“J. Norm.” Epiphany’s tone was grave, contemplative. “If you didn’t die in that fire, maybe the rest of them didn’t either.” As usual, her mind was one step ahead of my own. That was the thought I had been reaching for, the next section of track to be laid into the uncharted lands. What was true and what was untrue, and how would I know the difference?
Closing the page, Epiphany stood up, then dropped the book in the sack and scooped it off the bench. “Let’s go, J. Norm. We need to see the graveyard and where the house was.”
I stood up too quickly, and my heart rapped hard against my chest, lurching unevenly in a way that caused the street to narrow and then expand before me. These past two days, with so much activity and excitement, were far outside my normal routine. I gripped the back of the bench, steadying myself.
Epiphany didn’t notice. “C’mon, J. Norm.” She trotted ahead toward the car, her dark hair swinging from side to side over her shoulders, her long legs covering ground in enthusiastic, confident strides. Turning, she walked backward a few steps. “Hey, just stay there. I’ll go get the car.” She began hurrying off without waiting for an answer.
I called after her anyway, “You’re not allowed to drive alone!”
“It’s just up the street!” Checking for traffic, she jogged across, then hurried along the other sidewalk to the car. Obstinate as usual, she put the books in the back, climbed in, pulled onto the street, and turned around in the driveway of a pharmacy before I had any hope of stopping her. She was beaming when she pulled to the curb beside me and rolled down the window. “Hey, dude, need a ride?”
I shouldn’t have laughed. It would only encourage her.
“Learner’s
permit
,” I reminded her, as I slid into my seat. I’d put a pill under my tongue while she was gone, and my heart was settling now, the tightness fading. Still, I felt oddly off balance. Perhaps it was the photos, or perhaps I wasn’t certain I wanted to see the graves. It’s a strange thing to think about viewing one’s own resting place.
“I know, I know,” she huffed. “But you gotta admit, I’m getting better at driving.”
“A bit,” I allowed, and she beamed again.
“Come on, J. Norm. You couldn’t have figured all this stuff out without me. We’re like Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Bonnie and Clyde robbed banks.”
“Same difference.” Shrugging, she repeated the shopkeeper’s directions under her breath, “Right on Dogwood Street, three blocks . . . right on Dogwood Street . . .”
We continued along the road and turned on Dogwood. The mini storage sat on a corner lot next to a yellow Victorian house that may have been grand once, but now looked as though it were slowly surrendering to the wind and the weather. Across the street, a low-income rental complex had been built, and beyond that, several lots had been cleared for trailer homes. Down the block, a number of old homes had undergone what appeared to be haphazard renovations. On the whole, it was clear that the neighborhood, once upscale and the toast of Groveland, had long since fallen into decline.
There appeared to be no on-site supervision at the mini storage, so Epiphany and I drove in as if we owned the place. “Circle around to the back,” I said. “See if the fence is still there.”
“ ’Kay.” She cast worried looks toward the side mirrors while navigating the narrow aisle between two storage buildings. “Man, this is skinny. How do they expect people to drive through here?”
I leaned toward my window to see around the corner to the back of the lot, where weeds, wild grapevines, and brambles grew in a tangle, like the wall of thorns around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. My breath caught in anticipation. Somehow, it seemed that if I could touch a bit of the house, hold it in my hand, the rest of my memories might come flooding back.
As we cleared the building, I saw the corner post among the weeds, a thick, heavy brick structure with an ornamental iron finial atop—the head of a lion entwined with vines, encrusted with a patina of dirt and rust and moss. In my mind, it was freshly painted, the teeth catching the noonday sun, sending a chill of foreboding over me.
Epiphany turned off the car and stepped out, but I was barely conscious of her. My mind cartwheeled back in time as I started toward the corner post. A section of iron fencing lay sideways in the weeds, the vines winding in and out like threads in a needlework canvas. Epiphany leaned over the tangle of grass and brush, reached, then pulled her hand away without touching. “Oh, shoot, there’s poison ivy everywhere.” She pointed, and, indeed, she was right.
Bracing a hand on one knee, I bent toward the grass. Epiphany caught my arm protectively. “J. Norm, don’t. You’ll catch pois—”
I plucked a dandelion from the edge of the brush, stood up again. Staring at the flower, yellow and lacy, I saw the hands of my little sisters, heard their laughter. My sisters. My brother. And the baby. Another boy. My sisters. My brothers. Two of each. All these years, I’d been an only child, but in truth I wasn’t.
Reaching across the weeds, I laid a hand against the corner post, willed the memories to come back, but they remained a garden in the mist, alluring, tempting, yet impossible to make out.
“Did you remember something?” Epiphany asked.
I shook my head, looking up at the iron finial. The lion’s mouth made me shudder, even now. In my mind, I saw another one like it, a smaller version capping an iron post, perhaps for tying horses. It was near a stable. There had been a stable at the house. The lion’s mouth held a ring. A rope was strung through it, tied tightly, wrapped around my wrists.
The backs of my legs were raw, sticky, flies crawling over them, dining on little trickles of blood.
The windows in the stable were going dark, night coming.
Cecile was there, her hands shaking as she untied the rope. “Oh, Willie-boy,” she whispered. “Oh, child. Hush, now . . .”
I pulled my hand away from the cool stone, the memory stopping abruptly, catching in my throat, seeming to suck the air from the space around me, leaving a vacuum.
“J. Norm?” Epiphany gripped my arm again. “You all right?”
“Let’s go back to the car,” I said, allowing her to help me navigate the uneven patches of dirt and crabgrass. Safely in my seat again, I noticed the dandelion still in my hand. I tossed it into the grass, afraid of the memories it might conjure. My remembrances were an unpredictable mix. Some were hard, cold, unyielding, like the stone post. Some were soft, beautiful, and resilient, like the dandelion. To find one, I would have to come near the other. Perhaps this was the reason my mind had locked away the memories long ago, and the reason my mother had never told me the truth. Unimaginable things had happened to me in that house, terrible things that should never have been done to any child, to any human being. Cecile had attempted to protect me, but as a young black woman of that day, a maid in the home of a wealthy man, she would have been in danger herself. What had she risked in order to look after me and the other children; what had she endured? Had she survived in the end, or had she perished in that house?
As we drove to the graveyard, I tried to imagine who I might have become, if not for the mother who raised me and the gentle, quiet father who quoted from Proverbs and encouraged me to be an honest, enterprising man. Their love for me had erased everything about this town, all the pain and trauma of those early years. Did they know of that when they took me in, or had they discovered later that they’d been given a damaged, broken little boy? At what moment had they decided to extend the time and patience that would be needed, and keep me anyway?
We found the graveyard easily enough. It lay in a field beside an old clapboard church that was no longer used, other than as a historic site. The headstones were more recent in front, older in back, although it was evident that, like the church, the cemetery wasn’t generally in use anymore. Walking past the rows of stones, Epiphany carried the book with the VanDraan family photo in it. She lingered over some of the tombstones as I moved on, searching for any markers bearing the VanDraan names.
“Find anything?” she asked, trotting to catch up with me after a bit. With a shudder, she threaded her arms and pressed the book to her stomach.
“Not yet.”
She sighed impatiently as we walked. “I used to live down the road from a graveyard like this. When I got bored, I’d go read the stones, or sometimes I’d dig up flowers from the ditch and plant them on the graves for the little kids. It seemed like, if you were a kid, and you never got to grow up, you wouldn’t know the difference between weeds and real flowers, right? Weeds are tougher, and just as pretty, anyway. Flowers are just weeds somebody decided were special. Like those dandelions back there at the mini storage. I mean, if people called them flowers and sold the seeds in little packages, they’d be flowers, right?”
“I believe they would,” I agreed, and it occurred to me that Epiphany’s analysis wasn’t entirely random. She’d been considering the question, thinking about her life, or mine, or both. We’d both been cast adrift as youngsters, Epiphany and I, and she seemed to be searching for an anchor as desperately as I had been when I sat at the feet of the mother who raised me, and clung to her knee. My mother was everything to me—comfort, security, safety, love. Epiphany needed those things as much as I had. Who could say why God would have selected an old curmudgeon like me for such a task, but I wanted to be the mentor she needed, the person who would make a difference. Here at the end of my life, I found myself yearning for the things on which I’d placed so little importance in my adult years—a connection, someone to listen to my stories, a sense that my life would matter after I was gone. A ripple in the pool.
Stopping suddenly, Epiphany pointed ahead, her eyes widening. “There it is! VanDraan. That big one over there. J. Norm, look!”
I turned my gaze in the direction she indicated, and indeed I saw it, not more than twenty feet away now—a wrought-iron fence, aged and leaning, that marked a private plot for several graves. At the center, an obelisk of granite proclaimed the name VanDraan. The letters were black with mildew, grown over with moss, so that they seemed to spread, twining into the dark threads of the rock as if they had been forged along with it, deep in the earth. I took an unsteady step, moving closer, felt breathless, my heart fluttering, but not painfully, not dangerously. The flutter was anticipation, the sense of being so caught in the moment that I could think of nothing else, even breathing.
Epiphany’s hand slid under my elbow. “It’s okay. I’m right here,” she said quietly, and I moved my fingers to clutch hers. Together, we walked closer. The gate creaked, protesting as I opened it. At the base of the stone tower, there was a name. Like the face of the father in the book, it was meaningless to me. LUTHER WILLIAM VANDRAAN SR
.
Any memory of his name had been erased so cleanly from my memory that it no longer existed. All traces of those words were gone forever.
Staring at the letters, thinking of the family photo, I tried to excavate the memory, exhume it like a body needed to solve a cold case. But there was nothing.
Epiphany gasped, released my arm. “There are the kids.” Sidestepping, she opened the book, thumbed through the pages until she’d found the VanDraan photo again. She read the names out loud, pointing to each of them in the book, “Paul, Johnny, Erin, Emma, and Luther William VanDraan Jr.—Willie.” She turned to look over her shoulder, her gaze rolling slowly upward to catch mine, her eyes flinty, filled with questions. “You.”
I couldn’t say how long we stood there, numbly studying the graves, looking at the pictures. Five plots, youngest to eldest in sequence, each tombstone slightly larger than the last, an odd physical depiction of the dates on either side of the hyphens, the short spans of young lives. And beside those, next to the grave of Luther VanDraan, who had lived fully twenty years beyond the deaths of his family, was the grave marked, FERN, WIFE AND MOTHER
.
My mother. I could remember her, if I tried. Her hair was red, long. Her eyes blue, sad, vacant. She was a pretty woman, but thin and pale, a shadow. Helpless, afraid, confused. Weak. These were the impressions that came to me with the picture, with the name. They rose from her grave like restless spirits, surrounding me.
She played the piano sometimes. Long, haunting melodies that drifted through the halls of the house, filling every corner, choking the air like smoke, drowning out the voices of the women in the kitchen, the laughter of the children. Who was she, this woman in the grave?
Was
she in this grave? Was she there under the soil, a victim of a fire that took some lives, but not all?
How many lives? Had the mother who raised me known? Had she known who was buried here and who wasn’t? How had she become involved to begin with, and if the baby on her lap in our family albums wasn’t me, what had happened to that child?
So many questions, and I’d arrived so late in my life to search for the answers. . . .
Epiphany handed the book to me and slipped away. I watched as she walked across the cemetery, the shade sliding over her skin, painting her the color of rich earth in shadow, a golden hue in the light.
Finally, I closed the book and left the family plot, unsure of my feelings about it. Should I sense a connection or not? I was no longer that boy named on the stone. I was James Norman Alvord. An engineer, a scientist, a man who’d lived a full life, who’d been fortunate enough to exist in a time when the world was changing, when America was making unprecedented strides in innovation and technology. I’d seized opportunity when it came my way, sometimes stumbled upon it, always tried to do good business, to be enterprising. My father had taught me that—and my mother. They’d made me who I was. These people on the gravestones were strangers. What good could come of learning all of this now?