“I’ve heard rumors for years that Grandma Burgess kept his clothes, but I didn’t believe it.” Lisa, my oldest sister, sucked in her breath from across the room. We rushed to where Lisa knelt upon our father’s musty carpet, her arms outstretched, holding a tattered shirt out from her body as if the ragged piece of clothing might infect her with a strange disease. Her mouth open in shock, she eye-balled it up and down.
Resting the shirt over her arm, she pulled an accompanying pair of worn denim overalls from the green, hard-shelled suitcase that had exhaled the burned cinnamon smell of my grandmother’s house when she’d opened it.
I hardly noticed the rest of the suitcase’s contents. I was mystified. Unfolding the shirt, my eyes fastened on two jagged rips that showed signs of trauma to the shirt from its front to its back. I placed several fingers through the large rip over the front pocket and watched them wiggle through clean to the shirt’s back. I studied the shirt and its great tears singed around the edges with blood-brown flecks of color like deep tea stains.
“His name was Julian,” Lisa pulled herself up from the carpet that had soaked up my father’s stale cigarette smoke. “He was Grandma’s first born son…her voice trailed off as her eyes now skimmed the set of overalls, “… he was killed by lightening.”
“In these clothes…” I whispered.
A black and white photograph, aged but sturdy, had fallen out of the folded overalls revealing the face of a young boy wearing a smile tinged with a smirk. I liked him immediately and if we had known each other, we would have built forts together in the woods and been friends.
Entranced, my sisters and I studied the photograph until Jill, the second oldest, spotted further clues on the picture’s underside, erupting into our pensive moment with “turn it over!” where we found the very short story of this young man in my grandmother’s scrawled cursive: “Julian Aldon Burgess. Oldest child. Was killed by lightening as he walked down a country road one summer from returning a corn planter to a neighbor in June, 1933. He was thirteen-years-old.”
“Julian Aldon,” My voice slowly released the soft vowels. We smiled.
“Like Ava,” my sister said.
“Ava Aldon.” I held his picture close, looking for details of my daughter’s face in it. I had given her the name so that she and my brother could have something to share. My brother and I had built forts together in the woods and been friends. I had been so pleased by the name. Now it held much more meaning than I ever imagined.
Holding in my hands the faded blue fabric – the material and tangible loss of life – feeling its rips where the lightening bolt seared through it and robbed the life and heart beating below its threads – captured and held my imagination. Who was this young man who would have been my uncle, my father’s only brother? Did the buttons of this shirt give him a fit on the morning he struggled to put them through the holes with distracted fingers on the day that would be his last?
Dang it, Mama, I’ll be there in a minute!
Did he step into the denim over alls and click their clips together with reluctance at knowing he faced the cumbersome corn planter dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, constrictive and suffocating in the unforgiving Carolina heat?
It’s rainin’ Julian. Now you be real careful walkin’ home.
My sisters and I looked at history, sitting in my hands. We stood frozen, the mood much different from earlier when we had thrashed through boxes in an eager frenzy, giggling at letters we’d found tucked inside bags and boxes which were written to Santa Claus that my parents had saved; balancing the fine line between laughter and tears when we discovered something personal: an old love letter or poem; a piece of clothing we’d forgotten existed.
Now we were solemn, heads bowed as if at a funeral – it was one, of sorts – dividing the contents of our childhood home into separate houses after our parents’ divorce, picking through items like scavengers; and now viewing the last pieces of clothing a young boy wore to meet his death. We stood faced with a dilemma: we came here to decide which sibling takes what. Who would get Julian?
How funny that such an uncanny item – the blood-dried, fire-tinged clothes of a dead boy – could be something that we all wanted. Yet we did. The sense of it filled the room, as did Julian, who had joined us in the unsealing of his clothes. Perhaps the courage of his smirkish, tight-lipped smile inspired me to break the silence.
“I would really love to have them,” I said, adding tentatively, “if it’s ok with you.” My eyes bounced back and forth between each sister.
So eager to make my drive back home to Savannah with these clothes in my truck, I continued my plea, resorting to pulling from my bag of tricks: “help a teacher: donate supplies”, the bargaining chip I had used many times to persuade the donation of pens and pencils and to entice businessmen into being guest speakers inside my English literature classroom.
“The students...” I spoke in a listless, it-would-be-a-shame-voice, “could be so inspired to write at the sight of these clothes.”
“Never mind that." Lisa sighed with some resignation. “You should have them anyway,” She smiled. “Ava is his name sake.”
And so with that: sold. I became the new owner of Julian Aldon’s last clothes. The experience of bringing them back into the light and to life inside my classroom for the students’ writing explorations awaited. And most importantly, the story waited like ripening fruit, to be shared with Ava someday.
I drove home to Savannah, singing to my radio, the story of Julian, Julian Aldon, stirring in my head.
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