Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (31 page)

It was also him, Papa, who give us the relics. I don’t mean holy relics, like slivers of the true cross. I mean historical relics. They don’t have anything attached to them sacred or magic.

They couldn’t have.

That’s the whole point.

You see?

They were from his father. He kept them in a Cornelius hatbox.

We were twelve when he gave them to us.

It was summer. We were sitting out on the low, black wrought-iron fence right near the street, waiting to see Patricia Finnian, the oldest of those girls, Joanie’s big sister, walk past, the way she did every night. Patricia was wild. She would come swinging her shiny red plastic purse, with her black hair like a thing with its own eager spine dancing on her back, her breasts plain visible in the sinking light under her cheap cotton dress, and girls didn’t do that then, crossing the two streets from Grant into the city. She was seventeen and she had no eyes for Jackie or me. The Dagos picked her up around the corner in long white Lincolns. Patricia is a lady now. She lives out in Lake Forest in a house the size of a block in a normal place. Joanie and I get asked there for Christmas Eve, like the king asked his stable men to come in and have food on the night Christ was born. She gives us something Joanie and I laugh about the rest of a year, like once crystal bowls you put salt in, with tiny spoons.

That night, though, Papa called us to come over before Patricia came out. He lived across and one building over—and he says,
I got this box I got to show you boys some things in.

He untied the strings and lifted off the top. There, in the top, was a flag folded, like for the dead. An American flag but not like one we had ever seen, not with the right number of stars, and so old the white was yellow. You knew it would crack like paper if you unfolded it. There was a big-brimmed hat all tore up, dirty black felt material. And there was pictures of a man with big earmuffs of sideburns. In one of them, he was holding two babies, one Papa’s father and one Papa’s twin brother, Pavel, who died from the scarlet fever. Twins run in families, so my mother turned out to be one.

Papa’s father served with the Sixth Wisconsin, the Iron Brigade, the bravest of all the Union forces, the miners and farmers who wore the big, black hats. The big-brimmed hat in the box was his. I guess that was how Papa’s father got his fondness for hats, those hats worn with so much pride. Papa was probably eighty by then, but he never forgot a thing, old or new. He said his father could do all sorts of things besides grow alfalfa and fashion a fine fedora. Once, after he sold his farm, he taught drawing for a family of girls whose father was rich, but no one could support a family teaching girls to draw. But the first Grandpa Nickolai really could draw anything he saw, Papa said, from his mother’s face in the mirror to the butcher’s hands. In the Civil War he drew dying men crazed with thirst in the fields in Pennsylvania, as they cried out in Dutch or German or with Irish on their tongues. Papa had his father’s music notation book with a black-and-white marble cover—filled with the drawings. Papa showed us them, so fragile and faded. Looking slowly through the drawings, being careful not to smudge the pencil marks more, Jackie said, “Papa, these are real good. Art and also historical. You should give them to the Field Museum.”

Papa said, “He did not mean for people to see them.”

Jackie asked, “Why?” And Papa shrugged as if he knew the answer but he wasn’t to say it. That must have been where Jackie got his gift for art.

There were some buttons in the box, too, and one old boot. The knife with two blades and bone handles was the next thing but one to the bottom. It was wrapped in a lady’s handkerchief.

Jackie was sitting closest, so Papa gave it to him.

Opened up, it looked just like that bug, a praying mantis. Papa said his grandfather got it off a Rebel soldier in the Civil War. Crazy with hunger, our great-grandfather used it to dig something like sweet potatoes from the ground, a farm before it was a battlefield. But he had nothing to cut dry wood with to make a fire so he could cook them. They was too tough to eat raw, since his teeth was loose anyhow.

“They all had scurvy or the dysentery,” Papa said.

“Did he have to shoot the Rebel?” I asked Papa. Papa looked out at the colored boys, who were just starting to sing around a fire in the trash can on the corner under the streetlight, up past where Grand ended and Chicago began.

“Someone made it named Furnace, see there,” Papa told us. “Think of your name being Furnace. Made by Furnace but they call it a Barlow knife. It is from England.” I asked again was he dead, the Johnny Reb, when our great-grandpa took the knife off him, and Nana came out. She pulled my hair and said, “Tcch! Enough!” Right then, my mom came in the back door with a casserole, looked at the hatbox, and cut her eyes at Papa like he’d sworn in Jesus’ name. Papa fell silent, pouty as a little kid. He felt deep in the bottom of the box and pulled out a man’s muffler, a winter scarf. Wrapped in that was what I got, a bayonet. It fitted to the end of his rifle, though no one knew what happened to the rifle.

“It’s American history, Marie,” he said.

“Of war,” Mom said. “We don’t want any more wars like when I was a girl. We’re done with wars.”

Us boys weren’t; of course, we didn’t know that.

Jackie’s knife was the better thing. Sure. He could carry it anywhere. Bring it out and examine it, in front of the Carney brothers like he was figuring who he should cut. The knife made up for a lot, not that Jackie needed it. But he never used it to hurt anybody or anything. He carved with it because it was still sharp as new. First, he made tiny teacups from acorns for his little sister and swords for him and me that we burned until they had points hard enough to pierce human skin. Then he started to carve sculpture things from scrap bits of cherry and mahogany Dad and Unkie brought home from new houses they were doing plumbing on. He carved birds and owls. Then hands. Then finally flowers. Auntie Maggie said the opening rose he made reminded her of the story of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain and the Stone Flower.

“There was a master carver,” she said. “And he could make flowers of stone and wood that looked more real than living flowers; but to do this he had to give up his love and remember nothing of his mother or his loyal sweetheart. But he gave back the gift, instead, and forgot the copper mountain until he was ninety years old . . .”

She was just getting started. We ran outside. Auntie Maggie could go through three cups of coffee on a story. You could be ninety yourself when she got done. It was rude; but we just heard her laughing after us. We got away with most things.

Even though the Barlow knife was the better, Jackie said my bayonet had stains on it and that they had to be real blood. I told him I bet the bone that made the arms of his knife was tiger bone.

That’s how we was to each other. Tried to make the other one feel good. I don’t know if real brothers would have been that polite. Though our mothers were. They still are.

The only difference between our families back then that I could tell was Jackie’s parents lived in the upper of the two-flat. Because of the stairs, it was a little smaller than our house, though it had more bedrooms. No one ever said a thing about it or the fact that, even with them calling themselves partners—the plumbing truck reading
NICKOLAI AND NICKOLAI
—actually the rod, the pipe wrench, and the truck itself were Dad’s. The time Unkie left the new snake at the Emerson house and when they went back the snake had crawled off—as my dad put it—that was all he said. He laughed. No reproach. It was like family was a piece of lace that might already have a lot of holes but you handled it careful so it didn’t get more.

One time, my pop got my mother a lamb coat, ’cause she lost a baby girl born way too soon, and Jackie’s mother had to do with a long shawl knitted by Nana. Auntie didn’t complain. She said, “Oh, Marie, that collar brings out the red in your hair.”

And Mom would come right back with, “Maggie, it fits us both the same, so you take it to the Knights dance—”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Marie. If I ever got something on it—”

“No, Sissy, you just take it anytime you want . . .”

Which was why, with their having a little bit more trouble than us making ends meet, probably because Unkie played the ponies, we were all shocked when Unkie gave Jackie the Studebaker for high school graduation. It wasn’t new, far from it. But it was clean as a priest’s collar, not a scratch on her. We all knew right away whose it was. Marty Jaworsky’s. The diamond dealer’s car. We knew, too, that it couldn’t have had no more than twenty miles on it because Reb Jaworsky didn’t do a thing with it but drive down the boulevard on Friday before sunset taking his family to temple on a magic carpet so black it gleamed like a river in the rain, then have a guy drive them home after. We also all knew Reb Jaworsky wasn’t going to give it up for a nickel less than it was worth. Not because he was a Jew. Because he didn’t have to. Things didn’t go up and down in your job if your job was diamonds.

Then, the Sunday night after graduation, we found out why Unkie did it. He brought cherry wine, dessert wine. And he left on his fancy old-fashioned dress collar from church at dinner. Afterward, he stood up and said, “I want to say I am proud here that my only son, Jukka Andrea Nickolai, is enlisted in the First Calvary, the Big Red One, and will sail nine days after Christmas, with God we hope to watch over him to keep the mountains where our grandmothers and grandfathers lived and now they sleep, free from the evil one.” Auntie Maggie got up and put her apron over her face like she was ashamed and ran from the room, my mother right after her, muttering something at Unkie like she did when my father gave Mr. Emerson ten bucks to bet on a horse—despite Unkie’s problems with gambling.

“Jack,” Mama said later, “he’s Maggie’s only son. What if it was yours? What if it was Jan?”

Anyhow, Unkie was left standing there, looking like he wanted to cry, and the Russian cut-crystal glass right in his hand glowed like an icon with a candle in it at the Orthodox church on the South Side where Papa and Nana still went—though we went to Catholic church by then. The adults went into the living room and put on the radio. The shortwave could get the BBC. I started to ask Jackie why he enlisted; they would come and get a kid anyhow, soon enough, but for the first time in our lives he held up his hand, which told me as plain as words that his father made him do it, maybe because of newer immigrants having to prove something all the time, us being like German in the eyes of born Americans.

It wasn’t the same as my mother’s family. Of course, Jackie couldn’t admit that.

Which left the wine sitting there for us to finish. We did. And we didn’t have no stomach for it. Jackie said
let’s take a ride.
We went out to the car and polished off the fenders with our coats. Jackie had to stop and heave by the steps and clean his hands with a paint rag and his mouth with the hose before we could go.

I remember this.

Nora Finnian hung out the window across the street in just her full slip and yelled up the block, “Jackie, can I ride in your fine car then?” I couldn’t wait to sit in it myself; but the fact was, I felt about the same as Auntie Maggie. I didn’t want Jackie to go to war. It made me sick, though I knew a brave man should go. I had my own stuff to prove, supposedly. But I wore a shoe with a built-up heel and I never ran or took gym, though I could catch and throw in street games. I told girls poker was my sport. Swimming helped, so I did that. But I had to wear a brace to bed to keep my knee straight. I wouldn’t never be a soldier. Jackie, now, could run like a bastard wind. He disappeared at shortstop. He could outrun all the Carneys, even Amon, the youngest, Amon so thin he was like a rag twisted into a person. I wonder what he would have done, with those hands made for beauty and being able to run like that. Maybe gone for a professor, despite the way Unkie didn’t think men needed to learn much from books. Or I like to think of him playing pro ball maybe. He was so good the college guys came to watch him when we played American Legion.

That night we drove to Seven Sorrows Cemetery to smoke. They locked the front gates of the cemetery at dusk but they never locked the back. I guess they figured why would anyone want to go in a cemetery? So there was beer cans all over the place. We sat there and smoked a butt each, and I noticed Jackie inhaled now, and he said
let’s take a walk
so we got out, us knowing Seven Sorrows and the lanes between the graves as certain as we knew our bedrooms. We played there so much after dark when we was kids it was the school yard to us.

That night, we got to one of the little houses rich people bought for their dead—family crypts. Everyone knew this particular one; it was all covered with long strings of mirrors between the wrought-iron bars. It had little windows made of mirrors and a hipped silvery roof that came almost down to the ground. It belonged to Gypsies, Romany people the same as us but different. This being July and not long after the longest day of the year, the Gypsy queen and king’s children or subjects or whatever you please had hung ribbons, too, gold and blue and red. Nobody liked the tomb. People said it was haunted. Everybody took a long loop to avoid it, even on a Sunday stroll. But Jackie walked right up, pulled off one of the ribbons, and almost sneered at me when I gasped. He must have thought I was a priss.

“You don’t believe that shit?” he asked me. “Mirrors to scare off the devil if he should see his face, eh? Even Magda and Marie don’t believe that.” What made my hair prickle on my neck was the way he sounded different. Saying our mothers’ given names like they was girls from our street. Like there was a fan belt broke or a violin string snapped in him. Because we would never talk about our mothers that way. You just didn’t.