Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel by Chappell Fred

Author:Chappell, Fred [Chappell, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Six

THE MEMORIAL

He pushed on the center of the panel several times, gently but rapidly, and could hear the muffled click of metal on metal. There was at least one latch holding it. So he put his eye to the crevice on the left-hand side and, gradually kneeling, followed the line of light down toward the floor. About navel-high, he found the little bar of shadow cast by the latch on the other side, but he couldn’t tell what sort of latch it was. Out of habit he patted the pockets of his overalls, but he’d already noticed that his faithful Boker pocketknife was missing. He’d left it in his suit pants when he changed clothes, or he’d lost it in the creek swimming after that little girl.

What he needed was something to squeeze the bolt over to the right. Didn’t need to be much; the plywood panel was only a half-inch thick. If he had a fifty-cent piece—but he didn’t. Then his fingertips brushed the hard little rectangle and he drew from his pocket the medal that he had had to choose, the medal that honored Lewis Dorson.

Here was a dilemma. To get the medal to fit into the crack, he would have to press flat the little eyelet that received the pinpoint. He didn’t like to do that; it seemed almost an act of vandalism, of desecration. He decided to go ahead and flatten it; he could bend it back again later, no one would notice. He felt, though, a twinge about his heart-root.

He knelt and inserted the medal and began jimmying the latch, working the hard rectangle from side to side until he felt the bolt begin to squirm and ease back. There now, it was coming along dandy. Joe Robert Kirkman could have been a headline success in a life of crime if he’d so chosen; he could have become an expert cracksman, another Jimmy Valentine. When he felt that the bolt was free, he stood up and pushed the door open and entered. He slipped back into his pocket the medal that he couldn’t help thinking of as damaged.

What kind of room was this? My father had broken into it because he’d suspected that it was something the students had tacked together. A secret clubroom, maybe, or a place to play cards and trade the indecent funny books, the “eight-page novels,” and to smoke cigarettes.

But it was obviously no sort of place that students would construct. A kerosene lantern hung from a hook in the webby ceiling by a strand of seagrass twine and shed its yellow-orange glow and drowsy odor all through the dim spaces here. On the right-hand side, the bulk of the furnace, its ducts and the jumble of lower pipes, took up most of the room. The pipes and ducts led into darkness, into areas my father knew nothing of, had never thought about. Directly beneath the lantern was an unsteady card table with a sagging cardboard top. No part of school property, it had been rescued from a refuse heap and brought there.

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