Secrets at Dillehay Crossing -- Chapter 14 -- An Enigma
Frank stood up, eager to show Lilly some of his drawings, but an unsettled feeling welled up inside him as he considered actually sharing his drawings and exposing himself and his past. His past was like a poison running through his veins. Outside of alcohol, drawing was the only antidote he’d found that counteracted that poison and relieved his pain. Exposure, he thought, would diminish the antidote’s calming effect, and he’d once again be left defenseless in combating his pain. Frank’s knees locked and his chest tightened, and he was unable to move. What the hell! Why do I care what she thinks? He mustered up the courage, taking a hesitant step forward. “Are you coming, sweetheart?” he asked in a sharp tone. “I haven’t got all day.”
Lilly followed Frank, noting a rather dramatic sketch of two boxers duking it out inside the ring, one of whom was battered and weary, noticeably struggling to block his opponent’s punch. “Were you ever a boxer?” she asked in her most demure voice.
“There you go again with your damn questions!” he hissed, wishing he hadn’t agreed to her request.
“You’re impossible, Frank! No wonder people don’t like you. You’re what my Grammy calls a curmudgeon, just an old crank!” She exclaimed, her face drawing a pinched, unhappy expression.
Frank rolled his eyes and let out a derisive snort. “You’re Grammy’s right! You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. What difference does it make to you anyway?”
“You frustrate me, Frank. When I look at you, I see a miserable, lonely old man who, by his own choosing, pushes people away. For the life of me I don’t understand why you push me away. I just want to be kind to you, but maybe you don’t understand kindness. Maybe you’re afraid of it. Maybe you don’t want it. I just don’t know. Quite honestly, my patience is running thin.”
Lilly had delivered Frank a series of one-two verbal punches. The fighter he was wanted to strike back as he always had, but when Frank opened his mouth to make a spiteful comment, he was speechless, unable to make his usual verbal jabs. She’d backed him into a corner, leaving him defenseless with no way to avoid the pain of the next punch.
“You’re right” he conceded, admitting defeat. “I don’t understand kindness so I sure as hell don’t want yours. You don’t know me, the hatred and unkindness I’ve experienced, and the harsh and brutal life I’ve lived. But my life is what it is, and I doubt there’s anything you could possibly do to make it any better. So pardon me,” he shouted, “for frustrating you with my misery.”
There was something in that shout, a pain behind it. Lilly watched Frank’s eyes. Then she knew. His anger was nothing but a shield for the hell he’d been through and the pain he carried. His words were nothing but grenades filled with explosive anger he detonated to defend himself whenever he was scared. She breathed in slowly. “You’re absolutely right, I don’t know you. How could I? How could anyone?” Then she said something Frank understood. “You’re like the exhausted fighter in that sketch of yours rising every morning at the ringing of the bell, fighting for your life, ready to defend yourself from your pain and misery. And I must admit, I admire the fighter in you, your strength, courage, and willingness to blindly fight to the bitter end regardless of the consequences. I wish I could take away your need to fight, but I can’t. Nor can I rid you of your grisly past or eliminate your pain and misery. But I can comfort you with my kindness, if you’ll stop fighting long enough and let me. The choice is yours.”
Frank thought about Lilly’s offer, likening her to his cornerman who’d throw the towel in the ring, knowing better than Frank did when the fight must end. “Seems to me you don’t back down from a fight either,” he snapped, “and I can use a fighter like you in my corner.”
“So we have an understanding,” she said, her voice firm as a rock.
“We do,” he nodded, letting his eyes meet hers before escorting her to the thumbtacked drawings haphazardly hung on the wall. “I don’t know where to begin.”
“Let’s begin with this one. It caught my eye.” Lilly stared into the drawing of two men, one in his 20s and the other a mere teenager, riding in a vacant, open box car. Even without a title, she knew the two men were afraid, poised to jump the train before it reached its destination in order to avoid being arrested or beaten up. She all but heard the cadence of the train on the tracks, felt the men’s desperation, and sensed the dangerous forward movement of the train as it rumbled down the tracks.
For Frank, the drawing was a time machine. One glance and he was back in his teen years with his life stretched before him, all the decisions that lay between his present self and his past self were unmapped, anything was possible. How impossible it seemed that all those day-to-day decisions would take him across these 50 years to where he now stood, broken and miserable. If he'd just not hopped the train that day, his life would’ve been different somehow.
But fate, the harsh mistress she ofttimes is, drew the two men together. Frank had hopped aboard a westbound train headed for Santa Fe when he met Yeggs. He wasn’t like the other good-for-nothing, helpless vagabonds Frank encountered while riding the rails. Yeggs was an energetic, self-directed, charismatic man and master trickster who took Frank under his wing teaching him how to lie, cheat, and swindle people out of their money. “It’s easy money, and you’re entitled to it,” he told Frank, appealing to his weakness for money and his sense of powerlessness. Frank bought into Yeggs con, attracted to the lure of easy money, becoming addicted to the thrill of the con and the power he had over people. For almost a decade he and Yeggs were partners, until that fateful night Yeggs fled without a word taking Frank’s share of the money. Frank wasn’t going to be made a fool of, so he hunted him down. “You can’t con a con,” Frank told Yeggs just before shooting him in cold blood and leaving his body to rot in the open desert.
Lilly studied Frank’s face, wondering if he knew the two men in the drawing, but for now she avoided asking him. She strolled past other sketches, pausing at some and lingering at others. Lilly peered into another drawing and saw two passengers standing on the steps of a street car waiting for it to stop as it progressed down a steeply inclined road heading for a wharf and an open bay, presumably Fisherman’s Wharf and San Francisco Bay. In the distance was Alcatraz Island and the famed Alcatraz Prison.
Her eyes traveled over a series of prison-related sketches until her eyes landed upon on a drawing that looked like ash from some dirty fire had been used to create it. She stepped closer. The prison cell was a gray, empty hollow cube of bricks and concrete with only one way in and no window. Lilly imagined hearing the heavy chunk of the metal doors closing behind the prisoner. Everything around him was gray, and there was no sound, no sunlight, no furniture or cloth of any kind only a single light bulb strung too high above his head for the prisoner to reach. The inmate sat on the floor, each minute feeling like an hour with no idea how much time had passed or even if it was night or day. The cell was disorienting by design, and given enough time, a person could forget his name in there. Looking at the drawing was intense, like reading a novel condensed on a single page.
Lilly took a deep breath and backed away from the drawing, her head pounding, and noticed a sketch of a woman’s eye with a single glimmering tear falling silently down one cheek. The eye was stunning, made of stardust cut out of the sky, crystal clear, full of geniality and kindness, and framed by thick eyelashes that curled up gently like the waves during low tide. Beneath the drawing Frank had penned words that were uncharacteristic of the Frank she knew:
Darling, come as close as you can to these prison walls and whisper love songs into the tiny cracks. I can forgo the golden beams of light, I can suffer nothing but bleak walls for company, but I cannot live without love. Tell me of the days to come, the ones where we walk in meadows, a feast of color for eyes that have seen nothing but grey for so long. Tell me of how we walk hand in hand to the river. Tell me of how we will feel the warm light of the sun on our skin and hug like our love is eternal. Tell me of how we'll watch the fish make their way through cool waters before heading home to rest in each other's arms, always knowing a fresh dawn will come.
Lilly steepled her fingers in front of her mouth, surprised that she’d let out an involuntary groan. She gazed at the drawing, wondering who was the woman whose love had sustained Frank and given him hope while he was in prison. She fought the urge to ask him but resisted, fearing he’d bristle if she asked. Instead, she quickly focused on an easel perched in the corner, scanning the unfinished drawing clamped to it. She widened her eyes and stared into the drawing. It was the shirtless boy with a kite in his hand running along the shores of Hawkes Pond. Her throat muscles tightened, disbelief gripping her throat. Lilly swallowed and without thinking blurted out, “Do you know who that boy is? I mean have you ever seen him?”
“No!” Frank said emphatically, uncomfortable in telling her that the boy frequented his dreams and haunted him during the daytime hours.
“Maybe it’s just my crazy imagination, but I swear I saw him the other day streaking past Hawkes pond. He darted past me and ran barefooted towards the verandah in your direction. He was even flying a kite just like the boy in your drawing. Are you sure you didn’t see him?
“Absolutely not!” Frank answered, tucking in his upper lip. “Maybe you are crazy.” He smiled with a touch of mockery.
“Seriously, Frank?” Lilly returned his smile, grateful that he was comfortable enough to joke around with her. “That’s exactly what my Grammy says!” She laughed, turning her attention to another sketch, Frank’s rendition of the old abandoned farmhouse at Dillehay Crossing.
Storm clouds loomed over the house, casting a shadow on it making it look grim and gloomy like a long-abandoned prison rather than a home. The front door hung loose on its hinges and banged in the wind that sometimes gusted over the prairie. The windows were boarded up, and the roof sagged in the middle, having succumbed to the demands of time and gravity.
Despite the deterioration, the house stood in a composed way, having chosen solitude for itself. It was as if the house had become aware of itself, of the dark history that echoed within its walls and intentionally shut every door and window shrinking from the world hoping to be invisible and forgotten. The place was perfectly still, heavy with a foreboding that chilled Lilly’s soul. Unable to look at the sketch any longer, she turned away, fixing her eyes on a drawing of the old barn and Texas windmill she’d seen a few days ago.
The barn, like the farmhouse, had seen better days. Decades of rain, sleet, and baking summer sun had taken their toll. Cedar shingles were missing, rotten and sticking up at awkward angles. The tall double doors were decaying, and shafts of light streamed through the jagged-edged gaps. In places a stubborn patch of sun-bleached red paint clung to the wooden sides, but otherwise the barn was as brown as the rutted mud around it. The structure looked timeworn and weary, and Lilly thought she heard the barn moaning from fatigue, tired of defying gravity. But Frank remembered the barn decades ago when it was a strong fortress, keeping the weather off the summer hay and protecting the animals from the heat and cold. It was also his safe haven and the place where he sought shelter from his father’s temper and drunken outrages, living in the loft for days on end and learning to survive with nothing but a wood burning cookstove to keep him warm and a can of beans to keep his belly from aching.
Lilly noticed a dozen or so other sketches randomly strewn across the floor. She gathered them up, quickly thumbing through them. Within the group was a sketch of a children’s rocking horse that bore a striking resemblance to the rocking horse she’d seen inside her attic. Her eyes moved over Frank’s rendering of the Mason’s gazebo, awestruck with the detail. The white paint on the gazebo was peeling; the leaves on the ancient willow tree were small and wilting in the summer sun; and sunlight sparkled off the water at nearby Hawkes Pond. A woman wearing a yellow dress sat on the bench inside the gazebo holding a bouquet of forget-me-nots. There was something compelling and familiar about her doe-like eyes and her soft spirit, and she wondered if Frank had known the woman or if he’d just created her in his imagination and placed her inside the gazebo. Even Frank’s sketch of the turn-of-the-century tractor looked almost identical to the one she’d seen just a few days ago while exploring the old abandoned farmhouse. What an uncanny coincidence, she thought.
And the sketches she held in her hands were unlike the drawings on Frank’s wall. The ink on these was faded, bleached by the sun, and their deckled paper was yellowed and worn from age indicating they’d been drawn decades ago, long before Frank moved into Hickory Pines. How odd, she thought.
Lilly bent over to pick up a wadded up drawing on the floor next to where she stood. “Don’t pick that up!” Frank hollered, his eyebrows snapping together into a scowl. But he was too late. She’d already uncrumpled the paper revealing a sketch of a man whose face bore an intense, fevered stare. His eyes flashed with anger, much like lightening on a pitch black night, his nostrils flared, and his lips twisted with scorn. The sketch was so compelling that it drew Lilly in, and she felt the hatred in the man’s soul. “Who…who…,” she sputtered, struggling to find the right words, “…is that horrid man?”
“My father,” Frank said in a pained voice.
A weight settled on Lilly’s heart, and she wondered just how to respond to Frank’s suffering and his wounded spirit. She remembered her childhood when she desperately wanted to help her wounded, broken-hearted friends and remembered Grammy’s wise words. “Be kind. Kindness is a tonic for the injured soul. Be gentle. Gentleness is the antidote for cruelty. Be understanding. Understanding is the antidote for pain and suffering. Be patient. Always be patient. Healing can never be rushed.” She reached out, lightly resting her hand on Frank’s shoulder. “I’m at a loss for words, Frank. What an evil, foreboding man.”
A shudder swept through Frank’s body as he remembered his father’s temper, his unpredictable, irrational behavior, his demeaning words, and the beatings he endured at his father’s hands. He once again felt powerless, clenching and unclenching his hands, as his own rage welled up inside him.
“I just can’t imagine what your childhood must’ve been like,” Lilly said, choosing her words carefully, adopting a gentle, soft tone, rich with kindness and compassion. “You’ve put so much of yourself into all your drawings, and hidden within the lines are feelings you’ve locked away. I understand you better now.”
Frank’s beleaguered heart softened, and a rush of relief washed over him at having been understood and validated. His repressed feelings and tension left his body leaving him weak-kneed. He flopped down in his easy chair, an unfamiliar warmth filling his chest.
“Frank, are you alright?” Lilly’s words were muffled as if he was wearing earplugs, and he didn’t immediately respond. “Frank!” she hollered. “Frank, are you alright?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he barked using his old, familiar tone. “Listen sweetheart, I really need to get back to work here.”
“Sure, Frank, sure. I’ve had a long day and best be heading home. She laid down the sketches in her hand and turned to leave, but stopped. “Your sketches are more than just random drawings, aren’t they?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re like a gallery of your experiences—places you’ve been and people you’ve known.
“Maybe,” he replied. “What of it?”
“Well, it’s just that, well, uh…” The words leapt out of her mouth before she could stop them. “When I look at your drawings of Dillehay Crossing, they’re older than the others, and I can’t help but wonder, ‘Have you been here before?’.”
“You think too much,” Frank snarled, retreating into his old behavior, “and you ask too many damn questions. Just leave! I’ve got work to do,” he shot back, his eyes blazing with fear and anger.
From the look in Frank’s eyes, her question had definitely struck a nerve, convincing her that he’d been at Dillehay Crossing before. But she knew better than to press him further. “Okay, Frank, okay!” she blurted. “I’m leaving, but…” she paused, unable to resist the urge to mention the shindig one more time, “at least think about coming to the shindig. My Grammy will be there, and I’d love for you to meet her.”
Frank’s brain stuttered for a moment, thinking about the last time he saw Nora. What if Grammy is my long-lost Nora? Na, that’s impossible. The fates would never allow such a thing.
“Like I said before,” Frank’s eyebrows drawing together in his customary scowl, “hell no! Now go on! Get the hell out of here!”
Lilly stormed out of Frank’s apartment, pausing outside his door.
What an enigma Frank is—an enigma, not like that of books where words are plainly written out and flow from page to page, but of books torn, frayed, mysterious, and not easily decipherable. One minute he opens up to me then shuts me down in the next. Why is that? He’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma, but if I keep searching for clues, perhaps one day I’ll be able to decipher the man.
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