'Old News Flutters From a Bottom Drawer'

Like most family history, it started as a rumor, a titillating story without context, myth-like. My mother had four brothers, three of whom were older. The oldest were Kenneth and Clifford. We never met the latter. Uncle Ken lived in Tampa, Fla., and we visited him in 1968, annus horribilis.  He often went shirtless and we noticed the scars on his throat and upper chest but asked no questions. A fragment of story said they were the result of an accident involving a gun – a detail sure to grab a boy’s attention.

 

A decade ago my brother found a brown newspaper clipping from one of the Cleveland papers, dated around 1926. Ken and Clifford got their hands on a shotgun somewhere. They would have been in their early twenties, not children. They loaded the barrel with nails and scraps of metal. Clifford held the gun to his shoulder and fired, and the gun exploded, killing him outright and scarring Ken for life. I wish I had taken a photograph of the clipping. Perhaps it’s still in the boxes my brother left after his death last year. 

Time is a corrosive. It dissolves memory. The clipping confirmed an old family rumor but I may have lost it forever. Now my mother and all her brothers are dead. Maryann Corbett’s poem “Late Night Thoughts While Watching the History Channel” was published in Literary Imagination in 2017 and collected in The O in the Air (Colosseum Books/Franciscan University Press, 2023): 

 

“Is it by God’s mercy

     that children are born not knowing

     the long reach of old pain?

  

“That the five-year-old, led by the hand

    past the graffiti, cannot fathom

    his mother’s tightening grip,

 

“or why, when a box of nails

    clatters to the tile like gunfire,

    his father’s face contorts?

  

“So slow is the knitting of reasons,

    the small mind’s patching of meaning from such ravel

 

 “as a cousin’s offhand story,

    or a yellowed clipping whose old news

    flutters from a bottom drawer,

 

 “or some bloodless snippet of history

    dully intoned as you doze off, in the recliner—

 

 “so slow that only now, in my seventh decade,

    do I turn from these sepia stills,

    this baritone voiceover, chanting

    the pain of immigrant forebears,

    my thought impaled on a memory:

  

“my twelve-year-old self, weeping

    on Sundays fifty years ago

    when my father drove us to mass

    but stood outside, puffing his Chesterfields,

  

“doing what his father had done,

     and his father’s father before him,

     wordless to tell me why.”

  

Corbett outlines exactly the mysteries in which children are raised and the intractable corrosion of time.