Lost Tales of Kirev

Knots

On a lonely wooden shelf, beside a small painting of two cities under starlight separated by a comically tall hill, sits a modest wooden frame containing a black-and-white action shot. In it, a man in large glasses is sitting sideways on a wooden beam, about to hit a blocky wooden mallet against a large metal chisel that he holds with his left hand.

I never knew my grandfathers. Not the real ones, anyway. My family has a bad track record with them. The grandpa on my mother's side, named Petras, Lithuanian for Peter, died while my parents were attending MIT together, and my father's father, who everyone simply calls Mr. D.B., passed away half a decade later, in 1999. Both died suddenly, without warning. There was no illness to watch fester, no diaper to change, unlike my grandpa Tim, who came after Petras and died from brain cancer just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

My knowledge of Mr. D.B. was, until recently, somewhat tainted by my mother's recently shared memories of her father. I knew someone's father was depressed. Someone's father was suicidal. Someone's father was an alcoholic, and probably bipolar, in a bad way. Not until recently did I get the chance to separate the two. Petras was all but one, and Mr. D.B., who I learned was named William but more often called Bill, wasn't the troubled, insane man that I pictured him to be. Though he was troubled.

I share a clinical depression diagnosis with Bill. I remember how unsurprised I was to hear mine, sitting unusually central in the attention of my parents and three doctors. I think I always knew I was depressed. I can't imagine what he must have felt when he found out, in those days before mental health was given its proper respect. Elation, maybe. Understanding. Understood. What I can imagine are the solitary hours of crying between bouts of crying, shuddering under the never-straight blankets, wondering if you should go out into the woods and let the coyotes decide what to do with you. The hole inside you grows, and when people say it should end, it digs itself deeper on instinct.

The single, wide pocket on Bill's not-quite-zipped sweatshirt and the visible seam on his pants, making them jeans, contrast sharply with the photograph's grayscale. He looks modern, as if the color scheme is nothing more than an Instagram filter.

My refuge is my laptop. My keyboard, specifically. The one where I can type 70 words per minute with only my pointer fingers, despite my mother and the school system breathing down my neck about the ways of touch typing. Writing is my place of rest, where everything is in one place, carefully constructed, pieced together from shards of inspiration. I can't imagine living life any other way, but I can understand other people having other passions, like Bill had for everything wooden.

"In that picture, he's cutting a mortise for a mortise and tenon joint on a huge oak beam," my father texted me while taking a break from his programming job. "Ten by ten, or maybe twelve by twelve. The house that we lived in at the time (CT) had a very old post and beam barn that was falling apart." In another message, he added, "House and furniture restoration was his hobby / meditation."

He's pulling back, ready to strike. Then, suddenly, a pleasant thwack rings out through the forest. I assume he lived in a forest like I do, anyway; It would be only fitting. More likely, the smack of wood against metal startles his neighbors, who peer through missing knots in the handmade fence to catch glimpses of the master at work once again. He wrinkles his nose and tries not to look up at the camera. Somehow, Patricia's gentle, unknowing smile reminded him of the turmoil of his feelings, and he white-knuckles the chisel, freezes with the mallet high, tightens his brow, and he can't cry. Not here. Not now. He breathes. Stares down at the oak. Waits for his wife to move on to other things in the yard.

Behind Bill's hunched form are hints of a tree and a pile of misshapen wood that his hair blends right into. Beyond that is a fuzzy building with the most stereotypical barn doors I've ever seen. It must be the barn, old and ragged, populated by owls of the same name.

I never saw the Connecticut house and barn, but I did visit the other, more recent house some years ago, in all its grotesqueness. Patricia became a hoarder after Bill died, and along with her new husband, who is now on the verge of the same fate as all the rest of them, they stacked cairns of stuff so mismatched and souped together that listing the contents of those bulging walls surrounding the most commonly walked paths will always fall short. I do remember storage bins, and folders, and countless papers. Somewhere in there were important documents, I forget which ones, and I don't think they were found before movers were hired to evacuate the place of its contents.

"That house was originally a couple miles away," my father told me. "It was going to be destroyed and replaced by what my dad would have called a McMansion." My dad is infamous for lightening every situation with his humor, and I'd like to think his dad was the same way. I can almost hear Bill complaining over the dinner table in the cartooniest of New England accents, We can't let them bash up that house just to build a McMansion! So, he trucked it away in pieces and spent the next few years restoring it from the comfort of his own backyard. Saturday afternoons, he would have packed up his toolbox and walked the short distance from back stoop to front stoop, pondering the tasks at the top of the never-ending list. Paint the bathroom. Refinish the dining room table. Figure out where that noise in the attic is coming from. He would open the door, filled with unusual optimism, and stare at the line of ants leading to a dead rat on the carpet. Well with tears. Shut the door behind him.

When I look at the picture of my grandfather Bill, I sometimes find myself staring at his head. A mark is above his right eye; whether a mole or damage to the photograph, I have no idea. But something else draws me in. His brain is in there. I swear I can see it bulging out of his forehead, trying to escape.

Cerebral hemorrhages are normally caused by head trauma. Something like falling down the stairs or otherwise getting your noggin smacked. Persistent undiagnosed depression doesn't make that list, but maybe it should. Less than a year ago, I found out that Petras committed suicide. The only reason Bill didn't suffer the same fate was because he had the strength to check himself into a hospital first. "He was dramatically happier after he got on the right drugs," my father said. But nothing can undo years upon years of the same thoughts thwacking your insides.

Late one October night, William awoke from a dream-turned-nightmare with a searing headache. He sat bolt upright, trying to get a handle on his emotions. Patricia snored deeply beside him. He swallowed and grimaced, putting on the brave face that he had mastered. It was nothing. It had to be. Trembling, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, only feeling one foot connect with the floor. He stumbled to the bathroom. Leaned over the sink. Switched on the light. That should illuminate things. He grinned, immediately gritting his teeth again as the pounding drowned out his thoughts. His vision blurred and swirled. The deafening snores in the other room grew distant, zoomed out, as if coming from deep within a cavernous maw. Without thinking, he sat, and then laid. Outside, coyotes howled.