Buried Memories
by H. E. Vogl
Dust danced to the tune of heavy machinery as we looked through the wire mesh window of the construction trailer. “In three months, it’ll all be gone,” Lawson said as she rolled up the blueprints.
“Everything has its time,” I replied.
“Still, it has to be strange coming back to the neighborhood where you grew up in order to tear it down.”
I managed a wistful smile as Lawson bounced down the steps to the construction site.
My name’s Theodore Johnson, but everyone calls me Tad. I grew up in a small two-story, five blocks from the roadway expansion. That home will survive. But something else about the project touched a nerve in my neck. My crew is preparing to demolish a row of old rentals at the end of David Street. And the home closest to the corner was where my grandmother lived. It’s something I didn’t tell Lawson, because she’d paint me as a sentimental old fool.
Over the decades, life had taken me far from this working class neighborhood. Still, it occupied a special place in my heart. As trucks rumbled by, I decided to pay one last visit to my memories. I picked up my hard hat, went down the steps, and walked along the street that led to the house.
A couple of times I stopped to survey the construction site but, in reality, I was taking mental snapshots of a piece of my childhood before it was buried under tons of asphalt. I stepped around a jagged chunk of sidewalk and stood in front of the house. The aging clapboard sagged from end to end, giving the appearance of a dying creature begging to be saved.
My grandmother lived in an upstairs apartment in the back. My mother would drop me off whenever she went shopping. When I knocked, Grandma would appear in the doorway wearing her flowered dress. Then she’d put on the rhinestone-studded glasses that hung around her neck on a gold chain. Her face would light up and she’d say, “There’s my big man.”
But what I remembered most was the garden in back. It wasn’t much to see. A three-sided flowerbed surrounding a postage-stamp lawn. Now only weeds wrapped around the small plot of grass. I stood there for a few moments and recalled how I would stick toy soldiers in the dirt, or lie on the lawn and watch the clouds move across the sky. The only interruption in my bliss was when Grandma saw me near her flowerbed. I gazed up at the kitchen window and I could still hear her knuckles rapping on the glass, warning me to stay away.
I took a few steps back to the construction trailer and stopped. Dust settled on my boots. I’d forgotten about the sheds. Now, long gone. Four small gray sheds attached to the house, one for each of the residents.
An old man, whose name I no longer recalled, always worked in one of them. He’d be dressed in blue coveralls wearing a grizzled beard and a gray engineer’s hat. The old man never said much, but he always wore a smile. The kind of smile a six-year-old could trust.
* * *
It was one of those summer afternoons where waves of heat peeled off the sun like the skin off an onion. My soldiers were lined up for the next battle when the old man limped over to me. He put his hands in his pockets, mumbled a few words, and went back into the shed. Then, I heard a rap on the window and saw my grandmother motioning to me. When I got to the kitchen, she was slicing bread for lunch.
She waved the knife in the air and said, “Was that dirty old man poking around in my garden again?”
“No.”
“He better not be. Stay away from him.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“But he didn’t “
I jumped when her knife hit the cutting board. And I watched as a slice of bread tumbled to the floor.
“Wash your hands; lunch is ready.”
* * *
Summer gained speed as it neared the start of the school year. My mother kissed me goodbye and watched as I ran along the path to my grandmother’s. At the top of the steps, I made a fist and pounded on the door. Grandma appeared and gave me a thin smile.
Then she said, “Go down to the backyard and play. I’m frosting up a cake, I’ll call you when I’m done.”
I ran down the stairs and out into the garden. As always, the old man was there. He smiled and waved me into the shed. When I entered, darkness covered me like a blanket. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed a curved saw with wooden handles hanging on the wall next to a hammer and a small axe. A shovel propped in the corner screeched as the old man slid his hand into a dark corner. When his hand reappeared, he held a baseball mitt.
The pocket of the mitt was deep and looked as if stained from a lifetime of fly balls. He smiled and handed it to me. I ran up the stairs to show my grandmother.
“Where’d that thing come from?” she asked.
“The man in the shed.”
She walked over to the window and pressed her nose against the glass. “Damn him! He’s in my garden again,” she said. “Stay here.”
She pulled the mitt from my hand and made her way downstairs. A minute later I heard shouting. I didn’t understand all the words, but I knew that some of them were bad. After that I never saw the baseball mitt again, and the door of the old man’s shed remained closed.
* * *
On Saturday evening my family gathered for their weekly game of gin rummy. They slapped cards down and laughed as I snaked between the legs of the kitchen table. Someone made a comment, and the room went silent. My grandmother got up and slid her chair back.
“Tad, I’m sure we’re boring you. Go into the living room and turn on the television.”
I clicked on the TV, and while it warmed up, I listened.
“What do you think happened to him?” one of my aunts said.
“No idea. But I hope he’s in the looney bin,” Grandma said.
“Did he really jump on the hood of the car yelling?”
“Just like Tarzan. Saw it with my own two eyes.”
“And they took him away?”
“Yep. The wagon came screaming down the street, and they threw him in. All I can say is good riddance.”
The image on the TV snapped into focus and the conversation faded. Then, the sound of jackhammers punctured my bubble. I was no longer a boy of six, but a man of fifty. I gazed at the backyard for the last time and walked up the hill to the trailer.
* * *
A bulldozer and three dump trucks idled nearby, ready to complete the final demolition work. I was signing off on the last of the plans when Lawson ran up the trailer steps. She took a gulp to catch her breath then said, “Tad, the police are at the construction site.”
“Where?
“Near the houses scheduled to be demolished today.”
Other than a couple of minor scrapes, the project had gone along without an accident. I hoped it wasn’t serious. I grabbed my hard hat and said, “Let’s go.”
A patrol car and a blue van were parked in front of the house. Two police officers were standing alongside the car engaged in conversation.
“What’s going on?” I said.
One of the cops pointed to the van. I walked over and saw a white-suited technician placing a bag in the back of the van.
The technician looked up and said, “One of your crew came across something and called the police.”
He pointed to the back of my grandmother’s house. I went down the path that I had run along so many times as a child. Then I stopped. In the back another technician was on his knees, digging.
He raised his head and said, “Bones, human. They’ve been here for a while.”
The technician picked up a fragment of skull and pointed to a starlike fracture in the bone. “It could be a homicide.”
He reached down and pulled something from the dirt. It resembled the hide of an animal. Then, I saw the lacing between the fingers. And like a tsunami, the memory of my grandmother going down the stairs to confront the old man flooded my mind.
Lawson glanced over to me and said, “What should we do?”
For an eternity, I stood welded to the ground as fragments of my childhood clinked into the bag.
“Tad, what should we do?” Lawson repeated.
I stamped the dust off my boots and said, “When they’re finished, bring in the bulldozer and level the goddamn house.”
As I walked back to the trailer, the sweet smell of hot asphalt filled the air.
Copyright © 2021 by H. E. Vogl
