Don't go looking

TW: mention of suicide, violence

Don’t go looking. Don’t go looking. Don’t go looking.

There were leaves on the ground that year in piles and drifts. They were brown and golden, red and amber, purple and still green. Why did the green leaves fall? It was not their time. Maybe they fell because they had to. They couldn’t be left all alone. The only leaves on a bare tree. Someone has to go before their time, I thought. We all must, perhaps.

***

Don’t go looking.

There was my grandfather, rough and grizzled. The aches and pains had drawn the lines on his haggard face. There was a kindness about his pallor. He wished for love to go out. He didn’t hold the love for himself. It bleached out the life from him until he was gone. He could have held on to more.

***

There were brambles down in the gully. There was a stream down there too if you could find it. Old undergrowth turned to moss. There were little rabbits and mice, chipmunks and other small critters. I would hear the skittering in the leaves as I walked. The rustling from the bushes.

This was my morning walk as a child. Down into the ravine, slipping and stopping the slip as I went down the side. Roots and branches and a little lip of hardened earth stopped a more violent descent. I would push aside broken branches and make new broken branches. I would carve out small paths with my stick. My holes in the wet earth turned into tunnels to China.

My sister Roberta never went down into the gully with me. She found it too scary. It reminded her too much of the fairy tales she wrested from my grandmother. The tales were set in dark and mysterious forests, where fairies and witches lived. They would contain a hero setting off on grand adventure. A poor step-daughter toiling away in the forest, waiting for rescue.

I discovered while researching a school paper one year that the Black Forest in Germany was the inspiration for many of these tales. Forest became a symbol for the darkness of the human soul. It was the root of evil mysteries. It was the thing we all wished to be rescued from.

***

Don’t go looking.

The dreams started when I was maybe seven or eight. I would be in a large field where construction cranes were toiling. Except it was night now. No one was out in the yard. I wandered around between the huge piles of dirt, like mountains beside me. I climbed them. I would meet someone. I would feel anger and fear and rage. They burned deep and bright.

The next moment I was at the old family farm, a secret rotting inside my heart.

I had killed a man.

I could never recall the moment or method of death. I only knew that I was guilty and that I had buried him under the old oak.

***

The ancient oak was a prolific acorn-producing tree at the edge of the ravine. The ravine started perhaps 200 feet past its last visible roots. When I came back up from ravine excursions - pulling on branches and rocks, digging my feet into the mud, hoping that the dark red, thick roots would hold my weight - I would see the branched elder. It stood as a sentinel. You shall not pass was written in its stance.

It had no branches that a boy could grab onto. All the branches started far above my head. Far above my father’s head.

***

I was eight when my mother died. I wasn’t told how she had died until I was ten. By the time I was told the means of her death, sadness and loss had already become a part of me, like an extra limb. After I was told, I examined this limb and discovered it unchanged. Would this limb have grown or shrunk had her death been illness? Suicide?

Murder?

My mother’s death had been an accident. It was the blink of an eye and a misstep on a crowded street. The driver never saw her coming and she didn’t see him.

I wonder to this day if they told me the whole truth. I also wonder if anyone knew the whole truth. No one can know what is in another’s heart. No one knew what was in my mother’s heart. We all pretended we knew because we had to. Knowing was necessary for our survival.

If a death is planned, is purposeful, how can anyone survive that?

***

My father died to us that same year. He left for a job interview in a nearby city and never returned. Months later, I heard my grandparents talk about him behind a closed door.

It was a dark, winter night. The rain was coming down heavy on the patio roof, and the heater was broken. My sister and I were bundled in blankets on the couch. My grandparents normally joined us for after-dinner TV. Not that night. They had taken a phone call and been gone over half an hour.

I got curious and crept down the hall. I listened outside their door. My cold cheek pressed to the worn wood. I didn’t dare move, even with my breath, for fear of discovery.

“They found him.” My grandfather’s voice.

“Should we go to him? Will he come back?” My grandmother’s voice was deep and rough.

“They said he doesn’t want that. He wants to be left alone.”

“And you know why.”

“That’s over with.”

“You mean he knows what will happen.”

“It’s settled, Margaery. Don’t resurrect it.”

“He won’t even call, to check in? The poor kids want to know something.”

“No. And maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s best they don’t expect anything.”

I heard footsteps moving towards me on the other side of the door. I ran back to the living room and jumped under the blankets.

That night I had the dream again.

I was so guilty. The weight of my guilt pulled me down and into the ground. I wanted to disappear into the ground, lie under the ground, just like he did. The man. The man I had killed.

They were going to find out. They would get me.

They would find out.

Did I really kill a man? I don’t remember. Should I dig? Should I find him?

In my dream I would never dig. I would be too afraid.

***

When I was twelve, I told my grandfather about my dream. I would have it about once a month. It was my only recurring nightmare. I shared with him to get it off my chest.

We were in the sun room. It was nice to talk about the darkness in the bright day. It was August and there had been an unusual late summer rain storm. The ground had sucked in the water like a dying man in the desert. The eaves dripped. The sun was already starting to peek back through the clouds and a ray hit the patio chair I sat in. The air was muggy and damp.

I told the whole thing to my grandfather and he leaned back in his rocker. He rubbed under his nose and then clasped his hands.

“That’s quite a story, Donny boy.”

“I know. I don’t know why I never told anyone. It’s just…it’s just strange. I wonder why I have it. I hate it.”

“Our brains are funny things,” my grandpa said.

He looked out a screen towards the forest. There was a loud drip.

He turned back to me. His smile was warm and genuine, but wistful.

His eyes met my gaze.

“Don’t go looking,” he said.

He gently touched the side of my face with his open hand. Twice. It was almost a caress. Then he heaved a sigh and stood up. As he walked back inside, I heard the whine of a mosquito.

Don’t go looking.

Of course, I had thought about it. Some mornings, waking from my dream: I could take a shovel and dig. If I found nothing, maybe the dream wouldn’t have such teeth.



Don’t go looking.

What an odd thing to say.

***

My grandfather died three days ago. He had lung cancer. I didn’t know he was sick until Saturday before last when he had to go to the emergency room. Then he was admitted to the hospital. He never left.

I visited him once. He looked so thin and fragile. His eyes were too big in his face. He wasn’t really there, not like that. The man I knew was already gone.

He fell asleep shortly after I arrived. And I had wanted to ask him so many questions.

***

I am turning fourteen in one month. He won’t be here for my birthday. For the first time, he won’t be here.

The sky is grey today. It is another autumn day. There is a brilliance to the little deaths around me. They make the world so beautiful.

There are two shovels out in the shed by the woods. One is short and one is long. I’m big enough for the long shovel now, but I can dig faster with the short one.

My grandmother is with my sister at Aunt Gloria’s hotel room. Aunt Gloria will be moving from New Jersey with her kids. She will come to live here, with us. My grandmother said that Aunt Gloria is coming to help out with my sister and I, but she just got divorced. Maybe she’s just lonely.

I pick up the small shovel from the inside of the shed, where it is still dry. There are flies in the shed. It smells of gasoline and dry pine cones.

The girls are all going shopping. I have the rest of the day alone.

I stand now and look up at the ancient oak tree. It is angry at me for my impudence.

I close my eyes. I see the dream place, the dream tree, the dream ground.

I open my eyes and begin to dig.