Salvage

Salvage From falling barns my grandfather bought boards, another man's kindling, crackling in a Warm Morning stove, but sanding and shaping, staining and glossing, he caressed them into panels and tea tables and desks. The honey-colored wood is marred— at least some might call it so— where the blight got to it, dotted with black holes or swirling black lines where the worms devoured. But from this wormwood he coaxed perfection. I've known him through scraps— photos and letters, a leather water bottle hanging on a peg from the rock hearth he made, the ladder-back chair where he sat. He stares out from pictures, the eyes intense and distant, a hard Roman nose and cleft chin. He left familiar North Carolina peaks, their scarce work and harsh winters, their clean air and beauty, and left the family who longed for him to build bridges in places with exotic names: Casablanca, Baghdad. In yellowed photos worn with handling he towers, broad-shouldered, over turbaned men. In a scrawling hand he teased: "Tell Sussie the mean-looking one is a devil-worshipper." His demons I cannot see in those photos but I've been told he sometimes drowned them, sometimes embraced them. At the kitchen table in a room where he lingers we read fading letters bundled and labelled "Baghdad, 1958." 96 In a light hand, almost womanly, he wrote of missing mountain mists, of memories of his love, a dark-haired mountain girl who came to him in dreams he did not relate: "Loretta and Sussie might read this." She came to him, he wrote, after stormy nights when the heavy air oppresses and lightning cuts the darkness, outlining the fears blackness hid, shaking his heart, but she was the cool morning breeze and the sun bathing the black mountain ridges in magenta. For three years he answered pleading letters with poetry. In Granny's house I've stared at walls paneled with wood he salvaged and thought of how he channeled his pain sometimes in drink, but sometimes in work and wood and words, and wondered if blight blesses us. —Beth Kemper Graham 97 ...