Chapter 2 – Uncles and Peanut Butter Sandwiches...
Brandon fed his uncles like a zookeeper.
The feeding first demanded Brandon’s attention each morning. Brandon assembled peanut butter sandwiches during each sunrise, stopping when he filled his favorite bucket, a thing salvaged from the yard like all of Brandon’s possessions. Brandon paced as carefully as he could muster through the sharp salvage yard’s acres and set a peanut butter sandwich upon any spot he thought might have betrayed an uncle’s track.
The care with which Brandon placed his peanut butter sandwiches would surprise any interloper. But Brandon realized his elder uncles shuffled more deeply into the Tuggle yard of piled steel and rusting iron than he dared to go. The further one traversed into the teetering piles, the tighter became the corners, and the sharper became the edges protruding from the detritus. Thus Brandon chose the locations for his peanut butter sandwiches with care, striving to find those spots not so far into the dangerous debris, striving to find spots not too close to the yard’s periphery where Brandon doubted any of his many uncles any longer tread.
Brandon could not guess what motivation pulled his uncles so deeply into the crowded and sharp heart of the Tuggle salvage yard. His uncles had once seemed too full of life to turn to such narrow paths. They had taught Brandon how to operate the yard’s giant crane when he was only a boy barely able to reach all the levers and pedals. They had schooled him in the craft of telling one ore from another, showing him how to determine which pile each piece belonged upon no matter how thickly the rust covered the contours. Tallied together, the uncles had sufficiently substituted for the father who had fled the salvage yard, who Brandon failed to remember. He hated the silence of his uncles’ absence after his day's work, hated how it made him imagine how his face may have resembled that of his unknown mother’s.
He regretted he had not asked his uncles more regarding the history that left him alone to stack the salvage piles so high. Brandon cursed the silence that descended upon the yard after the last uncle vanished. He hated the stillness that made him imagine his heritage and feel so alone.
Brandon’s uncles left him before he could articulate the first questions concerning his origins. Instead, the uncles answered the pull pulsating from the salvage yard’s hidden center, one by one disappearing from Brandon’s sight during the workday, eventually none returning by nightfall to the single cots of their individual campers. Brandon saw rare, fleeting glimpses of orange, dusty men in the periphery of his vision from his crane’s vantage point. Yet none of those random flashes of uncles paused to answer his call, nor did they stay to answer any of the questions Brandon shouted in their direction.
“Heaven grant me mercy!”
Brandon was listlessly placing his peanut butter sandwiches when he turned a sharp corner and nearly toppled into a frazzled, old uncle. The surprise stole his breath and nearly sent him reeling into another sharp collection of rusted edges.
“Heaven grant me mercy.” Brandon held his chest as his heart calmed.
The shriveled, rust-stained face Brandon gazed upon expressed no surprise. While a few strands of wispy hair, stained as orange as any of the dust throughout the salvage yard, swayed in the slight breeze swirling between the iron and ore, the mummified corpse appeared at peace. The tightening eyelids had been closed when death found the uncle in the salvage yard. The dry lips were calmly set together. The arms folded across the shrunken chest, the fragile, dried fingers knitted carefully together as if the hands shaped a last prayer. Brandon saw no trace of injury. The uncle’s corpse was not the first he had tripped upon in the salvage yard, and it appeared as satisfied with death as any of the other uncles he had found between the salvage piles.
Brandon shivered all the same. “How many uncles are left, old man?”
Brandon emptied a full bucket of peanut butter sandwiches on each route. Fewer and fewer of those sandwiches disappeared from day to day. The sandwiches started to pile, sometimes showing the ravages of a rodent’s nibble, seldom exposing an uncle’s denture bite. Brandon did not have the courage to consider how unbearable the silence would feel when he could no longer deny that peanut butter sandwich piled as high as the stacks of salvage proved that no uncles remained to share his family name.
“Ouch!”
Brandon retreated from the uncle’s mummy, slicing the back of his arm upon another point of jagged, rusted iron.
“And how many scars did you uncles gather in the yard?”
Brandon followed the trails winding upon his dead uncle's mummified skin. They crisscrossed atop whatever skin was not covered by a shredded shirt and decaying pair of paints. Brandon rubbed at his skin while he traced the spider web patterns on the uncle he failed to match with a name, one more uncle who had become another piece of salvage yard scrap.
“Heaven grant me mercy.”
Brandon observed a silent moment before continuing in his peanut butter sandwich circuit. He used to remove the bodies of his uncles for a burial outside of the salvage yard. Yet he realized that the ground beyond the shadow of the rusting towers of debris remained as hard as the ground beneath so much accumulated scrap. Besides, Brandon felt that burying a body beyond the salvage yard denied the soul the rust that so fascinated his uncles in life.
He did not understand what his uncles hoped to find amid so much salvage. He feared he too would soon answer the call that pulsated from the salvage yard’s heart. Brandon felt the summons vibrating in his feet whenever he woke in the morning to stare upon a new canvas sketched in rusted oranges, whenever he woke in the morning and saw how the tracks of his sleepwalking came closer and closer to those swaying, salvage piles.
Brandon picked up his bucket of peanut butter sandwiches and believed for a little while longer that uncles still shuffled through the salvage who needed sustenance. He maintained a faith that not all his uncles were lost, that uncles remained who might pause, with words slurred by peanut butter, to explain to him the history that earned him such a lonely place in the Tuggle salvage yard. The workday was ever long. The workday’s demands were always taxing. But before Brandon ever mounted the crane, he first remained diligent to that circuit of the peanut butter sandwiches.
* * * * *