When I was a child my parents used to take me to my grandparent's house on weekends. It was an old Victorian-style country home in the foothills outside Anytown, America. It had a long dirt road approaching it and an old barn behind. On two sides the property strayed off into woodlands and was bordered by a thick stream on the third. It was idyllic, the literal embodiment of the literary pastoral.
I used to lay out on their verandah playing with toy cars or trying desperately to keep my crayons between the lines while they silently finished their breakfast in the shade. They would often sit for hours afterwards drinking their tea, seldom making a sound.
In my youthful naivete I had assumed it was because they had nothing more to say to each other, that they had been together so long that they no longer had any stories to share that they didn't already know. But I grew up, and so too did my notion of that silence between them.
By the time I was in my mid-teens my parents were on the verge of divorce. It was easy to avoid the constantly raised voices and angry arguing by hiding at friends' places or the library in the evenings after school, but the approaching summer posed a different problem altogether. I found refuge at my grandparent's house. It became my escape from the domestic turmoil that had begun to characterize of my family life.
My grandfather put me to work immediately and without hesitation. He taught me how to split logs for fire, how to fire a rifle, and how to track game for food. And in the evenings my grandmother would take up the mantle and show me how to mend clothing, how to knot rope, and prepare livestock. Despite the long days, my summers seemed to vanish like the autumn sunsets.
Although, looking back on them they were full of lessons and much learning. Having grown out of my childhood obliviousness, I discovered that besides their indulgence of a long breakfast, my grandparents were rarely idle, they forever had some project that needed attending and they seemed to move in perfect concert with each other despite an apparent lack of communication.
It was during this time that I had come to alter my former belief regarding the pervasive silence in which the two of them lived. Where as before I had believed they knew each other so well they had nothing left to say, I now firmly believed it was because they knew each other so well that they needn't say anything at all. I fancied they knew each other's minds so well that words were simply wasted breath. And I held that belief for many years.
Until the day I was required to take ownership of my grandparent's property. It was many decades after those summers of which I held such fond memories. Their will had specified it be passed on to their son, and had my father not hit the bottle following the divorce and fallen into the back of a cop car or had my mother not hit an airport and fallen off the grid, then the old house and the plot on which it sat might not have fallen into my hands.
I took a summer off from work and moved into the house to get affairs in order before putting the house up for sale. Even in their absence something of that silence that had come to define them in my mind still seemed to reverberate throughout the empty house. I had initially found it warmly nostalgic, but at some point as the weeks wore on it began to unsettle me, enough to sometimes raise the hairs on the back of my neck. The feeling grew and unable to shake it, I began to hasten my efforts.
My plan was to pack up anything worth keeping, sell what I could, and donate the rest. That was until one evening I accidentally discovered a loose panel within one of the closets while I was clearing it out. Puzzled, i removed the panel to reveal a low wooden stairway that crawled up and out of sight.
The fading sunlight filtered through the wooden siding of the house in places along the stairway's length, enough that I was able to make out a track of shuffling footprints in the thick blanket of dust that otherwise covered everything else in the narrow passage. The idea that my grandparents knew of, let alone used, this passage seemed entire incongruous with the lifestyle I had come to cherish about them. Imagining my grandfather hunched low and climbing the old stairs had seemed to finally confirm the absurdity of such in my mind, so I let my bafflement grow to curiosity and made my way up the stairs.
The stars were out by the time local fire control managed to quell the fire. When they had arrived already half of the house had succumbed to the flames. Before they could even install their pump in the well, a large section of the second floor collapsed into the first leaving little worth saving. The horizon had begun to take on its own orange by the time they had finished.
All the while I sat staring blankly from the back of an ambulance, paramedic blanket around my shoulders, ruminating on that which I had found at the top of those stairs. The very notion of it all might still seem impossible if not for those journals of dreadfully familiar handwriting. I had watched the flames eat those leather bound chests filled with stacks of letters and documents before calling for help.
After that, I sat silent the rest of the night through. That silence grew in me all the while smoke obscured the stars above and the sun came to rise on ashes. It grew until there was no room left; and that is when I finally came to understand the silence that hung between my grandparents. It was the silence of things that must never be said.
(It feels a bit rough to me, disjointed in some places, but I hadn't posted in a while; feedback ought to help smooth it out a bit too)
