Thu, Oct 29, 2015
10:30PM
One of my high school buddies died just before school began on the morning of Monday, November 2, 1964. I probably already told you most of what I am telling you tonight. If you have an idea who I’m talking about and you Google his name with mine, you will find quite a lot of the story of our friendship, minus the part represented by an inked-out portion of my friend’s autograph in my 1964 Fjord High School yearbook.
My friend’s father lived until three years ago. The old man’s several surviving children soon held an estate sale at his farm a few miles outside Fjord but first gave other relatives several chances to lay claim to family items, including things that had belonged to my friend. I arrived at the sale at mid-morning, when the crowds of serious shoppers had thinned. I found a quilt and a crucifix that I thought might be appreciated by someone else who had gone to school here but who is now living in another state. When I paid my friend’s sister, she and I began to do a bit of reminiscing, and I told her I’d be interested in seeing anything belonging to her brother—especially high school yearbooks—if she wouldn’t mind my looking. She told me what I just told you, that relatives had gone through everything and taken what they wanted. But, she added, she knew of two boxes of things no one seemed interested in, and if I would call her sometime in the coming week I would be welcome to look.
We continued to chat, the sister and I, and eventually a couple of other family members came into the house, while only a few shoppers were still rummaging about. Asking someone else to watch the cash box, the sister moved a chair that blocked the way to a narrow staircase, and she led me up into the nearly empty little rooms at the top of the house. There, on two old oak dining chairs, were two open cardboard boxes, as she had said, and they turned out to contain freshman and sophomore yearbooks, a school athletic letter, some of my schoolmate’s homework papers and some of his dad’s, and the Ninian, Wisc., newspaper published the afternoon of my friend’s accidental death, which was, on that day, front-page news with a photo of the accident scene. The sister urged me to take the boxes, and I urged her to put folks in touch with me if anyone asked about anything she had given away.
After I carried one box downstairs and returned for the other, the sister told me she’d found one more thing that would likely be discarded if I didn’t take it: a framed papercut, quite crude, white paper against black construction paper, possibly someone’s school project, a life-size profile of a boy, presumably my friend when he was in maybe eighth grade. The thin black-painted wood frame was scuffed bare in places; the glass had cracks across the upper right corner, leaving two shards separate from the rest of the pane. The papercut didn’t seem something I’d hang on my own wall, but I thanked the sister and added it to the other treasures.
This afternoon, as I was attempting to tidy the nearly fruitless fruit cellar in my home, I noticed the frame where I had placed it, resting on the floor, leaning against a wall. I decided the time may have come to put the whole works into an empty heavy plastic bag, one that had held Morton’s salt for my water conditioner, and send it off to the landfill in next Wednesday’s trash collection. Then I thought perhaps I ought to first find out whether there was something written on the back of the artwork, something to confirm the profile was my friend’s or something stating the year the schoolboy had posed for the “picture.”
With a screwdriver, I pried out the metal tabs holding the cardboard on the back of the frame. Then I turned the frame face up again on my work table and, barefingered, carefully removed the loose shards and set them aside. I turned the frame face down again, removed the back, and found, looking out at me, a boy in a pencil drawing, hard light lines on brittle yellowed paper, slightly less than the full twelve by sixteen inches of the frame opening, a portrait presumably of my friend, though I am still at this point not certain I can say. Guessing again, I’m going to figure the boy facing me was in seventh or eighth grade.
I am nearly finished writing out this report, but I cannot complete it yet tonight. I may have more news for you some other day. I must tell you I found nothing on the back of the drawing, and found no date on the front, but someone had put a name in the lower right corner, only a given name, a girl’s name, five letters, one of those names so frequently given to girls in places like Fjord in the 1940’s and 50’s.
It so happens that I immediately made a guess as to who the pencil artist might have been, someone I for a short time counted as a friend and pen pal when my family moved from Fjord, someone whom I can no longer call or write. I plan now to show the artwork around this town, the way a cop chasing leads in a case gone cold might conduct his interviews. If I become convinced this is a picture of my friend, and if no one seems to have a higher claim to the pencil sketch than mine, I might be going down to the True Value to order a new piece of glass cut to size.
