Family Salvage

After a long drought, one-hundred-year-old heartwood
submerged in anaerobic mud is considered so superior
to lumber from trees currently being harvested

that it would fetch a decent price if I could dredge up
those sodden logs and haul them to a sawmill.
Unearthing old pain works like something like that, too.

I’ve been thinking today about my great uncle, Andy,
who may or may not have molested my baby brother, Joey.
Andy was a large, pale, elderly man, a lifelong bachelor

who lived in a rooming house on the wrong side of town
and who, at least twice a week, would show up at our door
bearing shopping bags filled with wilted kale or spinach

he’d purchased from a local produce stand
for pennies on the dollar and which some savvy
green grocer was likely happy to unload.

Andy expected my poor mother to boil those greens,
which he’d sit at our kitchen table to eat with a tablespoon,
seasoned only with salt and a little olive oil.

Why my mother indulged Andy, I can’t really explain.
Out of pity, I suppose, or respect for the elderly
or from some strange sense of familial obligation.

And always while he was waiting for the water to boil,
Andy would insist that my baby brother bounce on his lap
and would bribe him with nickels if he tried to squirm away.

And when my great uncle died, alone in his furnished room,
our entire extended family showed up to sort through
his possessions, to divvy them up or simply dispose of them.

Andy had a old cardboard steamer truck filled with white
short-sleeved shirts that nobody wanted as they’d yellowed
inside their cellophane, but beneath those shirts

were a dozen ancient paper stock certificates for companies
no longer listed on any exchange but which might
possibly have been acquired by some larger corporation

and were potentially valuable. One of my older cousins,
a middle-aged guy who worked at a bank,
was tasked with researching, evaluating, and cashing-out

those certificates so that their worth, if any,
could be equably distributed, but, of course,
we never heard another word from anyone about them.

Earlier in his life, Andy had been a skilled machinist,
so he’d also left behind a small, locking, wooden case
filled with tempered steel tools.

Somehow my father had ended up with these,
and many decades later, when my dad also died,
and my brother Joey didn’t want them, I acquired them

by default, and I’ve stored that case in my overcrowded
garage for nearly thirty years. On cold winter nights,
when I have nothing to do, I sometimes imagine I

ought to start sorting through things because my own sons
won’t want to deal with all the crap I’ll leave behind,
but over the years I’ve somehow misplaced the key,

and my boys will likely need to force
that case open as they’ll probably be curious
about what it might contain.

And those logs? That long submerged heartwood,
the likes of which is increasingly hard to find?
Surely somebody could build something useful out of that.