A Brilliant Death

by Yocum, Robin

  Things are okay over here. Well, as well as they can be in a war. Keep your grades up and get to college so you don’t have to go someplace like this.

  Go get the weights out of my garage and start using them. I wrote a letter to my mom and told her to let you have them. You’re old enough to be lifting them by now. I expect you to be playing for the Blue Devils when I get home.

  Be good.

  Your pal,

  Alex

  Mom thought I was asleep the morning she heard the news on the Steubenville radio station. She called up to my dad and tried to talk softly, but I still heard her. “They’re talking on the news about Alex Harmon. He stepped on a mine and got hurt real bad. He lost both of his legs.”

  I knew it wasn’t a dream. I wished it had been, and I tried to go back to sleep and make it go away. But, of course, it wouldn’t. I thought of how his muscular calves used to extend from his football pants and wondered how someone as invincible as Alex Harmon could be without legs. I got dressed and went downstairs. Mom was frying eggs in bacon grease, and the kitchen smelled of fat and coffee and browning bread. She and Dad exchanged looks, thinking that I didn’t see. She set a glass of orange juice in front of me and said, “Mitchell, I’ve got some bad news.”

  “I heard you tell Dad,” I said. I didn’t cry, but I wanted to. It was summer before they could bring Alex home. When they did, the American Legion held a parade in his honor. It was a fine day for a parade. The sun was high and the sky unusually clear for the Ohio Valley. It seemed that nearly everyone in town had lined the parade route to welcome Alex home and salute him for his efforts. I was standing outside our house at the corner of Second Street and Ohio Avenue when the police car and the American Legion honor guard rounded Clark’s Corner. I thought my legs would buckle. I was taking short, staccato breaths to keep from crying. My mom stood with Mrs. Winston and Mrs. Jermaine, and I tried to hide behind them. Mom asked me several times why I wasn’t acting very excited to see Alex. It was because I was terrified, but for some reason she didn’t understand that. She thought that I should be happy he was alive and that I was getting to see him again. She thought the mere fact that Alex had returned home breathing was reason to celebrate. “He’s lucky he’s alive,” she said.

  I was betting that Alex didn’t think he was so lucky. Here was this magnificent specimen of a man, a standout athlete, who would never again walk on his own legs. Hell, no, he wasn’t lucky.

  Behind the police car was the high school marching band, which was playing Stars and Stripes Forever. After the band, the hood of Myron Baughman’s white Cadillac convertible appeared from behind the trunk of the elm on the Clark property. Red, white, and blue crepe paper adorned the car. A cardboard sign on each front door proclaimed:

  Alex Harmon

  American Hero

  I stood behind my mother and saw Alex a full minute before he saw me. I tried unsuccessfully to blink away the tears that rolled down both cheeks, and I swiped them with my shirt sleeves. He looked so thin and pale. He was alone in the back seat, and it looked as though it was taking all his strength just to sit up. I wanted to run. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even move. When Alex saw me, his face lit up. He told Myron to stop. He smiled and waved me out to the car. “Go on,” my mom said, pushing my back. “He wants to see you.” I took a couple quick breaths, made a final swipe at my tears, and walked to the car, watching my shoes until I could feel the enamel of the back door with my hand.

  “Whatta ya say, champ. Jeez, it’s good to see you.” He put his left hand down for support, then reached out and shook my hand.

  I started crying again and this time made no effort to hide the tears. “Good to see you, too, Alex,” I said between sobs and sucks of air. I looked down to where his legs should have been. They were gone below the knees. Whatever was left was covered with the light blue blanket with silk trim. I shouldn’t have looked, but I couldn’t help myself. It was as if I wouldn’t believe it until I saw for myself.

  “Thanks for all the letters,” he said. “They really helped.”

  “You’re welcome.” It was the best I could muster.

  There was now some considerable distance between the band and the convertible. “Did you get those weights out of my garage?” I nodded. “Are you lifting them?”

  Again, I nodded. “A little.” It was a lie, but I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  “Get on them. As soon as I get used to the artificial legs they got for me, I want to come watch you play. Got it?”

  “Sure.” I stepped back from the car, realizing Mr. Baughman was getting impatient.

  Alex leaned toward me and said, “Don’t worry about me, champ. I’m going to be just fine. I promise.”

  I was still crying as Myron pulled away. When Alex was far enough down the street that he could no longer see me, I went into the house and cried some more.

  I slouched on the couch in our TV room, staring at a fishing show that didn’t interest me in the least. I couldn’t get past thinking how unfair it was. The drapes were pulled and the room was dark except for the dancing light from the screen. I was at peace with my misery, content to allow time to slowly wear away at the memory of a crippled Alex Harmon.

  My solitude, however, was short-lived, interrupted by the familiar sound of the feet of Travis Baron across our back porch. Travis had a distinctive pattern of approach, always entering the porch deck by leaping over the stairs, which was followed by two quick footfalls as he slowed before the door. I yelled for him to come in before he could knock. He cut through the kitchen and stopped at the entry of the TV room, giving his eyes a chance to adapt to the darkness. “What’s this, Dracula’s castle? You all right?” he asked, mostly feeling his way to my dad’s recliner.

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “Pretty rough seeing Alex like that, huh?”

  “It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  We sat a few minutes watching the television. It took him that long to get to the point of his visit. “How about riding out to the cemetery with me?” he asked.

  “You have an odd way of trying to cheer someone up,” I said, keeping my eyes on the television screen.

  “I want to go find my mom’s grave. I’ve never seen it.”

  “There’s a reason for that, Travis. They never found her body. She doesn’t have a grave.”

  “Well, right. But they put up some kind of memorial or monument to her at the New Alexandria Cemetery. I want to see if I can find it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I found a little newspaper article about it in my Grandma Baron’s Bible. It was in a box of stuff down in our basement.” He turned on the lamp on the end table and stood, pulling his wallet from his hip pocket. He pried it open with a thumb and carefully removed a yellowing, one-column newspaper clipping.

  Baron Memorial to Be Dedicated

  A memorial garden in memory of Amanda Baron, the Brilliant woman who was killed in October 1953 during a boating accident, will be dedicated at the New Alexandria Cemetery at 1 p.m. Saturday.

  Although her body was never found, Mrs. Baron is believed to have drowned after her boat was rammed by a coal barge.

  The garden is being sponsored by the Brilliant Church of Christ, where Mrs. Baron was a member. The service is open to the public.

  “No mention of that messy adultery thing,” Travis said.

  I grinned. I had wanted to sit and sulk away the rest of the day, but the worst of moods should not keep someone from helping their best friend locate a monument to his dead mother. I said, “You know, that place is huge, and there are thousands of graves out there. How do you propose to find it, just walk around until we spot it?”

  “There’s usually a map of the graves at the caretaker’s place. It’ll show us where it is.”

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “Television, man.”

  I nodded. “Let’s go.” Travis didn’t really need help finding the memorial. He just didn’t wan
t to be alone when he got there.

  Big Frank was out of town, heading for Fort Wayne with a load of cat food. It was a good time to go, since Travis was keeping his research a secret. We rode our bicycles to the New Alexandria Cemetery, which was six miles beyond Tarr’s Dome off of State Route 151 on a hillside that was once the location of a mining town. The caretaker’s home was located at the bottom of the hill, just inside the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the graveyard. No one was home when we got there, but a black notebook containing the plot maps was chained to a table on the front porch. It was cross-referenced in the back and contained the names of four members of the Baron family—Travis’s grandparents, his Uncle Tony, and Amanda, whose monument was not located anywhere near the other three.

  “They didn’t put the memorial with the rest of the family,” Travis said, noting that the family plot was clear across the cemetery, two hillsides away from his mother’s monument. “Section fourteen, row twelve,” he said. He took a minute to find the plot location on the map. “Here it is. It’s way back in the corner.” We followed the rutted gravel road over the most distant hill. Once over the knoll, the road took a precipitous drop, ending at a nameless stream that rimmed the cemetery to the east. In the northeasternmost corner of the cemetery, isolated by the knoll from the rest of the graves, in an area shaded by poplars, oaks, and maple trees, and covered with a thick blanket of grass, was a semicircle of four granite benches on which was inscribed: GOD, FAMILY, LOVE, and TRUST. In the middle of the benches was a three-by-four-foot slab of polished granite, on which were the words:

  IN LOVING MEMORY

  OF AMANDA VIRDON BARON

  BORN: April 15, 1931

  INTO GOD’S HANDS: October 2, 1953

  The Voice and the Heart of an Angel

  Dedicated August 19, 1955

  I stayed several steps behind as Travis knelt at the stone and ran his fingers over the letters of her name. “You didn’t know this was here?” I asked.

  “No idea.”

  He sat down in the grass next to the stone, his left leg tucked under his rear, and continued to trace the letters. “I wonder who cuts the grass,” he said.

  “The caretaker,” I said.

  “Yeah, but what about around the stone and the benches? This has been trimmed. Those other ones haven’t been trimmed.”

  I looked beyond the knoll to tombstones that had tall grass creeping up around them, some of which was so high it covered the names of the deceased. “Probably members of the church. They do stuff like that.”

  Travis nodded. “Prob’ly.” He got up and looked around, then walked toward the stream to a mound of grass trimmings, weeds, and branches that someone had gathered and piled neatly at the water’s edge. “Kind of nice down here, huh? Real peaceful.”

  I concurred. Travis kicked around at the pile of trimmings, then jerked his head up and scanned the area, like a nervous camper that had just heard a noise in the night. He asked, “This little garden is the only spot in this part of the cemetery that’s been maintained, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  “Then these trimmings had to come from around my mom’s monument.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  Travis reached into the pile and pulled out a withered bouquet of daisies and lilies. “Then who left these?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  In that fall of 1967, I was a freshman and an expendable member of a very poor varsity football team. The days of Alex Harmon, when the Blue Devils had been the class of the Big Valley Athletic Conference, seemed a lifetime past. During summer two-a-day practices, I was relegated to the unit that was fondly referred to by one of two endearing terms, “cannon fodder” or “scrimmage bait,” which meant we were draped in gaudy yellow vests, designating us as the opponent, and used as sacrificial lambs against the first string. On this particular day, a torrid August afternoon where the meager breeze served only to lift dust from the practice field to our nostrils, the defensive middle guard on our cannon fodder squad had been taking a tremendous beating and decided to suddenly become ill with a mysterious stomach virus, and I was recruited from my defensive back position to middle guard—all burly 117 pounds of me. Our center was Rex Tate, who wasn’t all that good—like most of our team—but he outweighed me by 110 pounds. Thus, I continued to spend the rest of the afternoon in the defensive backfield because that’s where he kept knocking me, much to the delight of the coaches. It made for a miserable day.

  It had been several hours since practice ended, and I was resting on the back porch swing, nursing an orange juice, a bruised body, and a badly battered ego, when I saw Travis heading down the alley toward the house.

  “Jeeesus, what happened to you?” he asked.

  “Oh, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon being Rex Tate’s personal punching bag.”

  “Looks like he had a good day.”

  I turned my head, slowly and painfully, toward Travis and nodded. “I think he rather enjoyed it, yes.”

  “I’ve got some good news,” Travis said, taking a seat on the porch deck, resting his back against one of the wooden supports. “I’ve come up with a plan.”

  “A plan?” I sipped my juice and frowned. “A plan for what?”

  Travis’s mouth dropped. “My plan, you know, my plan for . . .” Travis twice arched his brows.

  It had been several months since our carp shoot and a month since our trip to the cemetery, and I had temporarily forgotten about his latest project, which he had named Operation Amanda. “Sorry, Trav. I forgot. Your plan, what is it?”

  Travis leaned forward and motioned for me to do the same, which took no small effort as I was bruised from my shoulders to my kidneys. He whispered, “I remember a long time ago, Big Frank sent me up to the attic to get something. He’s gotten so fat he can’t get up there anymore. Anyway, I remember that Frank’s got all these old boxes full of junk up there. I’ll bet there’s something in there that would tell me about her.”

  “That’s it? That’s your big plan? Sneak up to your own attic?”

  “It’s not as simple as it sounds,” Travis said, annoyed at my response. “The only way to get up there is through an access panel in the closet ceiling in Frank’s bedroom, and the attic isn’t finished. It’s just a bunch of rafters with a couple of boards across them to stand on, and it’s like walking in a cave, darker than hell. I’m going to need some help.”

  “Uh-huh, and you want me to climb up there with you?”

  “You said you would help.”

  “Have you lost your marbles? I said I’d help, but I didn’t know that meant sneaking into Big Frank’s bedroom! You neglected to tell me that little fact.” My blustering made my stomach and chest ache.

  “Well, at the time I didn’t know that, either. I just thought of this the other day. Come on, man, be a buddy. You said you were going to ask your mom about it for me, and I’ll bet you forgot that, too.”

  “Ask his mother what?” my mom chimed in, having just stepped onto the porch after picking a basket of grapes from the arbor at the back of our house.

  “Oh, ah, Travis wants to know if I can go camping with him Saturday night. Is that okay?”

  My mother squinted and said, “You know, dear, your Adam’s apple jiggles something terrible when you lie.” She turned to Travis. “What was he supposed to ask me about, Travis?”

  “I wanted him to ask you if you knew anything about how my mom died.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence, and I could tell by the way her face had puckered up that she was wishing she had just answered the camping question. I smirked.

  “Why, she drowned in the river, sweetheart.”

  “I know that, Mrs. Malone, but how? She was out on a boat with her boyfriend? Do you know who he was?”

  As the red flush consumed my mother’s neck, she looked away from Travis and started toward the back door. “I think that’s something that you’d better just talk to your father about,”
she said, disappearing into the kitchen.

  Travis looked at me and shrugged. “See what I mean? No one wants to talk about it. It’s like everyone in this town is trying to keep a big secret from me.”

  The implication was obvious. “Trav, I don’t know anything. Honest. If I did, I’d tell you. And, against my better judgment, I’ll help you look through the attic. When do you want to do this bit of exploration?”

  “I don’t know yet. Soon. The next time Big Frank’s out of town.”

  I snorted a burst of laughter that sent daggers though my chest. “When Big Frank’s out of town? Padnah, that’s a given if you want my help.” I looked over to make sure my mom wasn’t listening through the screen door. “Just out of curiosity, what do you think Big Frank would do if he found out you were snooping around in his attic looking for information about your mom?”

  Travis shrugged, a sign that he was well aware of the ramifications but preferred not to think about them, or at least discuss them with me. For all his bravado, I knew Travis was terrified of Big Frank. A year earlier, we were watching a war movie at his place when Big Frank was on a road trip. The soldier on the screen was making his way through a mine field, feeling his way through the sandy earth with his toes, trying to get to his injured buddy. It was a very tense scene, and when it was over Travis said, “That’s exactly what it’s like living here with Big Frank. You creep along, trying to be quiet, trying to be careful, trying to stay hidden because you never know when you’re going to trigger one of the mines. Remember when I asked for the money to go to the show and he backhanded me?”

  “Vividly,” I said.

  We were twelve and wanted to take the bus to Steubenville to see the movie The Dirty Dozen. I had permission and my three dollars. We needed only to secure three dollars for Travis. Permission was not a problem, as Big Frank wouldn’t have cared if Travis hopped on a rocket to the moon. As we stepped onto the back porch, I could see his massive outline through the gray mesh of the screen door. He was sitting at the table, his belly stretching the seams of a sleeveless undershirt, his forearms resting on the table’s white baked enamel surface. It was barely one p.m., but standing at attention before him was an amber phalanx of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon longnecks, the bottoms of which were full of soggy ashes and butts.