes, and you borrow a look, don't you, Lee? Right inside a person's head."
I didn't say anything.
"But that's not the all of it, I bet. 'Cause if you're anything like me—and I'm betting my life you are—sometimes you can even make things ... happen. Can't you, my boy? Like moving the cereal box across the table when you don't feel like reaching for it."
"The man on the tracks?" I asked.
"His name was Johnson, Larry Johnson. He worked as a photographer for the Office of War Information ... it doesn't matter. It was a long time ago, and some things ... well, they're over the heads of little boys. He wasn't a bad man, but he wasn't a good man either. That's all little boys need to know. Even special boys like you."
"Did he die?"
"Yes.”
I fell silent, distantly aware of what it meant when you died. It was something bad, and it lasted forever. That was as much as I needed to know.
"I'm not proud of it," Grandpa Myles said. He looked at me, his eyes dark, his shoulders slumped, as if the weight of what he had done had grown heavier over the years. "It happened during the war, when I was working as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific. We were hauling oil, came up on a broken rail late one night, and this guy Johnson, who was supposed to be snapping off PR photographs ... him and I ... we'd had a little too much to drink. I don't even remember what the argument was about. All's I remember is walking along the tracks with him, thinking how much I'd like to tie him down till the next train came along ..."
My grandfather went into a short coughing jag then, finally tearing one hand away from the steering wheel long enough to cover his mouth. When he was done, his eyes were watery, and his voice had a new huskiness about it.
"That night, I guess I thought about it a little too much," he said solemnly. "It never should have happened. I lost control and a man died."
He looked at me again, his eyes not quite as dark as they had appeared before. "Am I scaring you with this?"
I was scared. Scared and fascinated and curious, all wound together like a tightly-coiled spring. I told him no, though. Sometimes it's just too hard to tell the truth.
"The only reason I'm telling you this, Lee, is because you and me ... we're two of a kind, you know. Sometimes it gets lonely, knowing you got a secret you can't tell anyone. It's like having a million dollars buried in the backyard, but you can't spend it 'cause you had to rob a bank to get it. You might live a whole lifetime without ever getting a chance to share that kind of a secret with someone. You understand?"
I nodded.
"There aren't many folks in the world who can ... borrow the way you and me can, Lee. I don't want to scare you. But at the same time, I want you to know you aren't the only one."
We drove in silence for a long time after that, Grandpa Myles with his eyes on the road, me staring out the window. Finally, he said, "There's something else you should know. That night, when Johnson died …”
I looked at him.
"Something happened to me that night. I guess some might call it guilt, but it was more than that. It was like ... you ever see black smoke shooting out the stack of a steam engine? Like that. A black cloud that started growing inside me. It's been growing inside me ever since, Lee." He looked across the seat at me, his face emotionless except for his eyes, which were as frightened as any eyes I had ever seen. "I think it's killing me," he said.
There are a lot of things you don't understand when you're eight years old. But one thing you've already learned by then is that it's better to say nothing when you're in over your head. I turned my attention back to the scenery, watching the landscape slide by, wondering what he had meant about the black cloud growing inside him. I'd had a headache once that felt like that.
When we drove down the gravel road to Aunt Trudy's place, he looked across the seat at me again, studying me. "Our secret?"
"Yeah," I said, knowing it was a secret I had already been keeping. Only now the secret was a little larger. And he had been right: there weren't that many people in the world who could borrow the way him and I could.
I've never met another one.
3.
1 always thought I'd remember Grandpa Myles as the old brakeman who took me down to the railyards on warm summer afternoons to watch the trains roll in from the south. On those rare occasions when a steam locomotive came through, he almost
always slipped into some sort of foggy recollection of years gone by. "That's an Alco," he'd say. "Manufactured by the American Locomotive Company. One of the best ever made. You don't see those anymore. Not since the diesels came along."
He would sigh then, his eyes dull, looking like someone who was happiest when reliving old memories. Those favored years had passed him a long time ago. But for Grandpa Myles, his best friends would always be the railroad, the war, and the steam engines.
Some six years later, in early 1970, my grandfather suffered a stroke that forced him to move in with Aunt Trudy. ("Where I can keep an eye on the old coot," she'd say in good humor.) The stroke left him partially paralyzed on the left side of his body, with almost no feeling in his arm and leg. It took months before he finally regained movement in his hand and the left side of his face. In the end, though, after all the improvement had run its course, his left arm continued to dangle uselessly at his side, and the only way he was able to get around was by dragging his leg behind him.
He refused a cane or a walker. Instead, he would lean his weight against the wall, or the back of a chair, or whatever happened to be handy that might support him. I guess I couldn't blame him for that (though Aunt Trudy certainly found it a nuisance having to walk every step with him just in case he tipped a little too far to one side). It was a difficult time for everyone in the family. This was a man who used to work on the railroad, who used to travel across the south on mighty steam engines hauling oil for the war effort, who used to drink until dawn in little out of the way bars in out of the way towns. Back then, he had been a free man. Now, suddenly, he had become a burden.
Through Shattered Glass Page 17