Souvenir

by James R Benn

  “My name—my name is Jake Burnett.” These were the strangest words he’d ever said, after twenty years of not speaking his own name. “Jake Burnett. Clay Brock was my buddy. He died giving me covering fire, saving my life, down in some damn village I don’t even know the name of. He died in my arms. God, I miss him.”

  “Was that when you were wounded?”

  “Yes. That same day. Everyone else was killed or wounded, maybe captured, I don’t know. We knew every trick in the book, but that day it didn’t matter. We ran out of luck. After the Germans pulled out a medic found me and patched me up.” He looked down at his hand, the blood welling in the cut. He tried to make it sound like it was easy. There was the truth, and then there was too much of it, after all.

  “So you came home as Clay Brock?”

  “I did. No one left alive to say different, so I did what Clay wanted. Alice got ten thousand dollars, and I hope to God she used it to start a life for herself somewhere.”

  “But she thought her son died.”

  “Lots of mothers got that news. Happened every day. At least it gave her a chance to get away. Not to have me to worry about any more. About what I meant, reminded her of.” He remembered that as the best he’d made of it. A tragedy for Alice, but something of a blessing, perhaps.

  “You’re a good son, Clay. Or is it Jake?”

  “I made Clay a promise to pass on his name, and live a life for him. It’s my name now, as much as his.”

  “Where does this leave us?” Addy said, moving away from him on the couch, giving herself room to move. “I don’t know what it all means. What does it have to do with us, now? You’ve always been Clay to me.”

  “Maybe everything, maybe nothing,” he said. “I know it wasn’t right not to tell you, but I thought it was for the best. Then as time passed, it seemed harder and harder to ever bring it up. I was ashamed, Addy. Afraid of what you’d do.”

  “Do you mean,” she said, slowly and deliberately, “like leave you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was about to, but because of how you shut me out of your life, not because of what happened to you in your life.” She stayed on her end of the couch, calm, her hands folded in her lap. He moved to her, took her hand in his, and promised himself that if she stayed, he’d be a different man for her. He knew it was too fragile a promise to even say out loud, to use as a persuasion. He willed her to understand. She squeezed his hand.

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Addy, having heard all this?”

  “Do you mean okay with you?”

  “Yes. Now that you know. Know about my family.”

  Addy thought about it. He could tell she wanted to give the question a proper answer, to let him know how she really felt. Her eyes flitted to some faraway place, as they always did when she was deep in serious thought. “I think that a man who had a friend like yours, who would want to give such a gift to him, has to be a good man at heart. A very good man.”

  They sat on the couch for a long, long time, a half hour passing as Clay allowed himself to understand that he’d spoken about things he’d never said out loud before. He’d revealed his anguish, his shame and his secrets to Addy. He cast quick glances at her face, wondering what thoughts hurtled through her mind, but he saw nothing but restfulness, maybe even understanding. She looked peaceful, even with the shambles of their belongings around them. He thought of Clay, dead in the snow, and how even with his horrible wounds, he had looked at peace there, the pain gone, never to touch him again. And he thought about the name he’d passed on, with hopefully some of steadfast qualities of his buddy.

  Addy got up from the couch, and he froze, afraid he’d read her wrong, that she’d come to some conclusion, couldn’t stand to be with him anymore. When she left the room, he wondered if the torment that ate at him all these years would leech out to her, come between them, spreading doubt and fear. He wanted to get up, follow her, but it was easier to sit, waiting, than to run for the truth. He counted, to ten, twenty, almost to one hundred, another of Clay’s habits that he’d picked up and kept over the years.

  She came into the room with a tray, carrying bandages and ointment to cleanse and bind his wounded hand. She cleaned the cuts, wrapped them in white gauze, winding it around his fingers and tying it off.

  “There,” she said. “Now we have to let it heal, don’t we?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  2000

  They drove along Route 209, through Pottsville, down West Market Street. Down by the Miner’s Memorial, a tall statue of a miner holding a lamp and a pickax looking out over a mini-mart parking lot. Paralleling the railroad tracks, the road tucked itself under a high ridge that loomed over them, and Clay felt strangely at home, the steepness all around him a comfort, protection against the outside world, that place he’d been for more than sixty years.

  Clay pointed to a side road. “Take this, Township Highway 605.” Two and three story narrow houses lined the roadway. Each had a small front porch, some decorated with flower boxes, some brightly painted, others rotting away under the weight of abandoned stoves and discarded furniture.

  “Next left, then pull over,” Clay said.

  As the Jeep turned the corner, Clay closed his eyes. Fear streaked through his body. Fear that he would find the house as it had been, red-trimmed kitchen curtains and all. He saw his father’s high cheekbones, the lines in his face, inhaled the smell of his Aqua Velva. Feeling the car pull to the curb and stop, he opened his eyes, and lifting a shaking hand he lowered the window. His fingers wouldn’t stop trembling, and he let his hand drop into his lap.

  “Oh, God,” Clay said. “Oh, my God.” He let his head fall back against the headrest, eyes staring ahead, blinking back tears.

  “What is it, what’s wrong?” Chris asked, leaning over with an anxious look at his father. He put his hand on his shoulder, studying his face. Up close, it shocked him how pale his father was, how loose the skin was along the line of his chin. It was as if he hadn’t seen this face of his father’s before, never took notice of how age played itself out on his features, reducing hard lines to curves, determination to indecision, smoothness to creases and folds. This close, he couldn’t overlay the picture of the man he had known as a youth on his father’s face. This was the face of an old, old man. A man whose defenses had finally crumbled, decades of stone falling away like shale from Lamentation Mountain, washed down the slopes by the agony of unwanted tears.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Clay said, wiping away the wetness from his cheeks with the flat of his hands. “I didn’t expect—I don’t know.”

  Clay felt pressure at his temples, blood pounding through his head. The bottom dropped out of his stomach and he recognized the feeling, the overwhelming certainty that he was going to die. He knew it well. He’d felt it in a foxhole, artillery shells bursting yards away, hot earth cascading over his huddled body as if the devil’s own gravedigger were shoveling it on him. He’d felt it with machine gun bullets snapping the air inches above his head, watching other men rise up to run, fear driving them into the path of lead that burst skulls and shattered bone. He felt it now. He wanted to get out, to be anywhere but here, to get someplace safe outside the shadow of these hills. Instead, burying his head in his hands he wept, shaking his head back and forth.

  “Dad?” Chris drew his hand back, afraid now of what he was witnessing. A minute passed, and Clay quieted, the weeping reduced to sniffles and gasps.

  “I never came home,” Clay said, his face still buried in his hands. Sitting up, he rubbed his eyes and nose, and looked at Chris. “I never came home. I thought it was the right way to handle things.” He looked out the window, a sense of terrible wonder rising up in his throat. “I never came home,” he said, slowly and softly, letting the impact of the words settle in.

  “Why?”

  Clay spread his hands, feeling helpless to explain. But he had to try. “Chris, there was something wrong with my family. With my father, and m
y mother too, for that matter.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. Chris sat silently, leaning his back against the car door, watching his father. “I had a sister. Alice. One day I found out she was also my mother. But that’s not all. It was my own father, he got his daughter pregnant at thirteen, and here I am.”

  “Jesus, Dad. Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah.” Clay looked out the window, studying the houses for the first time since they’d parked. It was the same street, but everything was different. Trees gone, new houses, aluminum siding, cars everywhere. He tried to pick out which house had been his. There seemed to be no space left on the small street, homes crammed together with barely enough room for a driveway between them. He gave up, shaking his head at his own foolishness.

  “You know what the hell of it is? I’ve been so ashamed of that for so long, so mad at them for so long, and now that I’m back here, and all I can do is cry like a baby. A baby! I never came home, Chris. I never saw them again. There damn sure wasn’t anything pretty about it, but they were my folks, and I never came home to them. Alice was my mother, and I never came back.”

  As he spoke the words, he knew that wasn’t the source of his anguish. Pa. It was Pa, the bastard. He wanted back what he once thought he’d had, until he’d learned the truth. A father. Pa had been strict, but that was the way back then, it didn’t really matter. Time would’ve smoothed over those memories, but instead Pa had left him with jagged glass for a memory, and there was no softening of those edges. Pa had cheated him of a son’s right to grow old and remember his own father with fondness. With love.

  Clay reached for the car door, and this time his hand was steady. Opening it, he eased himself down slowly. The burst of energy he’d felt earlier was gone, and every step was once again an effort. The ground was soft and wet, the spring damp soaking the earth. Steadying himself with one hand against the car door, he pushed off, down the cracked slate sidewalk, along the street where he’d run and played as a child, remembering the last time he saw it, walking away from the house toward the bus stop out on State Route 209.

  Chris walked up beside him, putting his arm through his, and Clay rested his weight on Chris’ forearm, thankful for the help. “I’m sorry to have to tell you such a horrible thing, Chris.”

  “It’s no reflection on you, Dad.”

  “No? I was never sure. Not that I thought I’d ever do anything like that, but I always had to wonder if the bad seed would come out in me some other way.”

  “Or in me,” said Chris, stopping suddenly, tightening his grip on Clay’s arm. “You were worried you might pass it on, weren’t you? That I might be the bad seed.”

  Clay made a face, shaking his head, ready to dismiss the idea. He stopped, knowing that Chris’ cop sense would detect a false statement if he heard one.

  “I only wanted to be sure, sure that it was erased from the family tree. Yes, yes, I worried. I know it sounds so old-fashioned, but I did worry about you, and I worried about myself. I never wanted anyone to know.”

  “So that’s why you never told me the real story after the fire.”

  “I couldn’t tell you anything about that. It would’ve opened a crack in the dam, and I didn’t trust what might happen after that.”

  “But Mom knew, right? She had to.”

  Clay pulled away and walked a few steps, crossing a driveway, squinting his eyes to read the house number.

  “Dad!” Chris didn’t move, his voice sharp, demanding his father’s attention. “Tell me Mom knew. You had to have told her, didn’t you?”

  “That was between her and me. I think this may have been it. My house,” he said, pointing. “Number sixty-two.”

  Chris walked up beside him, and they both studied the house. Two stories, red brick. The bright color of the brick showed it had been sand-blasted recently, blowing off layers of paint. Some of the cement had crumbled, and there were furrows in the brick, an amateur homeowner effort. Crocuses peaked out from along the side of the house where the spring sun warmed the bricks. The front door was painted a glossy black, and a child’s tricycle sat on the sidewalk.

  “Looks like a young family fixing up the place,” Chris said. “Any chance they’re related?”

  “Not likely,” Clay answered, pointing to the mail slot on the porch. “What’s that name say?”

  “Kandratavich,” Chris said slowly.

  “Lots of Lithuanians around here. Probably no one left from my family.”

  “You sure?” Chris said.

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “So you’re not from Tennessee, right? Was anyone from your family?”

  “Somebody was,” Clay said, quietly, a whisper.

  They both stood, watching the house. It was silent, no evidence of anyone at home. Noises from the street drifted around them. Doors slamming, a child crying, cars driving by, but where they stood, nothing moved and time passed slowly, as if Clay’s visit had shocked the bricks into silence. They told no stories and held their secrets close.

  “Let’s go back to the car,” Clay said, hoping Chris would take his arm again.

  “Okay, Dad, whatever you want.” Chris took a step, then waited a second, and looped his arm around his father’s. As they walked, minding the uneven seams in the sidewalk, they came to a garbage can set out by the road for pickup. Chris took the manila envelope he’d been carrying since Meriden and tapped it against his leg, feeling the stiff cardboard inside, the fingerprint report from the coffee cup he’d sent for analysis. It was unopened, knowledge and certainty sealed inside, courtesy of the state of Connecticut. Before, he had wanted to know everything, to pry secrets out of his old man and confront him. Now, he dropped it into the can, hearing a soft thunk as it hit bottom.

  “What was that?” Clay asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Inside the car, Chris started the engine, letting the heater run. Watching his father, he knew it wasn’t time yet to leave, and knew also that whatever he would learn about this man, it was best it come from his own lips. They sat without speaking as the heat began to take hold, banishing the damp chill.

  “What did you mean you were counting on it?” Chris said. “About your family being gone.”

  “Well, there were the four of us, no other family around here. And I hope Alice got away.”

  “Got away?”

  Clay sighed. It was too much to explain all at once. “I sent her some money.”

  “When? I thought you never contacted them. How much?”

  Clay smiled as he looked at Chris. He was proud of his son, proud of his work as a detective, but sometimes he seemed to forget he wasn’t interrogating a suspect. Or maybe he hadn’t.

  “Right after the war, no I never did, and ten thousand.”

  “That was one hell of a lot of money in 1945, Dad. How’d you come up with it?”

  “One secret a day, Chris, one secret a day is plenty.” He knew this was enough, that it was fact he had shared any secret with his son.

  Chris shrugged. “Can’t argue with that.”

  The car warmed up as they sat, the sun finally cresting the hill above, brightening everything around them. A green minivan slowed as it passed them and pulled into the driveway by number sixty-two. A young woman with blond hair got out and slid the rear door open, unbuckling a little girl from her car seat. Her husband, tall and skinny with long dark hair, got out and started lugging groceries up the porch steps. Faint cries of Mommy Mommy came through the glass as they watched the little girl in her mother’s arms reach down toward the tricycle.

  “Want to say hello?” Chris said.

  “No, no need. It’s nice to see, though. A new century, new beginnings.”

  “So, what’s it like, being here?” Chris said.

  Clay wiped condensation away on his window, and stared out through the streaks. “Feels like something I had to do, but now that it’s done, it’s just sad. Not awful anymore, just so sad. I’m sorry, Chris, sorry that this ate up so much of me. I�
�d always worried I’d turn out to be like Pa.”

  “Dad, you know all those chores I hated that you used to make me do at the Tavern? When you were watching me like a hawk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No matter how much I bitched, the God’s honest truth is I just wanted to be with you.”

  Clay didn’t speak, not right away. He remembered Addy telling him that, decades ago. He couldn’t believe it then, just plain couldn’t, but he’d never forgotten her words. Now Chris laid it out for him, the simple, beautiful truth. Wiping at the condensation again he rubbed the cool dampness on his fingers across his eyes.

  “It’s all I wanted too, Chris.” It was the absolute truth, and it spread across three generations anchored by Clay, his son to his left and his long dead father haunting the home of his memory on the right. Looking at the newly exposed red brick, like a skin flayed raw, the bright flowers and the yellow tricycle, he finally could know this shiny clean house in the spring sunshine was somebody else’s home now. It was a fair trade; overwhelming sadness and the vision of this young family replacing Pa, Alice, deep shame and fluttering red-trimmed curtains.

  “Let’s go,” Clay said. “It’ll be good to get home before dark.”

  “Are we done here?”

  “Yep.”

  Chris did nothing but nod, and pulled away from the curb.

  Route 209 took them right to Interstate 81, and after gassing up the Jeep they headed north, riding in silence. Clay lowered his seat a bit, closing his eyes. Exhaustion pressed down on him but he couldn’t sleep, only rest and listen to the hum of tires and traffic on the highway. As the miles spun away Clay felt a comfort filling the space between him and his son. There had always been a tension, a tightness in his gut, even at the best of times. But now, he felt lighter than he ever had, as if he’d left a ten-pound iron weight behind on that sidewalk. He had told his secret and it hadn’t been a disaster, hadn’t blown up in his face, hadn’t sent Chris running in disgust. Maybe somehow it would all make sense to Chris, why his old man acted so crazy for all those years.