I developed a reputation among the neighborhood children as a solver of problems, but except for the occasional request to patch a ball or adjust a pair of skates, I had little association with them. I preferred to keep to myself. That shed was my sanctuary, both from my mother’s mood swings and from my sister’s mockery and intransigence, and there were times when I spent the entire night there. The only member of my family who ever visited me in the shed was my father, and his interactions with me there were only, as far as I could tell, coincidental to his real aim of retrieving a hammer or other tool from the elaborate and useful pegboard rack I had made.
One side of the shed had been taken up by deep, painted pine shelves, and I had left this area entirely to my father’s possessions. Most of these were magazines — back issues of handyman and do-it-yourself publications, and (I eventually discovered) a small cache of pornography, about which he seemed to have entirely forgotten. There was, however, one curious item shoved into a shadowy corner of the shelves: a handmade hardwood box about the size of a large dictionary. The box was held shut by a heavy latch with a lock on it. I was curious about this box, of course, and attempted many times to figure out what it held. It was rather heavy and solid-feeling, and it made no sound when shaken; the hinges, latch, and lock were extremely sturdy and well fitted. The only way into it would have been to break it, and my curiosity was never so great as to drive me to that extreme. Every now and then my father would enter the shed — he never knocked, as he rightfully regarded the shed as his, and my tenancy a condition of his generosity and good will — and remove the box from the shelf, and at these times I would always study his face for clues to what was inside. It was almost always in the evening when he came to take the box, and usually when my mother was asleep and my sister out somewhere, carousing. He would always return it within the hour.
Over the course of my childhood, I must have spoken with my father many, many times. But these exchanges are vague in my memory, his deep voice little more than a smear of sound. Instead what I recall is his silent presence, and my own reciprocal silence. I would not call it companionable, but neither would I refer to it as tense; our closeness was never deliberate, though we made no effort to avoid one another. But neither did we entirely ignore each other. We were like two discrete parts of a personality, taking up residence in the same brain — our proximity was unavoidable but we had little to say.
For all that, however, I never truly felt I understood my father. I do not fully understand him today. There were, however, times when I felt like I was my father, when I could sense his blood flowing through me, his expressions on my face, his anxious, hangdog stance in my bones.
But now, ironically, he felt very distant. And when I returned to myself from my reverie, and looked around at the gray skies and muddy ground, I could sense my memories draining away, pouring through me like rain off a mossy roof and into the earth. I was no longer sure about where I was standing — perhaps this wasn’t the former site of our house, after all. Perhaps we’d lived closer to the swamp — or maybe farther in the other direction, nearer to Main Street. In any event, it was all mud and weeds now.
I returned to my car and drove away. And after several false starts, I was able to find the municipal cemetery where I had last seen, and argued with, my sister, before her recent appearance at my house. It was at the edge of town, on a woody rise around which the county highway curved. Unlike the church cemeteries that dotted our town, this one was ill cared for, the grass long and gone to seed, the ground littered with dead branches and trash blown from the road. The headstones leaned, and the graveled paths were cut through by runoff. It took some searching, but I was able to find my parents’ graves. They were not buried together. My mother’s bones lay beneath a willow tree. This is not as idyllic as it sounds, because the tree was old and half dead, having apparently been split decades before by lightning; and just beyond it ran a low, cracked, graffiti-covered cement wall, over which the road could clearly be seen and heard. Her stone was simple, bearing only her name and dates: 1937–1981.
My father was buried behind the crumbling cinderblock bunker where the groundskeeper, if there even was one anymore, kept his supplies. His grave was marked only by a cement slab, half-buried in the ground. The dates were identical to my mother’s.
I did eventually discover what was inside the mysterious wooden box. The police found the box standing open on my father’s workbench in the cellar. It was lined with velvet, and bore a depression the precise size and shape of the pistol that killed my parents.
As I drove back to the hill, rain began to fall in torrents; but by the time I got home and unpacked the car, it had ceased, and the sun emerged. The ice that had covered the trees that morning was gone, melted away in the warm rain. The front that brought the storm was balmy, and by the time I was ready to go outside again, the temperature had risen to nearly sixty degrees.
It was 2:00 p.m., leaving me time enough before darkness fell to perform an exploratory walk around the edge of my property. I recalled having been hungry before my unanticipated trip to Jefferson Street, but oddly my hunger had passed, and so I left at once, loading a few light provisions in my pack. I wore a thin waterproof jacket, a pair of running shoes, and a baseball cap; a pair of binoculars hung around my neck. It would be an easy walk, as I planned to stick to the roads, searching carefully for any former trail that could lead me to the rock.
The first leg of the walk was downhill. I left the lot in front of my house and took Lyssa Road in long strides, keeping to the northern edge, my feet crunching in the gravel. I could hear water bubbling in the ditch on the other side. A hawk circled overhead once, twice, three times, then moved on. And once I saw the face of a doe peering out from the trees to the south.
But mostly I kept my attention on my own property. I was looking for any evidence that a path once existed, some entryway to the interior that I could trace on my upcoming venture. I kept in my mind, as I walked, some sense of the location of the rock, relative to where I stood; and, given my long experience in the area of land use, I believed I had a very good sense of its direction at all times. Every once in a while I peered into the woods, or took a few steps beyond the treeline, but I found nothing on Lyssa Road to suggest there was a clear route. The deadfall, as on the hilltop, was barely penetrable, and I could see patches of wet, glistening marsh in those few places where no branches lay. The storm, no doubt, had made even worse what was already a nearly insurmountable problem.
I reached the end of Lyssa road quite promptly, and made a left turn onto Minerva. My experience there was more of the same. No paths, and no clear forest floor. I did pass a roadkilled squirrel, its snout dark with blackened blood, lying on the shoulder, and I pushed it into the dirt with my shoe, so that nature could reclaim it more quickly.
Soon Minerva Road began to climb, and I passed over the creek that cut off the corner of my property and ran underneath the pavement. Thus, it was not long before I arrived at Nemesis Road, which I turned onto with a renewed sense of purpose. The road ran downhill for a time, crossing once again over the creek, and I made my way deliberately to the lowest point, diligently checking for anything remotely resembling a footpath. Once again, there was nothing.