From the time Roger and I first carried a footlocker to the attic, we went there at least weekly. Occasionally, after hauling something to the attic, we had a few moments without another chore, and amused ourselves by rearranging luggage and furniture and bric-a-brac in order to make more room. Nearly weekly, we recovered luggage from the attic to deliver to a departing guest. Familiarity diminished the creepiness of the attic. It became just an enormous closet. Once in a rare while, something would catch my attention, or Roger’s, and we would muse upon whatever it was: a postcard found on the floorboards, a crow’s feather, the old aluminum Christmas tree, long since replaced with an annual real tree. None of it had any significance and none of it was scary. There never seemed to be any lack of curiosities; we were forever discovering things that we had not previously noticed.
Grady’s plumbing chores never took him to the attic but he heard about it from Roger and from me. It was the only part of Merrymeeting that Grady did not know as well as Roger and me. It began to seem unnatural that he had never been in it.
The summer before we were all to start high school, we settled on the day of the annual Five Flags Fiesta, when Cleonie and Perdita had the day off, and all the guests and Miz Verlow were at the Fiesta all day, for Grady’s first visit to the attic.
Once the house was quiet, we set off on our mission. So as not to get either of the boys in trouble if we were discovered, I carried the key that I had taken from Miz Verlow’s office. The attic, of course, was hideously hot. I wore only a halter and a pair of loose shorts. The boys were stripped down to their shorts. We had a jug of sweetened iced tea that I’d made and laced with pilfered bourbon. We had some cigarettes, lifted singly from one unattended pack or another, and saved up for the occasion. Grady had a lighter. I had a few candle stubs and paper cups for the tea. And Roger had a kitchen timer.
Instantly, muck sweat dampened our bodies and our clothing. We spread out an old canvas tarp and set up near a porthole to share a smoke and drink the syrupy spiked iced tea. Grady lighted three candle stubs. The old used candles seemed to us more sophisticated than the electric bulbs. We dripped melting wax onto the tarp until there was enough to fix the stubs upright.
Grady climbed up on a broken end table and peered all around, getting a sense of the space.
We had a plan. After the first cigarette and the first round of drinks, we were going to explore. We each took a candle stub and moved in a different direction. We set the timer for ten minutes, in which we had to find something to show off to the other two.
I lifted tarps and pulled out balky drawers and rummaged and heard Roger and Grady doing the same. Under one tarp I found what I thought at first was some kind of totem, an object as high as my waist, with seven pairs of frowning owlish eyes one over the other. My first reaction was to start away from its malevolent stares. Bringing the candle closer, I saw that it was a semanier, a narrow chest of shallow drawers. Inlaid dark wood made the brows of the owls, the handles the owlish eyes. I giggled at my childish credulity. Opening each drawer in turn, I was surprised to find each one contained several things. I took a single object. I didn’t think about it, just snatched it up, slammed the drawer shut and bounced away as if somebody might catch at it.
My find fit into my closed fist. I was back at our tarp well ahead of the ten minutes. A couple of minutes later, Roger sank onto his haunches next to me. He kept one hand behind his back, and made a motion with the other for a cigarette. I lighted one of our precious stock, took a puff, and passed it to him. Barely under the ten-minute mark, Grady emerged from the darkness, his hands also behind him.
Roger had a spoon. It was a silver spoon, and at the tip of the handle was the thick-lipped, kinky-haired caricatured face of a black boy. Engraved in the bowl was the legend: Souvenir of Pensacola.
Grady had a coconut monkey. I’d made it myself when I was seven or eight, from an immature coconut that washed up onto the beach.
“My old monkey,” I said. “Its name is Ford.”
The boys laughed.
“Ford?” Grady asked.
“My brother.”
“I didn’t know,” Grady said, and Roger rapped the spoon against the coconut.
“We know you don’t know,” said Roger.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I guess I never mentioned him.”
Grady was embarrassed at having hit what both he and Roger took for a tender nerve. The only surprise for me was that I felt more for the monkey as an artifact of my childhood than I did for my brother.
I opened my fist, with a triumphant excitement that made me giggle. In my palm a golden egg the size of a quarter glinted from its nest of coiled and braided silk loops.
The boys wowed.
Opening my fingers, I let the egg roll off the tips, spinning out the silk braid behind it. I expected it to depend smoothly from the braid but it hitched almost at once to a stop. At first I thought the braid tangled but then, with the egg in one hand and the braid in the other, I saw that there were two braids. The longer one, on which the egg hung, had a wee gold buckle and looked like a belt. The other was attached to it at three points, like a pair of suspenders. It was not, as I had first taken it, a child’s pendant.
“What?” Grady muttered.
I passed it to him.
He pushed it around in his palm. “Looks like a harness. Too big for a mouse, too small for a raccoon.”
He passed it to Roger.
“Maybe a rat,” Roger suggested. “The ‘string to swing it wit’—”
Roger and I sniggered. Grady scratched his head, reminding me of the days when he had nits. Grady never did get past moving his lips when he read.
Roger passed it back to me and they awarded me the first round, and I got to drink twice as much of the iced tea this round. While I drank it, I studied on the egg itself. It was not one piece. A ridged seam went down one side from top to bottom, and a smoother one on the other side. Like a locket, I realized, and pushed down experimentally on the bit at the top, the little gold ring where the braid went through. The egg opened like a book.
“Cowie,” exclaimed Grady.
Roger blew a breath out explosively.
They scuttled close to me and we looked at the opened egg together.
On one side, the interior of the egg framed a tiny picture. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait, one of those soft old-timey photographs, and indeed the young woman it depicted wore a hairstyle that I knew was called a Gibson. Her neckline was very low, though, making her neck swanlike under the heavy weight of luxuriant upswept hair.
We were nearly dumbstruck for a long moment.
“She’s the spit of your mama,” Grady said, “when your mama was younger.”
Roger nodded. “Like your mama dressed up with her hair done old-fashun.”
Except, I thought, Mama never smiled like that in her life.
I shifted my gaze to the other wing of the egg. Delicately engraved in swooping letters was the name CALLIOPE.
When I showed the boys, they reacted with even more surprise and wonder.
“ ’At’s your name!” Roger said. “All spelt out.”
Grady nodded dumbly and then said, “Well, is that her name? Calliope?”
“Dunno.” I knocked back the rest of my iced tea and pushed the egg on its silk rope into the pocket of my shorts.
The timer was set for fifteen minutes for the next round. We were supposed to go in different directions each time.
Grady came back with a blue Pepsi bottle. He told us that his uncle Coy had one and claimed it was made before the First World War.