by Tia Wilson
“You can have my room. I can sleep down here,” I said as I tried to come up with any kind of solution.
He looked away from me and I had caught the glisten of tears in his eyes. The sight of the tears swelling at the cusp before they spilled down his cheeks sent me over the edge and I started wailing. I got up from the bed and kicked one of his pile of books over as I stormed out and climbed the stairs away from him.
“Sasha please,” he called after me in a cracked voice, “Let me explain to you about the move.”
I didn't want to listen and when I think back on it now I can feel my cheeks redden. Worse behaviour from me was still on the horizon. I spent the next two days in my room alternating between crying and lying wide eyed and exhausted staring up at my ceiling. Every time I caught sight of any of the books that Tyron had gifted me I would start up again until my throat was raw from emotion.
My mother and father took it in turns to try to coax me out of my room. I wouldn't listen and when my mother told me Tyron was leaving in two days I became more closed off. “I never want to see him again,” I said with the ferocity of a child.
On the day of his departure I wouldn't leave my room and when he tried to enter I screamed and shouted like I was being attacked until he turned and left with his head bowed and his eyes tearing up. I slammed my bedroom door and buried my head under my pillow as I wailed with a broken heart. It wasn't until I heard the sound of my fathers car starting up that a small part of me broke like a brittle twig. I jumped from my bed and ran down the hall to the living room. I ran to the front window and watched as my fathers car pulled away from the house and drove away. The last look I got of my uncle was a glimpse of the side of his face, his head was down and I could see tears streaming from his eyes.
I ran to the front door with tears spilling down my cheeks and my chest heaving as I tried to catch a breath. I fumbled at the door and my fingers wouldn't work as I tried to open the lock. My mother rushed from the kitchen and swept me into her arms as she tried to absorb all my emotions. It didn’t work. I pressed my face into my mothers neck as I wept and didn't stop until I was numb.
That night I dreamt of my uncle running through the outback of Australia fighting a crocodile the size of a bus. While he was fighting the beast a snake was wriggling across the ground and I just knew he was going to bite my uncle and hurt him. I tried to scream out to him and my voice came out no louder than a mouse until I woke up in bed soaked in sweat and staring into the darkness of my room.
The following morning while I was eating a cereal at the kitchen table and feeling in a total daze, my mother sat down across from me and said, “Tyron loved you very much. I think you should go down to the basement. He left you a gift.”
I dropped my spoon into the bowl with a clatter and walked on wobbly legs towards the basement door. In my child's mind I thought that the surprise was going to be Tyron sitting in his favourite chair and ploughing through another book.
At the bottom of the stairs I knew he wasn't there. The basement already felt different, empty and lacking warmth. I turned the corner and saw the gift sitting on his foldout bed, now with all the blankets and covers removed. I approached it slowly and made a promise to myself I wouldn't cry.
Sitting on the bed was a book wrapped in purple tissue paper and secured with a length of twine. I sat on the bed and picked up the gift. I could feel the weight and sturdiness of a hardback book. I rested it on my lap and looked at the neat knot keeping it all held together. I pulled one end of the twine and it opened and fell away. The paper crinkled as I slowly pulled it open, careful not to rip it. A light fragrance wafted up from the paper. I folded back the layers and it revealed a hard back edition of The marrow of tradition. I ran my finger along the title and followed the swoops and curls of the cursive writing. The letters were gold against the blackness of the cover and when I lifted the book up to marvel at the gift I saw that the page edges were also gilded in gold.
I put the book on my lap and opened to the first page and my heart skipped a beat. Below the title of the book and written in my uncles beautiful script was the inscription, “Keep on striving to be a better person. You hold the key in your hand, from Tyron.”
I ran my finger across what he had written and my tears stopped for the first time in what felt like days. I would never stop missing my uncle and the book he left me and every one I read after that formed a connection between us that distance could never diminish.
The second person who deeply effected me was my grandmother. While my uncle opened me up to the world of the brain and a rich interior life, my Grandmother was my guide into the world of the heart. On my most stressed out days when I think I am being perceived as an unfeeling robot I often think back to my grandmother and the weekends spent in her small bungalow. She helped me become a more rounded person and helped me to see it was ok to peek my head up from the latest book I was absorbed in and get involved with the people around me. She helped me to come out of my shell and was just as influential on my formative years as my uncle.
When I was a young girl there was nothing I used to love more then curling up on my grandmothers lap. She was known as the indomitable Ms. Billy Lee to all who knew her and while I was on her lap I would listen to her tell me stories of her life in a far off distant time period I could hardly wrap my young brain around. A time filled with a great depression, segregation, and all out hardship for our people. She would talk of an America which had changed in some ways and still in others, lurking right below the surface stayed the same.
She told me about houses made of the cheapest wood and covered in rigid paper smeared in tar. Endless storms of dust that wiped clean the land as far as the eye could see. She told me the look the people around her would get, a hungry animal desperation that she hoped never to see again. She told me about one of the happiest days she remembered when a boy older then her had managed to get his hands on a cup of sugar as white as snow. An old man by the name of Clancy Wilson showed the boy how to boil the sugar in water and use the roots of the chicory plant for flavouring. The mixture was boiled up over an open fire and when it became thick enough that a stick stood straight up the man poured the molten sugar out onto a sheet of metal that he had scavenged. My grandmother and at least twenty other kids watched as old Clancy poured the milky concoction in a thin layer on the metal. The old man then made them wait an agonising hour when he took the sheet away and rested it on his bed in his shack.
My grandmother told me that they must of ran past old Clancy sitting on an upturned bucket outside his shack a hundred times in the hour, bothering him and yelling and screaming about the sugar. At the end of the hour he brought the sheet out and the sugar had taken on a slight yellow hue and it shone with a high gloss.
Clancy rested the sheet across his knees and with the handle of his knife used for whittling he whacked the surface of the hardened sugar. It cracked like glass, with spidery fractures spread out from the point of impact. The kids all leaned forward waiting for what was to come next. Clancy broke off a piece the size of his thumbnail and popped it in his mouth. He let out a moan of happiness and the kids leaned in even closer with their mouths hanging open. Clancy passed each kid out a sliver as big as the palm of theirs hands.
My grandmother would close her eyes when she spoke about the first lick of the hard candy. Up until then she had never tasted something so sweet. She bit into it and chomped on a chunk of it as many kids around her did the same. She then ran to the edge of the camp with the sticky shard in her hand and showed it to her mother. Her mother took a tiny nibble from the corner and let my grandmother keep the rest for herself. She made that shard of hard candy last for two weeks. She wrapped it in a piece of muslin and kept it under her pillow. Every morning before she went to fetch water from the shared well she would break off a tiny piece of the sugar candy and allow it to melt on her tongue. My grandmother said that those tiny bites every morning was the closest she ever got to pure bliss in her life.
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She was filled with an endless amount of stories that I was always transfixed by. Her tales were filled with the hardships of her early life and the changes she had lived through in her life, seeing things she never thought would change and then also seeing the same traits shift and hide in the shadows and never really going away. She told me stories filled with adventure about relatives from long ago who lived in other countries and the cruelty of the men who captured them for profit. She weaved a tapestry of stories about the ones who had come before us and our connection to each and every one who had sacrificed and made it possible for the next generation to survive. She was a storyteller in the finest tradition and my time was spent with her absorbing the stories she told me.
I’d sit on her lap and stare up into her large yellowing eyes and listen to her tell me the tale of how she meet her first husband. As the familiar beats of the story washed over me I’d rest my head on her ample bosom and listen to the slow thunk of her heart. A sound that my young ears believed had always and would always beat its rhythm as long as the world existed. It was steady and powerful and hearing it when I pressed my ear to her chest made everything right in the world.
I had heard her stories about my grandfather on countless occasions and when she started to tell me one again it was like slipping into your favourite worn and comfy slippers. I especially loved hearing about her first meeting with my grandfather. When they first met he was a wiry and nervous boy of just shy of sixteen. They courted and fell for each other and within a year both families agreed it was time for them to marry. My grandmother would tell me that when you are in love everything comes easy to you. The big decisions in her life that were now looming on the horizon were no longer scary with my grandfather by her side. At this point of the story I hugged me grandmother all the tighter as I knew what was coming.
My grandfather had a job in the paper mill, and he worked the only position that the boss would give to a black man.Three weeks before the wedding was when tragedy struck. His job was to sweep and clean up the scraps from the newly produced rolls of paper. On this fateful autumn day when one of the machines broke down he was ordered by a white superior to climb into one of the large cutting machines to remove a blockage. The true sequence of events has long been lost or as my Grandmother always suspected was covered up by the men who witnessed it.
While my grandfather was crawling on his stomach inside the belly of the machine something went wrong with it. The machine stirred to life while he was in the cutting chamber and a blade that could cut through huge thicknesses of paper sliced down and he was instantly killed.
Three days after the funeral my Grandmother was sitting on the porch staring unblinkingly at the swaying scrub grass when the tears broke and her whole body shook with uncontrollable sobbing. At that moment as grief and despair tore through her body she knew one thing with utmost clarity. My grandmother sat and stared at the world around her and she knew in her very soul that she was pregnant. Nine months after the funeral she had my mother.
At this point of the tale my grandmother always looked down at me and took my tiny hand in her gnarled and twisted hand which looked as if it was carved from the root of some ancient tree, and tell me “In trying times you have to be strong. Strength is what matters.”
Sometimes at the end of the story I cried, not fully understanding what it meant to lose someone that you loved, feeling a deep longing for a grandfather I would never meet. Sometimes I just cried because she cried as the tale was told. Now was the time I needed to be strong. The news report had said that the boat was lost in a storm out at sea and that the rescue efforts were grounded until flight conditions improved. Letting the sadness in that was pushing at my edges would do me no good. Even though I barely knew Jonas a voice inside me insisted that I make my way back to Isafjordur, I had to be in the town when I found out any news.
Chapter Eight
I left Keflavik airport and hailed a cab. I needed to head back to Reykjavik city centre airport and get the first internal flight to Isafjordur. I wanted to be there no matter what the news was going to be.
The cab drove along the road which snaked its way through endless fields of volcanic rock. I stared out as the scenery whipped by, a blur of jagged rocks interspersed with bright green moss which clung to the sides surviving against all odds.
The guidebooks had described the volcanic landscape as lunar, right now it felt like I was moving through hell. Faceless and unchanging with small patches of life clinging to rutted peaks. This place looked like somewhere you would eke out an existence, it was nothing like the beautiful lush fjord I had been in only days before.
The snow was coming down heavily and the light was quickly fading. At this time of year the sun jutted above the horizon for a handful of hours and then was gone. The whole place was bathed in a washed out light that made it feel like you lived in an endless dusk.
Snow clung to some of the harsh jagged rocks softening the outline slightly. I darkly thought to myself that the softer curves looked like dead bodies laid out on the ground with a sheet haphazardly thrown over them.
My eyes glazed at the endless monotonous landscape. I felt alien and disconnected from everything around me. Only days before I had felt a deep connection to this land, an ancient stirring in my soul when I had seen the wide open vistas of the fjords and the dazzling display of northern lights in the night sky. Now I felt nothing but animosity to this foreign land and its harsh weather. The very landscape whizzing by the cabs window felt like a threat to me. The sharp rocks seemed to be goading me in their silent witness, you are not cut out for the true harshness of this land. This is the true face of this tiny island nestling up against the arctic circle. My resolve faded with every mile we drove and by the time I could see the lights of the city in the distance I felt thoroughly defeated.
An hour later I was back in the tiny Reykjavik city centre airport with a flight booked to Isafjordur. I had two hours to kill and the thought of sitting in the cramped waiting area and catching the open stares from the locals did not sound appealing. I checked my bags and went outside to explore the surrounding area.
Whenever I was stuck on a particularly hard coding problem I always found the best way to solve it was to leave my desk and take a stroll down to the small park near our office. I would push the piece of code that was giving me hell to the back of my mind and then switch into what I called auto mode. I’d let my mind go blank and then walk at a brisk pace around the park. I did this in all kinds of weather and usually by the third or forth circuit of the park an idea would bubble up and I would have a new solution or a novel way to code around my particular problem. The physical act of walking always worked for me, it both calmed my mind and sharpened its focus. I needed the fresh air on my face and my muscles working to drag myself out of the pit I was sinking in to.
I crossed a couple of streets at random and was now in auto mode winding my way through the compact streets that surrounded the airport. Mentally I was laying down a trail of breadcrumbs so that I could find my way back easily. The houses on the street were all painted bright colours and clad in corrugated siding. This was the traditional Icelandic style of house and most houses in this area looked like this. Maybe the bright colours was the locals defence against the long dark winters I thought as I walked.
On every corner I turned there was usually a large cat waiting to greet me as he surveyed his surrounding kingdom. The snow had stopped falling and there was a light dusting on the ground. Trails of cat paw prints intersected and wound there way through the snow as the animals ranged across their domains.
The chill air against my skin felt good and I could feel my anxiety level drop with each new block I passed. I didn't know what to expect when I would land in Isafjordur or even who I could talk to but I knew I had to be there when I found out Jonas’s fate. I took his business card out of my pocket and kissed it gently, I would see him again I told myself, hoping It was not in vain.
The sky was a
sapphire blue as the plane banked hard towards the small airstrip in the wide mouthed fjord that Isafjordur town was nestled in. The plane touched down gently and with no drama. Within twenty minutes I was off the plane and in a taxi heading towards the only hotel in the centre of town. Fatigue was starting to fray the corners of my mind so I checked in and collapsed on the bed and slept until morning.
My dreams where peppered with scenes of tiny fishing boats being engulfed by huge suckered tentacles wrapping themselves around the boat and pulling the vessel down into the churning depths. Men roared and stabbed at the slimy tentacles to no avail. The ship cracked and snapped in two as it was dragged under and the sound of mens gurgling gasps as they drowned awoke me with a jolt from my slumber.
Everything was dark and I groggily checked my phone for the time. It was 10:22 A.M, I silently cursed the long Icelandic winter mornings. I put on the TV and checked the local news. The overly tanned newscaster spoke Icelandic over a clip of kids throwing snowballs at each other. I watched for a few minutes and there was no mention of the boat. I stared at my phone in my hand as the bright light stung my sleepy eyes. It took a few seconds for my brain to register and then I pecked out an email to my team back home. I gave them the good news about our new clients and left out any more details. I ended the email by telling them I might be spending the holidays in Iceland. I winged off a couple of emails to family members letting them know I was ok and I might not be online on Christmas morning for our annual group video chat. Over the years my family had spread out to all corners of the states and we didn't always get together to celebrate. On the years that we could all be together we had made it a tradition to spend at least an hour in the morning in a big chaotic video chat, filled with people talking over one another and some tear filled eyes as it hit some that a video on a screen could never replace being all together. When the last email was sent with a whoosh and all obligations meet my sense of disconnection hit me full force. I was untethered from my life and unsure what the next few days would hold for me.