Jayden Lerma, “Heart’s Hoard”
He left his hometown in the dead of night, with his affairs as close to in order as they had been for the last three years.
The road out of town, winding and rocky and not so much built as accumulated, seemed a stranger to him. His childhood spent planted in his father’s pickup truck, packed like peach slices with far too many boys, had grown so distant it might better be called a mirage.
He’d done his best to forget it over the two decades since he’d left for college, deliberately and with no small helping of spite, but more as a small part of a concentrated effort to forget everything.
He’d found that it never really left him; the crunch of gravel and the slide of each turn. In the most sleepless of his living situations—his college dorm and a cramped shared apartment—he felt them as phantom sensations every night before he finally went under.
Ironically, he’d only really forgotten it when he moved back home, over the course of three long years in a childhood home he rarely left, occupied with responsibility he’d returned to shoulder.
His hands sat steady at ten and two of the loosely affixed wheel of that same truck, though it was his now. Its dented body was cleaned of all but the most primordial encrusted mud as it drove slow through the heavy-bodied night. He learned each turn as if for the first time, and felt every crunch of gravel knowing it would be the last. His fingers tapped in time with the jingling keys in the cupholder, soothed by a steady thumping as all the things he’d taken with him slid around the truck bed.
He’d spent the three weeks before his leaving between two phases of being. All concerning the contents of the shed. The first, of heart, and the second, of practicality.
The first was deciding which of his many possessions had too much of his love in them to leave behind. Too much of him in them to recognize himself when he cut them out.
The second was deciding how much of his love could reasonably fit in the bed and backseat of one pickup truck. How much of himself he would have to leave behind, to survive the move at all.
The place held an impressive collection of things, for a backyard shed he only stayed in when he couldn’t stomach his childhood bedroom, and his father insisted he’d be fine alone for the night. He spent that near-month downsizing. Nail-biting over placements and organization within that truck before rolling over to do the same with the contents of his heart. He would spend a day pulling his hair out over something he could not bear to but knew he would have to part with, only to find the next morning that he had cut ties with it in his sleep. The list of his loves grew shorter by one each night, as if the chambers of his heart—in only beating—measured each of the things that could not come, and released them after one last embrace. He slept deeply, though perhaps not well. Getting out of bed got harder every morning.
Then, the very night he finished poring over the things in that shed, he leapt out of his sheets, and left town. Got in the truck and drove off in the dead of night, as if fleeing.
He was. Not from a man, but maybe the grave of one. Or maybe just a particular truth. The shed was a small offshoot of the cabin he’d once lived in with his brothers and father. In moving back here, the shed had become the closest to what he’d call a home. He only ever called the cabin his father’s.
The truth remained: It’d taken three weeks to toil over all of his things. It would take the better part of a year to toil over his father’s.
His father had been fond of repeating that the men in their family were men of things. They were born heartless, and spent their lives digging through the filth and muck of the world for love. It was the most spiritually important way of calling them hoarders.
He would not say he’d been born heartless, but he might say his father had. The man had never found a way of loving anything without possessing it. Maybe it was only his excuse for it all. For loving too many things that didn’t deserve it, too deeply, and too late.
He was a rather different man than his father, in the shades of things. Maybe it was in being born with a heart, but he’d lived his life more as a collector than hoarder. If he and his father and his brothers were men of things, then maybe he had been the only one who knew how to pick and choose them.
Maybe now that he was the last of them, they were more so men of loving things.
It never felt more like a curse, than when he finally laid eyes on the cabin that was now his. He was a collector, inheriting a hoard. A more sentimental man might’ve called it the hoard of one man and three sons. He knew better. It was the hoard of a man who’d never stopped mourning, and who’d swallowed it all into one cabin.
He visited it for the first time since the funeral, wandering quietly and touching nothing. It looked no different than it had for the past three years, cleared out only enough for a bedfast man and his caretaker. He couldn’t put a name to the nauseous taste beneath his tongue.
A memory replayed over and over in his mind. His father, who in life had stubbornly insisted that it was all a whole load of junk. Insisted he shove it all in closets, just so neither of them had to look at it. As if he were begging, in that austere way of his, that he look away. Look away from all the meaningless things where kept his love. From the meaningless remains of three sons. Neither of them ever mentioned throwing any of it away.
The cabin was quiet now. He went home, after that wordless surveyance, to his cramped shed. He lay sleepless with a tightness in his chest. Staring at the cabin keys sitting heavy on the shed’s side table.
That strange taste burned on his tongue. He thought of nothing but the cabin that was once his father’s home. Now, it was a grave. The meaningless remains of a father and his three sons. All of it now belonging to the last.
He’d once prided himself—or perhaps thanked himself—for his selective hand. For picking and choosing the things where he’d keep his love, and never picking too much.
It was the taste of helplessness. A moment of understanding, for his father and all his things. For not being given a choice, in loving them all.
They were men of things, their family. All that was left of their men were things. And as helplessly as he’d ever loved his family, he loved them all.
He realized then that he would have to weigh each one, night after night, with only a third of the truck bed left for them to occupy. He would bite his nails down to the bed. He would tear out his hair at the roots. He might throw all of himself away, just to keep some of them. The men of their family. His brothers. His father. Their things. He’d leave, hollowed out by legacy. By things.
He’d left that cabin with one single certainty. It would kill him. That it’d turn his heart to ash to spend the next year measuring the love and loss in every piece of trash and treasure of that house.
But what he realized, staring at those keys in a cold shock, is that he would live. He would stay. At the end of that year, he would rather choose to die here than give any of it up. He, like his brothers, would never again leave this town. Though they’d never gotten a choice.
More like his father, then, who held all their things tighter than he’d ever held any of them. Than he’d ever held himself, for losing them so soon.
Then he, like his father, would choose to die in that house.
So he ran. Like a bat out of hell. Past the cabin, not daring to glance at it, down the dirt path to the driveway, barely breathing until he shut the driverside door behind him. All the shed’s things had been packed into the truck as soon as he’d finished. As if his heart, always wiser than him, knew this would happen.
His father, in life, had insisted that he leave town no few times. Sometimes that gruff order to move out again was all he’d hear out of him for the day. The bruised pride of a man unused to being taken care of. Or maybe, a quiet plea. It was the last thing he’d ever heard out of him. He refused it then, too.
His father had once said that the men of their family were so stubborn they’d never do anything unless they thought it was their idea. This legacy was one he might claim.
He left his hometown with all of his love sliding around the empty third of space in the truck bed, and a full, beating heart.
Thrumming in time with jingling cabin keys.
