Proof

It is a boy’s box. He chooses it at the hobby shop on Cotanche Street. It fits into his small hands. He touches the mitered corners, tiny square fingers that will guard his cache for longer than he would believe. The unfinished grain—pine, he decides; its scent is of the woods around Greenville—stands rough to the touch. The lid hugs the base, fitted, and he likes its swooooosh when he pries it off. He gives the owner two dollars in small change. The owner knows the boy: his few weekly coins, the balsa he buys for his models, the little tubs of paint, the tubes of glue, the slippery decals, his budding confidence, his watchful curiosity. The boy straps his package to the rack of his Sunbeam Special and, pumping on the pedals, races the dusty shortcuts to Elizabeth Street. He pretends to fly.

On the back porch, he finds sandpaper white from use, and a dark walnut stain. He shoves aside jars of tacks, stiffened brushes, and rags smelling of linseed oil. On a table where his mama stacks preserved okra and his daddy rests his shotgun shells, he sands the box. He works with haste; he has been told of his impatience, reminded of his impulsiveness. He sands and stains and waits, and again. Each attempt to tame the grain raises it further, vaguely reminding him of himself.

He needs to make the box his own. From “Flying Aces,” he cuts a picture for the lid—a single-winged airplane in flight. Along its black wings, the artist has painted slender feathers, parrot-red and toucan-orange, so real the boy imagines them alone responsible for lift. He follows the quill-lines with a finger. The fuselage is wrapped in zebra stripes, black and white, and settles into a white underbelly so soft the boy smooths it as he would a pelt. The airplane tugs at him—wild colors, jaunty wings, night-black stabilizer, the away-ness and the promise of it—and touches his unbridled heart.

Too late, he discovers the photograph measures too long for the lid. Never mind, he says and, ever the fixer, he slices off the nose and the propeller, and saves the rest in one piece. Now shellacked with careful pressure and smelling of turpentine, the airplane takes off into endless, silent flight. The boy dreams his dreams: he opens the throttle and grasps the stick, the jungle-bird responds, and he flies off into tomorrow, seeking something else. At sunset, he returns and hides the box in a drawer of his boyhood bureau.

Darkening with the years, the box gathers the treasures that speak of who he is more than this quiet boy-man will ever say for himself. Proof of the military school thought at the time to offer a steadying hand, but isn’t. Proof of his escape to Beachum’s Flying Circus in South Carolina until he is found out and dragged home. Proof of his license to fly the Taylorcraft, the Piper Cub, the Cessna 150 and 210. Proof in a newspaper clipping of his star turn as a college short stop, his injured left knee, his 1944 draft notice, his 4-F, his disappointment or relief. Proof in a splintered propeller that he walks away from a single-engine crash near Cherry Point. Proof in a rabbit’s foot that he believes in talismans. Proof of his right to buy milk for his children during the war. Proof of his permission to hunt deer on Malcolm Butt’s land at Lee’s Creek. Proof in a twelve-ounce lead pyramid sinker that he fishes the Gulf Stream for the big ones. Evidence that he rereads Hilton, London, Vern—checked off. MacLean and O’Brian—to be reread. Proof in an eighth-grade school photo that he loves the dark-haired girl who will become his wife and our mother. Evidence in a white-channeled whelk that four of us walk the wrack line of Bogue Bank. And evidence of something still unknown to us—a tiny key with no lock.

As he endures his final illness, he holds the box in his once capable hands. It is an old man’s box, nicked and darkened, its scent vague with piney woods, its airplane satin under his touch. Its contents shuffle and rattle as he moves it from its safe place to the top of his bureau, knowing that we will find it and, now with his permission, know his quiet and questing heart.

Artifacts endure—objects suggesting an uncommon journey through a territory, objects as signposts along back roads known only to the traveler, objects as symbols of a child's query. And the jungle-bird flies off into tomorrow, seeking something else in endless, silent flight.