Chapter 2: Burning

It was mid-July as Todd watched the last few minutes of the sunset from his grandparent’s farmhouse.  The glossy white columns that lined the front turned a blazing fire-orange.  Shingled, cracked flowerpots held the red and white roses at attention.  The air was moist, heavy with the sweet smell of tobacco curing in the set of barns a few hundred feet away. 

            He loved his swing on the porch.  It was positioned so that he could see the oncoming traffic from either direction on the rural road that ran in front of the house.  The swing hung from the ceiling beam so that it was impossible for the sun to shine directly into his eyes during the day; or for the lights inside at night to disturb an otherwise beautiful evening with the chirping of the crickets.  He could take sensations in and dwell on them for hours or could just as easily fall asleep with the delicate symphony of sound around him.  Passers-by waved, acknowledging that he was Mary and John’s grandson.

            He walked back into the house, letting the screen door crash into its old, chipped gray and white metallic frame.  The dining room was the entrance to the home.  Before many renovations, it was originally the main room of house where the family spent many nights alone just sitting and talking.  The other grandchildren had taken bits and pieces of antiques MaMa had collected over the years.  The only thing that was left, a maple china cabinet, belonged originally to his grandmother’s mother, Annie.  It sat in the same spot of this old house for twenty-five years.  It was the pride of the room.  Its great glass panes reflected the light of the candle from across the room.  On top was carved the archangel Michael with his arms reaching to the corners of the cabinet.  Inside sat a new set of china received a few months earlier at the wedding.

            The top shelf was bare except for an old Bible and a packet of letters bound by a thick black rubber band. Letters that he never dared to open.  They were sent back and forth between MaMa and PaPa as they courted, married, raised a family, and eventually began growing old together. The dates on the back of each envelope told him as much.  He had flipped through the envelopes before and seen the names of the different ports through which his grandfather had passed.  One envelope was tucked into the Bible.  As Todd pulled it out of the Book, the following passage was underlined on the underlying page.

                        Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and ye shall find; knock, and

                        it shall be opened unto you:

                        For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth;

                        to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

            The floors in the living room creaked and the one in the hall cried out as he walked to the bedroom where Abby lay curled in a ball on the bed.  She heard his creaking footsteps down the hall and reached for him when he kneeled on the bed.

            “Watching the sunset again, sweetie?”

            “Yeah.”  He smiled at her.  She always had to kiss him after he smiled.  It was something about the way he did it.  His eyes would look deeply into hers and the left corner of his mouth and cheek would rise higher than the right.  It was his trademark.

            “See anyone today when you were out,” she asked.

            “Actually, yeah,” he said, as he knelt down a little farther on the bed.  He laid down on his right side so that he could be next to her.  She leaned towards him and kissed him lightly on the lips. 

            “Who?” she replied, pushing his hair out of his eyes.

            “Oh, just old man Willie from the chapel.  He wanted me to give you a neighborly hello.  He wants to come by sometime and see what we have done with the place.”

            “He’s a nice old man.”

            “Sure is.  I wonder how old he is?”  He paused to think for a few seconds.  “I know he was older than PaPa, because they got married five or six years before MaMa and PaPa did.”

            ‘That makes him older?” She quizzically poked at him.

            “Well, I guess.  Hmm.  Maybe not. I guess it really doesn’t matter.”  He turned onto his back and looked up at the motionless ceiling fan.  “What did you do today?”

            “Same as always,” she quipped, “enlightened the youth of Western Craven County.”

She laughed to herself.  Todd just stared at the ceiling.  She looked at his face.  It was expressionless.  “Thanks for listening to me.”

            He quickly shook his head and looked at her, smiling.  “I’m sorry,” he apologized, “I was just looking at those envelopes again.”  He sat up and turned to the outside edge of the bed, his back facing her.  “I just can’t imagine all that they have to say in those letters.”

            “Why don’t you read them, then?”

            He stood up and walked to the window.  He looked out and could see a few shadows slowly moving through the front yard.  Deer, he recognized.  “Come here,” he whispered.  She didn’t move. 

            “You didn’t answer my question.  Why don’t you just read them?  If they torment you so much, why don’t you just open them up and read them.  Or if you’re not going to do that, give them to your mother.  Or maybe your aunt.”

            He watched the deer slip into the cornfield directly in front of the house.  “They’re not mine,” he said still facing the window.  He lowered his head and closed his eyes.  Perhaps she was right he thought.  If he wouldn’t read them himself, what then would be the point of keeping them around to torment him with every time he thought of his grandparents?

            “Well then,” she started, “I don’t know what to tell you to do.”  He could hear the frustration in her voice.  She picked up her magazine from her bedside table and began to flip quickly through the first fifty or so pages.  He stood at the window motionless, lost in his own thoughts.   

            She closed her eyes and laid the magazine in her lap.  She knew she had snapped at him, and felt a tinge of regret.  But why did he have to be so stubborn over such a silly issue?  The gravity of the Todd’s loss was somehow a mystery to her.  “I’m sorry,” she said.

            “Me too,” he mumbled.  He turned around and looked at her.  “I’m going to go get ready for bed.  I’ll be back in a few, okay?”

            “Sure,” she said as she reached for his hand.  She squeezed it three times, their “I love you” touch.  He squeezed her softly back and leaned down and kissed her again, this time on the forehead.

            “I love you too.”

            He walked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom around the corner.

            He looked in the medicine cabinet mirror for a few minutes.  He then opened it and pulled out the same red, white and blue lather brush that his grandfather had used when he was alive.  It was a keepsake that he believed was left there for only him to revel in.  PaPa had used it since before Todd’s mom was born.  The bristles never seemed to wither, so he had never found a reason to use anything other than that one.

            He lathered up quickly, then found the razor and began the relaxing process of removing the tingling white foam from his face.  In his mind, he could see his grandfather.  He was walking back from the old irrigation pump towards the house.  He looked nervously back over his shoulder.  He was crying. 

            The water flowed out of the faucet and down the drain, occasionally being shattered of its cylindrical path like rapids over the razor head.  He could see PaPa reach behind the trellis of the porch and pull out his rifle.  He quickly looked over the weapon and back again towards the irrigation pumps.  He ran his fingers down the stock and fingered the trigger.  He looked down the gun, and into the barrel between his eyes.

            A splash in the face.

            He put on his pajamas, turned on the ceiling fan, and crawled into bed.  Abby had fallen asleep.

            The hours she spent at school seemed to drain the life out of her sometimes.  They used to stay up and watch the late night comedies and then drift off to sleep with the TV on. She seemed to think that he was leaving her.  Not so much literally, but figuratively.    She had seemed that way for the last few weeks.  Since moving into the old house, she seemed to feel isolated from him; as if he was growing more and more distant.  She couldn’t quite figure it out. 

            He watched the ceiling fan slowly make its lonesome circle, wavered only by a slight rocking at the base.  The window was open, the screen protecting them from the incessant mosquitoes, which somehow always found them when they were the most comfortable.  He listened to their buzz and wondered what his grandfather thought about when he slept in the same room.

            He remembered him as being gentle, yet rugged.  He was broad shouldered, much like himself.  He was very quiet, from what Todd could remember.  He rarely seemed to talk, at least much to the grandchildren.  He would occasionally make clown faces, though.  PaPa would pull out his false teeth and make droopy faces at the kids to their roaring cheers.  When Todd was ten, he had written a “You’re My Hero” story about him.  He remembered how PaPa had read it, walked out into the fields behind the house, and stood there for a good hour or so. 

            Or the time that they were all riding in the “77 Chevy work truck to the market in Greenville one hot August afternoon.  The wheel went flying from the trailer and into a mean old lady’s yard, and how PaPa went laughing up to the old woman, asking for his tire back.

            He remembered how alone he was at the end of his life.  MaMa and Aunt Gina took him to the doctor in the late 80’s and a few weeks after they came back, he seemed to be much perkier.  Sometimes, though, the family would go over there to the house on a Sunday afternoon for supper.  PaPa would quietly walk in from the fields, eat, and then, just as quietly, walk out of the kitchen into the utility room, lay down on the old day bed and sleep the rest of the afternoon.

            Todd never really understood the change that had taken place until a few years later.  He was working side by side with his grandfather one day in the humid sun of July, and PaPa looked over and told him, “Todd, when you get older, don’t look at your parents and see what you’re going to be when you get that old.  Don’t look at your children and second-guess the choices that you made when they were growing up.”  PaPa held onto the waving rack of steel holding the tobacco together and then, after a shake of his head, pushed it into its place in the barn.

            He remembered how PaPa blew his brains out with a rifle on Easter Sunday while he and his family were vacationing in Charleston. 

            The fan spun above him and the mosquitoes buzzed by the window.  The dream of sleep wasn’t going to rest with him anytime soon and he knew it.  He couldn’t resist the overwhelming urge to go back out on the porch and rock a little longer in the swing.  He pushed the covers off, took them to the door and folded them across the seat.  Delicately, he lifted Abby in his arms.  She opened her eyes, smiled, and put her arms around his neck.  He carried her to the porch swing, where he laid her across his waist and legs.

            They rocked in the swing silently for hours, just the two of them, with the tobacco burning in the distance and the last memory of his grandfather pulling him into loneliness.