Family Heirlooms

I’d been putting this off for too long but just standing and looking across this one room it was easy to tell why.  My parents had been hoarders in their own way and just the living room was full of proof.  There weren’t piles of old newspaper or other such things that became garbage as it sat, but there were keepsakes, photos, certificates, trophies, everywhere.  My siblings and I weren’t superheroes or even all that involved in many things, but the few things we did, we did well, and our parents had saved every mention of that.  The living room was the showcase for every proud parenting moment for which they had physical reminder and every gift we had given them since we were toddlers, all covered with a protective coating of dust declaring the time which had passed since they were put on display.  The view was as daunting as it had been the day of the funeral, when we all stood staring at it.

I was alone with it now.  I lived near so I could spend more time sorting through it all, at least in theory.  In practice, I had stood in much the same way I stood now, daunted by the enormity of sorting through the piles and intimidated by the memories that I would find within them.  As I stood in the doorway from the kitchen, a shelf to my right held numerous small gifts, mostly souvenirs, which we had given them over the years and I picked one up.  It was a small model of the Parthenon sitting on a base which read “Athens” on the top and “Made in Singapore” on the bottom.  Donna had given it to them after a trip to Nashville, TN, and thinking of that gave me a brief smile and an idea for where to begin.

I laid out three boxes, one for each of us, and began sorting all the various tidbits into them according to the one of us who had given it.  I didn’t concern myself with dusting and though I packed then so they would be less likely to break, I didn’t spend a lot of time on it.  When a box filled I named it, taped it, and set it aside, laying out another to continue the process.  Each piece that I touched sparked some response within me, but I managed to keep this distraction mostly under control, continuing to sort and pack.  After about an hour I had a box for each of us full, a second nearly full for Donna, and one each about half full for Chris and me.  Dust was everywhere and I was sneezing regularly, so I walked outside for a minute when I came across the doll.

It was old, homemade of some tough fabric, stuffed with who only knows what, and had the appearance of a squarish man with balls of yarn for hands and feet.  A single strand of yard looped through its chest like a wilted boutineer.  It had sat there for a very long time, judging from its outer coating, but I didn’t actually recall having seen it in that setting before.  It seemed out of place among all these mementoes because it hadn’t been given by us to our parents, it had been given to Donna by our father’s grandmother.  I carefully brushed and shook the dust from it as I stood on the porch, ignoring the fact that I was adding to the air what I was trying to escape in the first place.  The doll projected a fascination over me and my mind wandered back along its history, and that of its giver.

Granny Harkness, dad’s maternal grandmother, had been a strange woman.  I was the youngest of us and she died when I was only five, but even I remembered that much.  She had been active right up to her death, she had always lived in her own house and we had been told that she was sweeping her kitchen when she passed.  She had never looked old, but rather had seemed ancient as though carved by erosion from the bones of the earth.  She laughed often and loudly, sometimes at things no one else was able to see or comprehend.  I remembered puzzled looks surrounding her when others were present, particularly when she was around people outside the family.  At least as such a young child, to me she had been someone around whom I always felt a slight discomfort but never fear.  I always had a strange sensation around her that while I might not like where she might take me, I’d always be safe when she was there.  We had never known her husband, gone before even Chris was born, and dad seldom spoke of her aside from mentioning her health.  She had remained an enigma everyone knew about but perhaps no one understood, until she had died.  We all knew that she was Granny Harkness and that was all.

Looking at the doll brought back every one of those strange, but oddly comforting, memories and I wandered through them as I stood there. I don’t know how long it took but my memory gradually focussed on the doll itself; I remembered her giving it to my sister.  She was sitting at her kitchen table when she passed the doll to Donna.  It had been in a pale green box, I could see the sun from the window over the sink reflecting dully from its surface in my mind.  Its shape was odd and had caught my attention then but while I could see the scene frozen in my mind, that shape eluded my recall.  She had said that the doll was important and it should be cherished and cared for and let Donna turn it in her hand and look it over carefully before placing it back in that strange box and handing them both to her.

The doll was one of those rare exceptions where the silence surrounding Granny Harkness was broken.  Neither dad nor mom seemed happy about Donna having it but they did not take it or ask her to get rid of it and on the way home she had asked what it was and why it was important.   

“It’s just an old doll that she played with as a child.”  Dad responded.  “I remember it sitting on my mom’s dresser when I was young then when she passed on,” He choked a bit momentarily, “Granny came and got it.  I remember her putting it in that box and taking it with her.”

Grandma had died in a car accident, odd in retrospect since mom and dad had just gone the same way, when Chris was only two and neither Donna nor I had been born.  None of us had any actual memories of her and while dad often spoke of her from the happier times of his youth, he never spoke of her loss.  Now that the doll had me thinking about such things, the family stories we had been told throughout our lives all revolved around grandma; the ones about dad’s family at least.  Mom’s family was well known to us, her parents, siblings, uncles and aunts, we had known all of them growing up.  On the other side, grandma had died before we could remember her and even dad had no memory of his own father.  There were no siblings, no aunts and no uncles.  Granny Harkness was the only member of his family that we knew and grandma the only one we were told about.

I sat down on the porch swing with the doll in my hands and let my mind roam through my knowledge.  Granddad had died in the war, drafted and taken away while grandma was pregnant.  She had raised dad with no help from anyone other than her mother, Granny Harkness, and had never remarried.  Both women were strong, capable and kind, even if granny was a little strange.  They were survivors, happy survivors, and had raised dad just as happy and strong.  It was a small family, perhaps physically broken but upright in spirit.

Where was that box?  Donna had kept the doll but very seldom had she played with it.  She kept it on her dresser, as dad told us his mother had, and there it stayed like an avatar of days long past.  She had kept the box, of that I felt quite sure, but I didn’t remember where.  Since the doll had always been in her room before and was nowhere to be seen near it now, I thought that it must still be there.  I stood and returned to the house, intent on finding it.

Why did I want it?  The question wound its way through my consciousness as I walked through the living room and down the hall.  I really had no idea how to answer it; the doll itself seemed to work a geas on me and pushed me toward some unknown end.  I stepped into the room in which my sister had spent her childhood and looked around.

It had become an office, sort of.  A desk was against the wall beneath the front window scattered with what appeared to be old mail and supporting a lamp which loomed starkly above the chaos.  Donna’s things were gone and a variety of boxes, small tables, and a cedar chest provided the other furnishings.  I stepped across the room and opened the closet door first.  It was closed and resisted my pull, requiring a considerable tug to come free of the frame.  There’s nothing else quite like an old house but in this case weight might have been a factor; several small boxes and a pile of folded clothes tumbled out when it opened.  I bent down to pick up the fallen items and there, sitting plainly atop the cardboard box from which they’d fallen, was a small, oddly shaped box.

I forgot about the things on the floor as I stared at it.  I remembered it being dull green and so it was now, but it was made of copper.  I straightened up, reaching for the box as I did so, and noticed as I picked it up what was so odd about its shape.  It was the elongated pentagon of an old coffin.  I walked to the desk and set the small, copper sarcophagus atop the scattered mail, looking at it in the light from the window.  It was smooth and undented despite the years and its patina seemed almost rubbed into the metal itself.  There were no hinges and no latch but the top fit tightly so that it took effort to open it.  The inside was lined with a soft, smooth material and pillowed at the head.  As I looked at it I realized that it wasn’t made to resemble a coffin, it was a coffin.

As I made this connection I felt my left hand growing sweaty and realized that it still held the little doll.  The doll felt almost hot to the touch and without thinking at all, I reached over to place it in the box.  As the yarn touched the little pillow, my senses reeled momentarily and I found myself gazing at a remote, but perfectly clear, vision.

I saw my grandmother, grandma, as a young woman standing in front of a sink washing dishes.  A man, slightly older than she I think and resembling my father, walked up behind her, grabbed her waist and spun her around to face him.  With his left hand he hit her hard across the cheek, staggering her backward while his right clutched and tore the front of her blouse.  I closed my eyes, not wanting to see, but the vision continued mercilessly behind the lids.  I was on my knees crying before it stopped and my eyes seemed to go dark.

The darkness didn’t last but the sight before me now was different.  Granny Harkness, looking little different from her visage in my memory, sat beside an oil lamp stitching.  There was no sound but she seemed to be singing while she worked and before long I could see the flat pieces of the doll’s body taking shape.  It resembled a little bag and she stuffed it full of an unidentifiable amalgamation of material from a bowl beside her.  When the stuffing was finished she stitched it together fully and used yarn to make the arms, legs, and the strange, fuzzy head.  All of this she wrapped in an old piece of green canvas, drew a star over the end of the wrap, and was setting it aside as my sight darkened once more.

I thought that perhaps it was over but seconds later a new vision unfolded.  Granny lifted the green-wrapped bundle and slowly unwound the cloth, again seeming to sing as she worked.  When the doll was exposed she took a small knife and punched, not cut but punched, a small hole in its chest then laid it flat on the table in front of her.  She took the knife and similarly pricked a small wound on the third finger of her left hand then laid the knife carefully beside the doll.  She reached to her left and when her hnd returned to view she was rolling a tiny ball of some sort between her thumb and ring finger, through the drop of blood on its tip.  Her hand moved straight across to the figure and, using the same fingers, firmly pressed the ball into the hole.  She laid the green cloth beside the doll, carefully turning the star down, and drew her ring finger, still oozing slightly, across the cloth in a rectangle, pressing it firmly on the final corner to stop the bleeding.  She reached for her stitching and without lifting the doll from the table, stitched a short piece of red yarn across the hole in its chest.  Her lips had been constantly moving and they continued as she placed the form in the familiar copper box, closed the lid, and draped the cloth over it, rectangle up.  As her lips ceased their motion my vision faded again.

I found myself kneeling in front of the desk, holding the box with my thumb pressed on the doll inside.  I dropped them both in revulsion and ran from the house.

I stopped when I reached the porch and sat down in the swing to breathe.  What had I just seen?  Nothing in my experience prepared me to see my abusive grandfather killed by my great-grandmother using some sort of arcane sorcery.  Nothing in the memory of my father suggested that he was raised, even in part, by such a woman.  Of course, I could think of nothing to make me think he could be sired by such a man, either.  I remembered the way I always felt around Granny Harkness, a little uncomfortable but always safe.  She always seemed capable of making me safe, even if I didn’t like where we might be.

I don’t like where I am in my mind for now, but I think I’m safe.