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I Found a Missing Journal. The Last Page Had My Name On It. · Creepy Stories to Fall Asleep To

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The house sold for $211,000, which is a number I know because
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I'd read it off the closing statement so many times it had
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stopped meaning anything. The buyers were a young couple
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with a baby and the title company wanted the place empty
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by 9 the next morning, and my mother could not do this part,
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so I was doing it. She'd been at Magnolia Gardens
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in Stone Mountain for 11 months by then.
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I'd visit on Sundays, and she'd ask about the house like it was
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a person recovering from something, and I'd tell her it
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was fine, and she'd nod like that settled it.
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What she never asked about, not once, was the boxes she'd packed
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most of them herself before she left, taped and labeled in her
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round, careful hand. And then she'd stopped, and the
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last dozen or so sat in the garage for a year until I
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finally rented a box truck and brought them inside to deal
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with. I was down to the last four.
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No furniture left, just bare floors and the smell of old
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carpet glue where the rugs had been pulled up.
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And me sitting cross legged with a box cutter and a trash bag,
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working through a box labeled Clifford Office Misk and blue
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marker. Her handwriting, mostly.
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It was what you'd expect, Expired insurance paperwork, a
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stapler, a coffee mug from some conference in Savannah that Dad
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went to before I was born. I was moving fast, the way you
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move when you've done this 11 times already.
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That night, sorting in to keep and toss without really looking.
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And then near the bottom, my hand closed around something
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with a soft cover instead of a hard 1, and I pulled it out and
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it was a composition notebook, black cover, the kind you buy at
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a drug store. No label, nothing on the front
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at all, just his handwriting on the spine in blue ballpoint,
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cramped and slanted the way it always was.
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And it didn't say a project name or a date range or anything that
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would tell you what it was for. It just said his name.
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Clifford Boyd. I'd gone through every box in
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that garage twice. I knew what was in them.
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This wasn't in any of them, not that I'd seen.
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And I sat there for a second, just holding it the way you'd
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hold something you found in a coat pocket that you didn't
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remember putting there. Then I opened it.
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The first pages were exactly what you'd expect from him.
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Dad was a federal contract cartographer, and in the summer
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of 1988 he'd been sent down to Camden County to survey a
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stretch of tidal marsh called the Calder Flats, and the early
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entries read like field work, because that's what they were.
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Whether GPS coordinates copied out in long strings of numbers,
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notes on tidal cycles, vegetation density, a running
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tally of how many acres he'd covered that week.
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It was dry and it was orderly and it was so completely him
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that I found myself reading faster just to get through it,
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the way you'd skim a report until I realized I'd been
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sitting on the bare floor for almost 40 minutes without
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moving. Somewhere around the 6th week,
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the sentences got shorter. He'd write full paragraphs about
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vegetation density on one page, and by the next his entries had
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gone clipped, staccato, the same phrase turning up two or three
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times like he was trying to convince himself of something by
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repeating it. And then there was an entry, the
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23rd or 24th of that week, where he described finding a clearing
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in the interior marsh that he had not logged with the survey
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program. A circle, he wrote, almost
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perfectly round, 30 meters, near enough, everything inside it
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dead and flattened outward from the center, like something had
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come down on it slow and stayed there a long time.
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He wrote that his GPS unit would not hold the coordinates every
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time he marked the position, saved it, walked on and checked
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it again. The unit had reverted to an old
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saved point from earlier that week, as if the clearing had no
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place in the machine's memory it was willing to keep.
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At the center of the clearing, in six inches of standing water,
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there was a post. Not driftwood milled lumber, he
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wrote. Someone set this.
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A metal box was nailed to it, padlocked, rusted through at the
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corners, and the post itself showed no rod at all, despite
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standing in brackish water that should have taken it apart in a
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season. He shot a full roll of film.
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He wrote that down like it was a normal thing to note, the way
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he'd note anything else in a field log, and I turned the
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page, expecting more of the same, and instead found the
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photographs themselves, folded twice and tucked into the
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notebook's back cover, like something he hadn't wanted loose
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in a box. They were bad photographs,
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underexposed, a little soft, the kind of thing you get off a
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cheap camera in low light through marsh grass.
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But the clearing was there, the flattened vegetation radiating
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outward, exactly like he described it, the post standing
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up out of black water with a box bolted to its face.
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I went through them slow, one at a time, laying each one on the
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bare floor in front of me. And it was on the third print
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that I stopped and held it closer to the lamp, Because at
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the right edge of the frame, cut off at the waist by the border
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of the shot, there was a second shape in the water near the
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post. Low, dark, angled wrong for a
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post or stump or anything I could put a name to.
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He never wrote about it. I went back and reread the entry
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twice to be sure, and there was nothing.
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Just the clearing, the post, the box and then the next entry,
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which returned to survey notes like nothing had happened at
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all. I set the photographs down
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beside me and kept reading because there wasn't anything
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else to do with my hands. The last two weeks of entries
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got hard to follow. Sentences dropped their middles.
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He'd write something and then repeat it 3 lines later, almost
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word for word, like a man circling back to check that a
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thing was still true. The final entry in the notebook
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was dated the 11th of October 1988.
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I knew that date the way you know your own birthday.
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It was 3 days before the Camden County Sheriff's Office logged
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him as missing, and three days before the state, a year and
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some months later closed the file and called it an accidental
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drowning and released his truck back to my mother.
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I sat there on the floor of the empty house with a notebook open
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in my lap and the photograph spread out beside me.
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And I understood in the plain and reasonable part of my mind
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that still worked, what the sensible thing to do was box it
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back up, Tape the flap down like my mother had taped every other
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flap in that garage. Call the Sheriff's Office in
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Camden County in the morning if I felt like I owed anybody that
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call. And then drive back to Atlanta
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and let the title company have the house at 9:00 the way they
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wanted it. I set the journal on the floor
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beside the photographs and did not put it back in the box.
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I picked the photographs back up because my hands wanted
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something to do, and I laid them out in order on the bare floor,
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the way you'd layout cards. You were trying to make sense of
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six of them. The overhead light in that room
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had already been unscrewed and boxed, so I worked by the light
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of my phone, holding it low and at an angle, tilting it until
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the Gray shapes in the water separated themselves from the
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Gray shapes of the marsh grass behind them.
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The post gave me a scale. It stood about waist high out of
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the water in every shot, and once I had that fixed in my
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head, the shape beside it in the third photograph stopped being a
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smear of shadow and became a man waiting, standing still, facing
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away from the camera with his shoulders squared toward the
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tree line, like he'd heard something out there and turned
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to look at it. Before Dad ever got the shutter
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down. He was in three of the six,
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always at the edge of the frame, always cut off at the shoulder
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or the hip like the border of the picture had been drawn
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around him on purpose, and always facing away so that I
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never got so much as the side of his face.
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He was heavier through the chest and back than my father was, and
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thicker in the arms. I sat there telling myself that
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could have been someone else's man, some other survey crew,
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before I remembered I'd already read the page where Dad wrote it
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down. Plane.
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He worked the flats alone that whole summer, No crew, no
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assistant, just him and a rented truck and AGPS unit that
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wouldn't hold a coordinate. The last photograph was taken
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from the post, looking back the way he'd have come, and the man
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wasn't in it. I checked twice, just water and
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dead grass pressed flat in rings and the tree line gone soft with
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distance. But the light was wrong in it.
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The sun was behind him when he took it low enough that his own
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shadow stretched out long and dark across the clearing toward
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the camera, the way a shadow's supposed to fall when you've got
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the sun over your shoulder and off to the side of that shadow
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at an angle that didn't belong to any sun.
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I could work out. There was a second one, long and
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thin, the same way, falling across the flattened grass from
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nothing. I turned the photograph over and
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there was nothing written on the back, and I turned it back and
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looked at the empty middle of the clearing, where a source for
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that shadow would have had to stand.
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And there wasn't one, There was just water.
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I set it down last on top of the others face up, because I didn't
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want it face down where I couldn't see it either.
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Then I picked the journal back up and turn to the last page
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again, even though I'd already read it once and didn't need to
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read it twice to remember what it said.
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My father had written that the name on the post was mine.
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He'd written that he put it there himself that he didn't
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know when, and that he didn't remember carving it.
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He'd written that he found it there that day and knew his own
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hand in the letters, the way you know your own signature, and
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that he could not account for a single hour in which he might
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have done it. He'd written that he believed
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the clearing had been waiting on me since the day he first walked
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into it, and that he believed that was the whole use of the
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place, start to finish, and that he was not going back in.
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He was going to walk to the road.
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He was going to get in the truck.
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He was not going to look behind him.
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There wasn't another page after it.
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I sat with the notebook open across my knees for a long time,
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long enough that the street light outside the window change
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the shadows in the room without my noticing it move.
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I thought about my mother taping the boxes shut with that careful
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straight line tape and never once going back to check what
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was in the bottom of any of them.
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And I understood, sitting there, why she hadn't.
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I understood the sensible version of the next hour to
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close the cover, stack it on the box, drive to Magnolia Gardens
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in the morning and not tell her a word of it.
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Let the title company have their 9:00 signing and go back to my
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life in the city like a man who had never opened a banker's box
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marked Office Misk. I folded the photographs into
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the back cover where I'd found them and set the journal on top
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of the box like I was leaving it there for someone.
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Then I picked it back up and I went and found my keys.
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The house didn't have anything left in it to say goodbye to.
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I locked the door behind me out of habit more than reason, since
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it wouldn't be my door past nine that morning anyway.
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I put the journal in the photographs on the passenger
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seat where a person would sit, backed out of the driveway into
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a street that hadn't woken up yet, and drove S out of Decatur
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before the sun came up. Route 17 came down out of the
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Pines into flat country, and then Calder was just there.
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No warning, no outskirts, just a Shell station with two pumps and
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a hand painted sign for boiled peanuts.
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And then the town was already behind you if you weren't
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watching. I saw a bait shop with a plywood
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mullet nailed above the door. I saw a diner called Winds with
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four trucks parked nose in and steam still coming off the
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griddle vent. And past that set back off the
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road, behind a stand of live oaks, sat the Calder Motor Court
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single story cabins in a row. The same green paint the sign
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probably had in 1962. The same round bulbs over each
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door that hadn't been swapped for anything newer because
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nothing newer was needed. I parked in front of the office
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and sat there a minute with the journal on my knee before I made
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myself go in. The man behind the desk was
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maybe 60, heavy set, moving like every motion cost him something
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he'd rather spend somewhere else.
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He had my card in his hand before I'd finished saying I
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needed a room, and he filled out the registration.
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Slip himself in pencil without asking me to spell my name.
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You running this place back in 88?
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I said while he was still writing.
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He didn't look up. Was Daddy built it in 62?
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I took it over in 81. He set the pencil down and
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looked at me for the first time. Straight on.
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You asking for a reason, or just asking?
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I took the photograph out from the back of the journal and set
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it on the counter between us. Turned so it faced him, Dad in
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his survey gear, standing at the mouth of the access Rd. with a
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marsh behind him, squinting a little against whatever light
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was in his eyes that day. Leroy W went still.
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Not surprised, still, still like a man deciding something.
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That's the man who rented Cabin four, he said.
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Whole summer of 88, Paid weekly cash every Friday morning before
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he went out, ate breakfast at Winds every day of the week.
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Until he didn't. He didn't ask who I was to him.
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I didn't tell him. Federal contract got cancelled
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after he went missing, Leroy said.
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Like I'd asked, though, I hadn't.
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Nobody from that program ever came for his gear.
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It's been sitting in my shed since October of that year.
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Didn't know what else to do with it.
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Nobody ever claimed it. Can I see it?
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He looked at me another second, the same flat look, And then he
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came around the desk, took a ring of keys off a nail by the
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door, and locked the office behind us without being asked.
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The shed was behind the last cabin, tin roofed, smelling of
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cut grass, gasolines and old rubber.
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Leroy worked the padlock and pulled the door, and the light
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coming through the gap fell across a stack of lawn chairs, a
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push mower, and against the back wall, half buried under a folded
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tarp, a canvas duffel bag with A tag still zip tied to the
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handle. Government issue.
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It's printed label outlasting the program that issued it.
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I got down on one knee and opened it.
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Compass 3 field notebooks, the covers soft with damp and age,
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and when I opened the first one, the handwriting matched the
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early pages of the journal exactly.
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Same cramped hand, same shorthand notes on title windows
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and grid coordinates. A spare GPS unit, boxy and dead,
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the kind that would have been state-of-the-art the summer he
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carried it. And at the bottom of the bag,
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wrapped in a shop rag that had gone stiff.
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The metal box. I knew it before I had it fully
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out. I've been looking at it in a
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blurry 35mm print for most of the night.
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It was open, the padlock hung off the hasp cut clean through,
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not picked, not worked loose cut the way you'd cut it with bolt
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cutters if you didn't have the key and didn't have the
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patience. He brought it out himself.
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He got it open somewhere after the box was empty except for a
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strip of masking tape, gone brown and brittle, still stuck
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to the underside of the lid, and under the tape folded twice. 4
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sheets of paper. I peeled the tape back, careful
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as I could, and it's still crumbled at the corner.
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I unfolded the pages on my knee. It wasn't his hand.
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I'd spent all night with his hand, and I knew it the way you
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know your own name in the dark. This was slower, more even.
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No rush in it anywhere. Numbered steps, each one a
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bearing, a landmark, a time of day.
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Step 1100 and 10° to the fallen pine at first light Step 270°
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past the second cut in the grass line before the tide turns on
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and on. 4 sheets of it, plain and unhurried, the hands steady
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from one line to the next. I got to the last step and read
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it where I knelt. The last turn will be known by a
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sound. When the sound is heard, do not
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stop. Whatever is visible on the right
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is not what it will appear to be.
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Do not address it. Do not look at it directly.
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Continue to the post. I read it again to make sure I
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had it the way it was written and not the way I wanted it to
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say. I folded the four sheets back
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along their old creases and put them in my jacket pocket with
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the journal, and Leroy watched me do it the whole time and
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didn't say one word about it. He pulled the shed door shut,
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worked the padlock through the hasp, and walked back toward the
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office without looking at me again.
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I stood there in the gravel in the flat morning light, holding
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the empty metal box in both hands like it's still weighed
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what it used to. Cabin 4 was smaller than I'd
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pictured it reading the journal on the floor of my parents empty
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house. 2 windows, a night stand, a lamp with a shade gone amber
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from age, a bed with a frame that creaked when I set the
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duffel on it. The same fixtures, probably.
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Nothing about the place looked like it had been updated since
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my father slept here, which meant nothing about it had been
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updated since before I was born. I spread everything out on the
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bedspread, the field notebooks, the photographs.
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The four sheets folded soft along their creases and sat down
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next to it like a man laying out a hand of cards he already knew
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he was going to lose. I went through the photographs
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again, this time with the magnifying glass from the duffel
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and a pencil, and I use the post as my ruler.
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It stood maybe 4 feet out of the water in every frame, and once I
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had that fixed, the rest of the pictures stopped being shapes
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and started being measurements. The dark thing at the edge of
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three of the shots resolved the way a word resolves when you
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finally sounded outright. A man waiting, not walking,
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standing still in each one like he'd stopped the moment the
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shutter dropped heavier through the shoulders than my father,
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and turned away from the camera every time so that all I ever
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had of him was his back and the way the water sat still around
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his legs where it should have moved.
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He was at the edge of the frame in all three, not centered, not
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close. He stood exactly at the edge of
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what the lens could see, one step past it every time.
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The 4th photograph didn't have him in it at all.
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That one was shot from the post itself, Looking back the way my
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father must have come in. I'd noticed the shadows the
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night before, in the shed office under Leroy's bare bulb.
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But noticing it there, and noticing it here on the bed my
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father had slept in, in the room he'd walked back into every
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evening that summer, were not the same thing.
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The sun was behind him. In that shot.
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His shadow ran forward into the grass, long and correct, and the
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second shadow lay across it at a different angle, coming from
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nothing. No tree, no post, no man
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standing at the tree line to cast it.
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Just the shadow lying where a shadow doesn't lie, unless
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something is standing where nothing is standing.
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I set the photograph down and picked up the four sheets
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instead, because I needed something in my hands that was
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only a compass bearing and a landmark and not this.
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I read them through slow cross, checking each bearing against
22:28
the numbers in the early notebooks, back before his
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handwriting changed. The split pine at the mouth of
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the Access Rd. was in his second week of entries, noted almost in
22:39
passing split pine 40 meters east of the turn off good sight
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line. The channel crossing was there,
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too, its width log to the foot, the stand of dead Cypress he'd
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flagged as a survey marker before he ever knew it would
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matter to anyone. Whoever wrote the four sheets
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had walked this ground, known it well enough to put it down in
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landmarks a stranger could follow. 40 years later, someone
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knocked on the cabin door, a little past 63 knocks,
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unhurried, and I knew who it was before I got there.
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Leroy stood on the gravel with his hands in his pockets, not
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looking to come in, not looking like a man who wanted to be
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asked. The light was going gold and
23:24
long behind him. Wanted to say something to you
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before tomorrow, he said. All right.
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Flats got a reputation in this county, older than any survey
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the government ever paid for. He said it flat, the way he'd
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said everything since I showed him the photograph of my father.
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People go in, they come back, most of them, But they come back
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different. Not hurt, not lost, just quiet,
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like something got taken out of them and they don't go looking
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for it. I didn't say anything because
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there wasn't a question in it yet.
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Hargrove boys went in on a hunting trip back in the 70s.
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Both of them came back and didn't talk again.
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Not to their people, not to nobody the rest of their lives.
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Cadels had the same thing happen.
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Different year, different family, same result.
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He looked past me at the window, not at me.
24:26
Nobody ever found what your daddy found.
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Sheriff's people looked man from the federal program, looked for
24:33
about a week till the money to keep looking ran out.
24:37
Never found the clearing, never found the post.
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Leroy, I'm not telling you not to go, he said.
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I already know you're going, he said good night then, the way
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you'd say it to somebody at the end of an ordinary day, and
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turned and walked back toward the office, hand still in his
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pockets. Not fast, not slow.
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I stood in the doorway and watched him go until the light
25:04
in the office window came on. I went back inside and sat with
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the four sheets and the notebooks a while longer, laying
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out in my head what I'd carry come morning.
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The instructions, the compass, my father's field notebooks, so
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I'd have his numbers alongside the other hand's numbers in case
25:26
the two ever disagreed. I didn't figure I'd need much
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else. I turned off the lamp and lay
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down on top of the covers with my boots still on.
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I put the four sheets on the night stand, folded along their
25:39
creases, within reach of my hand if I woke up needing to check
25:44
them again. The window was open a few inches
25:47
and the marsh sound came through.
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It's steady, that low working hum of water and insects and
25:53
things I couldn't name settling into the dark.
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I lay there listening to it for a long time before anything
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close to sleep came near me. The sky was still more Gray than
26:04
blue when I pulled the car onto the shoulder where the pavement
26:07
gave out and the unpaved track started.
26:10
There wasn't a sign. There didn't need to be 1.
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The road just narrowed and the trees came in closer on both
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sides until it wasn't a road anymore, more a suggestion of
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where one used to be. Then it ended at a pull off wide
26:26
enough for one car, which was one more than it needed to be
26:30
that morning. I sat there a minute with the
26:33
engine off, going through what I had, the four sheets folded
26:38
along their creases the way I'd left them on the night stand.
26:43
The Compass Dad's field notebooks rubber banded
26:47
together, his handwriting on the covers gone soft at the corners
26:51
from being handled by somebody 33 years ago who thought he was
26:55
just keeping records. I put all of it in the canvas
26:58
bag Leroy had loaned me without my asking, got out of the car
27:03
and walked into the marsh. The first step was a bearing to
27:07
a split pine at the edge of the access Rd. and there it was,
27:12
split clean down the middle the way lightning splits a tree.
27:16
The second step was a channel crossing at a width.
27:18
The sheets gave in feet and the water was exactly that wide when
27:22
I got to it, no wider, no narrower.
27:26
I stepped through it, feeling the cold come up through my
27:29
boots. The third step was a stand of
27:32
dead Cypress, and the fourth was the time of day, and both of
27:37
those checked out too, The Cypress standing Gray and
27:41
stripped where the instructions said it would be.
27:45
The light coming through the trees at the angle the fourth
27:47
line described, like somebody had built the marsh around the
27:50
paper instead of the other way around.
27:54
It was on the 5th step that I heard it.
27:57
Not a tone, not a beat, something in between the two, A
28:02
pressure that came in through my right ear and down through my
28:05
jaw and settled somewhere behind my sternum, low and even, like a
28:11
truck idling on the other side of a wall.
28:14
I kept my eyes on the ground in front of my boots by the way the
28:17
4th sheet told me to, and I did not turn my head in the edge of
28:23
my sight. Off through the grass, something
28:26
was keeping pace with me. It had the shape a man has when
28:30
you catch him out of the corner of your eye and don't look
28:33
straight at him. Shoulders a way of carrying its
28:36
weight. And it moved through standing
28:39
water without putting out a single ripple, without a sound
28:43
at all. I kept walking.
28:46
I said Clifford Boyd's name to myself.
28:50
And then October 1188, the numbers off the last page of the
28:55
journal, just to have something in my head besides what was
29:00
walking next to me. I didn't stop, I didn't look.
29:06
I came out of the grass and there was the clearing and I
29:09
stopped looking at anything else.
29:12
It was round. It had to be near 30 meters
29:16
across, and every blade of whatever used to grow inside
29:19
that circle was dead and lying flat, pressed down and out from
29:24
the center in lines like the spokes of a wheel.
29:27
Exactly the pattern in the photographs folded into the back
29:30
of the journal. Except a photograph doesn't
29:33
carry a smell, and this had one. Brackish and old like standing
29:40
water that has never once been disturbed by wind.
29:43
The post stood dead center, Gray wood and six inches of black
29:48
water that didn't move even when I waded into it and the water
29:52
was bitterly cold. The box wasn't there.
29:57
I already knew it wouldn't be. It was zipped into the same
30:01
duffel back at the motel that I'd carried out of Leroy's shed.
30:05
The padlock cut clean through sitting empty in Cabin 4 while I
30:09
stood in the marsh looking at the post it used to hang from.
30:13
I put my hand on the wood to steady myself and look down to
30:16
where the bolt holes were and below them, cut into the grain
30:20
in shallow letters, gone as Gray and weathered as the rest of the
30:23
post was a name. My name, Thomas Andrew Boyd
30:31
under it on its own line. A date October 14th, 1988, the
30:38
day the Sheriff's Office would later write down as the day my
30:41
father was reported missing. I stood there with my hand flat
30:45
against the wood and did not move for a long time.
30:49
The letters weren't fresh. They weren't carved recently and
30:53
left to weather on purpose, the way somebody might try to fake
30:57
old. The wear on my name was the same
31:01
wear as the wear on the post itself, the grain gone soft and
31:05
Gray in exactly the same measure.
31:09
That meant whoever cut it there had done it long before I was
31:12
old enough to spell my own name, long before anybody standing in
31:17
this marsh in 1988 had any reason to know it.
31:22
That was when I looked up. He was standing at the far edge
31:25
of the clearing, knee deep in the black water in the canvas
31:29
survey jacket from the photographs.
31:32
The same set to his shoulders, the same face, mid 40s, not a
31:37
year older than the man in the pictures Mom kept in a shoe box
31:40
for 17 years. He didn't move, he didn't say
31:45
anything. He just looked at me across all
31:48
that flattened grass, like he'd been waiting for me.
31:53
I didn't say anything either. I don't know how long we stood
31:56
like that, him at one edge and me at the other, with my hand
32:00
still on the post. Then he raised his right arm and
32:04
pointed not at me, passed me over my shoulder at the center
32:10
of the clearing behind me, and I turned to look, because there
32:14
wasn't anything in me that could have not turned to look, and
32:18
there was nothing there, just water and dead grass lying flat
32:24
in its spokes, same as it had been the whole time.
32:28
When I turned back around, the far edge of the clearing was
32:31
empty. No man in a canvas jacket, no
32:36
wake in the water where he'd have had to move to get gone
32:38
that fast. Just the marsh, still and quiet,
32:44
exactly as it had been. I got myself back to the tree
32:48
line, the way I'd come, running the four sheets backward in my
32:51
head. Step 5 before Step 4.
32:55
The sound came up again on my right, on schedule, and I did
32:58
not look at it either. Then it was gone and there was
33:03
just the Cypress, then the channel, then the split pine,
33:08
then the access Rd. opening up Gray and ordinary in front of
33:11
me. I got in the car and I did not
33:15
start it. I sat there in the pull off with
33:18
both hands on the wheel, the bag on the seat beside me, the marsh
33:22
going on, making it sounds outside the windows.
33:26
It was 20 minutes, near enough before I could make myself turn
33:30
the key and point the car back toward the motel.
33:34
Cabin Four had a window unit that clicked when it cycled, and
33:38
I lay there in my clothes on top of the bedspread, listening to
33:41
it click and thinking I should be scared.
33:45
I kept waiting for it to arrive the way it's supposed to, the
33:49
cold water feeling you get when something's wrong.
33:52
It didn't come. What came instead was something
33:56
closer to recognition, the way you feel when you finally
34:00
remember a word that's been sitting just out of reach all
34:03
day. I had stood in that clearing,
34:06
looking at a man who'd been gone 17 years, and some part of me
34:09
had already known he'd be there, not guessed.
34:13
Known the way you know your own address.
34:16
A little after 2, I heard gravel shift outside.
34:19
Not wind shift, foot shift, and I got up and went to the window
34:23
without deciding to. He was standing at the edge of
34:27
the lot, under the sodium light by the ice machine, and he
34:30
looked exactly like the man in the photographs folded into the
34:33
back of the journal. Same jacket, same set to the
34:37
shoulders, standing like he was waiting on a ride that was
34:40
already late. He wasn't moving.
34:43
He was pointing, arms straight out, finger aimed at my window,
34:47
at me, and behind him. The tree line at the edge of the
34:50
lot was moving too, but not the way trees move.
34:55
No branches swaying, no give and snap of wind through leaves,
35:00
just the whole black mass of it, sliding sideways, slow, like a
35:05
stage flat being drawn off on a track.
35:09
I'd tracked that same motion out of the corner of my eye that
35:12
morning, off to my right, keeping pace with me through the
35:15
grass and standing there at the window, I finally understood it.
35:21
The same thing had been wearing him all along.
35:23
My father's shape. Just a coat it put on, and the
35:26
tree line was where the rest of it still lived.
35:30
I opened the door anyway. I don't have a good reason.
35:34
I wanted to hear if it would sound like him.
35:37
It did exactly like him. The register, the flatness, the
35:42
way he never hurried a sentence, even when the sentence mattered.
35:46
Come back before dark. My legs went cold from the knee
35:50
down, like standing in water, and I stepped back into the
35:54
room. Without meaning to.
35:56
It came forward one step onto the little concrete stoop, into
36:01
the doorway, into the light spilling out from the lamp by
36:05
the bed. And that's when I saw where it
36:07
broke. Above the mid thigh.
36:10
It was Dad. Canvas jacket, field trousers,
36:14
the whole cut of him. Below that.
36:17
The legs didn't finish his legs. They narrowed and ran together
36:21
into something low and wide that moved across the gravel and made
36:25
no sound doing it. No crunch, nothing.
36:28
A body owes the ground when it crosses it.
36:31
I didn't think about the front door.
36:34
I went for the back window through the sash and shoved
36:37
myself through it, into the dirt behind the cabin, and I was
36:41
running before I was all the way on my feet.
36:44
I came around the side of the building toward the car, and
36:47
that's when I saw Leroy on the porch of the office, in his
36:50
bathrobe, standing dead still, and the figure had turned from
36:54
my door and was facing him now instead, square on, close enough
37:00
that Leroy could have reached out and touched it.
37:03
Leroy, get inside. Get inside the office now.
37:07
He didn't move, didn't even seem to hear me.
37:11
His mouth was open a little and his hands were down at his
37:14
sides, and he stared at it like he'd finally seen the thing he'd
37:17
spent his whole life being warned about.
37:20
I got in the car, hands shaking bad enough that the key missed
37:23
the ignition twice, and I pulled it around in a hard arc across
37:27
the gravel and brought it up alongside the porch passenger
37:31
side to the steps. And I leaned across the seat and
37:35
got the window down and got both hands on the front of his robe
37:39
and hauled him through it. He came half in, half out, one
37:44
knee catching the door frame, and I don't know where the
37:46
strength came from, but I got him the rest of the way across
37:50
the seat and floored it before his other foot was clear of the
37:53
ground. I didn't look in the mirror.
37:57
I didn't want to know what the porch looked like behind us.
38:00
I drove N on 17 with both hands locked on the wheel and Leroy
38:05
folded into the seat beside me, breathing loud through his
38:08
mouth. And about a mile up, I put the
38:11
car under the fluorescent canopy of the Shell station, the pumps
38:14
dark, the little store behind them dark too, nothing on but
38:19
that flat white light buzzing overhead, and I put it in park
38:23
and left it running for the heat.
38:26
Neither of us said a word about what he'd seen.
38:29
He sat there with his robe still hanging open at the collar where
38:32
I grabbed it, staring out through the windshield at
38:35
nothing. And I sat there, watching the
38:38
road behind us in the mirror in case anything came up it.
38:43
And that's how we stayed under the lights while the sky out
38:48
past the tree line started very slowly to go Gray.
38:53
The heater ticked on the dash, then off again, and neither of
38:56
us said anything for a long time.
38:59
Leroy sat with his robe still gapped open at the collar, his
39:03
hands flat on his knees. The light over the pumps buzzed,
39:08
a low hum that never resolved into anything, just kept going.
39:13
It was Leroy who finally spoke. Wasn't the first, he said.
39:18
Not a question, not an answer to anything I'd asked, Just a flat
39:22
statement dropped into the space between us.
39:25
Who wasn't your daddy? He kept looking at the road.
39:31
There was a man named Goss, 1971, federal contract, same as
39:37
your daddy, surveying the same stretch.
39:39
Went insane as your daddy did, Didn't come out.
39:43
You knew him, knew who he was. Aided wins, same as everybody
39:49
before him. There was another one further
39:51
back. My own daddy would have known
39:53
his name, but he never told me, and I never asked, and now
39:57
there's nobody left to ask. He said it without any weight to
40:01
it at all, the way you'd read off a grocery list, and that was
40:06
worse, somehow than if he'd made it sound like something.
40:09
I sat with that a minute out past the windshield.
40:12
The road ran flat and Gray in both directions.
40:15
No headlights on it, no sound but the hum overhead.
40:20
Then why does it keep happening? I said.
40:23
Why does the county keep sending men out there?
40:27
Because it never gets finished. Leroy turned his head just
40:31
enough to look at me. Flats or government land have
40:36
been since before I was born, but the surveys never closed.
40:41
Somebody goes in and it don't get done, and the contract just
40:45
sits unsettled, and a few years go by and some office up in
40:51
Atlanta or wherever issues a new one, because far as the
40:54
paperwork's concerned, the job's still open.
40:58
He looked back at the road. Been that way as long as I can
41:02
recall. Long as my daddy could recall,
41:05
too. I thought about the box in the
41:08
shed with the federal tag still on it, sitting in the dark.
41:12
Since 1988, nobody had ever come for it.
41:18
Anybody ever come back? I said after they found it.
41:22
The clearing. Leroy didn't answer right away.
41:27
When he did, his voice had gone flatter still.
41:31
Your daddy did. Twice.
41:34
A pause, longer this time. Third time he didn't.
41:39
I had the journal on the seat between us, where it had written
41:43
the whole way up from the motel. I picked it up now and opened it
41:47
to the last page, the one I'd already read once, on the floor
41:52
of an empty house in Decatur. Thinking I understood it, I read
41:57
it out loud this time, for Leroy, and maybe for myself, in
42:02
the flat light coming up Gray behind the tree line.
42:06
The name on the post is my son's name.
42:10
I put it there myself. I don't remember when.
42:14
I don't remember carving it. I found it there today, and I
42:17
knew my own hand in the wood before I knew what it said, and
42:21
I still don't know when I did it.
42:24
The heater clicked on again. I kept reading.
42:28
I believe it has been getting ready for him since the first
42:30
time I found it. I believe that's what it's for.
42:35
I turned the last quarter inch of page, though there was almost
42:38
nothing left on it. I'm not going back, I'm going to
42:43
walk to the road and get in the truck and not look behind me.
42:48
I closed the book. Leroy didn't say anything.
42:52
He didn't ask what it meant, didn't offer anything back.
42:57
He just sat there with his eyes on the empty Rd. while the
43:00
canopy light hummed on above us. I look down at my hand, the
43:06
right one, the one I'd pressed flat against the post out there
43:10
in the standing water to keep from going over my palm against
43:13
the wet wood while I stood close enough to read my own name cut
43:17
into it. There was a mark across the palm
43:19
now, faint at a glance. You'd take it for a fold, line
43:24
or crease from gripping the wheel too hard.
43:27
Except it wasn't that It had shape to it.
43:31
It had letters. I turned my hand under the
43:34
fluorescent light to get it square, and there they were,
43:39
pale against the skin, already going fainter even as I watched
43:44
Thomas Andrew Boyd, my name, all of it.
43:49
I didn't say anything. I just turned my hand toward
43:52
Leroy, palm up, held it there in the space between the seats so
43:56
the light caught it. He looked at it a long moment,
44:01
long enough that I watched him take in every letter of it,
44:04
watched something move behind his eyes and then go still
44:07
again. Then he looked away, out the
44:11
windshield, back at the road, and he didn't say a word.
44:17
I sat there with my hand open in my lap and the letters fading
44:21
under my own eyes. There was no way to know whether
44:24
it had come from the wood or out of the wood, whether the post
44:28
had put it there or whether it had always been there and only
44:32
shown it to me. I closed my hand slowly and held
44:35
it shut in my lap. Outside, the light kept coming
44:39
up over an empty Rd.