by Wayward
*
This year’s Thanksgiving was only a few weeks after Dad’s funeral. I was under the table and listening to the adults. I saw lots of socks. It was hot under there. Outside the snow was dumping down, the roads were dangerous, nobody wanted to go home. The fire was humming, spoons dinged on plates, somebody was pouring coffee, my cousin Linda was playing the piano. I tried to listen my way through the noise and hear what they were saying about Dad.
The heating vent said: “Your Dad is in hell.”
I flew out from under the table, the tablecloth came off with me, all the dishes jumped and the coffee spilled, I was shouting that they were all liars, there wasn’t a car crash, Dad didn’t go to hell, where was Dad?
And for a second they all just looked at me.
*
I didn’t get in trouble for ripping the tablecloth off the table. Mom helped me get ready for bed and then went downstairs to say goodbye to everyone. Mom hadn’t made me clean up the action figures. They were still set up on the carpet.
The wind was rattling the window screen. The world was buried in snow. Everyone was going home. I watched all the cars’ red tail lights creep down the street, smaller and smaller, eaten by the blue dark. I heard Grandma cleaning up downstairs. Mom came back up and talked to me and tucked me in. Her face was scrunched up.
I asked why we couldn’t be at our own house.
Mom said it would be better if we stayed away from our house for a while.
After she left I laid there, not sleeping, as Mom helped Grandma finish cleaning and came upstairs and went to bed. Then everyone was asleep.
I was awake.
A voice was coming from the heating vent. The furnace at Grandma’s house had a metal mouth in every room, it had the whole house clutched up with aluminum throats and it was speaking quietly. I got out of bed and took the grate out of the vent and lay with my ear in the hole. The hot wind blew in my ear. I closed my eyes and I heard something like a man who lived in the furnace murmuring to himself, talking like he didn’t know I was listening. He talked on and on.
The man in the furnace stopped talking to himself and said in my ear:
“This is the devil’s radio.”
I jerked my ear away from the vent. Everyone else in the house was asleep. I was alone in the dark. I edged away and opened the door to my room. The hallway was dark, too. I wanted to turn on the lights. The furnace said no. I reached to turn them on anyway. The furnace said I’d better not turn them on or it would show me something I didn’t want to see.
I looked into Grandma’s room. She was asleep. The furnace blew its hot breath on her. I looked into Jenny’s room and Mom’s room. The furnace breathed over them too.
“I eat time,” said the furnace. “I eat their time, I eat your time, when I’m done eating their time you’ll be all alone. And when I’m done eating your time I’ll eat you.”
I was standing in the bathroom, looking in the dark mirror. My face looked wrong in the dark. The shadows were buzzing with shapes.
“Come downstairs,” said the furnace.
I walked down the dark stairs to the basement. The furnace crouched in the back of the storage room, an upside-down metal tree spreading its roots upwards throughout the house, dead but hissingly alive. It watched me with a flickering red eye and a steady orange eye, glowing on top of each other in the dry darkness.
I knew what it demanded. I ran back upstairs. I knew what would happen if I didn’t give it. I ran to my room and took Greedo and dumped it down the furnace’s throat. I heard him ding and tumble down to hell.
“Not enough,” said the furnace. “I’ll take Grandma first.”
I dumped down Hammerhead. Snaggletooth.
“More, more, more,” said the furnace.
I dumped down Walrus Man, heard him rattle and slide down the hot metal tunnels.
“Or maybe Mom,” said the furnace.
I took fistfuls of action figures and threw them down the vent. The furnace just hummed. My hands were shaking. My face was hot. The furnace ate them all.
*
In between the kitchen and the family room was a step. I was playing there with some wooden blocks Grandma had brought down from the attic. I was trying to build something that used every block but Jenny was being a baby, she kept taking the blocks.
“I need that,” she said, but I grabbed the blocks back, and she started crying again. All she did was cry. Mom and Grandma were right there and I expected to get in trouble. I always got in trouble when it came to Jenny, no matter what I did.
Not this time. Mom took Jenny away somewhere else, gently. Grandma and I were alone now.
Grandma was the opposite of Mom. Mom was slight and soft-spoken and always seemed to be fading away. Grandma was like a big friendly boat. It was impossible to imagine Grandma staying in bed for days. I remember Dad talking about how Grandma made it through the Depression. At first I just had the vague idea that meant Grandma had passed through some huge sadness.
“Your father would play with those blocks, right where you’re sitting,” said Grandma. “He’d sit there for hours while I stood over here and cooked. He had concentration.”
I was still sitting at the step with the blocks, looking up at her. She was my Grandma and I loved her, but she was so old and huge and wrinkled that she was a monster. The idea that she and I were of the same species, that she had ever been any age other than what she was now, did not fit.
“Where are your space toys?” she said.
Grandma didn’t miss a thing. If I lied about the action figures she would know. She’d get it out of me somehow that I’d thrown them down the vent. My face got hot and red. I stared at the blocks.
Grandma didn’t say anything for a while.
“I want to show you something else your father did,” said Grandma.
I didn’t say anything.
“I found it just a few years ago,” said Grandma. “I think he forgot he did it. It was a funny thing for him to do, for him to hide it there. He had imagination.”
Grandma was always telling me about what Dad did in that house as a boy. This was the window seat he liked to read in. That was where he wrote all over the wall and got in big trouble, and if you looked hard you could still kind of see it. Here in front of the fireplace was where he would put on his shows for everyone. But the way Grandma said, “it was a funny thing for him to do,” I already knew I didn’t want to see it. Still, Grandma was already taking me into the basement, I don’t think she even noticed I didn’t want to go down there, I heard Mom playing with Jenny somewhere else in the house, I so badly wanted to be with them instead but Grandma was taking me down the creaky wooden steps, steps which didn’t even have backs, so you could slip down through them if you were only a little smaller than me, she took me into the basement and all the way back to the furnace.
The flickering red eye and the steady orange eye stared blankly. Behind the furnace were two metal doors. The doors were set right in the concrete wall.
“The fireplace is right above us, these things are to catch the ash,” said Grandma, and opened one of them with a puff of white-gray dust.
A metal box stuck out of a heap of ash, about the size of a shoebox. Grandma took the box out.
“It was a strange little thing your father did,” said Grandma, and gave me the box.
She nodded at me. I opened it. Inside there was a small man made of corn husks.
There was something wrong about it.
“He got that at the state fair,” said Grandma. “It was his project. He made the rest himself. He made this little shrine.”
The corn husk doll was decorated with seeds and bits of wood and leaves and pine cones, but it was all frozen in clear glue. The doll originally had a blank face but my father had made eyes and a mouth out of seeds and hair from pine needles. Its expression was still blank. I suppose it should’ve all crumbled away a long time ago but then again it was trapped by the glue, the seeds frozen before the
y could sprout, crumbled away inside themselves.
The corn husk doll was looking at me. I did not want to look at that doll. I knew that Grandma was trying to share something about my Dad but I didn’t like that doll.
Grandma looked disappointed. I knew she thought I was a soft thing. When Grandpa was still alive he took me ice fishing once. I hated it because I was just standing there in front of a hole freezing to death doing nothing. When Grandpa finally pulled something out of that hole, it was even worse, because he made me hold the slimy thing for a picture, and all I wanted to do was get away, to go watch TV in the warm house. Maybe when Grandpa was five he would’ve loved to hold a dead fish but I was not in his Depression.
Grandma put the doll back in the box. The inside of the box was decorated too, with glued-in pennies and bits of fancy fabric and shrunken gray teeth and hair. They were his baby teeth, Grandma started to explain, this was his hair. I didn’t want to look at it. She closed the box. She put it away right back where Dad had left it when he was a little boy, tucked into that heap of ash.
*
That night I listened to the vent again.
What if, I thought, what if I were small enough to fall down into the vent myself, and enter the hot dark veins, and I could travel by secret tiny aluminum hallways, a secret maze in my father’s house, it all goes down to a hot belly, it all goes down to hell. But secret mazes can lead other places too. I imagined another vent, in a secret room that had no windows or doors. If I could find that secret room, I thought, Dad might be waiting for me in that secret room.
I put my ear on the vent and listened. Nobody was talking. But I knew the furnace was getting ready to ask for more. The corn husk man with his frozen face was waiting, hidden in that little box.
The vent kept blowing empty air.
*
We were bundled up in coats and hats and mittens and we were in our station wagon, headed out for the Christmas tree farm. Carols were playing on the radio. Mom was singing along, she wanted us all to sing along too, she really wanted it. Grandma was singing, and my cousins Cindy and Linda came along too, they were in junior high, they didn’t want to sing, they barely existed, they talked about things that didn’t even make sense. Grandma was driving and Mom was in the passenger seat and Jenny was in the middle of Cindy and Linda. I was in the way way back, bumping along, watching the road fly away backwards from under me. I didn’t have anything to do with them. The sky was an iron wall locked down tight, snow swarming and swimming around like it wanted in. Dirty melted snow made the carpet a wet dark brown. There was a crumpled cardboard thing for French fries down there and some dirty loose bolts and crumbs of something. The station wagon smelled like Dad. I was warm and I didn’t want to get out and go to the Christmas tree farm.
We crunched to a stop in the gravel. Cindy and Linda were complaining it was too cold and it would take forever to find a tree and why did they have to be there? They had an artificial tree at home. Grandma shut them down with a look. Mom’s cheeriness was getting brittle. This was something Mom needed. I waited for someone to open the back door so I could get out. The back door swung open and there was Mom. The stuffy smell flew out of the car and now it was sharp clean winter air on my face and in my lungs. I was wrapped up tight in sweaters and scarves and boots, and now Mom put my hood up and I heard the string rubbing busily inside the jacket as she drew it tight and tied a knot. I was as snug and warm as if I were sealed in a space suit. I was ready to help find the tree.
We got out to the barn where they were selling hot chocolate and doughnuts. Cindy and Linda wanted to stay there, they said it was too cold to look for a tree, they knew the boy selling doughnuts so they wanted to stay. Grandma bought me a doughnut and hot chocolate. The doughnut was tough and chewy and the hot chocolate burnt my tongue. I wasn’t going to finish my doughnut and Jenny asked for the rest but I said no and finished it anyway even though I didn’t like it so much.
We got into a wagon that was pulled by a tractor with some other family. We didn’t talk much to them. The tractor took us way out in the forest. Christmas trees were poking up everywhere in crooked lines, caked with snow and ice. The wagon jolted along the muddy trail and the tractor was loud and smelled like burning gas.
The wagon stopped and let us off and it drove away. We were left in a snowy grove. Christmas trees waited all around us, holding their breaths. All the trees looked the same. The snow was flying too thick and hard in my eyes. I felt the heat leaking out everywhere all over me.
Grandma and Mom and Jenny and Cindy and Linda were spreading out, wandering from tree to tree, and I started looking around too. The trees were rustling ranks of green and blue spikes shooting up and exploding outward, murmuring in the wind, they all crowded around me, getting in front of each other and shouting for attention, all while standing still and silent in the killing cold and darkening air. There were too many of them. I was freezing. I wanted to go back inside. I was afraid I might get lost. I started looking for Mom.
I turned around, and then I saw the blue tree.
The blue tree stood up straight and gorgeous. I walked around it. It was bushy and fat. I walked around it again. There wasn’t even a bad part you would stick against the wall. The air was full of fluttering ice but the blue tree glowed darkly, threw itself up into the sky, had the power of heaven crackling off its branches. I took off my gloves and let the blue needles brush across my hand. I shook the white glitter off the tree and it turned to water on my skin. It was a huge, silent, weird being. I felt it watching me.
This rough thing could be caught and carried home, I thought, a cold monster from the woods brought into our warm house. Its branches were a hundred prickly fingers, its bark rough hide sweating sap. I touched the crumpled wood and my fingers came away dirty. We might hang it with ornaments and make it pretty but it was a monster.
I stood by the tree. I didn’t want the other family to find it and take it home. I had to guard it. This was our tree.
Grandma came over, and after a while Mom with Jenny. Finally Cindy and Linda wandered over too. There was a lot of talk but I just had to wait it out. This was the tree. I knew it wanted to come home with us. I could feel it quiver. It was expecting it. It was on my side.
Grandma got the man with an ax. The man swung it, the ax bit into the trunk and I felt the tree sing. The man tugged out the ax, brushed it off, struck again. The tree shivered. Another hit and another, another, and with a splinter and groan the tree was crackling down and fell into the snow. The man dragged it over the mud and ice and heaved it into the truck.
Its glory folded up and dimmed and pulled in and was gone. I stood in the muddy road and looked at the tree. It was different now. Even its color seemed to have changed. Laying on the back of the wagon it was ridiculous. It was just a big green thing. I felt embarrassed. I might have made a mistake.
*
The furnace hated the Christmas tree.
I knew it as soon as we got home. We decorated the tree that afternoon. I could feel the furnace shoot hate at it.
Grandma brought crumbly boxes of ornaments and decorations down from the attic, little spicy-smelling tombs full of ancient crumpled newspapers and oddments. The furnace hated them all. The furnace filled the house with bad feeling. Everything should’ve been fine — Grandma had eggnog and hot chocolate and brunch, Christmas carols were playing on the record player, Cindy and Laura were actually being nice and helping, Mom seemed to be feeling better — but it wasn’t fine, and Jenny was hogging all the toy soldiers that were Dad’s even though she knew I should have them, and anyway she wasn’t even hanging the ornaments on the tree, she was whispering some whole other stupid story of her own with the soldiers in the corner. She was doing it all wrong, so I took them back and she screamed at me and I pushed her away and she started crying for no reason. She had taken the soldier that had the gun, all the rest of them had swords but I wanted the one with the gun. Give me the gun, I shouted, I want the gun!
<
br /> Mom left the room.
She walked out without saying anything. Cindy ran after Mom, and Linda swooped in to be with Jenny, who was still sniffling, and they were both glaring at me as if I was the one who had done something wrong. Grandma talked to me very seriously for a while, but nobody cared how selfish Jenny was. The Christmas tree looked ridiculous. We had made it look ridiculous. Outside it was a shaggy monster but in Grandma’s living room is was a tame, shrunken thing stuck in a plastic tree holder, scraping awkwardly against the ceiling, chained up in green and red and blue and yellow lights, glopped all over with tinsel. We had ruined it.
I said I was going to the bathroom. Instead I went to Mom’s room.
She was in bed, just like she used to be at home. Her face was between pillows.
“I just have to lie down,” she said. “I just need to rest.”
I climbed into bed with her, I burrowed under the covers next to her. She said nice things to me and kissed my forehead. Her face was wet. I fell asleep close to her in the middle of the afternoon. It was already dark out.
*
When I woke up I was in my own bed.
The house was dark. Nobody was up. I didn’t know how long I had been sleeping. Outside big fluffy snowflakes spilled down from the black sky. The furnace muttered steadily.
Something was different in the house.
I sat up. The furnace was louder. Angrier. I had put a pillow and a bunch of books on my vent so I wouldn’t have to hear it talking. My bedroom was cold. I heard the furnace growling in other rooms. The whole house was full of its roar. It wanted me for something. I heard something scraping through the ducts, something moving.
The furnace had sent something to visit me.
I didn’t move. A patient sliding sound came from under the floor, like a little body was squeezing through the air ducts. I watched the pillows and books on top of the vent. I imagined the crooked little man in the box in the basement, the corn husk with seeds in its eyes, misshapen face frozen under glue. I felt him in the veins of the house, scraping closer.