My brother called me for supper and I arranged the books in the order I’d found them and went downstairs. After years of being scared of the attic, I now wanted to rush back upstairs. For a week I secretly read hard-core pornography until my mother cleared the area for the carpenters. I was eleven years old.
That same summer a dentist pulled four of my permanent molars to create sufficient space to move the rest of my teeth around my mouth. I wore a full set of braces for two years—upper and lower—the only ones in the county. Every morning I replaced four rubber bands that crisscrossed between my jaws. At night I slept wearing a metal bit that locked into my teeth and buckled behind my head. My mouth ached most of the time. I’d always been a rough-and-tumble kid, and the inside of my lips bled from ragged wounds sustained by rural life. I learned to ignore throbbing gums, cut lips, and the spitting of blood. Pain relegated itself to a distant nagging, similar to the itch of an insect bite.
The carpenters worked all summer, and in August my brother and I moved to our new room in the attic. Each night we stepped into the dim closet at the foot of the steps. Our room above was completely dark, and the light switch was at the top of the stairs. I inhaled deeply and held my breath. I placed my hands on the doorjamb and catapulted myself up the steps, knowing just where to place my feet to avoid each creak. At the top of the stairs, my open palm hit the light switch, and I jerked my head to check for ghosts. They were always gone, having managed to flee moments before my sudden arrival. It was then safe enough for my brother to climb the steps.
Decades later he told me he’d been grateful that I went upstairs first. Every time he ascended the steps as an adult, something cold always passed through his body. Later, I asked my younger sister if there was any part of the house she was afraid of. She was silent for a moment, then shook her head and said, “I was afraid of the whole house.”
Over the past thirty-five years, our attic bedroom had shifted in the traditional way of an abandoned nest—first to a sewing room, then a study when my mother attended college, and now a storage chamber for junk. Narrow paths flanked tall stacks of goods that included Christmas decorations from the fifties, clothes from the sixties, and high school yearbooks from the seventies. The roof leaked. There was a vague smell of mildew, rot, and squirrel urine. My bed was an odd-sized piece of foam rubber that was crumbling and gnawed by mice. Beneath it lay remnants from childhood: a few paperback books, an empty wallet, a pile of seventh-grade love letters, a cigar box filled with wheat pennies, three diaries, and a dead bat.
I found a framed charcoal sketch of my brother that someone drew when we were kids. I stared at the drawing for a long time. It looked more like my brother now than it did then, as if the artist understood that a portrait is future memory made tangible. I wandered among the maze of piled objects, touching this and that. It was like being at a yard sale, going through the remains of another person’s life. No one occupied this space anymore, living or dead. I had become my own ghost, haunting my past.
I went outside and used a ladder to climb onto the narrow porch roof. The closed shutters were screwed permanently into the brick. No secret door existed. There was just a man standing alone on a roof, facing a wall.
Chapter Seven
FOR MOST people, childhood is a refuge of simpler times. The increasing responsibilities of adulthood imbue the past with innocence and joy—a seemingly endless summer, the vastness of a night sky, winter’s fade to the bouyancy of spring. Childhood improves as we age and get further away from it. Not so for my father. He rarely talked of his early years except in dark tones, with the occasional anecdote or an obliquely bitter reference. The story of his youth is vague, shrouded in pain and difficulty.