| There are other quicker ways to get there, but
this road has one thing the others don’t, memories… He drives down the winding
curves and the over rolling hills and he can hear his sisters’ voices, singing
songs meant for double dutch and hand-clapping games. How four voices could carry so far, over time and space and the impassable barrier of the great beyond he will never know but he can hear them plain as church bells in his mind every time he drives down that old road. And he can see his father, leaning up against their old station wagon, pumping gas with a toothpick in his mouth, hat tipped down over his eyes, legs stretched out, such a lean you’d think that he was sleeping until the bell goes ding for the final time and he settles up with the man that owns the place. Somewhere up the road a piece is the place where their car broke down in the middle of nowhere. Their father walked away without a word. He was always that way, he did what had to be done and never complained. He came back hours later, covered in the dust of the road with a tow truck that didn’t mind towing “colored folks” as the driver put it. He always wondered how many stations his father had gone to before he found someone that would help them. They never made it to the beach that day. The daylight hours were gone by the time the car had been repaired, but they sat on the back porch of a soda shop, and had four bottles of pop to split between them. The looked up at the stars and made their own fun, they told stories that had since been obscured by the night clouds, and by all the miles traveled in between now and then. Shadows don’t fall the same way in moonlight, and dreams flicker like a well-fanned flame in the light of the morning sun. Sometimes the memories seem faded like the cracked old pictures of family members he’s never met in the tattered old picture album his mother kept under her bed. Dust clings to bygone days, and sometimes its hard to remember what was real when you’re the only one left. Did a kindly old fireman really open up a hydrant on the street halfway home from here that time they closed the beach because fire had broken out in the woods a mile up the road and smoke was wafting down the hillside, all across the sand, and water? Did they dance in the shower of that hydrant, just as merrily as they had ever ridden the tides of waves in patched up inner tubes? Did they all run to the car, hair curled like sheep’s wool by the water that beaded and glistened like diamonds on their skin to eat a picnic lunch in the backseat of their father’s car and ride home in a slumbering pile as the sun set softly? He remembered those times, some boldly and vividly, some half seen like a spider’s web on the wind, half heard like an echo in an empty valley. That was why he traveled on that crooked lonely road, because it had borne witness to those memories and those years. It knew how the sunlight made his brother’s eyes luminous when it struck them at just the right angle, it knew how it painted his sisters’ hair in shades of gold and bronze and auburn red. It knew the sound of singing voices, warbling over the roughest parts of the dirt road. Like him it was there through the years bearing witness. She came back a year later, and walked across the sand. |
