Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  There were good times, there were things he loved, and yet he had never revealed that to anyone, not even to Lil until that first day they came to look. That was when he told her how much he had loved that tree, and the river with its cold brown water, and the little pavilion that had a skating rink and swings. He loved the movie theater downtown and the way the whole town smelled like cured tobacco in the late summer. He liked that his mother seemed peaceful and settled with it all. Quite simply, he had grown to love the town, warts and all, but he’d never learned to have a foot in each place, an ability Lil had always possessed, half in the present and half in the past.

  On the way, they had passed long stretches of flat, dusty fields, and he was aware of both the simple beauty and the poverty, neither of which he had noticed as a young man. There were small trailers and lopsided houses, some looking abandoned and left to deteriorate, and yet there was a car, a satellite dish—barren dirt yards and old recliners on front porches, discarded broken furniture in heaps alongside the road. And then in the midst of it all, there was life, work shirts and sheets on a line, a cheerful Easter wreath on a battered screen door; a barefooted child smiling and waving a dirty hand, an old woman watching him from the stoop, where she sat with a cigarette and a bag of chips. That’s what he and Lil saw that first ride over.

  “Don’t look so sad,” she had said, as if reading his mind. “There might be a warm, soapy bath at the end of that child’s day, someone who loves him there to say good night.” She said she thought that child might be standing there feeling sorry for them, old people out riding around because they were too old to play ball or swing from trees. “He might say, ‘Did you see those old wrinkled people with nowhere to go? They didn’t have any chips either.’”

  The young woman had opened the door, chain lock still in place, and asked if she could help him, and that young boy, with a shock of dark hair that stood out in all kinds of cowlicks, squeezed against her and looked out as well. He was wearing a bushy fake mustache that hung low over his mouth and a bright-green towel tied around his neck like a cape. Frank has seen him in the yard other times when he passed, walking a figure eight with a big pine branch thrust forward like a sword—round and round, lemniscate, infinity. Frank had caught a glimpse of the inside of their house that day; the southern-facing window of the dining room where his mother had hung lace curtains now had venetian blinds that were closed tight.

  “I lived here,” he had told her. “My stepfather is the one who ordered this house from Sears; my mother planted the rosebushes.” It was clear that she didn’t want to ask him in. “I would love to come inside, show my wife.” He had turned and pointed to Lil, who had lifted her hand and waved. “We wouldn’t stay long.”

  The woman had paused then, one hand on the boy’s head, as if she were considering it all, but then said she was sorry. “Another day would be better. My husband isn’t home, and he knows more about the house,” she said, and before Frank could say anything else, she closed the door.

  Frank’s memories of Preston’s house are as vivid in his mind as the house on Andover Street, as if all of his focus during those years was on whatever minutiae surrounded him. He recalled arriving and finding his mother in bed, her ankle broken, her shoulder broken, her stomach swollen with Horace, and this stranger catering to her every need. Frank had stood looking out on the backyard that very first day, fists stuffed deep in his pockets, and then he had turned to see a picture hanging on the wall of the dining room of someone laid out in a coffin. At first he couldn’t believe what he was seeing and stepped closer to examine it. He had never seen a dead person except in the movies.

  “That’s my mother,” Preston told him, as if there were nothing at all strange about the photo being there. “When she died, we realized we had no likeness of her. So we had that taken. She was a wonderful woman.”

  Frank didn’t know what to say, so he just stood there studying the image: a padded casket lid open, an old woman in a black dress with her hands folded on her chest, where she had a Bible and some flowers. He waited until he heard Preston leave the room, and then he made his way outside into the sunlight and the baked brick stoop—the heat he grew to find comforting that summer, like being swaddled in down, the same way he was drawn to the distant shimmering mirages when he looked up and down the rails, urging him forward step by step.

  The image of Preston’s dead mother stayed with him for a long time, even though it was clear Preston had gotten the message, either from Frank’s reaction or perhaps Frank’s mother made a request, because the photo was not there the next day, replaced instead by a calendar from the local hardware store, which Frank’s mother then later replaced with the coupling of those paintings The Blue Boy and Pinkie, like so many homes at that time. Lil called them “the Depressing Duo”—and during the only visit they all made when the children were young, Frank overheard her tell Becca and Jeff that at night Blue Boy left his frame and jumped into Pinkie’s. She didn’t tell them that Pinkie’s portrait was to commemorate a twelve-year-old girl dead too soon, and he was relieved they never found out. In Lil’s version, Pinkie was a party girl, talking and laughing so much that Blue Boy asked her to be quiet. Frank was also relieved the kids didn’t discover the root cellar in the backyard, something he wasn’t ready to share, not even with Lil.

  That visit, he had pried open the lid and peeked into cobwebs and darkness; he had shined his flashlight to see his jar still there, the rickety chair.

  Preston had dug and lined it like a vault—for keeping things cool or escaping a tornado or, God forbid, some kind of air raid—with a tiny ladder leading down to where no more than four people would even fit. “It’s like a grave,” Frank’s mother had said, shaking her head and then turning away. Soon after, Preston more or less conceded that maybe it wasn’t a great idea after all, and other than storing some canned tomatoes and peaches, he let Frank take it over as his camp.

  At the end of her life, Frank’s mother began talking when it was just the two of them, always with a kind of urgency, so that no one else heard her. “I’m so sorry, Frank,” she said, Preston in the kitchen fixing a pot of coffee. It took some long minutes, and Frank’s coaxing, before she finally completed her thought. “I’m sorry I took you from our home.” She said that she had been so happy there it was too painful to imagine going back. She just couldn’t picture that house without his father in it.

  “Can you see?” she asked.

  Preston came in about that time, and she closed her eyes again, easing into the faint shallow breath of earlier.

  “She asks that a lot,” Preston told him, his large fumbling hands more helpless than ever. “She says, ‘Can you see?’ But I’m not really sure what she means, and so I just say that I do.”

  And now, Frank does see. He understands how memories of what was good can be so painful you might choose not to look. He understands the desire to disappear, like an animal in hiding. When no one comes to the front door of the house, he walks to the far edge of the lot, through the brambles, blackberry thorns clinging to his clothes and scratching the backs of his hands. The tall, spindly pines tower over him, and there are all the sounds he loved as a boy: the squirrels and the birds. The small strip of trees buffers the highway noise, but when he was a boy there was no highway, just miles and miles of woods.

  He had always kept the hatch open for light and air, and he could lie there and see the sky. It was a place to be alone—no baby screaming, nobody asking him to help with something. He kept his matchbook collection there, old marbles, flattened pennies, and in later years, right before he left to go to school, a can or two of Falstaff and a church key to open them. Frank’s mother had called it a grave, but it was more like a tomb, or what he imagined someone waking to the afterlife might find. When he told Lil all of this on one of their early meetings, she said it sounded like his whole career could be traced right back to that time—a hole in the earth in a small town in eastern North Carolina, “a blip along the
tracks.” That’s what he had called it, and he liked how closely she had paid attention, parroting the words right back to him. He liked that she didn’t laugh.

  The place is so overgrown it takes Frank a while to get his bearings; the sycamore tree at the back of the lot that had once stood over the cellar is no longer there. From here, he can see the screened porch has been closed in with cheap plywood, on which someone has written Keep out. A big dog is sprawled nearby in the sun.

  What does Tomb Time mean? Lil had written that in a note. Is that a course title?

  No, but it could have been a course title, the kind that would have drawn students, like when he used the subtitle “Skeletons in the Closet” for his undergraduate anthropology course on biological investigations. He still continues to think of topics and titles that would fill an undergraduate lecture hall: the recent excavation of an outhouse near Paul Revere’s home; the Neanderthal cave paintings; that recent find of a horse from the Pleistocene Epoch right in someone’s backyard. He has spent his adult lifetime studying such findings and is still shocked to learn that the bones of something that once lived and breathed have survived thousands and thousands of years. He kept a timeline in his office, stretching around the room, with that tiny half-inch mark that shows the miniscule life of a man.

  What does Tomb Time mean?

  He didn’t answer that question; how could he even begin? It’s hard to even answer it for himself these many years later. Tomb Time, a secret message, a silly buzzword for something that remained unspoken and removed from his real life. It was an escape, a call to flight, like what he had felt as a boy when he dreamed of jumping onto the northbound train, what he had felt during that time when Lil demanded so much of him, even though she was little more than a bitter ghost herself. And then something happened, something unplanned and surprising, and of course he responded to some attention; what dog wouldn’t? Someone who listened to all he had to say. Someone who believed in his ideas and his thoughts. Someone who asked questions and wanted more and more of what he was able and willing to give, not someone to quip “Mum’s the word” or come home from volunteering talking of death and decay, and smelling of all the hideous lotions and sprays people used to mask it. Of course he had had the fantasy of running, leaving all the heartache and sadness behind him and starting all over with a brand-new life and someone who would listen and care, someone who would make him feel important and loved, and, no, it also wouldn’t have hurt if it were someone interested in sex and willing to explore or experiment.

  He had been tired of a life so deeply rooted in grief. It was exhilarating to first allow himself to imagine it all, and then to actually act on the impulses. It was exciting; he felt alive, a gravitational pull that heightened all of his senses. But then even his imagination was crippled, every fantasy eventually broadening the lens to where he could see Lil standing there on the other side of the tracks—steadfast and loyal, opinionated Lil. And if he allowed himself to imagine the end of life, his body shriveled away, she was always the one there to witness it.

  His mother had said things she needed to say at the end of her life, and so did Preston, whether Frank wanted to hear them or not, and both times he wondered, Why now? Why tell me this now?

  Preston had said, “I fell in love with your mother when I saw her, and I felt bad, so help me God, because nothing in my life had ever happened to me like that.” Preston was in his bed at home, and Frank sat beside him looking out the window to where he is standing right this minute. The sycamore was off to the left, and there was a picture of Frank’s mother on the dresser looking as she did when they had first arrived here, a woman in her early thirties, the photo taken in Boston, in fact, on a day when she would have returned to their home on Andover Street and at the end of the day climbed into bed beside Frank’s father.

  “There she was, grieving and pregnant with another man’s child, bloody with a shattered ankle and shoulder,” Preston had said, “and I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” He said he had always felt so ashamed of that, and then he told how he had always wished she would say that he had made her life so much better, but she never did. She said she was grateful. She said she was comfortable, but it was clear to him that none of it even came close to matching what she had once had. “I always hoped for more,” Preston said. “Even though maybe I didn’t deserve it.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Frank had asked. He had come alone to see him, Lil back home with the kids and all their activities: Girl Scouts and football and carpools. When he’d called her early that morning, she had told him they had a big freeze, leaving the rhododendron drooped and coated in ice, but there in North Carolina, it was like spring, and he had left Preston for a minute to go and peer down into the vault, the hatch hinges rusty, cobwebs filling the space. He could see the mason jar of flattened pennies in the far corner, the old rusty church key, just as he had left it. He had planned to go down there later that afternoon after Horace arrived and when he had changed out of his good clothes, but everything had happened so quickly that he spent the afternoon making funeral arrangements instead.

  “I convinced her to stay,” Preston had said. The bag by his bed was filled with dark urine, and his hands looked nothing like Frank could recall; they were thin and pale, so different from those coarse tan ones searching for quarters behind ears and stealing noses.

  Frank had put his hand on top of Preston’s. “My dad asked that she not leave him.”

  But then Preston told him something else, something Frank has kept to himself all these years, simply because he didn’t want to think about it or analyze or imagine.

  There is a sound in the brush, and Frank pauses, listens, probably a squirrel or a bird. He knows the root cellar has to be close if it’s still there at all. He takes a stick and pokes into the brush, the brambles catching his sleeve, but then he sees a small cleared area, and there it is, the lid covered over with loose pine straw and sticks, and a heavy rock, as if marking the spot, with a scrap of paper beneath. He steps closer and sees a makeshift tarp shelter under the low branches of myrtle, maybe the camp of that kid who lives here, or perhaps someone homeless who has wandered up from the tracks. The train is due in a little over an hour, plenty of time to try once more to see inside the house and then to return. From here, the brambles and hedge so high, he can see only the roofline, and the stone chimney Preston built himself.

  “Can you imagine building a chimney like this, Frank?” his mother had asked one night over dinner—though then they would have said “supper.” “Preston spent hours working, all those stones cut just right and then fitting them there.” At the time, Frank avoided making eye contact with his mother or Preston, who was seated right across from him, his thinning hair slicked back from his shower, and Frank stared into his butter beans—he remembers so clearly the beans on that pale-yellow plate—and said that, yes, of course he could, but now he stares at the structure, thinking about Preston cutting and hauling stones—stone by stone—at the end of what had already been a ten-hour workday, and he feels that awful wave of regret, wishes he’d been kinder, had asked his advice and opinion about things, this man who stepped in as husband and father, his whole life relinquished to being the runner-up.

  If Frank could talk to his mother now, he would want to say what Lil had said years ago: that she was young and afraid and grieving, and what else could she do? His mother had heard her dying husband say, “Don’t leave me,” and so she didn’t, but Preston told Frank that what he had heard was “Please shoot me,” someone trapped and begging to die. Frank wanted to ask why he was telling that. Why now? But he chose to just listen because what did it matter? “I didn’t tell the truth,” Preston had said. Truth, Maat—a word that originally referred to a measuring device, a stick or a reed. Measure it. Weigh it. Heart of my mother.

  Shelley

  Shelley scans the crowd as she makes her way to the car. Once again, she will be late picking Harvey up, so she tak
es a deep breath and calls the teacher to let him know and to hear what it is Harvey has done now. She gets his machine and, against her better judgment, leaves a message. She hates for her voice to be trapped there in someone’s machine, waiting to be let out, but if she hung up, that would be worse, because he would know it was her. “I’m on my way,” she says. “I’m so sorry I’m late.”

  She barely starts the car, and he calls right back, more interested it seems in the trial verdict than anything; everyone in town is. The word guilty feels good on her tongue, and she relishes being the one who has something important to tell instead of just being told.

  “So about our boy, Harvey.”

  “Yes,” she says, marveling for a second at the surge in her chest with the use of that plural pronoun—our, our boy. She always loved when she heard Brent say that: “Our son,” “our boy.” And then she would add the s to the end of it: Our sons, our boys.

  “I’m almost there,” she says, and then, without meaning to, drives slower and slower, tired and slow like when Harvey pretends to be a turtle, scooching along and laughing as he inches his way across the floor.

  When she pulls up and parks, Harvey is over on the swings with another child, pumping his legs and soaring as high as possible, a bushy handlebar mustache lopsided on his face and obscuring his grin each time he flies upward. Ned Stone is waiting for her there on the curb. “Another kid has a late pickup, too,” he says, “so let’s just sit right here.” He motions to a bench in front of the school, and they sit.

  “Look,” he begins. “Harvey is a really sweet kid, and I hope you won’t take this wrong.”

  “That’s always a bad sign,” she says.

  “What I mean is that I feel I might be speaking out of turn, and yet I think Harvey’s acting out might have a lot to do with what’s going on at home.”