Most of the Things He Remembered Took Place Long Before He was Born * by J Bradley Minnick

Neither Mr. Dunner nor I knew which now-gone relative carefully placed the photographs in the chimneys. Had it not been for Mr. Dunner’s care, we wouldn’t have known the photographs existed. All that I know for sure is that Old Da, my grandmother, took up each newly discovered photograph and studied the emergence of her former self (portrayed in various instants), but there was more to it than that. I’ve come to believe that all the while she was either healing or dying, and I expect we were both waiting for some coda of presentiment.

Let’s go back to the beginning:

After a long ‘bout of procrastination, Old Da decided to have the two hidden chimneys in her 200-year old family home torn down. “It’s a miracle,” the contractor, Mr. Dunner said, “the house hasn’t caught fire because of the stove that runs through its middle. There are gaps, you see—between the bricks—all the way to the rafters.”

I could tell Old Da didn’t like to think about the tearing down of chimneys; yet, in the next breath, she said, “Mr. Dunner is the most meticulous worker I’ve ever laid eyes upon.” She sighed, “You know when you’re in the presence of a remarkable craftsman. You just know.” 

When Mr. Dunner actually began tearing down chimneys, carefully placing each brick into the spot-shiny bed of his pick-up, Old Da told me she felt the same kind of anxiety she did when confronted with Old Case, her mother’s tin-cut finger. “But that despair” she said, “was far greater” because she had no template to trace

As Mr. Dunner deconstructed the first chimney, there was the constant patter of equipment humming through the house—a noticeable annoyance. One can, I truly believe, become accustomed to anything. The persistent hum disseminating from the very walls, however, was punctuated by unexpected-moments: bangs, crashes, followed by the shaking of the foundation. When these unexpected bursts occurred, Old Da found something to hold on to, and I found myself clutching a table or chair, the stove or sink for long after it was normal to do so.

There was a sudden and positively terrifying burst followed by the soles of Mr. Dunner’s heavy, worn, steel-toed work boots as they scraped down the stairs en route to the kitchen. In his hands, he held a just-found ancient cigar box. I rather thought in our first moments of wonderment, we believed the cigar box might contain a store of riches (Old Da was told by Old Case, the Union Army had occupied the house for a brief spell); however, after my grandmother’s fingers carefully lifted the lid and sifted through the paper’s wadding and wrapping, she uncovered a photograph. In it she is a young girl, age 8, and Old Case looks to be an eternally old woman. The two are sitting with Pinafore Henry, her father, in a horse-drawn carriage in front of a far younger version of the house—a conspicuous part of the background that cannot be ignored.

Story goes Old Case cut her finger on a tin of pineapples after opening it for Thanksgiving. Old Da had been stumbling under Old Case’s feet all afternoon, wanting to know everything about cooking the turkey, how to make the cornbread stuffing, and insisted on having hotdogs with pineapple slices as a fancy dessert.

By noon Old Da’s fingernail had turned bright red.

Old Da said, “The world of expectation suddenly turned sour as we all recognized how quickly life can change, irreparably, in an instant. Before, we felt protected from life’s great tragedies—tragedies we merely read about in the paper and attributed causes to human fallibility, missteps we thought but never enunciated were most probably deserved at some level. But what had Old Case done to deserve this? And had Old Case stayed in Salt, had she taken the advice of Dr. Maury Lee, who was so old he often roamed around in search of his misplaced doctor’s bag, her fate would have been a foregone conclusion.”

Old Case’s own daddy, Pinafore Henry, had found his way to the drill fields, mining not oil but salt. Said the drill fields were about the toughest place he had ever encountered. Pinafore was a Yankee from way up around Oil City, Pennsylvania, and his name, his manner of speech, and even the way he held himself wasn’t trusted by the locals. Old Case remembered Pinafore saying that if ever he encountered ill-health or his kin found him out-of-his-mind with sickness, they should be sure to transport him up north to a Pittsburgh hospital where he would be sure to find the proper care.

If Old Case had never left the confines of her house, the gangrene would have most definitely spread first down her arm and then to the seat of her body. Old Da remembered, “Old Case insisted that her husband, Stanley Henry, purchase a train ticket and use the Salt Party Line to inform Allegheny General Hospital she was on her way. “Actions are funny things,” Old Da said, “and after she and Pinafore took the buggy and dropped her off at the station, I imagined Old Case sat staring at the backsides of Southern towns from the windows of the train, and words appeared out of the mouths of long dead souls at inopportune times.” 

The second chimney was in what I called The Museum Room because of its unchanging nature—later, I realized the room represented a collection of artifacts: an odd assortment of furniture—all American—placed unevenly about on a rug, whose pattern suggested squares and borders on which as a I child I felt compelled to play hop-scotch; there was a great pull-top writing desk within which were wooden boxes containing correspondence, bills, and important papers. During tax season, Stanley Henry sat before this desk with an abundance of clarity and silence. I was not to play at this desk nor ‘disturb’ anything. In the far corner of the room, adjacent to the great writing desk was a coal bucket—now strictly ornamental. The bucket had, for a great many years, held lumps of coal that were fed in a steady stream into the stove. If ever Old Da spied the bucket cluttered with paper, she threw a conniption fit. Other once pragmatic antiques included the great spinning wheel that still held an abundance of yarn left on the wheel from the last time Old Case spun it, a course and steely horse hair broom that silently swept the corner, a large petaled organ, whose pipes were still shiny, although I had never seen them polished in my lifetime, a blue velvet setae placed directly across from the great fireplace, whose rustic mantle adorned with evenly spaced holes was composed of an English walnut tree limb—saved, I’d been told, when smoke from the second chimney very nearly backed them all from the house, and Stanley Henry had, without gloves, found himself on the roof surrounded by snow thunder and a great bolt of lightning, which split a branch from the walnut tree that stood in the front yard for over 200 years. The limb nearly toppled the roof, as had a great many near accidents over its 200-year span, but somehow the house had managed to find its way through to daylight. The tree limb polished but, aside from the peg holes in it, was otherwise left to its knurled state, secured to the second chimney’s mantelpiece, and served as a cautionary reminder to the testament of fate.

With the destruction of the Museum Room’s second chimney, there had been a great amount of dust and a loud clunk. Mr. Dunner appeared in the kitchen gingerly holding a second cigar box.  Old Da let out an audible sigh when Mr. Dunner presented it to her and set it before her on the kitchen table. After all, he had found these boxes and because of that alone, he deserved more than a footnote in this drama.

It was all too perfectly symmetrical—two chimneys, two cigar boxes, two photographs.

For quite a long time mirrored by uncomfortable silence, the cigar box sat on the table. Mr. Dunner and I hovered like music playing strained and barely audible melodies in the distance, our weight shifting back on our heels, waiting for Old Da to hoist the lid and thrust her fingers inside, but she was nonplussed; there was no reaction at all. This box, aside from very definitely looking worse for wear, was as unremarkable as the other save its appearance felt like a finality. 

The second picture was of Old Da sitting under what can only be described as a peg tree.

Old Case was away in the Pittsburgh hospital, but Stanley Henry is in the frame, and it’s obvious that being alone with his daughter on Christmas is a prospect he had not counted on. The usual Christmas routine was to go out into the rolling hills behind the house and cut down a Christmas tree, drag it back into the house, set it up on the metal pronged stand, and then decorate it; this was the time-honored ritual they had always done together.

Old Da held the picture in her trembling hands: “It just didn’t seem right with Old Case in the hospital so far away and all. So, Daddy decided that together we would make a tree that would keep until Old Case found her way back to us. That was the idea anyway.” And in Old Da’s words I caught a sense of resolve that was not willing to let go the ember of her old self. “The world is most definitely made up of hard-driving days that will turn topsy-turvy if you let it, and even with great talent, each of us is, in this world, alone and must find a way to push through or else give up—anyway that’s what Stanley Henry used to say, and I found it a particularly wise and well-regarded habit to listen to him because in all my time as a little girl, I’d always known Daddy to be right. You see, there are those who are most always wrong and those who are most always right, and the rest of us are in between but don’t have any idea who’s who nor how to distinguish, which, as you might well imagine, makes for a hell of a mess.

“So, when Daddy proposed we make a peg tree for Old Case so that upon her return she could relive Christmas in just the same way we usually celebrated it, I knew that this idea was one true thing—filled with a quality whose heart was bigger than the wide, wonderful here and now.

“Together Daddy and I mapped out a plan on a napkin. With a ruler and a mechanical pencil, we fashioned the peg tree out of lines and shadows—the pencil lead pressed against the paper for depth. In this moment of deliberation and imagination, I felt able, with Daddy, to let go of the here and now and drift up to the heavens.”

 Old Da paused for a moment and held the picture by its brittle corners. “It’s okay Mr. Dunner,” she said, “you needn’t feel self-consciousness for having brought this to me. Memories are funny things—the more we refuse to talk about them, the more they come out in other ways. Take this photograph for example: what I want it to be is not what it is, and one wonders if ever so large an event in my life could possibly fit into a cigar box or even into my hand.

“There I sit under the peg tree that Daddy and I took five days to make. We used the large branch over the fireplace’s mantle. That branch was as thick as my leg, and, as branches go, not crooked. Daddy used an awl and fashioned the holes, pegs, one after another, side-by-side. The photograph knows no better than black and white—and we weren’t working to make this look good for posterity: we were doing this for Old Case.

“Then, Daddy had me shimmy up the trunk of the English walnut tree to collect fallen branches—cautioned me about how he could ill-afford a wife and daughter in the hospital over Christmas. The whole time I was up in the tree, he stood self-consciously below with his arms outstretched, waiting, I think, for me to fall into them and hoping for all the world that he wouldn’t have to catch me.

“At the last instant before I’d let go of each dislodged branch, I very nearly shrieked and shut my eyes expecting if I opened them to find Daddy on his back brained by them. When I did open them, I found him with his arms still outstretched looking up at me.

“The illusion of control was far more important than admitting that he didn’t have any, that Mama was recuperating in one of the finest hospitals way up North because of materials manufactured by man that had nearly killed her or most certainly would have killed her, had they not let man intervene. I believe Daddy felt much safer and secure with me, his only daughter, caught up in the arms of nature; he also knew that nature, too, could turn on you, and, in a second, change one’s life—and not for the better.

“Later Daddy and I placed each of the branches we had gathered into one of the many pegs, so they shot up out of each like tiny trees. Then, Daddy used the waistband of Old Case’s blue cooking apron to tie the branches together in the center, the apron’s folds hanging down like a dress over the lower half of our gathered branches; the upper half sprawled up and outward like a regular tree person, whose branches pointed toward the ceiling. Later, we hung an assortment of the house’s door knobs like the heads of baby ducks until the tree was ornamented in brass, wood and iron.”

In the picture, Old Da sits under the peg tree with a gift, waiting for Old Case to walk through the door. The gift in particular calls attention to itself—a miniature cast iron horse and buggy peopled by a wooden gentleman in vestments and a top hat and a lady in a hoop skirt and bonnet. The two look like they are on a purposeful journey, and they look happy.

Mr. Dunner and I watch as Old Da handles the picture of her small self, long before all the sadness. To tell the truth, I think that this moment—the one that she holds in her hands foretells the disillusion that is to come—a premonition that life doesn’t quite work out, will never really work out, and that one had better learn this at a young age.

Old Da said, “The peg tree, we believed would stay as it was for a good long while after Old Case returned, and when she returned, it would look as good and new and as full of promise as the Christmas morning we’d set it up.”

 Old Da placed the photo on the table.

After Mr. Dunner took down the second chimney, he took the siding off of the house and put up insulation; after the wooden floors were refinished and the Museum Room was returned to its former self—the wainscoting and the crown molding replaced, Old Da had the old barn behind the house restored

Up in the loft, Mr. Dunner found the gift; the carriage, and although a metal horse was pulling it, he couldn’t find its two passengers anywhere. When we told Old Da, she said, “We used to spend a lot of time bundled in our jackets bowling in that barn after my mother died up North. I think we used a croquet ball, but it was so long ago I can’t quite remember.”

*Title taken from Wright Morris

J Bradley Minnick

Image: Old photographs from Pixabay.com