I remember the day we scoured my grandmother’s old Portland home, not two days after her funeral. I was twelve years old, and it was the last time my mother’s family ever stood all together under the same roof.
Being at the ripe age of twelve - and looking more like seven - I knew I had no voice to be heard. Everyone zipped through the halls and across the rooms like clockwork, pulling out drawers and rifling through cabinets, and looking both ways before slyly snatching family portraits off the walls. It felt awkwardly mechanical, like some commercial score to be settled between weeping and saying goodbye. My entire childhood disassembled, sorted, and carried off in separate directions.
My grandmother’s crate of Matchbox cars had rested in the guest closet for a good portion of two decades, ready to be drug out by eager grandsons. My brother and I rolled and wrecked those cars over the den carpet as noisily as we could, till my Granny fussed and hollered and hid them so we could ponder the decibel levels of our voices without distraction. Now we were standing together, watching Uncle Bill carry them to his Ford truck with intent to pawn them away at his weekly yard sale. Such was the nature of that day.
I toured my grandmother’s home as it rapidly became a derelict, catching last glances at items I could only associate with that place. The wretch-green quilt that, despite its horribly ugly 1970s flair, cuddled warmth under even the coldest of spent nights. The History of Fountain Ferry Park VHS tape watched so many times that it was now barely entertainment. The thick blue-bound medical book my cousins and I used to sneak glances in, we always searching for those female surface anatomy diagrams (after awhile, my grandmother got so good at hiding that one that we simply gave up looking for it). The green alligator cup that sat in the cupboard - second shelf, first cup on the right - and remains to this day my favorite drinking device ever. Uncle Bill got that one, too.
Once the house had been thoroughly cleared, attention moved to the backyard shed. It was an old gray and white shed, built with God knows how old wood, and dollar shingles. The paint was flaking and splitting on every wall, and the dandelions grew en masse along the base. Of all the places, that shed was the one locale that had always ruled my curiosity, because kids were not allowed inside. What’s in there? Is it empty? Why does no one ever go in? I could hear the questions I never asked ringing in my head. I half expected to see all the things she hid from us over the years. The Soft Batch chocolate chip cookies that I ate by the Baker’s Dozen while watching cartoons. The rubber bands that served as ammunition for many an epic shootout in the living room. My grandfather’s old CB radio through which we tried quite adamantly to contact the President (with no success). But on this day, I’d have the truth all right, without ever having to ask for it.
A few of the fitter men approached the shed, my father leading them. As I took to his side, fully expecting him to command my young ass back into the house, he remained silent. He tried the doorknob - it would hardly turn. A quick swing and a push made the door quiver and break, and the shed was ours. Dark it was inside, and the spiders held the ceiling down, but what treasures lay inside. Lawnmowers, three of them, and a wheelbarrow; old construction helmets and toolboxes; army hats; shovels and hoes; hammers; nails; and Death’s magic wand. Or at least, that’s what I imagined it was.
It was a farming scythe. Long, s-curved wooden handle as tall as me that was beginning to split near the head. A massive eyebrow shaped blade, nearly twenty-two inches long and caked with rust; two handles dangling haphazardly off the stem, the wood worn thin with many years of handling. An entire network of cobwebs strung over it every which way, vast and highway-like, built presumably by the noble forefather shed spiders for all the subsequent shed spider generations to utilize. The kind of apparatus so obsolete by human standards that it can only find work on the diner wall of your nearest Cracker Barrel family restaurant. And of course, the immediately identifiable instrument of Death.
See, when I was a kid, I went through this bizarre stage during which I was obsessed with Death - not the phenomenon, but the guy. Perhaps it was just his intense visual presentation that struck me first, skeleton with a scythe and all. I drew him quite a bit on my desk at school - much to the dismay of teachers - and I even garnered some contest awards upon dressing as ol’ Eternal that previous Halloween (my grandmother, still the best seamstress I’ve ever known, helped me with the costume).
Although I fully didn’t expect them to approve when I asked for it, my parents surprisingly agreed to let me keep the scythe (but not without giving me the pleasure of viewing their smirking parental faces). They were probably just happy that I had picked something by which to remember my grandmother, even if it was a decrepit, cobweb-ridden farm tool I had never known was there until that day. And I sat comfortably in the back seat of our Cutlass Supreme, as I had so many times before, smiling, content with myself for making off with Death’s tool of the trade. Because somewhere deep in the recesses of my dream-filled, Merry Melodies-corrupt twelve-year-old brain, I knew that my grandmother had fussed and hollered before taking the silly bastard’s toy away from him for coming to make her dead; and I’d like to think she hid it for me to find, there in the dusty gray and white shed where kids aren’t allowed.
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