Leave It Alone

I can only relate the details from the past because of a hand-written journal that I have kept all these years. It is now yellow with age and there are stains-- some from tears, one a smudge of blood--whose it is I do not know.

When the top of the strange capsule had been sawed off, what we saw inside was a jumble of rotten nubs along with a tightly rolled, small piece of brittle, yellowing paper that had been inserted into the hole in the bottom. Written on the paper in an unusual script and in a language we did not understand, were the following words. I copied them into the journal I had started:

John morreu nas selvas perto do rio de Maici ao recolher a fruta da árvore da porca de Brasil. Esta porca caiu da elevação acima de golpear sua cabeça. Foi enterrado pelo Hi’aiti’ihi’.

We carried the small, doily-covered table up to a corner of the attic so that the workmen could continue with their renovation of our house. On the table we sat the desecrated capsule with its “now” removable top and the note.

While moving the table, we noticed a little drawer that had been covered by the hanging doily. In the drawer was an envelope and one letter. The letter was in English and apparently was written home to the author’s parents. It was dated, 15 April, 1924.

…I can hardly wait to see you again. It seems that I have been in the jungles of Brazil forever…I will be leaving here in one week…It is a long and tiring journey home…I have one more thing I want to do before I leave this place. The Piraha Indians are making a foraging trip to gather the Brazil nuts for their trading. I want to go along so that I can bring you some for souvenirs…

It was signed, “John”.

After copying the contents of the letter into my journal, I placed the original back into the table drawer in the attic. Then began my quest to libraries to try to find the meaning of the paper in the nut capsule.~~~~

It was Portuguese. He translated it for me first word for word, and then went through it again putting it into a more conversational paraphrase:

"This John went with the Piraha Indians (they call themselves Hi’aiti’ihi‘) to a place on the banks of the Maici River where the wild Brazil nut trees grow. This heavy thing (he bounced it in his hand) fell from the tree top where they grow, usually around 100 feet tall. It struck him on the head. He was buried by the Piraha. It does not say where--probably in the jungle near their village. Someone, probably a Brazilian friend, must have sent the offending nut capsule to his parents along with this note in Portuguese."

I had taken the thing along to show to the translator. Suddenly aware that it had killed the man, I was hesitant to receive it back from him. I was beginning to realize that the sealed up room in our house had been intended for a crypt of sorts, or an entombment of remains. But, the remains were in the jungle. All that came home to them was this--and the note, which they had inserted into the capsule of seeds…..

The room was doubled in size by the contractors and large windows let in the sunshine and the breezes. It became the bedroom of Son #1, who, at that time, was about ten years old. The boys played in the attic on rainy days, never noticing the table with the drawer covered with a doily, the nut sitting in the center. It was in a far corner and many boxes and pieces of junk were gradually piled around and in front of it. But, at times, especially at night when the family was abed, sounds were noticed coming from the attic:

- footsteps moving about over head

- footsteps coming down the attic stairs and stopping at the closed door

- sudden loud thud now and then, as if something fell to the floor above

- once, water poured through the ceiling of our bedroom from the attic above

Never, at that time, did we feel threatened--never once a feeling of malevolence. The boys continued to play in the attic on rainy days; and I would go there for my quiet times alone.~~~~

Years passed. The old house had a quality of a cross between happy living and old mystery. It drew people into its ebullient atmosphere with music, jocularity, activity, aromas of baking bread and roasting meat. It saw everything from hordes of children after school, to old ladies sipping tea and eating cakes at morning weekly prayer group, and everything in between. The garden with its old rock walls, climbing roses and sweet pea vines, its lilac bushes and hollyhocks, was often filled with those anticipating the grilled hamburgers and steaks that hubby so often prepared.

Son #1 eventually outgrew "the remodeled room” and begged to move, bag and baggage, to the attic where he could increase his privacy from his younger brothers and entertain his friends in a more unique setting. He chose the dormer section facing the street so he could look down on the comings and goings of his neighborhood friends.

He was a popular fellow and I soon got tired of running up the stairs or yelling at the top of my lungs when he was wanted. Through trial and error, I found a spot on the wall on the first floor, at the base of the stairs where, if I pounded with the heel of my hand, it resounded well into the section of the attic that had become his abode. Pound, pound, pound (three times) meant that he was wanted.

Those of us who slept in the second floor bedrooms continued to hear the walking noises in the attic at night, and the occasional bang of something thrown or dropped, though Son, in the attic, always slept soundly and heard nothing.

Children grow and things change and one day, I found my children gone--Son #1 to the Navy and the other three married and moved away. Hubby was gone too. The spring of love had turned to winter--cold, silent, winter of dead love. He was gone and the old house had become mine alone.

Not wanting to remain in the master bedroom we had shared for so long, I moved myself into “the renovated room”. I don’t remember ever feeling frightened, but I had a weird sense of being one small person in a house of many empty silent rooms.

The sounds from the attic were gone, but on nights when I missed my family the most, from the first floor level I would hear a muffled pound, pound pound sounding through the house, and it would comfort me.~~~~

Old houses have old plumbing. Old houses have roofing tiles that age and must be replaced. Just as a person changes in their declining years, a house will begin to sag and creak. Untended vines in the garden take over the yard, making to crumble the stone walls and foundations as nature tries to take back its own.

The day came when I no longer wanted the responsibility of keeping it up, not even for the visits from the children and the hide-and-seek games of the grandbabies. I turned it over to the one who still wanted it, my ex-husband, and with only my personal items, moved to an efficiency apartment to begin again.

He was lonesome there. He had hoped the old house would bring the two of us back together. He had assumed that the children and grandchildren would continue to come to that place for good times. Instead, they crowded into my apartment for food and fun, and he welcomed the occasional night sounds as if they were company. Finally he bought himself a computer in his older years and found himself a lonely woman to chat.

By the time that he married and was ready to move to Florida, Son #1 had a wife and two step-children. He was thrilled to move back home to the place that he loved and share it with his family. All he had to do was keep it up and it was his. They commenced immediately with gardening and cookouts and making a few decorating changes, although the majority of it and the old furniture continued the same as that of his childhood.

Fourteen-year-old Eric moved into “the renovated room”. The children learned to ignore the “night sounds” but Son’s wife had trouble overcoming her in-bred fears that were instilled in her by her Mexican grandmother’s superstitions of brujas, espectros and los muertos.

As a lot of teens do, Eric was working his way through a rebellious stage, not fully yet accepting Son #1 as a father figure. He was purposely slow to obey and often showed a stubborn face to his parents. The greatest part of his rebellious spirit was shown through his music--his choice of punk revival and gothic rock and the decibels at which he insisted on playing it. His boom box was his greatest treasure. It had a special place atop his dresser when he was in his room.

One night Son and wife were awakened in the wee hours of the morning to the reverberating beat of rock music, well beyond the time that Eric was allowed to play it. He had turned it on and then fallen asleep to its “sweet” strains. Just as son was climbing out of bed to make his displeasure known, there was a terrible crashing sound and then silence.

Terrified, the parents ran. On opening the bedroom door, they found Eric sleeping peacefully, the boom box scattered across the floor in an unfixable state of disrepair.~~~~

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. --Jean Paul

In the mysteries of the old house, this was not the case. In the 40+ years of our family’s sojourn there, nothing at the end was any clearer than it was at the beginning.

Eric turned out to be a fine young man, sensitive, hard working, responsible, self-sufficient. He lived and worked in another state, but he returned home for regular visits. Jenny was growing up without problems except for that of worrying about her weight. It bothered her that her mother was such a tiny thing and that she had inherited the larger frame of her birth father.

Son and wife loved the old house and gardens. Their favorite of all was summer evenings spent on the veranda, sitting together on the swing and watching the world go by from behind the pink roses climbing the trellis. Wife’s health began to fail. She had always been a fragile thing, but two hospitalizations in succession gave them both cause for concern. Then winter came and son had an accident on the ice that left him incapacitated for several months. One evening he called me. I could hear tension in his voice. He asked, “Mom, how can you find out if a stain that looks like blood is really blood?”

He followed that question with a very strange tale which I will tell you. But first, I would like to say that when I arrived at the old house with my bottle of hydrogen peroxide to test it, the stain tested positive for catalase, which is a very good indication of blood. I had learned in nursing that blood contains an enzyme called catalase that breaks down hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen gas. When this occurs, the oxygen gas is released as bubbles. You have observed this reaction if you have ever cleansed a wound with hydrogen peroxide.

Son and wife had been enjoying a quiet evening in front of the TV, he on “his” couch and she on “her” recliner with the cat beside her as always. Suddenly Cat yowled and leaped to the floor and disappeared in a flash. Almost immediately, a glob of blood hit her lap. At first she assumed she was having a bad nosebleed, but that proved to be not the case. Wife was checked from stem to stern--nose, ears, mouth, scalp, body. The cat was found and checked in the same way.

No evidence of blood was found anywhere at all--not on the ceiling over where she sat--nowhere except for the glob that had landed in her lap. She was terrified. It completely freaked her out and she took to her bed.

The blood splatter pattern was unusual in that it was not round and evenly formed as though dripped from above. It was spattered as though it were flung from the side, as if a
hand dripping blood was flipped to the side to shake it off.~~~~

Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality. --Emily Dickinson

Son was left behind.

In a matter of about eight weeks, wife had relapsed, returned to the hospital in fear and pain, then admitted into hospice care and quickly faded away. Jenny was reclaimed by her birth father and son was alone, except for Cat, some mice, silent empty rooms and his dead hopes and memories. Already in ill health from the results of his accident, complications, worry, depression, and years of alcohol abuse, he spiraled downward.

Cat would not get up on the recliner, but would rub against it and cry. When she would catch a mouse, she would lay it at son’s feet as if it were an attempt to cheer him, or as if she sensed his need for nourishment.

Son would not/could not eat. He became emaciated, weak, a hermit wanting no company. He would not answer the phone or knocks at the door. He pulled all shades, blinds, drapes and sat in darkness. If the house made strange sounds at that time, he heard them not, as he was drowning in his own alcohol-saturated misery.

My grandson called my attention to the light in the attic. If it were not for him mowing uncle’s yard each week, taking in the mail and carrying out the beer cans and whiskey bottles for trash pickup, the place would have looked abandoned. Grandson rode his bicycle past the house every evening to check things out.

“Grandma, did you know that in the late evening, after it gets dark, there is a light that moves about in the attic? It goes from one part of the attic to another.”

I knew it was not Son. He had become so weak that he could not even maneuver the stairs from the first to the second floor. The rest of the house was left to the wanderings of Cat and to whatever else inhabited the place. ~~~~

Death is a very dull, dreary affair,
and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it. --W. Somerset Maugham

Five years the doctors gave him--maybe--IF….

It was a big if and one he was not willing to even consider trying. The doctors were pessimistic about him. He refused the nicotine patches, he refused help with alcohol abuse, he refused to see the psychiatrist for depression, he refused anti-anxiety medications, he refused to eat, refused the high-protein supplements, the vitamins. He couldn’t drive. He couldn’t walk without holding on to furniture. He fell often, and when he did, he could not get up. He couldn’t take a bath because he could not get in and out of the big old claw-foot bathtub. He had developed cataracts on his eyes and in more ways than one, had a dim view on life.

The old house had lost its charm. It had the ambiance of death--except for one thing. One thing flourished without seeming reason. When wife was still alive, she had planted an avocado seed in a pot that she placed in “the renovated room”. Inadvertently, she had placed it immediately below the spot in the attic where sat the cherry wood table with the lace doily and the Brazil nut capsule.

Even without care, it grew upward until it reached the ceiling and then branched outward, reaching, searching, for a way to continue. It gave the illusion that the jungle desired to take back its own, or that the nut yearned to be, once more, in the bosom of a tree.

I became obsessed with the thought of removing son from the old house for good. With his money gone, family gone, health gone, prospects nil, and thinking it would never come about anyway, he agreed to the idea of leaving the place and sharing an apartment with me.

Determination worked wonders. By the end of the month, I had found the perfect place, given notice to my landlord, arranged for movers for both of us, contacted son’s dad who still legally owned the old house and informed son of moving day. The reality of the change terrified him.

The last time that I was inside the old house, my ex-hubby had already started cleaning it out to put it on the market. He was in the attic with the north window wide open and was throwing 40+ years of collected junk into a large dumpster container far below. It never occurred to me to ask what he would do with certain objects. I was just glad it was over. Deep down, I knew that the hard part was just beginning.~~~~

Epilogue The First:

Don’t cry because its over, smile because it happened. --Unknown

Yesterday I joined him on the deck where he stood breathing deeply the scent of the heavily perfumed blossoms on the tree between us and where sat his shiny black Chrysler Sebring LXi. The grass and trees were quickly greening and the redbud tree was in the height of its glory. The Canadian geese could be heard squawking as they landed on the lake across the way. A gentle smile was on his face.

“Spring is my most favorite time of year, and this spring is especially great.”

“I got the notice today that its time to renew our lease here. Shall I sign us up for another year?”

“Sure, I don’t have any place that I want to go.”

“Well, I don’t want you to feel locked in to anything. You’re free to make changes anytime you want.”

“That would only be if it had something to do with a woman and I’m not looking. I had Patti for fourteen years and she’s still in my heart.”

“I know, but some day you may be walking around the lake and see someone special sitting on a park bench….”

He smiled again. That was how he and Patti met so long ago.

“Well, if I do, I definitely will strike up a conversation.”

It had been a long, hard, two-year struggle with torturously slow progress. From abject incapacity and debilitating depression to a desire to live again and the gradual awakening of possibility, he had come. Against all odds, he overcame the dystrophied muscles and absence of reflexes that kept him tied to home. Six months ago he went back to work.

“So where are you off to on this fine morning?”

“I’m going to show Kraig my new car and see if he would like to get out and go for a ride. Kraig is his long-time friend who suffered a stroke last year. It effected his speech and he has right-sided weakness in both his arm and leg. His whole life fell apart. He lost his job, his home, his car, his life as he knew it. Son knows what that is like and what a little support from a friend might do.~~~~

Epilogue The Last:

I should have known that it was not in him to let it pass into oblivion. Of all those who experienced the oddities that transpired within the old house, he alone voiced the word “ghost” and only once. After his “ghostly” proposition and his claim of extrasensory perceptions was received with skeptical winking, he mentioned it not again. But we knew that he continued with his attempts to solve each unusual incident.

The rest of us dealt with it in each our own peculiar way. My way was simply to ignore in the same way that I ignored a whiny child. Son #1 reveled in its singularity until the incident of the blood and what followed. Son #2, when he rotated to “the renovated room” would lie on his bed playing his harmonica, inviting a response. It was only when he would play Home, Sweet Home that a faint echo of it would seem to float from the recesses of the attic. Son #3 would talk loudly to it, “Now what did you do that for?” he would call out toward the ceiling. Or, he would deride, “You just have to put in your two cents worth, don’t you.”

Until the day he died at age 22, Son #4 was strangely silent about the whole thing, even though he chose to reside in the attic dormer area for three years after Son #1 went into the Navy.

Until a week ago when I began to write these posts, I had just assumed that the cherry wood table, the letter, the doily and the capsule with the Portuguese note, had been trashed in the cleaning out of the attic and the sale of the old house. I never gave it a second thought until the writing of this peaked my curiosity. I began asking questions of Son #3 who had helped his dad with some of the disposal of household items. He didn’t know.

And then, I just happened to bring up the subject in a phone conversation with Son #2 who lives in Florida near his dad. “Sure,” he said, “I see it whenever I go to Dad’s house. Dad turned it into one of his Godwots.” According to son, the cherry wood table, doily, and Brazil nut capsule with its note, sit intact and protected from the weather and critters beneath the bougainvillea covered trellis in his dad’s butterfly garden.

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Fern’d grot--The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not--
Not God! In gardens! When the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign;
‘Tis very sure God walks in mine. --Thomas Edward Brown 183-1897

The End