I’m not sure I knew I was setting out on an important journey when I headed yet again to North Carolina.  Not home really, just the place I grew up, the little house in the mountains where my parents had lived for thirty some years. A place I’d spent my whole life traveling away from, trying to shed myself of my parents’ constant bickering, my father’s oppressive unhappiness, and the mountains of stuff he had accumulated over the years at auctions and flea markets. By the time I was born, my father was a bitter, humorless man at 45, with a history I never knew, a secret life before my mother and me. 

Twenty years my mother’s senior, he died in January, and my mother, suffering from emphysema, would soon be moving into an apartment. Over the last few months, I’d traveled back several times, sorting, selling, recycling, and throwing away my father’s stuff. I thought I was done, finally free of him and his possessions. 

“We found more,” my mother wheezed into the phone.

I groaned. I couldn’t handle another trip back, pawing through more musty piles. “I’ll hire someone,” I told her.

Her pause, punctuated by watery breaths, cut like the sharp edge of paper across a thumb.

“Someone else can’t do it. The stuff is his,” she hissed as if he were still alive, still guarding his things, or as if I’d just suggested some stranger handle his soul.

His stuff. Once when I was a teenager I filled my rusty Toyota with junk from a corner of the basement while he and my mother were out, boxes of wrinkled newspapers and sheet music, pungent and stained with mouse urine; old books, white with mold. He’ll never know it’s gone, I thought, feeling lighter, freer with each box I tossed into the landfill.

“Don’t you ever touch my stuff again,” he yelled when he discovered the tiny cleared space in the basement. He garnered my allowance for two months to pay for it.

“It’s just moldy trash,” I shouted back.

“But it’s mine,” he said, like a two year old who hasn’t learned to share. “You know nothing about me or my things.”

I didn’t know anything about him, and at the time, I didn’t want to. I reluctantly agreed to travel back one more time, for my mother’s sake.              

 

The nearly empty house looked wonderful, clean and clutter free for the first time in my life, like someplace I might actually want to live.            

“It’s in the attic. In a locked trunk.” She handed me a hammer and a screwdriver. “You’ll have to break it open.”              

The attic was stifling hot, smelling of dry, old wood and bats. It was empty now except for dust balls, a mouse skeleton forever stuck to a sticky trap, and the trunk, tucked away in the corner. I wondered how we’d missed it before.            

The old wooden trunk was warped and spotted, the leather straps worn away. It didn’t take me long to knock off the rusty lock.            

In a nest of blankets lay an old guitar, with a file folder next to it.  In the files were yellowed sheets of handwritten music and lyrics in my father’s dark, heavy printing, the notes firmly, decisively colored in. There was also a photograph of my father, holding the guitar, with four other musicians. Many years before me, before he met my mother, my father was probably in his twenties in the photograph. He looked handsome, with a strong jaw and long, dark hair. My father with long hair! He looked happy. Such a different man than I had known. My whole life he was gnarled and bent down, hemmed in by the things he collected, crowding around him, weighing him down, like a sickness.            

I realized that this locked up guitar might explain the void in his life, the one he constantly tried to fill. A gravelly clot of tears gathered in my throat. Why hadn’t he just brought it out?            

I carefully removed the guitar. It was dark wood with a lighter finish in the center, no markings on the handle, heavily dinged and scuffed.            

It might be valuable, this old guitar, but more than likely not. What I valued was the discovery of my father’s history, a man with music in him, a man I never knew. I wiped at the tear making a hot track down my cheek. I gently plucked the strings of my father’s guitar, and a rich, full sound echoed in the empty attic.