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Show well enough, he would say, the past could hold no power over you. Just don't open the boxes. Abuse survivors compartmentalize their world this way, denying the bruises, imagining the terror is happening to another. We will go to great lengths to protect ourselves from the fact that someone who is supposed to love us is unmaking us instead. As a child, my father taught me about the boxes and encouraged me to lock away the things that upset me, in fact he demanded it. Nothing undid him more than to see me cry. Nothing made him angrier. My hair glints red in the sun. At sixteen my father had learned everything he could from the teacher in the one-room schoolhouse. He had been listening to the lessons meant for other children, seizing knowledge like a life preserver, desperate to keep afloat. Jerry, the one he would always revere, the one whose dead body he would, at the age of 63, carry for a hundred miles down a remote Alaskan river so that Jerry would not be left alone in the wilds, a last act of kindness for a brother he had followed his entire life, had left for college the previous year. Bill, his next older brother, ran the farm. Two paths opened before him, I suppose, two ways of living in the world. The day of high school graduation, his teacher took him aside, moments before the actual ceremony, bringing him to the side of the building where the afternoon sun had just begun to sink down the brick. 25 |