This morning, while digging through some old boxes in the basement looking for papers (which I never found), I discovered something quite delightful to me: “A Blossom,” a story I wrote in the eighties which had completely vanished from my mind. Unlike the earlier blasts from the past I’ve posted on this blog, this one was actually written as a school assignment, but it worked out well enough that I believe I actually submitted it to magazines at least a couple of times. It was never published, though.

The odd thing about this story—semi-story, semi-memoir—is that while I’d totally forgotten about it, I did still have a memory of some of the comments the professor, Karen Carlton, wrote about it. But my memory had tricked me: I thought those comments were written for quite another story, one that eventually saw print. But no, here they are, in faded ink on the last page of this story.

The piece was written in the spring of 1987 for my Adolescent Literature class at Humboldt State University. Looking at it today, I’m startled to find echoes of material that would appear in The Unspoken, the novel I began writing slightly later in that period (and which wouldn’t be published until 2015 as The Unspoken: The Lost Novel). The treatment of the material here is closer to autobiographical, though there is still some fiction present. Whatever my reservations about the story now, as a gesture of respect to the 24-year-old who wrote it, I’ve reproduced “A Blossom” exactly as it appears on the crumpled and browning original pages—the only copy in existence, until now.

The main point of memory for me, however, is the final comment written by Dr. Carlton on the last page of the manuscript. It shows me that I must have talked to her about my career path a good deal (which also surprises me, since my actual memory of Dr. Carlton, to be honest, is rather vague). Anyway, it was one of the key validations I ever received for my writing, and I never forgot it:

“Chris, this is a beautiful story. It is incredibly polished—I trust you will send this out for publication soon. I found this a joy to read. Stick with writing. Forget teaching. Hang on. –Karen.”

Well, Dr. Carlton, I never forsook teaching, but I did stick with writing, and your comment was part of what kept me going in that long, grim period nearly thirty years ago. For that I thank you.

Wherever you are, this early story is now dedicated to you.

A Blossom

by Christopher Conlon
copyright © 1987, 2016 by Christopher Conlon

for Dr. Karen Carlton

At that age, at seven, I could hardly have created out of my imagination a wilder or more wonderful companion than my Uncle Tom. He was a very old man—probably the oldest I’d ever seen—and quite stocky, heavily built, with a voice as raspy and cranky as an old tractor motor. He had a huge red scar down his chest and a smaller, coffee-brown one on his throat, both the results of recent surgeries. He made no attempt to hide them; instead he displayed them proudly, like badges of honor. More than once I saw him strike up conversations with strangers which led quickly to the question: “Wanna see my chest?”

When I mother and I came to visit—once every few months, maybe, we lived over a hundred miles away—she and my aunt Billie would steal off to another room to drink and smoke and gossip. As soon as they were out of sight Uncle Tom would give me a an entire box, a big box, of See’s Candies, telling me they would help me grow, and as we sat in his shuttered, semi-dark room he would tell me stories. He had been, so he said, a riverboat captain; a brain surgeon at Harvard; a star of silent movies; an oil billionaire who’d lost everything in the stock market crash; a bank robber, once Public Enemy #2 (#1 at the time was John Dillinger, who learned everything he knew from my uncle); an FBI spy in Moscow; an Arctic explorer; the designer of the Apollo rockets; Ernest Hemingway; and so many other things that it was really quite breathtaking. Even more exotic to my seven-year-old sensibilities was his room—all filled with the most fantastic thingamabobs and doodads. A Japanese samurai sword (“Got it off a Jap I took prisoner in the war,” he said). A Nazi helmet with a real bullet hole right through the side. Kaleidoscope viewers from China. Perfectly preserved labels from the very first Campbell’s soup cans ever produced. Indian herbs and medicines in clay jars. An authentic Confederate flag. And in a box at the top of the closet, a huge stack of Action Comics—the very first Superman stories—that he let me read whenever I wanted. It was only years later that I realized how many thousands of dollars that stack must have been worth.

But best of all were his paperweights. He had twenty-five or so, in all different sizes, delicate glass balls with flat bottoms that contained within them the most beautiful things: an autumn leaf, a tiny snow-covered house, a white rose. My own favorite was the smallest one, just the size of my palm. In it was a small pink and white cherry blossom, like the ones on our own tree back home.

“Get ’em from all over the world,” he told me. “Little shops here and there. Junk shops, mostly. Ain’t worth nothin’.”

“What do you do with them?” I asked, the first time he showed them to me. I looked closely at the cherry blossom, like a little, peaceful world of its own in my hand.

“Do with ’em?” he said gruffly. “Don’t do nothin’ with ’em. Don’t always gotta do somethin’ with somethin’. Jus’ junk, anyway.”

There was a river behind my uncle’s house and on good days we would swim there, stark naked. We were surrounded by mountains and when we shouted it would echo back to us. I used to imagine there being little gremlins hidden up there, shouting back at us—making us think it was an echo. Uncle Tom would play along; when I turned my back he would suddenly say, “There’s one! Look!...Aw, you missed it!”

It got so that I would tell him anything. I had no secrets: I hated school; I missed my dad; my mother was becoming stranger and stranger. I would tell him these things not because he had any answers, he didn’t, but he would listen, he would try to understand. I would sit in the shallow water by the bank and he would float there, a few feet from me, on his back, his big red chest scar shining in the afternoon light. He would ask questions; he would tell jokes to cheer me up. Mostly, though, he would be silent as I talked on and on.

Slowly, though, something began to happen. Over the course of perhaps a year’s visits, he told me progressively fewer stories and fewer jokes and spent less time with me and began to seem more interested in staying inside to drink with the women. And drink they did. In light of my mother’s later history, it all seems rather ghoulish; but at the time I chalked it up to the vagaries of grown-ups, their unknowable motives….

One visit we stayed quite late, into the night, and the three of them became very happily drunk, hooting and hollering and carrying on. I wasn’t enjoying myself. Especially not when my mother, shortly before passing out on the sofa, said: “Oh yes, I forgot to tell you—my little boy’s in love!”

I blushed all the way down to the ends of my toes.

It was true, though. I was head-over-heels, madly, obsessively, all-encompassingly in love. Sonya! Even today the name conjures up a vision of white and gold, a brilliant sun, an Angel of Light: blonde hair that reached to her waist, deep lavender eyes, soft peach-blushed skin…No doubt the reality was rather more terrestrial than these memory-images; still, there was a sort of mystery about her. She had only just come to our school from some never-heard-of place; she said little to anyone (except—O Lord!—a little bit, to me); inevitably wore full white dresses rather than the usual skirts or blue jeans; and she got higher grades than anyone in the class, including me.

In short, she was a goddess on earth.

Uncle Tom found this terrifically amusing. “Ha-ha! So our little Junior G-Man’s got himself somethin’ on the side! Boy, how old are you? You sure don’t waste time!”

I giggled nervously, my face hot with embarrassment. I felt like boring myself a hold in the ground, a nice deep one. Maybe all the way to China.

“Don’t make fun of the boy, Tom,” my Aunt Billie said. She was a black-haired lady with an emphysemic voice.

“Fun? I’m proud,” he laughed, pouring some whiskey into his glass. “Shit, he’d make his daddy right proud, wouldn’t he?”

“Tom…”

I looked at my mother. She was out like a light.

“Gettin’ some pussy, are you?” he said, stepping close to me.

I didn’t look at him. I didn’t know what he meant. I shrugged.

“Well, you know what pussy is, don’t you?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” he said loudly, announcing it, “you go ask your girlfriend, that’s what you do!” He drained his glass quickly. “Yep, you go ask your girlfriend ’bout that. She’ll tell you!”

Aunt Billie laughed in a sort of embarrassed way. “Tom, you rascal!” she said.

“C’mere, baby!” he shouted, holding out his arms. She staggered into them and they disappeared down the hall to their bedroom.

I looked at my mother, there on the sofa like a collapsed mannequin. After a while I shut off the lights.

#

But one bad night wasn’t enough to shake my faith in Uncle Tom, not really, and after a couple of days I found myself nearly forgetting the evening entirely, remembering instead the chocolates, the gremlins in the mountains, the cherry blossom.

Except for one thing. That word he’d used, the one he and Aunt Billie had laughed over. I’d heard it before. It was an adult word. As such it seemed emblematic of an entire array of frustrating myself there seemed to be more and more of every day: veiled things, secret inferences, shadowy suggestions of things I would know “someday.” The dictionary was no help. I certainly couldn’t ask my mother; adult subjects were strictly off-limits between us.

Well, after a week of wondering, becoming nearly obsessed with the subject, I decided to follow my uncle’s advice and ask Sonya about it.

My judgment in matters concerning women, by the way, has hardly improved since.

It was without a doubt the biggest catastrophe of my seven-year-old life. Sonya, alas, knew what the word meant, and took it that I was making a rude joke—which she abhorred, which offended her, which she finally burst into tears over.

It may sound funny now. It wasn’t then. Her reaction terrified me. I ran home right in the middle of the school day and exploded through our front door, screaming and crying and carrying on. It must have taken my mother, who was still sober at this time of day, a good ten minutes to calm me down to the point that she could get a coherent sentence out of me.

“What, honey? Who told you to ask her that?”

“Uncle Tom!” I cried.

Well, after she had me calmed down, she got on the phone and gave my uncle a going-over that probably still has the telephone lines quaking. He was a monster! A beast! A bastard! How dare he say something like that to her son! Didn’t he know anything? Was he a complete idiot? He should see the state I was in. He should see….

#

At this point there is a long blank in my memory. A couple of months must have gone by; no, even more, for summer came and went and I was in school again; finally, on an unseasonably warm day in early fall, we again made the long trek to Uncle Tom’s house. I hadn’t forgotten the whole thing. Sonya still, after all this time, treated me with a cool distance; and I had resigned myself to having lost her and being alone—probably forever, maybe even longer. But the anger had long since dissipated, and it was with a bored resignation that I re-entered the house.

For a long while all four of us stayed in the kitchen talking together. Or rather, my mother and Aunt Billie talked. I sat there with my hands in my lap and Uncle Tom stared out the window blankly. He looked much older than I remembered him: he had lost weight, his eyes were milky and dull, the skin seemed to hang like old burlap off his face and arms. He’d had another heart operation, and another throat one, too. As a result he could hardly talk—his voice was a harsh whisper.

Finally, though, the women went off somewhere and Uncle Tom and I sat there listening to their laughter in another room. He didn’t look at me for a long time. Finally he stood, slowly and wearily.

“C’mere,” he whispered.

He led me back to his room, walking unsteadily, pressing his hand against the wall for support. I stood in the doorway as he rummaged around for something. Finally he found it and, holding up the cherry blossom, he tossed it to me.

“Give that to your girlfriend,” he whispered.

I had nearly forgotten about it. But as I looked closely I knew that I liked it as much, even more than I ever had: staring into that tiny ball of glass was like looking into a whole new world, a perfect, crystalline world, one without troubles or scary things. No strange shadows, no feelings of rushing headlong into something dark and unknown. Just silence.

I looked up at him again, finally. A moment passed.

“Jus’ junk,” he muttered.

He was standing at his shuttered window, his back to me. I could hear his shallow, uneven breathing. The rest of the house was oddly quiet.

#

Later we went down to the river. He wasn’t really able to swim anymore but he stripped down and got in anyway, sitting on the bank in the shallow water. I paddled around and floated on my back for a time—I’d become a much better swimmer over the summer, since I’d last been here. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to, I guess. Once I let out a shout and listened for the echo; but it never came. I looked at my uncle, pale and sickly in the failing afternoon light. The magnificent liar! Not entirely a liar—there was some shred of truth in many of his stories, I now think—but something had happened over the summer. I somehow knew him better. Understood him. Or thought I did. It seemed funny, all of a sudden. I started to laugh. He looked at me, momentarily puzzled, then emitted a hoarse, whispered chuckle.

“Jesus!” he finally rasped, in a tone of wonder, “one day you’ll know everything. Don’t you doubt it. Everything in the world.”

I watched him.

“Hell,” he added, “one day I’ll know everything, too!”

We laughed again. It was the last time I saw him. Two months later he died.

#

And the rest of them?

My mother died many years ago. My Aunt Billie has married and divorced and remarried; I’ve lost track of her whereabouts. And Sonya? I had a letter from her recently. She now lives in West Virginia with her husband, an architect, and she has just given birth to a healthy daughter. She mentions that, just out of curiosity, she recently had the cherry blossom appraised. Its value, so she was told, is just under two thousand dollars.

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