Locked Hearts

by D. Brown

  Maggie had forgotten and left the tea kettle whistling as she left with Sam.

  He set another log onto the flaming pyramid inside the stone circle.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” he said. “But we all felt we had to do something. Sam was a great friend to all of us, and we miss him already.”

  That’s when she saw the others.

  There was Bill and Dot Burnhart from three houses up the beach.

  Also, Bob and Bea O’Hara owners of O’Hara’s Pub on Butler Street, and their daughter Jade.

  Pearl Weams and Ginny Martin from Big Tybee Realty were there.

  These were new friends.

  People Sam knew recently, since their marriage.

  The old friends were almost all gone.

  Jerry Lee and Twyla Lewis were there.

  And of course, there was Wendy Finch too.

  Some she knew, just as many she didn’t, still, despite the rain and the cold, they came.

  They gathered in a tight circle about the fire to fight the rain’s chill, and seek warmth and comfort from each other. They said little other than a comment or a passing smile, something reminding them of Sam.

  There was no need for small talk.

  They all came to remember Sam.

  “Sorry to trouble you, Maggie,” Carl said. “But we had to come. Sam was our friend. He was a good man.”

  Carl stacked another log on the fire.

  “We want to remember him,” he said, “Figured the best way to remember Sam was to shine the light. You knew there was a party whenever you saw the fire burning at Sam’s place.”

  “Tybee Island will never be the same without him,” said Bob O‘Hara.

  “Maggie,” Wendy Finch said “I know you’d prefer to be alone with your thoughts right now, but we’d be honored if you would come and join us. No one should have to spend times like these alone. Sam showed us that,” her Sam, who spent so much of his life alone.

  “Sam was as much a part of my family as my own,” Jerry Lee said. “Sometimes he cared more about me than my own family. He was a brother to me. You are family too, Maggie, and now is the time for family.”

  She looked around at the porch her husband created, here where they found their own love among the beach treasures.

  Her husband is here, just like he promised, for always.

  “Can we be your family until yours gets here?”

  That’s when Maggie cried.

  59

  Maggie died in her sleep three days later.

  She died on a Friday, the day they were to scatter Sam’s ashes.

  She simply didn’t have the heart to go on.

  Not without Sam.

  The kids had all flown in for the weekend to keep her company. Sam’s kids came too. They fussed over her, attended to her every whim, and kept her busy with stories about their lives, their kids and the daily goings-on in hopes they could keep her mind off “things.”

  But, the “thing” is, Maggie missed Sam.

  He was gone, waiting for her again, somewhere.

  Sam, who had spent so much time waiting for her, Maggie didn’t want to have him wait any longer.

  We have all the time in the world, but never enough time to say I love you enough.

  It did pass too quickly.

  Maggie was tired.

  She excused herself after dinner, saying she just wanted to read a little and call it an early night.

  She kissed each of her children good night, hugged and kissed Sam’s kids, hugged all the grandkids and kissed their cheeks, then shuffled slowly off to bed.

  The nightstand lamp cast a soft, amber glow about her bedroom.

  She noticed the paperback lying on Sam’s nightstand, the one he’d been reading, but never finished.

  He was everywhere here, this house being now so much a part of Sam, like a favorite old shirt.

  His scent was here, his touch; his presence so strong Maggie could feel him standing beside her, or maybe off in the bathroom brushing his teeth, getting ready for bed himself.

  She lay down and after a moment, closed her eyes.

  So tired tonight, and she didn’t know why.

  Honestly though, she hadn’t slept well at all this week.

  Life isn’t going to be life without Sam here.

  Maggie felt the familiar touch of Sam’s hand on her shoulder.

  This was his way of reminding her to put some giddy-up into her step, it’s time to go.

  They didn’t want to be late.

  “You ready?”

  Maggie rolled over and opened her eyes. Her husband sat on the edge of the bed.

  Sam was dressed the way she remembered, his favorite cotton shirt cuffed at the sleeves, tan Dockers, Topsiders and of course, no socks.

  He was young again, like she remembered him the summer they first met.

  That familiar sparkle danced behind his eyes.

  A sarcastic smirk turned up the corners of his mouth, like this was all some grand practical joke and only he knew its outcome.

  “What kept you?” Maggie said.

  “Been here all along, sweetheart,” he said. “Leave it to a woman to keep Heaven waiting.”

  Sam held out his hand.

  “This is Heaven?” Maggie asked.

  She took Sam’s offered hand.

  “No Maggie, this is Tybee Island. Heaven is wherever I am with you.”

  Anna Beth found her mother curled in her sleep the next morning, a soft smile giving her face a tranquil expression of rediscovered peace.

  She only saw her mother smile like this whenever she’d steal side glances at Sam.

  On the nightstand next to the bed she found the pieced-together coffee cup, which she knew about, and a nine-millimeter bullet cartridge with a small nearly indiscernible dimple in the firing cap to show it had been shot, a bullet thrown into the ocean another lifetime ago, now sitting pristine and new next to the reassembled coffee mug.

  No one knew about the bullet.

  Their family scattered Sam and Maggie’s ashes along the beach in front of Sam’s place, mingling their ashes together as one, so in death, they would no longer be separated.

  Sam’s son Joe stood at the water line holding the ashes of his father in one hand and the ashes of the woman his father loved in the other.

  He smiled as he mingled them in a swirling gust of wind and let the ashes sprinkle upon the surf.

  All was as it should be.

  What had been two was forever again one.

  Sam wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Carl Brock stoked another bonfire, and this one burned brightly through the night.

  Jerry Lee read one of Sam’s poems, something he said talked about love better than that crap they wrote in First Corinthians.

  He added a quote something Sam had always tried to live his life by.

  “When you love truly love someone,” he said, “Everything else will work out just fine. All things eventually pass and everything will be all right. I promise.”

  They all came again, as they did with Sam, and stood around the fire.

  There were no tears this time, only smiles.

  They’re together again, and this time, heaven and hell can’t pull them apart.

  “Ordinary people,” Jerry Lee said in closing. “Living ordinary lives, yet finding extraordinary love.”

  A Cheshire grin moon smiled over the ocean, bouncing moonbeams off the gently pitching surf.

  A soft breeze kicked up from out of the south, bringing with it the faintest hint of rain.

  Someone must be cooking, they said, as the faint aroma of smoked ham danced above the meandering breeze.

  Sam’s favorite.

  D.P. Brown

  Moncks Corner, South Carolina

  October 2004 – March 2013

  A sneak preview Lunch Box

  Coming in July 2013

  to

  paperback and Kindle

  1

  The Lunch Box
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br />   If it had rained any harder the foreman would have called it all off today, and come back again tomorrow. They probably would have missed it altogether then.

  The lunch box they found buried in the dirt beneath the old oak tree.

  They were already two weeks behind schedule because of the lousy weather and he couldn’t afford anymore lost time to rain. The foreman figured a little mist never hurt anybody. Besides, his jobs were starting to back up. If he didn’t get this land cleared by the weekend, he’d have to postpone next week's job over in Commerce, and then the job behind that up in Hart County, and he didn’t want to do that.

  Money was money, and he was still feeling the sting from a lean winter.

  If only the damned weather would cooperate some.

  Just a little.

  The misting rain speckled his glasses. The breeze cutting through the valley carried a damp basement cold with it. Well, he thought as he regarded the gray soup hanging low overhead, the weather is cooperating.

  Just a little.

  The bulldozers and backhoes haven’t bogged down in the mud yet, so until one of them gets stuck in the orange quagmire known as Georgia clay, they were going to work.

  The land they were grading used to be part of an old farm. Just like the rest of the projects being developed here in North Georgia over the past five or so years, this one was no different. The old landowners, the Wade Whelchels, the Hubert Stephens, the Jess Heltons, the Oscar Trueloves and the Odum Smallwoods . . . the old family farmers had died off one by one, and the kids were either scattered to the four winds and didn’t have the time to maintain the family business, or they could no longer afford to sustain what had become a slowly dying American way of life.

  The foreman didn’t care.

  The kids sold off the land and made a fortune. They cried all the way to the damn bank. His job was to come in and grade the property, clear the land and get it ready for development. Concrete and asphalt crews were scheduled in here next week to start laying sidewalks and paving the streets, which meant his crew had to get busy, rain or shine.

  Roger Wallace, the site foreman, stood at the tailgate of his pickup truck, under the protective awning of the crew cab's lift gate and looked over the grading blueprint, stealing glances at the raw land, and then back at the blueprint, trying to visualize how this panned out in the end.

  First and foremost was the oak tree. It had to go.

  Three hundred years old. Thick, gnarled trunk wider around than a three-man hug, massive outstretched limbs throwing a wide canopy of shade about the rolling pastureland. The tree was probably as old as America was alive, but it had to come down.

  Roger didn't have time to mull over the tragedy of losing such a witness to history. That tree had the misfortune of growing right smack in the middle of the soon-to-be-graded Oak Hollow Way.

  Mother Nature should have taken all this into account when she allowed the seedling to take root. The tree was coming down this morning, and the big bulldozer was already at it. They couldn’t do anything as long as the tree stood in their way.

  Roger gave a tug at his ball cap and thought the quicker the tree comes down the sooner I can be eating lunch. His only other thought as the tree’s foundation cracked under the pressure of the bulldozer's shove, and a massive chunk of earth clinging to the root bed ripped free of the ancient oak when toppled on its side, was how it was a damn shame he wouldn't be able to use any of that lumber for firewood come next fall.

  The steady deep purr of the bulldozer stopped abruptly and a heavy blanket of silence settled over the wide pasture. A voice called from the distance, Harold Gainey, the bulldozer operator, and Roger looked up from his blueprint.

  “Hey Roger, check this out.”

  Harold trudged through the pasture's tall grass, holding what looked to be a large chunk of mud, crooked in his arm like a football.

  “Look what I found,” he said. “It came out of the ground with the tree.”

  What Harold held was a lunch box, caked with mud, rusted over, and dented in spots, one of the old metal kind, before they got cheap and were made out of plastic. It pulled a smile out of Roger’s scowl. He had one just like it in first grade: A National Football League lunch box.

  On one side, Fran Tarkenton, while he played for the New York Giants, had his arm cocked back to pass. On the other, old Lou "the Toe" Groza of the Cleveland Browns followed through on a field goal. Along the sides of the lunchbox were the logos of every NFL team at the time.

  The lunch box was also heavy.

  There was something inside.

  “You know Roger,” Harold said. “These old farmers were crazy as shithouse rats. They never trusted banks. They buried everything, from dead horses to ex-wives to money even. They buried their money in Mason jars in the back yard or out in pastures like this.”

  Roger spit a wad of tobacco juice.

  “That’s not a Mason jar Harold, it’s a lunch box.”

  “I know,” Harold grinned. “It’s bigger than a Mason jar. They buried these things someplace where they could be easily found.”

  Harold cut anxious glances from the lunch box to his boss and back to the lunch box, scraping his hand across the whisker stubble shadowing his jaw.

  “It’s pretty heavy. You think there's money in there?”

  “Can’t reckon,” Roger spit and regarded the rain and how they weren’t making much progress in this mud, “Only one way to find out.”

  “We split whatever's in there, fifty-fifty,” Harold said, calling ‘Shotgun’ on anything they found inside.

  Roger flipped the latch and popped open the lid.

  “Man oh man,” Harold said. “Would you look at that,” and his disappointment was evident.

  It wasn't money they found inside, but an odd, eclectic collection of things.

  These were a boy’s things.

  Mementos he supposed, wrapped in heavy plastic.

  An old baseball, autographed by Hank Aaron . . . okay, that might bring some money now that he’s the all-time home run king and in the Hall of Fame. Next he found an equally old Atlanta Braves baseball cap, the old wool kind, creased and faded from age and the elements.

  Next he removed one of those old iron die cast NASCAR replicas, painted red and sky blue, but now rusted from age and the ravages of being buried underground for God knows how long, a Galaxy 500 maybe, from the sixties, etched with the number 43 on the side.

  Also in the lunch box was one of those little troll dolls with the plastic gemstone eyes and the long multi-colored hair that fell to its feet in wild and stringy locks. The hair was gone and one of the eyes were missing.

  He also found a pink ribbon, wrapped around a lock of blonde hair, and a toy ring, the kind you either get at the dentist’s office or out of a Cracker Jack box.

  Last, he removed a thick sheath of what looked to be letters, wrapped in wax paper, folded over and tied off with another pink ribbon, probably part of the same ribbon that held the lock of hair.

  Roger peeled away the corner of wax paper and unfolded the letters.

  The first one, written on standard notebook paper, was written in the uneven script of a child, fourth grade maybe? Looked like a young boy’s uneven script, something he might have written when he was ten. Some words were misspelled, but that didn't make Roger any mind. He couldn't spell worth a damn either and he was past fifty.

  The first line of the letter said: To Channy, from Weazie.

  The rest of the letter read:

  Dear Channy,

  Today you and I buried this time capsule, like Mrs. Hatcher assigned us to do. What I didn’t tell you is I came back out here and dug it up. I wanted to put this letter inside too.

  I love you Channy.

  The guys at school will let me have it if they knew.

  They’ll kill me.

  But I do.

  And I wanted to tell somebody.

  I wanted to tell you.

  But gosh, you are my best fri
end too. How can I tell my best friend I love her? How can I tell the guys my best friend is a girl?

  Girls are gross.

  Well, not you though. But I don’t see you as a girl. I can’t stand the other girls, but you. Channy you are different. Every time I see you I feel like I want to throw up.

  That’s a good puke by the way.

  Bobby Brewster says that when you feel like Ralphin when you see a girl that means you love her. So I guess I love you because I feel like I'm about to barf even as I write this and Bobby Brewster says so, so I guess it really is so.

  Maybe one day, whenever we dig this up, maybe then I can tell you.

  Maybe then we will be married.

  The letter was signed simply . . . Weazie.

  The letter was the first of dozens of other letters, well over a hundred Roger guessed, his math skills weren’t much better than this spelling, and he assumed all were written to this Channy. The thick sheath barely fit into the lunch box. It looked like the author had added to the collection over time.

  Years of time it appeared.

  Roger grunted. He didn’t know what to make of this.

  Harold looked on in slack-jawed disappointment. He already had the money they were going to split spent a half a dozen ways: a new fishing boat, a dishwasher for Mickey so she would stop that damned complaining all the time, and hell, maybe even a new pickup if there was enough money left over.

  A waste of his damned time, that’s what Roger made of this. Harold dug up some kid’s lunch box, a long ago forgotten science project, a time capsule.

  There wasn’t any damned money in here.

  Just stuff.

  Kid's stuff.

  He tossed the lunch box into the open tray of his tool cabinet.

  “Just a bunch of junk,” he said and spat another wad of tobacco juice into the brown muck at his feet. “We didn’t get rich today, Harold. We’ll split another lottery ticket tonight if you want, but this stuff is nothing but useless junk.”

  Roger slammed the lift-gate shut and cut another look at the sinews of gray mist, draped like Spanish moss from the overhanging limbs of the sky. He didn't give the lunch box another thought until well . . . lunch.