Cages & Those Who Hold the Keys

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Alan looked heartbroken. “Not even a little?”

  Marian shrugged. “Maybe a little. But what good’s that, what good is a little?”

  A few days later Grampa insisted that he was well enough to go do his own Christmas shopping, and Marian’s mother made no attempt to stop him. When he came back with all the presents his check allowed him to afford he told everyone that he’d bought himself— of all

  things— a 45 r.p.m. record of some Neil Diamond song.

  “I never bought a record before, but they was playing’ this in the store where I was shopping and it was kinda pretty (which he pronounced ‘purdy’) so I bought it.” After dinner when Mom was doing the dishes he went into the front room and put the record on Mom’s old table-top hi-fi, then sat in the reading chair and listened to it. Marian stood in the doorway and watched Grampa as he closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair and seemed to...deflate like a balloon, sort-of, just a little bit.

  She didn’t say anything because he looked tired, so she just stood there and listened to the record. It was a song called “Morningside” and it was about this old man who lived alone and had no friends and when he died no one cried, and then people went to collect his things and they found this table he’d been building for a long time, and it was a beautiful table, the most beautiful table any of them had ever seen, and when they were moving it, they turned it upside-down and saw that he’d written a message underneath it that said for my children.

  It was the saddest and most awful depressing song Marian had ever heard; sadder even more than “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

  When the record was over the arm lifted up and swung back and set itself back down, the needle easing into the grooves with a brief clikkity-click before the song started again.

  Grampa opened his eyes and rolled his head over and saw Marian standing there.

  “That’s kinda pretty in a...in a way, ain’t it?” he asked, gesturing for her to climb up on his knee.

  “Yes, it is,” she said. And that wasn’t a lie; it was pretty, but it was sad, too, and Marian didn’t understand how something could be so sweet and so depressing at the same time.

  Later that night Grampa was lying in his bed in the middle room and asked Mom if he could have a while alone with Marian and Alan. Mom said sure and kissed him goodnight. It was the first time Marian could remember seeing her mother kiss Grampa.

  After Mom went to bed Grampa told Alan to go get him a small a can of soda pop and some chips, he was going to tell them a special story. When they were all situated and sipping away, he began.

  “I wasn’t too good to your mother when she was a little girl,” he said. “I was young and had all this Get Up and Go. I liked to drink me a mighty good time, I did...so I’s never around much. That’s probably why your Grandma and me never made it. I left her to take care of your mother all by herself. That was back during the Depression. Thing’s weren’t good for a woman with a kid and no husband then. County had to finally take your mother away and put her in a children’s home for a few years...until your Grandma could get enough money to give her a proper upbringing.

  “Anyway...that ain’t got a lot to do with what I wanted to tell you, but I seen the way you two’ve been watching me and your mother, and I know you’re not stupid kids so you were probably wondering. I just thought you ought to know.” He reached down under the blankets and took out a bottle. It was like no other bottle Marian had ever seen. It was made out of stone, and stoppered with an old cork. She was about to ask what it was but then Grampa started talking again; and all the time, his finger kept stroking the bottle’s stone surface. “I got myself shot overseas during the war and it did something to the bones in my leg and the doctors, they had to insert all these pins and build me a new kneecap and calf-bone—it was awful. Thing is, when this happened, I only had ten months of service left. I was disabled bad enough that I couldn’t return to combat but not so bad that they’d give me an early discharge, so they sent me back home and assigned me guard duty at one of them camps they set up here in the states to hold all those Jap-Americans.

  “I guarded the gate at the south end of the camp. It was a pretty big camp, kind of triangle-shaped, with watchtowers and searchlights and barbed wire, the whole shebang. There was this old Jap tailor being held there with his family and this guy, he started talking to me during my watch every night. This guy was working on a quilt, you see, and since a needle was considered a weapon he could only work on the thing while a guard watched him, and when he was done for the night he’d have to give the needle back. Well, I was the guy who pulled ‘Needle Patrol.’

  “The old guy told me that this thing he was working on was a ‘memory quilt’ that he was making from all the pieces of his family’s history. I guess he’d been working on the thing section by section for most of his life. It’d been started by his great-great-great-great-grandfather. The tailor, he had part of the blanket his own mother had used to wrap him in when he was born, plus he had his son’s first sleeping gown, the tea-dress his daughter had worn when she was four, a piece of a velvet slipper worn by his wife the night she gave birth to their son....

  “What he’d do, see, is he’d cut the material into a certain shape and then use stuff like paint or other pieces of cloth stuffed with cotton in order to make pictures or symbols on each of the patches. He’d start at one corner of the quilt with the first patch and tell me who it had belonged to, what they’d done for a living, where they’d lived, what they’d looked like, how many kids they’d had, the names of their kids and their kids’ kids, describe the house they had lived in, the countryside where the house’d been...it was really something. Made me feel good, listening to this old guy’s stories, ‘cause the guy trusted me enough to tell me these things, you see? Even though he was a prisoner of war and I was his guard, he told me these things.

  “It also made me feel kind of sad, ‘cause I’d get to thinking about how most people don’t even know their great-grandma’s maiden name, let alone the story of her whole life. But this old Jap— ‘scuse me, I guess I really oughtn’t use that word, should I? Don’t show the proper respect for the man or his culture— but you gotta understand, back then, the Japs were the enemy, what with bombing Pearl Harbor and all....

  “Where was I? Oh yeah—this old tailor, he knew the history of every last member of his family. He’d finish talking about the first patch, then he’d keep going, talking on about what all the paintings and symbols and shapes meant, and by the time he came round to the last completed patch in the quilt, he’d covered something like six hundred years of his family’s history. ‘Every patch have hundred-hundred stories.’ That’s what the old guy said.

  “The idea was that the quilt represented all the memories of your life—not just your own, but them ones that was passed down to you from your ancestors, too. The deal was, at the end of your life, you were supposed to give the quilt to a younger member of your family and it’d be up to them to keeping adding to it; that way, the spirit never really died because there’d always be someone and something to remember that you’d existed, that your life’d meant something. This old tailor was really concerned about that. He said that a person died twice when others forget that they’d lived.

  “‘Bout six months after I started Needle Patrol the old tailor came down with a bad case of hepatitis and had to be isolated from everyone else. While this guy was in the infirmary the camp got orders to transfer a hundred or so prisoners, and the old guy’s family was in the transfer group. I tried to stop it but nobody’d lift a finger to help—one sergeant even threatened to have me brought up on charges if I didn’t let it drop. In the meantime, the tailor developed a whole damn slew of secondary infections and kept getting worse, feverish and hallucinating, trying to get out of bed and babbling in his sleep. He lingered for about a week, then he died. As much as I disliked Japs at that time, I damn near cried when I heard the news.

  “The day after the tailor died I was typing u
p all the guards’ weekly reports—you know, them hour-by-hour, night-by-night deals. Turned out that the three watchtower guards—and mind you, these towers was quite a distance from each other—but all three of them reported seeing this old tailor at the same time, at exactly 3:47 in the morning. And all three of them said he was carrying his quilt. I read that and got cold all over, so I called the infirmary to check on what time the tailor had died. He died at 3:47 in the morning, all right, but he died the night after the guards reported seeing him—up till then, he’d been in a coma for most of the week.

  “I tried to track down his family but didn’t have any luck. It wouldn’t have mattered much, anyway, ‘cause the quilt come up missing.

  “After the war ended and I was discharged, I decided to take your Grandma to New York. See, we’d gotten married about two weeks before I shipped out and we never got the chance to have a real honeymoon. So we went there and saw a couple of Broadway shows and went shopping and had a pretty good time. On our last day there, though, we started wandering around Manhattan, stopping at all these little shops. We came across this one antique store that had all this ‘Early Pioneer’ stuff displayed in its window. Your Grandma stopped to take a look at this big ol’ ottoman in the window and asked me if I thought there were people fool enough to pay six-hundred dollars for a footstool. I didn’t answer her. I let go of her hand and went running into that store, climbed over some tables and such to get in the window, and I tore this dusty old blanket off the back of a rocking chair.

  “It was the quilt that Japanese tailor’d been working on in the camp. They only wanted forty dollars for it so you bet your butt I slapped down the cash. We took it back to our hotel room and spread it out on the bed—oh, it was such a beautiful thing. All the colors and pictures, the craftsmanship...I got teary-eyed all over again. But the thing that really got me was that, down in the right-hand corner of the quilt, there was this one patch that had these figures stitched into them. Four figures. Three of them was positioned way up high above the fourth one, and they formed a triangle. The fourth figure was down below, walking kind of all stooped over and carrying what you’d think was a bunch of clothes. I took one look and knew what it was—it was a picture of that tailor’s spirit carrying his quilt, walking around the camp for the last time, looking around for someone to pass his memories on to because he couldn’t find his family.”

  By now he’d slipped the stone bottle back under the blankets. He lay on his side, looking at them, his bone-thin hands kneading the pillow. “That’s sort of what I’m trying to do here, you understand? I know that if I was to die real soon I wouldn’t have no finished tapestry to show...mine’s got all these holes in them. I wanna have a whole one, a finished one. I don’t much fancy wandering’ around all-blessed Night because God don’t like what I show Him. I want to fill in the holes I made.” He smiled. “I love you two kids. I truly do. And I love your mom and your Grandma and your dad, too. They’re all real fine people. I just want you all to ...I just wanted to tell you about that.”

  “Grampa,” said Alan, softly. “Whatever happened to that man’s quilt?”

  Grampa pointed to his top blanket. Marian and Alan looked at one another and shrugged, then Grampa started to pull down the blanket but didn’t have the energy to finish, so they did it for him.

  Underneath the top blanket lay the quilt. Even though they could see only very little of it, both Alan and Marian knew it was probably the most beautiful thing they’d ever see.

  “I wanna...I wanna be buried with this,” said Grampa. “I already told your dad that.” He

  gestured for Marian to lean down close so her could kiss her good-night. “Hon, I need to be alone with your brother for a few minutes, okay?”

  “... ‘kay.”

  “Good girl. You run along to bed and I’ll see you in the morning.

  Marian decided to sleep downstairs that night in case he woke up and needed something, so she went into the living room and laid down on the sofa.

  She watched as Grampa gave Alan the stone bottle and explained something to him. Her brother looked so serious as he listened, more like an adult than a nine-year-old. Then she lifted her head and overheard Grampa say, “...wait here with me until your dad gets home...” but then she was too tired to keep her head up.

  She woke up around two-thirty in the morning. Lifting her head, she saw her Dad’s work boots setting next to the door. She wondered if he’d had a good night at work. Maybe he could quit soon, like he wanted, and start his own building business. She hoped so. It bothered her that Dad was never home nights.

  She heard Grampa tapping against the railing of his bed with something. She went to him.

  “You got good ears, little girl. You’ll go far.” He tried to raise himself up but couldn’t.

  “I gotta pee,” he said. Marian wanted to go wake Alan or Dad but Grampa wouldn’t hear of it. He finally laid down and pointed to his drinking glass. “Why don’t you empty that damn thing out and I’ll ...I’ll use it.” She did as he asked, carrying the glass into the kitchen and pouring its contents down the sink. When she came back in Grampa had his hands at his sides and was staring at the ceiling.

  “Marian, I hate like hell to ask this, hon, but…well...I can’t seem to move my hands. Would you mind, uh...?” Marian already had him out and in the cup, so there was no need for him to finish.

  “You’re a good girl,” he said. “You make your mom rind dad real proud, you hear?”

  “Yes sir,” she said. His eyes then lit up, but only for a few moments.

  “How’s about puttin’...puttin’ my record on real low so’s we don’t wake the whole house? I’d kinda like to hear it.”

  Again Marian did as she was asked.

  When she came back Grampa was desperately trying to empty his bladder but couldn’t get anything to come out. She wiped his forehead, then put her hand on Grampa’s abdomen, pushing down gently. After a few moments the pained expression on his face relaxed as the urine started to fill the cup. He soon finished and nodded his thanks. Marian took the cup into the bathroom to empty it.

  It was full of blood.

  She washed her hands afterward and then asked him if there was anything else he needed.

  “Could you maybe fix it so my record would play over a few times?”

  She did, then kissed him good-night again, and went back to the darkness of the living room, where she sat on the sofa and listened for a while before falling asleep again, hoping that Grampa would feel better on the morningside.

  When she woke up there was Mom, holding Grampa’s head in her lap, rocking back and forth, stroking his hair and crying. “Yes, that’s it...go to sleep, shh, that’s it, you rest now. You rest....”

  Alan came over and hugged Marian. They stayed like that until Mom looked up and saw them and told them to come over and say good-bye to Grampa. Marian was suddenly afraid of the thing that mom was holding in her arms. It wasn’t Grampa. It didn’t even look like a human being.

  She pulled away from her brother and saw that some of Grampa’s blood was still on her fingers.

  It took her forever to get that hand clean.

  5

  Press seam allowances toward the darker fabric. Cut apart in pairs. The squares are in their proper color placement and ready for sewing. Place the first pairs right sides together and sew into four patches.

  * * *

  Alan pressed the top of his baseball cap to make sure it was still in place, then reached into one of his pants pockets and removed the stone bottle. “When Dad came home that night Grampa had both of us cut our thumbs and put some of our blood into this bottle, along with his. Then he gave it to Dad to keep until it would be time to pass it on to me.” He shrugged. “Guess it was some kind of Irish thing, some legend that our great-great-grandfather brought with him when he came to the States.”

  “What are you supposed to do with it?”

  Alan shook his head. “I can’t tell you yet.” He lif
ted the bottle into the light, slowly turning it from side to side, admiring it. “There’s something like twelve generations’ worth of Quinlan-men’s blood in here.” He looked straight at her.

  “You’re now the only Quinlan woman left who can willingly carry on the family’s bloodline, so it’s your time now.”

  Of all the things that raced through her mind at that moment, Marian found herself focusing on one word: willingly.

  Alan took hold of her arms and pulled her to her feet. Jack reached up and—like something out of a cartoon or a Washington Irving story—removed his head from his shoulders and held it in front of him, his twig-fingers grasping the stem and removing it from the top of his head.

  “Not yet,” said Alan to Jack as he took hold of Marian’s injured wrist, removed the dressing, and pushed on her wound until it burst open, dripping blood into the stone bottle.

  Jack guided his head under the flow, trying to ignite his flame with Marian’s blood.

  “Stop it,” she said through clenched teeth, wriggling against her brother’s grip but he was stronger than she remembered. He increased the pressure on her arm, pulling it toward the pumpkin while Jack loomed closer, his glow dimming, his form somehow larger and more powerful.

  “We need to do it this way,” said Alan. “Just a little more blood, please.”

  “Jack Pumpkinhead’s lonely, hon,” said the thing holding its own pumpkin head. “I want our family together again.”

  Marian took a deep breath, twisting her wrist as some of her blood slopped into the jack-o’-lantern, then kicked back, the heel of her shoe connecting solidly with Alan’s shin. He howled and released her and Marian made a beeline for the back door because there was no way in hell she’d make it past both of them to the front door. Ignoring Alan’s calling her name, she

  made her way into the kitchen and toward the back porch when she was struck in the face by a tree limb and fell backward against the sink counter.