Broken
Broken
I f only the jar hadn’t been broken.
This thought creeps up on Ed in the half-light of the morning following the call from Ebby. It comes to him just as he is doing his usual sunrise walk down the slope from his house and breathing in the smell of the cove. The pungent odor of damp rocks and mollusks and cracked shells. It feels like a betrayal of his son that Ed should think of the jar at all. It goes without saying that more than anything, Ed wishes his son hadn’t been killed on that day.
It’s just that Baz, in his final minutes of life, saw the jar lying broken on the ground, and Baz had loved that jar. He’d believed in it. For the children, Old Mo had been like an ancient relative, an ancestor from long ago who was still around to share his lessons. Ed and Soh had used the jar to reassure their children that good could come of bad, that comfort could follow strife, that looking at their past could help to guide their future.
Baz had been at that age, that delicate period between boyhood and black manhood, when he had been frustrated by some of what he’d seen going on in his country. Just a month before he died, there had been yet another unjustified killing of an unarmed black man by a police officer, and Baz had lashed out.
“Things aren’t ever going to change, are they, Dad?”
“Things are always changing, son,” Ed said. “It’s true, some of the worst things keep repeating themselves, but things do change. And as citizens, we can do our part to keep things moving in the right direction.” Ed saw the skepticism on his son’s face, and it saddened him to see it so soon, that emotional armor that Baz would have to carry into his adult years.
“Look at Old Mo,” Ed said. “Simply by being made, being carried, being kept by our family, that jar helped to change people’s lives.” Ed felt his shoulders relax when he saw Baz nodding slowly in response.
Like his father, Ed had shared stories with the children about the jar, but in his own versions, Old Mo was more of a character. Ed had added a good dose of invention to the bits of historical and anecdotal information that his family had passed down to him about the jar’s earliest days.
Tell us about Old Mo and the creek, his kids would say. Tell us about Old Mo and the ship!
The jar stories had inspired Baz, ever the joker, to sketch cartoon scenes for little Ebby and tack them onto the bulletin board in his sister’s room. There had been one of Old Mo on stick-figure legs with chunky sneakers up in the air, tumbling down the hill toward the creek. Or Old Mo the fugitive, dressed in a movie-star disguise with a baseball hat, a wig, and oversize designer sunglasses. Or Ed’s favorite, the one of Old Mo leaning over his round stoneware belly and whispering in the ear of a woman in a fringed, one-shouldered dress. The woman was a reference to one of Ed’s ancestors, who had found shelter in a Wampanoag community on the Massachusetts coast.
The thought of the jar’s story, and his family’s attachment to it, is all knotted up in the grief that Ed is forced to live with. His little girl, traumatized on the day her brother died, kept repeating the last thing her brother had told her.
They broke Old Mo, they broke Old Mo.
If only Baz hadn’t seen the jar break. If only Ebby hadn’t seen her brother die. If only Ed had been home, goddamn it, instead of his kids.
But his son is gone, and Ed needs to believe that their story, as a family, isn’t over yet. If Baz is the great loss of Ed’s life, then Ebby is his great unfinished work. His hope for the future. During that first year of counseling, the therapist used to remind Ed and Soh that other children had witnessed the violent loss of a family member yet grown up to have healthy, productive lives. Ebby could find her way, too, the doc said.
But back then, all Ed wanted the therapist to do was erase what had happened to their family. Undo the whole damned thing. Ed wanted to see the jar back on the table in his study and his son back on his feet. Ed wanted a guarantee that, he knew, could not be provided. Which is why he stopped going to the therapist years ago.
His wife still goes to therapy. Maybe it’s time for Ed to go back. He suspects the doc would understand why he’s been obsessed with the jar of late. Ed had been doing all right, really, he had, until he saw his daughter having such a rough time after her wedding fell apart. Maybe Ed could tell the therapist about the jar. Tell her what he’s afraid to say to his wife.
But first, Ed would tell the therapist how both of his kids used to splay themselves over the small sofa in his study, jostling each other for space, to listen to Ed’s jar stories. Old Mo had always been part of Ed’s relationship with his children and his wife. And the children’s favorite story was the one where Old Mo had helped their parents to fall in love.