Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source
One month after he died, I buried a brush that belonged to my stepfather. It was in the truck that I later drove four days and nights back to Arizona. The brush had always been in the truck, on the vinyl seat. One of those twirly wooden brushes, with bristles emitting radially all around the head. A man’s brush, with many black and, later—only recently—gray hairs in it. To hold it in use is to grip it in one’s fist, like a microphone. Or, perhaps there’s another way. Brushing his hair was the final touch for Frank, who would make the six or seven coarse strokes over his damp head at thirty-five miles an hour, no mirror, on the way somewhere, the office, and toss the brush back onto the seat. I didn’t like it to touch me.
My mother and I had been cleaning out the cab of the truck, before I was to take it to the car wash. Both doors wide open as we worked opposite each other. I asked what she wanted to do with the brush, and she said to throw it away along with a handful of empty wrappers to his lens cleaning pads and plastic caps to his Quik Stik insulin syringes. Instead, returning from the garbage bins at the side of the driveway, I squatted briefly and hid it by a pine tree and later, when she was gone on an errand, came out to get started.
The early summer ground in Charlotte is pretty soft and so it was easy by that pine tree, near the fountain Frank would have heard in quiet moments the last few years, alone only for the duration of an errand. What do others do in their unguarded moments? I worked a stick, a broken branch, into the ground, twisting it deeper like a rudimentary drill, about seven or eight inches deep. Then, pressed with the stick in circle motions against the well walls of the hole it had created, dilating it sufficiently to admit the brush, which I pushed in, handle first. As the bristles gave resistance, I stood and stepped on the top of the brush, and then the earth accepted the whole thing rather easily, snugly. Only the brown wood button top of the brush was at last visible. To bury it entirely seemed wrong somehow. Uncovered, it has a touch of authorship, this penny-sized honey-brown button above grade; and perhaps the organic, even potentially nutritive essence of Frank’s hair is aerated a bit this way. It wouldn’t push deeper in without special effort that would have been beyond pressing. I’ll admit it was odd. But I like knowing about it there, this locally iconic instrument of his infrequent flair.