I tucked the pictures back in the envelope and set it on a shelf. I didn’t much want to keep going down memory lane. I’d give them to Scarlett and she could do what she wanted with them.
The next box was the same size. I picked it up to move it to a shelf, but it was oddly heavy. Out of curiosity, I opened it up.
Looked a lot like the other box—papers and so forth. There was another big envelope and I peeked inside. Instead of photographs, this one had newspaper clippings. A lot of them, in fact.
The newsprint felt brittle between my fingers, so I pulled them out carefully. There was an article about Gibson playing football senior year at Bootleg Springs High School. Bowie winning an award. An announcement about the Bootleg Springs Historical Society charity lunch with a big photo of Mama and a smiling six-year-old Scarlett.
There were full newspapers, too, folded in half. Three of them. I pulled them out and my heart felt like it was stuck in my throat. The front-page story on two of them was Callie Kendall.
The photo I’d come to know so well from her missing persons posters smiled back at me from the front page of the Bootleg Springs Gazette. It declared her missing and seemed to be reporting on the search. The second paper was more of the same, from about a week later. I reckoned a lot of Bootleggers had kept these papers. It had been a defining moment in the town.
The third newspaper had me especially confused. I didn’t see anything about Callie on the cover. Spreading it out on my workbench, I paged through it, wondering why my parents had kept it. Then, on page five, I saw something that surprised me more than anything.
It was me.
Way at the bottom, there was a small photo of me standing in front of a sculpture I’d done. Wasn’t metal, but I’d worked with a lot of materials as a kid. This one was clay, and I’d entered it in an art contest. Won first place.
The article was barely a caption. Just my name, and age—eleven—and a sentence or two about me winning. I didn’t remember ever seeing this—didn’t think I’d known my picture had been in the paper. But my parents had kept it?
Couldn’t hardly be a mistake. There didn’t seem to be anything else of interest in the entire issue. And the fact that it hadn’t been cut out like the others made me wonder… had my dad hung onto this? Seemed like Mama would have cut out the little snippet about me, not kept the whole paper.
But that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. My dad had never liked me doing any kind of art. Said it wasn’t manly. I’d shown him things, but he’d always scowled. Had he kept this?
I folded up the paper and put it all back. That didn’t explain why that box had been so heavy, so I moved a few things out of the way.
And just when I’d thought I’d been as surprised as I could possibly get, I saw what weighed so much.
I pulled out a hunk of metal that was roughly in the shape of a dog. At least, that’s what I’d been going for when I’d made it. It was the very first metal sculpture I’d ever made. The thing that had made me fall in love with the medium.
I’d talked Clint Waverly, the local mechanic, into teaching me to weld after seeing a video at school about an artist who worked with metal. It had been fascinating to watch, what with the sparks flying and the heat and electricity coming together to forge pieces of hard steel together.
Once I’d gotten the hang of it, he’d let me come over and use his tools as long as he didn’t need them. I’d found some rusty old wrenches in the garage—stuff my dad had probably forgotten was even out there—and used them to make this. Didn’t look much like a dog, now that I looked at it through the eyes of an adult. But at the time, I’d been mighty proud of it.
I’d given it to my dad. And gotten yelled at for stealing his tools.
He’d asked me where I’d gotten the wrenches, so I’d told him. I could still see his face, getting red with rage. He’d said it was stealing, and no son of his was going to be a thief. He’d yelled that I’d ruined his perfectly good tools, grounded me for a month, and thrown the sculpture out the back door.
I held it in my hands and stared at the messy welds. They looked like frosting spilling out between the edges of a cake if you pressed down too hard.