The Brother My Father Never Named

What My Father Sealed Away

The drywall came away in dry, chalky sheets, easier than I expected, like it had been waiting on somebody to finally do this. Underneath it was not a wall at all. It was a door, an old one with a glass knob gone cloudy with age, painted shut so many times over the paint had turned the color of weak tea.

It gave on the third try, with a sound like something exhaling.

The air that came out of that room was still, but not in a way that frightened me. Still the way a church is still on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody is inside it. Still the way a held breath feels when it is finally let go.

I found the light switch by memory, though I could not have told you how I knew where it was. The bulb had burned out decades ago, so I used my phone light instead, and what it showed me was a boy’s bedroom that time had simply stopped inside of. A narrow iron bed with a quilt folded neat at the foot. A slingshot hanging on a nail by the window. A pair of work boots lined up by the door, waiting on somebody who had never come back to put them on.

And on top of the dresser, a cedar cigar box, its corners soft with age.

I sat down on the edge of that narrow bed and opened it, my mother’s voice still going in my ear, still begging me to leave it be, to please, for once in my entire life, leave something alone and let it rest.

Inside the box was a man’s pocket watch, gold plated and worn thin at the edges, engraved on the back with initials that were not my father’s. There was a black and white photograph of two boys about my father’s age, arms slung over each other’s shoulders, standing in front of the old mill smokestack with the kind of grin that only exists before life has had a chance to get at you. And underneath both of those, a bundle of letters, maybe forty of them, tied with butcher’s twine, every single one addressed, every single one stamped, and not one of them ever mailed.

I turned the photograph over. Written in pencil on the back, in handwriting I recognized as my father’s, was a name I had never once heard spoken at our supper table in my whole life.

Hollis.