The Shed
I guess it had been about fifteen years since I was last out to the old shed; when I removed the remainder of my belongings from my parent’s house before getting married, moving fifty miles away, and setting up a house of my own, but now that I see it with thirty-six year-old eyes, the familiar structure seems somehow much smaller than I remembered, and less substantial. Maybe it was the large overgrown pine tree that draped over the old building like a cape, the merest twig of a plant I brought home from a girl scout meeting that dad helped me plant all those years ago, but the wood structure, with its faded olive green siding and crumbling almost-black roof shingles, was not the grand fortress I recalled from youth, not the massive secret hideaway for the precocious gang of girls we were, or the hallowed weight training facility where my brother and his band of would-be muscular friends sweated, joked about girls, and bragged of the glorious lives they were going to lead. It was just dad’s old wooden shed, where he kept his beloved gardening tools: rakes, shovels, hoes, axes; the lawnmower, gasoline and oil for his various power tools, wooden stakes for the vegetable garden, coiled green hose, all manner of fertilizers, bug killers and gardening chemicals, and the deck furniture that he dutifully drug out every spring and carefully put back each autumn. It was where the sleds were hung up in summer, and where my brother’s soapbox racecar was stored during the winter months. They built it together, dad and Ian, and it hung from the rafters by four metal hooks, beyond my reach for many years. One spring, when we took it out, it was full of crushed walnut shells the squirrels had deposited during their winter residence. I remember Ian swearing and my father chuckling at the sound of his son’s profanity. It was only when dad saw my shocked expression that he scolded my brother. “Not in front of the lady, son.”
Dad built the shed with his brother, back in 1967, just before my uncle went off to Viet Nam. I never met Uncle Nick, but dad often spoke of his talented and mischievous brother, especially whenever he went out to the shed, where the ghost of Nick Grady seemed to linger amid the rafters. “We weren’t the carpenter our father was, but the two of us managed to cobble this old thing together. We were just kids, me twenty-four and Nicky barely twenty. He wasn’t even old enough to get served in a bar, so he came over to help me, as long as I gave him beer. What lovely drunken weekends those were! Oh, yes. That thing could have got built in half the time, but we had such great fun, laughing, joking and talking about starting a business together: Grady Builders. We were going to build homes, and would have built a whole damn town together, if he hadn’t been killed in the Tet.
“We had plans, great plans, for the two of us, our sons and grandsons, and when he was killed it was like someone came along and denied me my dreams. When Nicky died, it was like the promise of America itself died for me. I couldn’t have the life I wanted with my family because of something that happened halfway around the world that nobody seemed to understand. I lost faith in a lot of things the day that telegram came.”
My father was not a bitter man, although he might have seemed that way to others. He was just quiet, sort of overwhelmed by life, especially in situations where he wasn’t comfortable, like at gatherings that involved the extended family, particularly on my mother’s side. He was not one to tell a joke or laugh out loud, at least as far as I can remember. “He and Nicky used to laugh so much,” Mom recalled with a faint smile that made her look older than her years. “Especially when they were working together. I swear they spent more time laughing than building that shed.”
Several people at the funeral came up to me and said that dad always seemed to be thinking serious thoughts. I wanted to say that they didn’t know him like I knew him, but only nodded. To have to explain him would not change the way they saw him, or bring him back.
My father never did become the builder he dreamt about. The death of his brother drove him into an office job, where he submerged into the murky depths of middle management, and rode out the time in the forlorn darkness. He put in his twenty-five years and retired with a modest pension. He and Mom had plans to travel the world, to see the village of his ancestors, and marvel at the remnants of past civilizations, but they only managed a trip to Las Vegas before he was diagnosed. Once the disease was announced, it took full command of the stage, like a rabid performer, and his remaining time was spent shuttling back and forth between hospitals, doctors’ offices, and the pharmacies which supplied him with the pills that lessened his pain but took the man I knew and loved away from those who struggled to get close to him in those final days. Paul Grady went to the grave with no memory of the dreams that had eluded him.
I never got to meet my uncle, but came to know him from the pictures dad showed with a father’s pride, and the stories he told with the earnestness of youth in his voice. He would always begin by telling me how funny and caring and crazy his brother had been; how Uncle Nick would do anything on a dare, even leaping from the Fielding bridge into the river, just to get a laugh, but invariably the weight of his great loss would wear him into sorrow.
“Nixon promised it was going to end. He promised, but it didn’t end soon enough for Nicky. They called him up, called him away from us.” Dad’s face would fall when he spoke of the draft, the veins in his hands swelling with anger. “I blame that devil bastard Johnson for killing my brother. That man had a lot of blood on his hands.”
I didn’t know much about the Viet Nam war, and made a point in college of taking a history class in third world politics so that I might understand what happened to this country a little better, and what happened to my father. No matter what I read, or what the movies tried to portray, I could not possibly experience the war like dad did. Ian and I were not very close anymore, but I could not even begin to imagine what it would be like to lose my only brother. I tried to see the point to it all, the grand ideal behind all the pain and suffering, but the things that drove people to kill were not the sort of things that drove me to live.
When dad got into one of his moods, I just let him vent his remorse until he was on the verge of tears. It didn’t do any good to try to stop him; my father was not a man you stopped from speaking his mind, and I could only think that letting the hurt out was better than having it eat away at his insides.
“I was born five years too soon, Franny,” he told me repeatedly. “That could have been me over there in that god-forsaken swamp, slithering through those jungles, with the rest of those young men who thought they were fighting for their mothers, baseball and apple pie, but I had a wife, a kid—your brother—and you were on the way, so I was stuck stateside, at least until things got really desperate, and they were ready to call up me, the world war vets, and the Pope.
“I thought about going. It seemed like the right thing to do at one time, to go were my government needed me, and to kill whomever my government told me. It was like the miracle of the Eucharist, an article of blind faith. I actually felt like a coward when Nicky went off, like I wasn’t doing my duty to my country. I wanted to be there, fighting alongside him, but I had a family, and obligations. Staying home was just as hard as going.”
“‘Don’t worry, Paul,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll win this thing quick and get back so we can start on them houses,’ and I remember saying to him, ‘Take out a few of them yellow bastards for me,’ and we laughed. We laughed about killing because it seemed a happy thought, at one time. Until the gun was pointed in the other direction.”
Dad and I spoke a lot about the war the year I took that history class, and I would like to think our talks helped him to unburden himself as much as it helped me to better understand him. I had the feeling he told me things he could not even tell mom, maybe because she had lived through events and had a different perspective, or maybe because she knew Uncle Nick. Dad and I spent many nights in the family room, while mom scurried about the house, doing the dishes or the laundry, and Ian played ball with his friends. We looked through books, watched films, attained a level of closeness I have never had with any other person in my life. I felt like the teacher’s favorite student. We even went down to Washington to visit the new memorial, just Dad and I. “I have to go to that wall and touch my brother,” he said, “one of the fifty-eight thousand lost souls.”
From a distance, the wall seemed to me like a gash in the ground, a great gaping puss-filled wound, but the sublime beauty of the thing did not become apparent until you got closer, and didn’t really move you until you began to read all those names on the black stone, row after row, panel after panel, life after life. We had descended into that valley of death, the rumble of traffic a faint whisper on the air above, and stood on the edge of another time. I touched Uncle Nick’s name and thought of all the people who were changed by his loss, and all the other lives that were never the same because of all those names on that wall: mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, friends, wives and children, thousands and thousands of children. After seeing those names, I felt so lucky to have my father.
The most chilling effect was when the sun shone a certain way and your own reflection appeared in silhouette among the names. “It’s like I’m there with them,” dad gasped, and I was too awestruck to respond. I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face that day. For an instant, he was a young man again, that vibrant dreamer who loved life and wanted to build homes, but then, very suddenly, as the light shifted, he seemed to age well beyond his years. His face fell and skin shriveled; he became an old man, right before my eyes.
* * *
Dad was dead two years now, and Mom was finding the four-bedroom house and the acre lot too much to maintain by herself. She could pay to have the lawn cut, the snow plowed, and the house cleaned, but there was little joy in not being able to share the comfortable space with someone. Though it pained her to leave the quiet suburban house she had taken great pleasure in with her husband of thirty-six years, where she raised a set of precocious kids, dreaded what the world was to become, and dreamt of what the world could be, there wasn’t much debate about what she should do. Since my brother had a house full with three kids, two cats, a dog and a wife, in a tiny cape cod, and I lived fifty miles away from the friends and community she had known all her life, the idea of her moving into a mature living community seemed the best option. It wasn’t like she was going into an assisted living facility, where nurses hovered like the specter of death. She had her health, and would still have her freedom, her car, her own private space; she was just downsizing, moving into half of a one-floor twin, in a new development, just three miles away.
“It’s a much better option than an apartment,” I explained. “You’ll be around people your own age.”
The place was new and shiny and modern. In fact, I was a bit jealous when I saw how lovely the house was laid out, with state-of-the-art appliances, and a spectacular view of the pond behind the development. She could be happy here, I knew, if she gave it a chance.
* * *
The family home was the mere shell of what it once was, the walls bare, the floor full of boxes that woefully contained the remnants of a whole life. Mom had given away or sold most everything, and was only taking her most precious possessions. The movers were due the next day, and I was making one last look around to see that there were no prized Grady belongings remaining.
“I’d better take a look in dad’s shed, just to make sure there weren’t any valuable family antiques sitting out there.”
“If there are, I’ll split the booty with you fifty-fifty.” Mom laughed as she folded and boxed her favorite set of dishtowels.
The key slid easily into the padlock, which opened with a satisfying click. To the best of my knowledge, no one had been out to the shed in almost three years, yet the lock still worked as smoothly as ever. The doors opened with only a slight groan of protest, and my nose was assaulted by a myriad of smells: damp wood, moldy grass, fertilizers, gasoline and death. I knew enough from finding dead rodents in the basement of my own home that the strong smell was probably a departed mouse in one of the corners. To my surprise, I found a light switch–a much later addition–and a pale sixty-watt bulb that cast just enough light to make the space apparent. Things went scampering into the shadows. The smell of cigarettes was pervasive as I moved inside, which recalled the conversation I had just had that morning.
“You know, your father never smoked, not really, not until he got the news about your Uncle Nicky. That’s when he started, heavy, and kept up till the day he died. I thought for sure he was going to blow us all sky high there for a while. Don’t you know that oxygen is highly explosive, but he would often have his mask in one hand and a cigarette in the other.”
I could only wonder how the death of this man I had never seen had impacted my life. My father had taken a another career, become a different person, and formed habits that took him away from us much too early. How else had my life changed because of Nick Grady?
I spent the better part of the afternoon in the shed. We were leaving the rakes and shovels for the next people who moved in. The back neighbor, a nice middle-aged man who enjoyed working in his yard, bought the mower, and we gave him all of the fertilizers and chemicals. I took the hoses and tomato stakes for use at my place. Mom would not need the tarps or the Christmas tree stand, so we left them as well, and it looked like I had just about got the place cleared out, except for the one corner, which was uncharacteristically cluttered. The rest of the shed had been neatly organized, with everything stacked or hung in its proper place, but this portion seemed to have no rhyme or reason; things were just jumbled. I pulled at a stack of burlap the mice had riffled though, and discovered a sort of seaweed green metal box underneath. I drug the weighty box across the mouse dropping–covered floor and into the light to discover that it was a footlocker, a sort of military suitcase I had read about in one of the war books. The faded yellow letters on the top read Grady, Nick P.F.C. I pulled at the lid, but the left latch was padlocked. All I could think of was that the padlock stood between me and the mystery of my uncle, the man I had never met, but who touched my life every day. I remembered the key hanging inside the door and wondered if it fit the lock.
The key released the padlock, and my hands were trembling as I opened the groaning lid, as if I had expected to find my uncle’s very corpse. To my relief, the smell of old paper, not rotting flesh, wafted upwards. The contents of the footlocker seemed to be organized; badges, pins and a Mother of Jesus charm were packed in a little felt-lined wooden box, a cloth hat and an American flag carefully folded and wrapped in a fogged plastic bag, papers and yellowed newspaper clippings piled in folders, letters bound with ribbon or string, and the pictures that dad often showed filled a cigar box. The pictures of the people and places were all black and white, sort of hazy and mysterious, with a thick cardboard-like backing and white edges, except for one color Polaroid of Dad and Uncle Nick. The two of them, Dad about twenty, thin and muscular with very short hair, and Uncle Nick sixteen, skinny, smirking with a cigarette between his lips, stood at the back of a white car, their arms around a smiling young girl who sat on the trunk. The men were in shorts, topless, the girl had on a two-piece bathing suit with frilly edges that were as pale as the car. Their skin was pinkish-red. The girl wore her hair up and had on sunglasses. It was a lovely day at the beach. The sky was pale blue and endless. I did not recognize the woman.
A stack of letters secured by a pale green string and addressed to “My Dearest Paul,” which were obviously not in my mother’s hand, caught my attention. I slid the letters from the binding and began to read. “Daddy, you devil.” I sighed, recalling the thin handsome man from the photographs. Even after seeing the pictures of the glorious youth my parents had been, and coming to terms with the aged figures they had become, it was impossible to imagine the two of them engaging in the sex act with one another, let alone anyone else, but the tone of the letters revealed a side of their lives I had not contemplated.
I didn’t have to read very far to begin to understand that these were not childish love notes from a high school flame, or remnants of relationships prior to his marriage to my mother. The letters were dated in the late 1960’s; well after my parents had married, and told the tale of a desperate female. Some of the letters, especially the ones from the 1970’s were to my grandfather’s address. The more I read, the more shocked I became by the revelations, and how conspiratorial everything suddenly seemed.
“I cannot live without you.”
“I ache for your touch.”
“I feel so hollow, like I’m only half a person.”
“The precious thing that grows within me is a product of our love, our bond. It will bind us, no matter how many miles lay between, forever.”
“My parents are forcing me to leave. They can make me go to California, but I will never forget what I had here with you. Maybe there will be a time when we can defy the world and be together, like we were meant to be.”
“Yours truly, Debra.”
The words flowed into my head like molasses, slow and sticky, reached down into my stomach and twisted my bowels. I had to sit on the locker to steady myself. I could not believe what I was reading. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t about the man I had known, the quiet, reserved loving father and husband. This Paul Grady was a stranger. If I was to believe what I was reading, it meant that I had a half brother or sister out in the world somewhere, and the consequences of the revelation were staggering.
I immediately began to imagine a life for this…this person. She was a woman, I felt, a little younger than me. I saw my mother’s face when I looked in the mirror, but what did she see? Did she look like her mother, or resemble my father in some way? Did she have his lips, his eyes, or his nose? Did her mother marry? Did she ever wonder about her father, and why she might look the way she did? Could she imagine that she might have a brother or sister out in the world? California was a long way away, but many things change over the years, and she might be closer than I knew. Would we recognize one another if we passed on the street; would we feel a tug, an urge to look deeper, if we were in the same movie theater, waiting in the same line at a store? Was she a career woman, or a housewife? Did she have children of her own? What sort of a house did she live in, and how much of the world had she seen?
As much as she began to fill my head, I thought of dad. I recalled the unselfish love he had for me and Ian, and wondered did he know her, the child of his flesh, and felt sorry for him for not being able to share with her the way he had with us. Did he send gifts at Christmas, money at her birthday? The questions were endless, and I had to suppress the urge to run into the house and demand an explanation of my mother. I hesitated. What if she didn’t know anything about this, what would it do to her to find out?
The day was wearing on, and I was wearing out. I felt liked I had lived ten years in the past few hours. I could have spent the entire night in dad’s old shed, but the mystery would have to be drawn into the light in order to be solved. I threw a piece of burlap and a length of hose on top of the footlocker and carried it to the rear hatch of my blazer. The final letter in the bundle had a California return address. It wasn’t much, a thirty-five year old address, but it was the start of a trail that might lead somewhere, or nowhere, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to undertake the effort.
Mom was admiring a family portrait when I returned to the kitchen. “You know, I love this picture of you and Ian. I paid twenty dollars for the set: this one, a few smaller, and some wallet-sized ones, from Grant’s. Your father was furious. He couldn’t believe I had spent that much on a picture, but it’s always been my favorite.”
I didn’t hear what she was saying; my thoughts were still out in the shed, with the half sister I had somewhere out in the world.
“So, did you find the hidden treasure out there?”
“What?”
“What do you have, cotton in your ears? I said, did you come across anything good in the shed? Anything we can share?”
I saw her, my sister, as clearly as I saw my mother, right there in the kitchen. She was wearing a red dress and had my father’s plaintive eyes. I reached out to take her hand, but she turned away and was gone.
“No. Nothing much of interest.”
© John Riebow
John Riebow has been writing fiction, poetry and essays for more than thirty years. His work has appeared in Avalon Literary Review, The Bethany Reader, The Chaffey Review, Forge Journal, Mulberry Fork Review, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Schuylkill Valley Review among other publications.
The Loch Raven Review 