My father kept very little his father gave him: some military pins some coins, and his tackle box. The rest lives in the ashes of his mind. The medals and coins stay in a box on the top shelf of his closet, and the tackle box stays in the attic until the week in the summer when we go to the beach. The night before we leave, my father polishes each bobber and lure carefully and systematically, ridding them of salt and stain.
Inside the tackle box was an amber prescription bottle, sealed so tight that neither my eight-year-old, nor my twenty-something-year-old hands could open it. Inside was something unidentifiable: black and definitely slimy. It was the prospect of slime that made it such a desirable object to my brother and I when we were barefoot on the dock, waiting for my father to hook and bait our fishing poles. We would beg him to open the bottle and reveal its contents, but he would just mumble that it was some sort of special bait Papa had bought. "It's irresistible to fish," he would say. "Then, let's use it!" we would exclaim.
"Nah," he would say, "we got some of Mom's fried chicken," The irresistible bait was older even than us, and the bottle was now unopenable. Not even bloodworms or fish heads were as wonderfully disgusting as what might be in that pill bottle.
When I was six, I would help Papa read. He would forget the words. On Saturdays, my father would take my brother and I to pick him up. We would go to McDonalds for Happy Meals and Papa would always turn to me and say, "well, isn't this a nice restaurant?" This horrified me. More than the fact that Papa often wandered off a few times a month, lost, until a neighbor or a kind stranger would call my father to come get him, it was that he could sit in a plastic booth and eat a Filet-O-Fish and for a moment believe that he was in an actual restaurant that frightened me to the point of anger. "Papa! This isn't a restaurant," I would admonish him, "it's McDonald's!" He would nod, bewildered, and dip a fry in a puddle of ketchup.
My parents decided I was too young to attend Papa's funeral, but they eventually took us once to the cemetery where he was buried. My brother and I were quiet when my father stopped walking and stood solemnly beside a gravestone. I was afraid he was going to cry, so I stood there as still as I could and tried my hardest to remember Papa's face, sure that if I made it real enough that I would never see him again, I would be able to cry. If I cried, I knew my father wouldn't. Just before I resorted to holding my eyelids open with my fingers until they watered, my father stood on his father's name and began tap dancing. He laughed a little and danced right on top of the death of his father. Then he stepped off and we went home. "Don't tell your aunt I did that," he said.
There is a side of Papa my father keeps to himself. It is locked tight like the pill bottle with the secret slug bait. I have tried to open it, but my hands are too small.
Last year, my brother and I decided once and for all to open the bottle. It had rolled around the bottom of the tackle box among the little weights and lures our entire lives and now my little brother was six feet and four inches tall and his hands were big enough. "Whatever is in here," Alex said gravely, "we won't tell Dad." I nodded. It was as if we were about to unleash the very serpent that might tempt us into evil. The irresistibility of this bait was not limited to the feeble willpower of fish; it had caught us. When he twisted it, the top came right off. There, inside the bottle was a black blob that smelled like rubber, if rubber could die.
"What should we do now?" my brother asked.
We poured the contents of the bottle into the salt marsh where it sank, blackness into blackness. It was a non-moment. In fact, it was a moment in its lack of being a moment. I allowed myself, briefly, the luxury of hoping that the water would come alive in a frenzy of fish, but settled, against my will, for watching our grandfather's magic bait dissolve until we were staring into the water made dark by our own shadows.
The undoing of the bottle had released the great myth of our childhood summers into the air. The secret was out. And it smelled awful. I realized then the wisdom of my father, who understood that some things are better if never revealed.
My grandfather, in his last years, began to save everything: aluminum foil, Styrofoam containers, plastic forks, and for some reason, boxes of the same Christmas ornament: a Santa holding a small gift, wrapped in green with white polka dotted cloth. Had he ever thought to unwrap the gift, I asked. My father told me not to bother, and went back to cleaning the fireplace. I sneaked into the kitchen and opened the box of Santas. I chose one and unwrapped the green with white polka dotted gift and found a tiny square piece of plain-old, white Styrofoam. Maybe, I thought, only some of them had real gifts inside: a tiny ring or a gold coin, or some unimaginable treasure. I just needed to find the magic one. So, I opened another and another until I was no longer careful with them. I was ripping the Santas apart frantically, panicking at the possibility that there is such evil in the world as someone who would take the time to wrap a block of polystyrene, put it in the hands of an old man known for his benevolence, and leave it like bait for a greedy little girl who refuses to accept that sometimes, the greatest gift is the lie.
