Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  The best part was how a turtle can sometimes swim twenty miles an hour and that’s faster than this one kid says he can go in his granddaddy’s wheelchair that runs like a car. He said he can go ten miles an hour and do doughnuts when his granddaddy is in the bathroom and can’t stop him. He says his granddaddy goes to the bathroom all the time too. He said his granddaddy goes to the bathroom when his grandma talks too much, which is all the time. Even the teacher laughed about that and it made Harvey wish he had a granddaddy with a wheelchair, or just a granddaddy. He is the only kid he knows without any grandpeople at all, not even an old one in bed sleeping, like a bunch of them that live near here. He has peeped in their windows before. Not too many kids have half people or if they do they don’t tell, and he knows they don’t have ghosts in their house so he tells he’s got half of a brother and he’s got a ghost that’s probably a dead old person trying to get back to that place they all stay or to the cemetery. He asks if anybody has ever heard about those boys that killed their mama and daddy while they were watching TV, and one new girl named Molly started crying. She’s from somewhere far enough that she talks funny and she has a hamster named Cheeks. He asked why she was crying like a baby—was she scared somebody would kill her while she was watching TV?—and she ran to tell the teacher, and the boy who drives the wheelchair fell back laughing.

  “Guess what?” the teacher says and pulls Harvey by the arm. He said Harvey had another chance yesterday. Harvey wants to say what Jason taught him: Guess what? Chicken snot—

  “What?” Harvey asks, and closes his eyes so he won’t have to see how mad Mr. Stone is looking.

  “Open your eyes, son,” he says, and when Harvey does, he doesn’t look so mean after all. He looks more sad, like when his mom was scrubbing the doo-doo rug or when she’s looking out the window. He has one hair coming out his nose but Harvey doesn’t laugh at that either. “I’m going to need to speak to your mom, again,” he says. “You’re a nice kid, a really good kid, and I want us all to get along.” He says, “Do you understand?” and Harvey nods yes. Harvey asks does he want to hear a joke.

  Frank

  Frank looks both ways, that endless flat stretch of rails as far as he can see—cotton, tobacco, soybeans all around him, and beyond, the straight line of spindly pines. How odd to be in this place on such a clear summer day, the sun so bright he has to squint; he sees dots if he stares too long, trying once again to imagine that dark, cold night, the sounds, the devastation. He steps carefully from one tie to the next, eyes on the spaces in between, where something shiny might catch his eye. He knows the train schedule and has since his childhood. Even all those years he and Lil lived in Massachusetts, working and raising their children, he knew the schedule through here, could imagine the whistle and the vibrations along these very tracks—the place of his adolescence, and now falling behind him in closed chapters, very few pages remaining.

  Lil was the one who first suggested the migration southward and who, with their daughter’s help, studied various communities. She had chosen this place to be near their daughter, a place with mild weather and four seasons; she had in mind that there are world-class medical facilities right down the road, places you don’t want to have to frequent and where he has already spent way too much time. When they arrived, the politics suited them but now have taken a downward turn. There’s a lot he has missed about their home, and lately he would prefer just about anything to pork and golf and ACC basketball. Bacon, barbecue, ham. Pork, pork, and more pork. Brackets for March Madness. Golf, golf, and more golf. i’d rather be golfing, the bumper stickers say, and why would a person who doesn’t play live on a course anyway, except that’s where their daughter said they should be. She’s a lawyer who had come to school in this state and never left.

  “You know Richard Nixon went there,” he told her when she was accepted and headed south.

  “And you spent much of your childhood there,” she had said. She said he had deprived them of a whole chunk of their history by never visiting, and now it was time.

  His mother had wanted to be where his father had died, his body never really found, just bits of bone and teeth and ash, and her health had been compromised; she had broken bones. And there was the baby to think about it; she couldn’t afford to lose the baby—it was all that was left of him. Lil said she could understand this; she said it the first time he ever told her, and yet it is only now he feels he understands. How many times had he heard the story, how his mother’s life had been spared by Frank’s baby brother filling her womb and pressing on her bladder? She was six months pregnant but still discreet in her dress. She had said a person would have needed to stare rudely to see what was going on, and she had worn a full coat, which was the style anyway. It was out of character for his mother to leave home, but she did, and she was excited about the trip and bringing his father home, excited about the new baby.

  The sun is hot as he picks his way down the tracks, careful of his footing. His eyes are tuned to the ground, but all he sees is litter—broken glass, scraps of fast-food wrappers. The collar of his shirt is wet, and he stops and pulls out a handkerchief to wipe his face. O my heart of my mother! O my heart of my mother! O my heart of my different forms. When he had students select and annotate from the Book of the Dead, spell 30b was by far the most popular selection. It was one of the easiest to memorize—he knew this was likely why—but he never discouraged it, perhaps because taking the time to imagine the judgment of one’s own heart is not such a bad thing to do. Undergraduates often compiled a list of drunken brawls and sex with strangers and cheating on tests, which made for interesting reading, even if not worthy of a grade above a C.

  “Could we weigh my paper one more time?” a stoned-looking smart aleck once asked, and Frank said sure, and pulled a feather from the drawer of his desk. He had done this many times, to the delight of all the others. He also had a small scale Lil had given him one Christmas years before, and he gently placed the feather on one side and waited.

  O heart of my mother! O heart of my mother!

  December 15, 1943. His grandmother had baked bread that morning, and the whole house smelled like warm, sweet yeast when he came home from Oakland School. It was a Wednesday, and as she did every Wednesday, his grandmother asked him to go with her so he could carry the bags. She was excited about his parents getting home. She was planning food for their arrival. Who knows what he was thinking about. It was the year they had to memorize so many different things, so maybe that—some verse of Longfellow or Over the river and through the woods—or he was thinking about Boy Scouts or what he wanted for Christmas; he is fairly sure that’s the year he asked for a globe and a new baseball glove. But whatever it was vanished the next day.

  They were all still in shock when they planned Frank’s move in the late spring. “You’ll be back soon enough,” his grandmother said. “Your mother needs you.”

  In the beginning, it sounded like Frank and his mother and the baby would be home by late summer; he would miss baseball, but he would be back for school. But summer became fall, and fall became winter, and by then, Preston had voiced his intentions, and a whole new part of his mother’s life began; that was the part Lil said she could understand, and for years they simply agreed to disagree, Frank a little hurt that she could so easily see his mother’s point of view.

  “But what about Grandmother?” he had asked when his mother delivered the news in a series of calm, quiet syllables while Horace wailed from his crib in the next room. “What about our house?” The house would sell, he was told, and his grandmother would move to live with Frank’s Aunt Jenny in Worcester. His mother’s family had dwindled to almost nothing: only a brother still in Maryland, where she had grown up. “What does it matter? We will be together—safe and together. As it should be,” she kept saying, and he soon grew tired of the argument.

  A story is easier to fall into than your own life, which is why Frank was always taken with mythology, the explanations of all those
unexplainable things: this is how the sun rises, and this is why the moon changes in size. The explanations of death, and what happens after, vary in different cultures, and so much of his life has been preoccupied with just that, the myths of death and all the ancient beliefs of the afterlife. “There was nothing for us to bury,” his mother had said. It’s hard not to think how different it would all be these days with DNA tests and research. Even now there might be traces of his father—his own DNA—in the dirt below his feet.

  Early in his career, he had a wonderful library of books about canopic jars, and paintings and photographs of them; the whole process was so fascinating and guaranteed to hold a class’s interest. Then of course, that silly fad of imitation canopic jars sprang up, and that’s all anyone gave him for years, everything from the sentimental syrupy ones—wishes, dreams, desires—to the irreverent—ex-wives, grudges, felonies. Beware if you are a man with a hobby and anyone discovers it—you will get more urns than there are shelves; or if you like to fish, you will get fish that flap and sing and all kinds of silly rulers and signs about lying. Or baseball: you will get baseballs that talk. Whatever, all silly, and, what’s more, it will taint your desire for this thing you love, which someone else is trying to claim with you. Part of having an interest is that it is yours—or should be—in a way that allows you to feel removed, instead of invaded, like the kudzu and wisteria overtaking the trees around him. He stops again to judge his distance from the car. So hard to find the right spot.

  Years ago, when he sometimes practiced class lectures on Lil, he told her about the special ceremony that took place to open the mouth of a mummy so he could speak in the next life, and she immediately began naming all of the people she hoped they kept sealed up. She said, “Mum’s the word!” Something she repeated a lot, especially after they moved. Now, he finds it all funny and has for a lot of years, but that night as he practiced, a young professor craving respect and recognition and tenure, he was irritated that she didn’t listen better, that she didn’t at least say something serious—How did they do that? or Oh, how interesting! or how smart his words were—before it became a conversation that was about her being funny. It was a time in his life when he really needed to be heard. He needed to be seen, to feel alive. He had just turned the age his father was when he died, and he woke each day with a tightening in his chest, a reminder that this could be his day. Of course, Lil also made him aware of that, since she herself had already experienced it.

  “What haven’t you experienced, Lil?” he asked her. “Anything? Is there anything at all?”

  “I haven’t been to the moon,” she said. “I haven’t gotten the Nobel Peace Prize,” and then when she realized he wasn’t laughing, she put her arms around him, the same way she did with the kids, when offering comfort. “Really, Frank,” she said. “You’ll be great. You always are.”

  It will be great. It’s just up ahead. It’s around the corner. Frank hates anticipation, hates waiting. Too often, the waiting is nothing but a lie, an undelivered promise. You’ll feel better soon. No, no, I won’t. We’ll be home on the sixteenth. No, no, you won’t. You’ll come home when your mother is better and able. No, no, I won’t. You come first, Frank. But, no, he didn’t—not as a child and not when his own children arrived, and what sane and loving father wouldn’t want his children to come first, and yet, every now and then, he wondered, When was it his turn? Would he ever get a goddamned turn? His mother didn’t put him first, and neither did Lil during that span of years when she was determined to make up for her mother’s life. “I didn’t marry your goddamned mother,” he had said. “I married you, and you aren’t there anymore!”

  And even this move. Why couldn’t he just live to the end without having to visit what has haunted him all these years? It was so easy to ignore it when so far away, but now he can’t not think about it, not revisit.

  When the kids were young, they listened eagerly to all he had to tell them: how the heart was weighed against the feather of truth, how the hearts were then fed to the monster. And he showed them the many jars on his shelf, the silliness of their messages—enemies, fantasies, dreams—turned to the wall. Instead, he introduced them as Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, and Qebehsenuef. Liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines. The kids loved hearing how all those good brains were tossed away, as if nothing more than a snot factory. Jeff liked the baboon, and Becca the raven, and Frank told Lil later he was predicting their future based on their choices—Jeff chose lungs, and Becca chose intestines, which he later turned into a family joke. One full of a lot of hot air, and one full of shit.

  “I needed to stay there,” Frank’s mother had said. “He asked me not to leave. That was the last thing he said: don’t leave.”

  “He was dead.”

  “No, he was dying.”

  She said, “I went to the restroom, and it saved my life.”

  What an odd fact to mark such a shift, and yet it had. And Frank has thought of it so many times when he excused himself to a lavatory in a public space or escaped a cocktail party or a heated discussion to collect his thoughts. Taking refuge there behind a locked door, eye to eye with himself in the mirror as he mouthed the familiar I am here.

  His mother had described the moment so many times that Frank felt he had lived it as well. It was as if she had to keep telling it in order to believe it, as if some time she might tell it and find something new. And so he listened. To his knowledge, he was the only recipient of her going back through and over it all; she did it only when it was just the two of them all alone. When she died, Frank asked Horace and Preston if she had ever talked about it to them, and they said no, assuming that she hadn’t talked to him either.

  “He was sleeping,” his mother had said. “He was wearing civilian clothes: a yellow cotton shirt with green flecks that he had bought as a souvenir, even though it was December. He thought it was funny and said he knew it would make his mother laugh when they got home.” His hair was combed back. “Thick and black, just like yours, honey,” Frank’s mother always said. He was wearing Aqua Velva, like always. He had a newspaper on his lap, his hand—with his tapered, tan fingers—on top of the obituary of the man who had created Corn Flakes. She said it was an odd thing to remember, but she had, perhaps because she was thinking that after, if she still couldn’t sleep, she would ease the paper from his hands and try to read a bit, in the dim light, about Mr. Kellogg, a detail that would be present in her mind forevermore, every trip to a market a reminder. She was thinking about reading the paper as she made her way through the car; she was thinking about how good it would be to get home, her body being jostled from side to side as she made her way into the small lavatory. She was wearing a skirt she could no longer button but had pinned to her slip; she was trying to straighten her stockings; she was reaching, the pooch of Horace filling her abdomen in a way that made it hard to bend over, when everything happened.

  She closed her eyes as she told it all—“I’ll be right back”—as if to conjure his father’s face, an expression Frank never saw in the presence of his stepfather lingering there. It was a pause, an acknowledgment of all that rushed out of her life in that moment.

  And why did this please Frank? He should have wanted her happiness, her comfort. Why did some part of him relish the pain and loss he saw on her face and heard in her voice?

  “I’ll be right back,” she had said, “and then I hope I can sleep.” She whispered this in his father’s ear; it was past midnight, and they were on their way home. They would have the whole train ride in the morning to talk and rest before returning to everyday life.

  Frank trips and falls forward, one knee landing on a crosstie with a crack of pain that takes his breath, his palms outstretched into the gravel. “Please don’t be foolish,” Lil had said the day she came with him. “It’s dangerous, and it’s so hot.” He catches his breath, hearing her say, I told you not to do that. His pants are torn, his hands scraped, but he can bend his knee. He can stand, and he waits for the pa
in to subside, for his vision to clear. He can see a small house in the distance, the roof caving at one end, where there is a big satellite dish; he hears a dog barking and the distant roar of a muffler in need of repair.

  He takes another deep breath, knee sore but okay, but he has to pee, so he looks around to a spot where the pines are thick, offering shade as well as relief. I went to the restroom, and it saved my life. And is it any surprise that Horace grew up to be a nephrologist? Every time the two have gotten together over the years, the conversation always comes back around to kidneys and their mother’s escape from death. “The kidneys should have been saved in one of those Egyptian jars!” Horace says. “The kidneys get more blood than the heart, brain, and liver. The kidneys, thanks of course to my presence, saved mother’s life.” And last year when Frank was in the hospital, complaining about all the tubes running in and out of his body, Horace had called from his place at Hilton Head and said, “Tapping a kidney’s not so bad, big brother.” Tapping a kidney. Horace said things like that, like he might still be at a fraternity party setting up a keg. “Tapping more than a kidney,” he almost said, but chose not to go there. He was tired of the chatter. He simply thanked him for calling and wished him a great time golfing or sailing or whatever it was he was doing. Catheters, catheters, heart, bladder, enough. Enough with the slow drain.

  Frank has always been grateful his mother was spared, even though as a boy he had sometimes—with enormous pangs of guilt—allowed himself to imagine his life if he’d been orphaned to his grandmother’s care and stayed where he was—his house, his school, his life. O heart of my mother! And then he would find himself going to sit near his mother, to take it all back. He was so relieved she was there, even though it was hard in boyhood to see Horace, the little red-faced mewler with chronic cradle cap, as hero of the world. “Don’t you go near those tracks,” his mother had said, and he can almost conjure her voice as he makes his way from the edge of the woods back into the glare of the rails and the short distance to go.