Many at the post office worried out loud how people seemed to need them less and less, how people wanted their gifts yesterday, how they wanted to pay nothing for postage, how they’d rather ship through private companies who paid their workers less, offered no pensions, and released employees like dogs shaking off fleas. Eddie worried about it, too. He turned in bed at night thinking of what he’d do if the postal service let him go. He had a two-year college degree in computer technology, but computers were getting faster, smarter, and more complex by the minute, and people weren’t even bothering to fix their computers anymore, just tossing them into recycling bins and buying new ones. He was approaching forty, and he had some savings—but not much. He had a pension, but there was no guarantee it would be there when he could no longer carry the ever-shrinking bags of mail. But he’d finally sleep after a resigned sigh, relieved that he and his job had survived another day.
Eddie would awaken at four in the morning to the sound of the coffeemaker gurgling and growling in his apartment’s green Formica-floored kitchen. His eyelids would scrape over his brown eyes as he opened them, and he’d shut them again in pain, reminding himself once again to head to the eye doctor and get a prescription for something to soothe his dry eyes. The clock radio next to his bed would bark to life, and he’d lie in his soft bed staring at the round light overhead and the tulip-patterned tin ceiling tiles painted over with thick white paint. He’d listen to radio announcers read through the news that had passed while he’d been sleeping and the traffic and weather reports that were occurring while he was awake.
He’d rub his eyes carefully, then run his fingers through his thinning black hair and take in a deep breath. He’d look over at the space next to him that was always empty and out the window that always had its blinds shut to the rising sun and the nearby streetlight. He’d say a few words to himself, usually about having to get up, about having to use the bathroom, or about whether it was Monday or Friday.
If it was the winter, he’d sit up, wrap a blanket around himself, and walk to the small living room to turn on the heater. If it was the spring or summer, he’d do the same thing to turn on a fan or the air conditioner, only without a blanket. Then he’d use the bathroom, he’d shower and shave. He’d brush his teeth and gargle with some incredibly strong mouthwash that burned his teeth and gums, and then he’d stare in the mirror. He’d stare at the face that was getting ever rounder, the stomach that was getting ever softer, and the eyes that were getting ever sadder. Sometimes he’d lose himself in the stare, thinking about how his mother used to tell him that he’d grow out of his awkward looks, that his wide eyes would narrow and his face would lengthen and become chisel chinned. But that phase never arrived, and the years took the weak clay that nature had given him and began leaving odd shapes here, bulbous deposits there. He’d tell himself to start going to the gym, but thoughts of the gym usually dissipated by three in the afternoon, when the back ached from the curve of the mail truck seat and the weight of the mailbags.
He’d drink his coffee, he’d eat his bagel. He’d put on his coat in the colder months and wear his short-sleeve shirt in the warmer months, and he’d head out the door, down the creaking steps of his apartment building, then walk outside into the morning blackness. He’d drive his dented red Chevrolet four-door Malibu the five miles to the post office and park in the employee lot just as others were arriving, all of them hunched over from the early morning hours and the toll of heavy work and poor diet. He’d check to see if his mail trays were ready, or how many parcels he had to carry to his truck, and he’d go to the breakroom and drink more coffee. People would mutter their hellos to one another, they’d sip their coffee, maybe they’d heat some pre-processed food in the microwave oven, but then they’d be at work, sorting mail trays, slipping envelopes into post office boxes, or loading up the trucks with mail trays.
When Eddie had his mail truck filled with mail trays and parcels, he’d make sure that he had his mail satchels, his Thermos of coffee, and his small digital music player. He’d start the truck’s engine, sit for a few seconds, take a deep breath, then join the convoy of mail trucks as they crawled onto the main road, splitting off onto their individual routes like white boxes on conveyor belts as the quiet roads of Northeastern Pennsylvania came to life with morning commuters, school buses, and grocery delivery trucks.
Eddie was happy when he could just pull up to mailboxes, open them, drop in the mail, then quickly move on, but was less happy when he arrived at one of the older apartment buildings or the neighborhoods where the mailboxes were next to the front doors. He’d load up one of his mail satchels, place the strap over his increasingly aching shoulder, then trudge up and down the street, dropping mail into each box, then moving on to the next street.
Sometimes he’d stop for a sandwich and coffee for lunch, but when he was falling behind, he’d forego food and concentrate on delivery, finishing his routes as quickly as he could so he could get back to the post office at five every afternoon.
Every week.
Six days a week.
Fifty-two weeks a year.
For fifteen years.
At stoplights, he’d sometimes get hypnotized by brake lights in front of him. In heavy rainstorms, he’d feel the butterflies of panic flutter in his chest and stomach as the mail truck tires would lose grip for a split second. In snow, he’d squint to avoid being blinded by sunlight, and he’d curse himself for forgetting his sunglasses in his car.
Fifteen years.
At every day’s end, he’d park his truck, return the trays and any deliverable and undeliverable mail. He’d say "Good-bye" to whoever passed him and then get back into his dented Malibu and drive home to the gray brick apartment building that squatted on a street corner in the town of Avoca. He’d walk in, check his mail, then walk back up the creaking stairs, the sounds of televisions or laughing or crying or coughing echoing down the stairs and the hallways as he walked back to his apartment, his back aching, his calves twitching. He’d open the door, walk in, close the door, then sit on the couch in his living room, rubbing his eyes and looking at the clock atop his television.
He’d sit in the darkening room, his mind empty, his stomach growling. Sometimes he’d walk to the kitchen and eat a sandwich, maybe a bowl of cereal. But usually he’d nod off for an hour, his head tilting over the back of the couch. Sometimes he’d dream of strange streets upon which he’d never walked or of smiling women to whom he’d never spoken. Often he’d dream of nothing, just a sleep of gray and black.
Nights would be filled with television repeats or pages of mystery novels he ordered by the boxful.
Then he’d slip into bed and sleep until four the next morning, his last waking thought just two words: Fifteen years.
***
Eddie had received more than enough grief over the years because of his name. He’d heard every joke in the book about singing songs for the rock band Queen, but no matter how many times he'd tell them that that was Freddie Mercury, and no matter how many times he tried to get people to call him Edward, the jokes would continue, as would the use of Eddie, and he’d shake his head and sigh. In high school, the jokes became frequent and often cruel, but he sometimes found that asking "Don’t people stop listening to Queen after fifth grade?" was a good enough rejoinder.
He’d been named after his great grandfather, or so his father had told him: Edward Mercury, Esq., a bookbinder from Essex, England. Eddie had never been to England. He’d not even been to Philadelphia. Every new year he promised he’d be able to save enough to travel, but every year the promise would dissipate like snow in spring. He’d think about being a bookbinder in old England, the smells of paper and leather, the light milky and golden from oil lamps. Cover lettering in gold foil, page lettering in the blackest of inks. And he’d think about letters passing from hand to hand, letters with wax seals, letters with scents of perfume, hand-stamped postmarks, packages carefully wrapped in perf
ectly folded brown paper and twine.
As a boy, Eddie would write letters to companies and pen pals. When an envelope arrived, he’d run his fingers over the ink and the stamp. When letters arrived from Europe, he’d think of the grand buildings he’d seen in encyclopedias. When thick manila envelopes arrived from companies he’d pore over the enclosed brochures and read about how the company manufactured televisions, or how it refined oil, or how it made candy. He’d keep letters and brochures in their envelopes and mark them on a map on his bedroom wall with red pushpins, then type replies on a typewriter his parents had purchased for his ninth birthday. His mother would watch from the doorway as he typed letters to England or Ireland or Germany, her arms folded, her smile tender in his desk's soft lamp light.
He’d ask his father about his work as an engineer for the Bell System, and his father would draw pictures with pen and pencil on napkins of switching stations and phone lines, his balding head and black-rimmed glasses bouncing up and down in excitement. "You love your work too much, Robert," his mother would say, and his father would look up at her and smile.
"It’s a miracle, Nicole," Robert would say. "Really, it is! Our voices pulsing through copper lines, bouncing up into space, bouncing down again, and into someone’s ear. Come on, Honey, it’s got to impress you."
"Not every day," she’d say, running her hand over his head.
"We’re Mercury’s, Nicole. You know what that is, Eddie? You know what Mercury was? Messenger of the gods, that’s what he was. He took messages from the heavens to earth and back again. That’s a lot to live up to, don’t you think?"
And Eddie would nod.
"Darn right it is. Messengers. Without messengers, this whole world, everything, just falls apart. People become out of sight, out of mind. That’s no way to run a society, Eddie. No way at all."
Then one year, Eddie’s mother began to bruise. Her arms, her legs. Her blood had turned against her, her bone marrow disintegrating, and his father began communicating less and less, sitting by her bedside, his head on her chest, his eyes red from tears as the months of failed radiation and failed chemotherapy took her farther and farther away. One day she weakly grabbed Eddie’s hand, brought it to her dried, almost-white lips then kissed it. "My little Eddie," she said before falling asleep one last time.
His father had her buried high on a cemetery hill in Avoca overlooking the street where she and he had first walked when they were in high school, and he spent hours after work sitting by her graveside, speaking to the green grass and the cold stone, brushing dust from her name, polishing the granite with his necktie. Five months after Eddie had graduated from Pittston Area High School, his father crumpled to the ground while looking through the window of a stationery store in Wilkes-Barre as his heart gave out. Eddie had him laid to rest next to his mother where the autumn leaves could dance around their headstones, where the winter snows could cover them in cold blankets, and where the street upon which they once walked could be seen forever.
***
After high school, there were stabs at college, a stab at learning how to service computer workstations, but like the leaves whirling around his parents’ headstones, no single idea, no single career settled in his mind. Half-formed thoughts and partial dreams appeared and disappeared in his thoughts like dust. When he sold his parents’ house to a young couple, he took his old letters and his typewriter and moved to the small apartment in Avoca and looked for work. Any work, anything to pay for food and rent while his mind jumped from idea to idea. An ad in The Scrantonian newspaper looking for postal workers sat in the center of the classifieds section, a large box with large black text.
The following week he took the bus to the city of Wilkes-Barre, took the civil service exam, and waited for the results.
A month later he was on his way to the post office in Pittston on a cold, cloudy day.
Then the routine began.
The routine that took him through small towns and medium-sized towns, down narrow streets and potholed roads, to old apartment buildings and new schools and turn-of-the-century homes. Up twisting hillside access roads, down arrow-straight avenues, and around curving cul-de-sacs. Into gated communities and out of dead-end neighborhoods. Villages, boroughs, patches. Sunup, sundown.
Fifteen years.
Through those years, Eddie watched the amount of cards and letters lessen, the amount of bulk mail advertisements increase. Sometimes he’d see letters from around the world, and he’d study their addresses, their exotic stamps, their computer-printed postal bar codes. Sometimes he’d see postcards from countries he’d never heard of or cities he’d only dreamt of. Always he’d slip them back into his mail satchel and then drop them in their mailboxes.
In his tenth year as a mail carrier, some of the mail routes had been consolidated and folded into one another to help cut costs. He was given a new route, and he looked at a map on his kitchen table as he drank coffee and ate corn flakes for dinner to make sure he could find the quickest way to the new streets. He picked up a red pen, gave silent thanks that the streets could easily be reached on his return leg back to the post office, then drew a red line from the main route he usually took to the new streets: Bingham Road, Red Soil Road, Humphrey Street, Starry Lane, and a short dead-end line named Lemontree Lane.
II. The Cottage, the Coin, the Pen, and the Shapes
Winding off the main road leading to Pittston, Lemontree Lane was a narrow path of pavement that was barely one lane wide. Its entrance was shrouded by tall maple trees that covered the road in dark shadows, and its steep drop off the main road almost completely hid it from view. On the first couple of days on his new route, Eddie had passed Lemontree on several tries before finally spotting the opening and easing the mail truck down the steep-angled road, letting gravity and a low gear carry the vehicle down the snaking path that was densely lined with thin birch and lemon trees overgrown at the base of their trunks with weeds and tall grass. The lemon trees were arranged in neat rows, five trees per row, and the first year Eddie had driven down the road, the air was filled with overpowering scent of citrus, bright yellow lemons filling the trees and falling to the ground. He’d never known anyone had tried planting a lemon orchard in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and he wondered why someone would try in the first place. There were plenty of crops one could plant in Pennsylvania, but heat-craving citrus wasn’t usually one of them.
The orchard looked like it had been abandoned for some time, the lemon trees unpruned and the grounds unkempt. Plots of dirt not claimed by weeds were claimed by alien trees usually cleared from orchards. On several occasions Eddie considered pulling over and gathering up some lemons for himself, but realized he’d really no idea what to do with them since he made lemonade from factory-processed powders and ate lemon pies purchased from large grocery stores. But every day he’d look at the lemon trees, their leafy boughs dotted with yellow orbs, and he’d take in the silence all around. The longer the road twisted downwards, the quieter and cooler the air became, as if the nearby neighborhoods and streets had faded away, giving way to the whisper of leaves turning in the wind. In autumn, the light seemed darker on the lane than elsewhere, and the leaves would burn with reds and yellows, and the lemons would decay into the soil, covered by leaves, composting and feeding the roots to begin the cycle again.
The road ended beside a Victorian-style cottage, its fiery red wood siding cooled by white eaves, window frames, shutters, and gingerbread-style gables. The front steps led to a small porch upon which sat a large red pot that must have contained flowers at one point, but now only held dried brown weeds. Dark curtains cut off the interior from the outside world, and when Eddie would pull up to the cottage, he’d shut off the engine and listen for any signs of life. Out back, a rusting windmill remained locked in position beside a rusting metal water basin, both heavily edged by tall weeds. Atop the cottage, a spinning black weather vane crowned with a crescent moon denote
d the cardinal wind directions with the letters N-E-W-S.
Sometimes he thought he’d see a curtain pull back, then close again.
Sometimes he thought he saw dark figures walking behind the trees.
Sometimes he thought he heard voices behind the front door and window, sometimes a few, sometimes many, sometimes just one.
But there were no cars or trucks, no footprints in the dirt, no sounds of music or televisions or smells of food cooking in the kitchen. The cottage seemingly sat inert like the orchard that surrounded it.
Out front was a large white mailbox, looking new and bright white, and every day its metal red flag was raised. Eddie would pull out thick handfuls of envelopes, each with different handwriting and in different envelopes, but each one properly stamped and each one sealed by a round wax cursive L on the back. Eddie would place the letters in his truck, lower the flag, close up the mailbox, then drive a few yards and flip through the envelopes. Some were addressed locally, some were to be sent to all corners of the country, some were thin, some were thick with tightly folded letters inside. Some were addressed with flowing cursive script, some were addressed with simple block printing, some were typed on an aging typewriter, with individual typed letters higher or lower than others, and, without fail, each envelope was sealed with that red wax L on the back. Eddie ran his fingers over the wax seals numerous times and smiled every time he did.
When he finished flipping through the envelopes, he’d place them in the outgoing mail bin in his truck, then continue back to the main road. And every time he looked in his rear-facing mirrors, he was sure he saw not only a curtain open slightly as whoever was in the cottage would watch him pull away, but dark figures, like flickering shadows, dart from tree to tree, evaporating into the air like steam.
***
In the first few months of his new route, when snows and ice storms settled over the county, Eddie felt like skipping Lemontree Lane when he saw road caked-over with snow or ice, but after a few moments of thoughts and sighs, he’d pull over to the road’s entrance, bundle up his coat, lock up the truck, and make the slippery walk to the red cottage where he’d find the mailbox stuffed with outgoing envelopes, all in different handwriting or typed, and all secured with the waxen L on the back. Then he’d walk back up the road, a road wrapped in total silence except for the trickle of snowmelt or the thump and creak of tree branches in the winds, a road where the shadows seemed to watch him as he made his way back to the main road.