The Jar, Again
The Jar, Again
October 2019
E d looks at Soh and she nods.
“Ebby,” Soh says, “your father has something he’d like to show you.”
Ebby tips her head to the side and looks at them with a frown. They’ve just finished the crêpes that Ebby has made them for brunch. Smoked cheese and chives for the filling. Very French. It’s good to have Ebby back again, though barely a month has passed and she’s already talking about going back to France for a while. Hannah will be there, too, Ebby says, so not to worry. But Ed hopes that after he shows her what’s in the trunk downstairs, she will change her mind.
Soh links her arm in Ebby’s, now, and leads her across the kitchen toward the basement entrance. Ed pulls the door open and walks down the flight of stairs ahead of them. He removes an old stereo and a lamp from the top of the chest. Soh takes a rag from the laundry area and wipes the dust from the top and sides of the lid while Ed pulls a key out of his pocket. He can tell, from the narrowing of Ebby’s eyes, that she might have figured out what’s inside, only her hunch must seem, to her, to go against all logic.
Nineteen years ago. After Baz was killed in that other house, Ed went back there alone. The crime-scene tape had been removed, but the professional cleaners had not yet shown up. On entering, Ed walked straight into the study and dropped to his knees at the sight of his son’s blood staining the carpet. He stayed there, rocking back and forth, struggling to breathe, until the tears came. As he wept, he saw that the police had left the broken jar lying on the ground, along with a couple of books that had been knocked off a side table. He picked up a piece of pottery that had split off the base of the jar, then, without stopping to think it out, he gathered all the smaller pieces and put them into an old tote bag.
Ed then fetched a plastic trash bag from the kitchen and put the base of the jar in there. He laid both bags in a large cardboard box that had been set aside to be recycled. He taped up the box and marked it STUDY and FRAGILE and took it to the trunk of his SUV. The box would become part of their house move and Soh would never know the difference. The only thing that wasn’t sealed in the box was the small piece of wood marked with an X, which Ed had found some distance away, under a chair. From Aquinnah’s side of the family. On impulse, Ed had slipped it into his jacket pocket.
Ed lifts the lid of the trunk, now, to show his daughter a mound covered with a flannel cloth. He hears Ebby gasp as he pulls the cloth back to reveal Old Mo, damaged, but repaired. Ebby puts her hand up to her mouth, now, and Ed tells her what he told Soh the other night.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, all these years,” Ed says. “I couldn’t bear to let go of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell your mother or you that I had saved it. It was too much of a reminder of your brother’s death. I didn’t think any of us could stand to look at it again. Your mom had refused to go back to the old house, so I simply told her that the jar had been discarded with everything else.”
Ebby puts her hand on the jar. She looks so sad, his little girl.
“After your broken engagement,” Ed continues, “I thought of how you’d spent so many years with such sadness, and I kept wondering, would it have been easier on you, to see that we still had the jar? Or was that twisted reasoning on my part?”
“To know that they hadn’t taken everything from us?” Ebby said softly. “Even though Baz had been everything?”
Ed turns in surprise to look at his daughter. She is nodding. She gets it. Just as Soh understood when he showed her the jar.
“You were right,” Soh had told him last night. “I would have told you to get that thing out of my sight. But things are different, now. I think we need everything that helps us to remember who we are, even without Baz. Because we’re still struggling with that.”
When, nineteen years earlier, Ed opened the cardboard box and laid the pieces of Old Mo in this trunk, he didn’t think he’d ever put the jar back together. But last year, feeling helpless to ease his daughter’s misery after her failed engagement, he was desperate to do something with his own distress. He began to research South Carolina stoneware, looking for the right person to repair the jar. He enlisted the help of a historian friend, who in turn called Ed when he thought he’d found someone. When Ed arranged for the repair, it felt like he was finally getting some use out of that insurance money. Only, once Old Mo was back in one piece, Ed didn’t know what to do about it. Until now.
Over dinner last night, Ebby had surprised him and Soh by saying she’d finally written down some of the jar stories.
“I can read you some tomorrow, if you’d like,” she said. Ed hugged her, and took it as further confirmation that it was time to tell his family about Old Mo. But he knew that, first, he had to show it to Soh alone.
“All those times you were down here in the basement,” Soh said last night as they crouched, side by side, in front of Old Mo. “You were looking at this?”
“Mostly no. I was on my laptop, doing research. Making calls. Trying to get help.”
“And those trips down south?”
“I went to see an expert potter,” Ed said. “I took the jar.”
Now, together with Soh and Ebby, he calls his parents and tells them about Old Mo. Hears his mother exclaim through the phone. He tells them about the stories Ebby has been compiling and a proposal he has in mind. Ed, Soh, and Ebby have written up a list of possibilities. They have calls and appointments to make. Professionals to consult. But if his dad and mom are in agreement, he says, they can take the next steps. Their family has the connections to make it happen.
His father is silent. Ed wants to be sure he’s convinced him.
“Dad, you taught us that our family’s connection to the jar was special. And I believe that. I respect that. But maybe Willis was wrong about something. Maybe Old Mo was never meant to be ours alone. Maybe the Freemans were only meant to be caretakers of its story until it could be shared with others.”
Ed hears his father clear his throat.
“What do you think, Dad? Now that the jar is whole again, don’t you think it’s time we let it go?”