That night, after eating dried apricots and apples roasted over the fireplace, I tried to get my brother to talk about what the camp might be like. Neither of us had ever been away from our family long. I wanted to talk it over with Edwin, to express my concerns, but he began to draw and soon his attention faded from me. He covered another large sheet of butcher paper with etchings, working in circles so his finished project looked like a constellation wheel.
His side of the room was covered in stacks of smooth and textured papers, sketchbooks, knives and peels of pencil shavings, brushes, tubes of paint, a jar of turpentine, and an easel that looked like a giant praying mantis when I caught it out of the corner of my eye in dim light.
Edwin had a book called The Greatest Drawings of All Time that he slipped his own sketches between the pages of.
“Just to keep them pressed,” he said.
“Our sports almanac is just as big.”
“I’ll use that one next,” he said, but page after page of his own work found their way between the covers in what must have been a small allowance to his own sense of talent.
I understood why he did it. I daydreamed about being a prodigy like my brother. I imagined greatness in sports, art, music, and industrial invention, and if those dreams came with tangible scraps, I would have squirreled them away in lofty bindings too.
Edwin spent hours that night working on his hands and knees. I woke much later to the scent of beeswax candles and saw his shadow hunkered over some new dream image he couldn’t wait to bring out of the paper. The lump of his body dark and still, his extended arm swaying and twitching, conducted some unfolding vision to life. Behind him the old steel radiator jutted out of the wall, a bleached-white square rib cage that hissed and ticked and warmed his midnight painting sessions. He filled an old cistern with water, wet his fingers, and rubbed dabs over the ink lines so they blurred. The shapes loosened at the corners, and the color bled across the watermarks like he created some new set of rules for form.
Our father bought him the easel, but he still preferred to do all his drawing leaning over the floor. He kneeled on the paper, somehow never tearing it, as if when drawing or painting he became weightless and floated over the work.
“Edwin. What do you think that camp will be like?” I tried to break through. “Why doesn’t Mom want us to go?”
Edwin gave me a look like I’d said something really stupid, and kept drawing.
I got out of bed, snuck down the stairs, and shuffled into my father’s lab. I lay down on the floor in the dark. The smell of burnt chemicals hung in the air, and slivers of glass speckled the floor. It became a sort of dare to myself to lie down without getting cut, and I never succeeded. Some jagged shard would always drive beneath my skin. Those little wounds made me feel closer to my father, like we both understood something about his work that went beyond words.
No light came through when the door was shut. I turned a flashlight on and swept it across the floor and the glass shone back like a crystal rug. The beam of light lingered on the tops of chemical canisters and gas welding tanks. I pictured my father bending into the shower of molten orange as sparks bounced off the dark faceplate of his helmet—the blue-tongued coalescence of metals drawing him closer to something that only he could see among the raw materials. I studied the beaded melding points of the castings and bases he made, and how each joint somehow balanced the metals in intricate and subtle curves.
I picked up the welding rod and imagined the blue flame liquefying steel and binding it together in more fascinating ways. An art form. I thought we were all supposed to have some kind of art form. My father had his lights, my mother her music, and Edwin, who beamed with talent and potential, took wide slabs of butcher paper and mimicked every shape in the world, as if practicing for some larger swath of canvas, maybe even a cathedral ceiling, that would surely come later. In the dark I imagined turning the blue tongue of fire on my own chest to crack it open, to pull out my own hidden talent, my own art form, whatever it was.
Late the next evening, I was reading at the top of the stairs, petting Fergus, when my mother’s younger brother, Uncle Martin, came to our house. In socked feet, he stood almost as tall as my father, near two meters, but he had muscular arms and a V-shaped back from years of hauling in fishing nets. Under his raincoat he wore a gray French seaman’s sweater for which my mother had sewn thick black elbow patches that cracked white at the bend. Under his sweater was a host of faded gypsy tattoos covering his chest and arms. A compass sat on his right shoulder, a large portrait of Neptune stretched across his stomach, and a bare-chested woman with wings and blue-tipped nipples soared across his rib cage. A paragraph in Latin scrolled along his upper forearm, and between his shoulder blades sailed a schooner at full mast with the words Flying Dutchman, etched in bold blue India ink, arched over the topmast. The top of the h crawled up the side of his neck like an arterial vein.
“Don’t get any ideas,” our mother said when she first saw us idolizing his tattoos.
He’d taken his shirt off while wrestling with Edwin, me, and our best friends, Ludo and Hilda. He let Hilda knock him down and took it easy on Ludo, whose left arm had dried up and coiled from a bout of polio he’d survived as an infant.
When we asked about his inking, our mother said, “He didn’t have a proper upbringing, so he couldn’t help himself. But you boys dream of it, and I’ll scrub the ink off of you with a fistful of sand and gravel.”
Like my mother and father, almost everything I knew about Uncle Martin’s life came from stories other people told of him. He rarely, if ever, spoke about himself, which gave him a sense of mystery, as if mystery were the language he moved in, his mother tongue.
Not asking my parents or Uncle Martin about their early lives was one of those things I knew. Whispered to me at birth. Traced on my skin by my mother’s fingers. It was just in me. But of course, that led to the creation of a great antenna to gather any fragments of news about them I could find into my own private mythologies.
I knew Uncle Martin left home in 1912, when he was fourteen, to get away from his fisherman father he never got along with. This part was shrouded in silence as my grandfather’s name only rose to my uncle and mother’s lips with vitriol. I knew Uncle Martin joined the crew of a schooner ferry that ran cargo between Rotterdam and England. After that, he did his time in the Dutch Marines, which according to him was the happiest he’d ever been. He went back to sea after the marines because that was all he really knew. For years he jumped ships that followed old whale roads to the Dutch colonies and around the world. Then, when I was six, he bought a fishing trawler and started running it out of Delfzijl to be close to us, the only family he had.