I had a memory of going down this road with my father at the wheel and Buckley sitting nestled against me – one seat belt serving the two of us – in an illegal joyride away from the house.
My father had asked if any of us kids wanted to watch a refrigerator disappear.
“The earth will swallow it!” he said. He put on his hat and the dark cordovan gloves I coveted. I knew gloves meant you were an adult and mittens meant you weren’t. (For Christmas 1973, my mother had bought me a pair of gloves. Lindsey ended up with them, but she knew they were mine. She left them at the edge of the cornfield one day on her way home from school. She was always doing that – bringing me things.)
“The earth has a mouth?” Buckley asked.
“A big round mouth but with no lips,” my father said.
“Jack,” my mother said, laughing, “stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?”
“I’ll go,” I said. My father had told me that there was an abandoned underground mine and it had collapsed to create a sinkhole. I didn’t care; I liked to see the earth swallow something as much as the next kid.
So when I watched Mr. Harvey take me out to the sinkhole, I couldn’t help but think how smart he was. How he put the bag in a metal safe, placing me in the middle of all that weight.
It was late when he got there, and he left the safe in his Wagoneer while he approached the house of the Flanagans, who lived on the property where the sinkhole was. The Flanagans made their living by charging people to dump their appliances.
Mr. Harvey knocked on the door of the small white house and a woman came to answer it. The scent of rosemary and lamb filled my heaven and hit Mr. Harvey’s nose as it trailed out from the back of the house. He could see a man in the kitchen.
“Good evening, sir,” Mrs. Flanagan said. “Got an item?”
“Back of my wagon,” Mr. Harvey said. He was ready with a twenty-dollar bill.
“What you got in there, a dead body?” she joked.
It was the last thing on her mind. She lived in a warm if small house. She had a husband who was always home to fix things and to be sweet on her because he never had to work, and she had a son who was still young enough to think his mother was the only thing in the world.
Mr. Harvey smiled, and, as I watched his smile break across his face, I would not look away.
“Old safe of my father’s, finally got it out here,” he said. “Been meaning to do it for years. No one remembers the combination.”
“Anything in it?” she asked.
“Stale air.”
“Back her up then. You need any help?”
“That would be lovely,” he said.
The Flanagans never suspected for a moment that the girl they read about in the papers over the next few years – MISSING, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED; ELBOW FOUND BY NEIGHBORING DOG; GIRL, 14, BELIEVED KILLED IN STOLFUZ CORNFIELD; WARNINGS TO OTHER YOUNG WOMEN; TOWNSHIP TO REZONE ADJOINING LOTS TO HIGH SCHOOL; LINDSEY SALMON, SISTER OF DEAD GIRL, GIVES VALEDICTORIAN SPEECH – could have been in the gray metal safe that a lonely man brought over one night and paid them twenty dollars to sink.
On the way back to the wagon Mr. Harvey put his hands in his pockets. There was my silver charm bracelet. He couldn’t remember taking it off my wrist. Had no memory of thrusting it into the pocket of his clean pants. He fingered it, the fleshy pad of his index finger finding the smooth gold metal of the Pennsylvania keystone, the back of the ballet slipper, the tiny hole of the minuscule thimble, and the spokes of the bicycle with wheels that worked. Down Route 202, he pulled over on the shoulder, ate a liverwurst sandwich he’d prepared earlier that day, then drove to an industrial park they were building south of Downingtown. No one was on the construction lot. In those days there was no security in the suburbs. He parked his car near a Port-o-John. His excuse was prepared in the unlikely event that he needed one.
It was this part of the aftermath that I thought of when I thought of Mr. Harvey – how he wandered the muddy excavations and got lost among the dormant bulldozers, their monstrous bulk frightening in the dark. The sky of the earth was dark blue on the night following my death, and out in this open area Mr. Harvey could see for miles. I chose to stand with him, to see those miles ahead as he saw them. I wanted to go where he would go. The snow had stopped. There was wind. He walked into what his builder’s instincts told him would soon be a false pond, and he stood there and fingered the charms one last time. He liked the Pennsylvania keystone, which my father had had engraved with my initials – my favorite was the tiny bike – and he pulled it off and placed it in his pocket. He threw the bracelet, with its remaining charms, into the soon-to-be man-made lake.
Two days before Christmas, I watched Mr. Harvey read a book on the Dogon and Bambara of Mali. I saw the bright spark of an idea when he was reading of the cloth and ropes they used to build shelters. He decided he wanted to build again, to experiment as he had with the hole, and he settled on a ceremonial tent like the ones described in his reading. He would gather the simple materials and raise it in a few hours in his backyard.
After smashing all the ships in bottles, my father found him there.
It was cold out, but Mr. Harvey wore only a thin cotton shirt. He had turned thirty-six that year and was experimenting with hard contacts. They made his eyes perpetually bloodshot, and many people, my father among them, believed he had taken to drink.
“What’s this?” my father asked.
Despite the Salmon men’s heart disease, my father was hardy. He was a bigger man than Mr. Harvey, so when he walked around the front of the green shingled house and into the backyard, where he saw Harvey erecting things that looked like goalposts, he seemed bluff and able. He was buzzing from having seen me in the shattered glass. I watched him cut through the lawn, ambling as school kids did on their way toward the high school. He stopped just short of brushing Mr. Harvey’s elderberry hedge with his palm.
“What’s this?” he asked again.
Mr. Harvey stopped long enough to look at him and then turned back to his work.
“A mat tent.”
“What’s that?”
“Mr. Salmon,” he said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Drawing himself up, my father gave back what the ritual demanded.
“Thank you.” It was like a rock perched in his throat.
There was a moment of quiet, and then Mr. Harvey, sensing my father had no intention of leaving, asked him if he wanted to help.
So it was that, from heaven, I watched my father build a tent with the man who’d killed me.
My father did not learn much. He learned how to lash arch pieces onto pronged posts and to weave more slender rods through these pieces to form semiarches in the other direction. He learned to gather the ends of these rods and lash them to the crossbars. He learned he was doing this because Mr. Harvey had been reading about the Imezzureg tribe and had wanted to replicate their tents. He stood, confirmed in the neighborhood opinion that the man was odd. So far, that was all.
But when the basic structure was done – a one-hour job – Mr. Harvey went toward the house without giving a reason. My father assumed it was breaktime. That Mr. Harvey had gone in to get coffee or brew a pot of tea.
He was wrong. Mr. Harvey went into the house and up the stairs to check on the carving knife that he had put in his bedroom. It was still in the nightstand, on top of which he kept his sketch pad where, often, in the middle of the night, he drew the designs in his dreams. He looked inside a crumpled paper grocery sack. My blood on the blade had turned black. Remembering it, remembering his act in the hole, made him remember what he had read about a particular tribe in southern Ayr. How, when a tent was made for a newly married couple, the women of the tribe made the sheet that would cover it as beautiful as they could.