Continued from my previous post … apologies for the delay in posting. I have a genetic mutation that causes numerous cancers and have been busy arranging for another preventive surgery. In the midst of that planning, I had a couple of injuries and falls. It’s been difficult to work, but I am getting back into it.
If my first sigils in the alchemical scroll could be called literal metaphors, my later ones edged into the full metaphorical realm. Skeleton keys:
The same year I made the sigil from Tooth 19 (last post), my father suffered a massive stroke. It did not look like he would survive, and if he did, he would need round-the-clock care. Mom was scrambling to figure out how to pay for it, and this is when we found out about my father’s secret money.
It wasn’t a normal inheritance. My uncle’s guardian — a half sister — invested his money while he was locked up in the Veteran’s Home, let it grow. She created their own birthright.
My aunt leaked the secret without knowing it was a secret. My mother called her about the nursing home and Medicaid application, and my aunt said, “What about the money from our brother?”
Every sibling got three disbursements, enough to buy a house in Cedar Rapids.
A house.
My mother lives on the edge: barely a few bucks after rent, Medicare supplemental insurance, prescription co-pays, her phone bill. “If we still had the house, we’d be comfortable,” she says. I know she regrets selling it. Back then, it seemed like her only option: get the hell out of that place of bad memories, get a little cash, try to pick up the pieces.
She needs a dental implant. She needs a new car. My father totaled her van three years ago and they never had the money to replace it.
The van. Oh god, the van. He bought her that van, used, when they got back together. He used to show it off all the time like an engagement ring.
“What do you bet he plunged some of that money into the van?” I text my sister.
“And then he wrecked it,” she texts back.
Of course he wrecked it.
I dispatched my sister to our parents’ apartment.
“Rifle through dad’s papers,” I said. “Look for a bank statement or maybe a safe deposit box key.”
We had to figure out what my father did with that money. To get care, my father needed Medicaid. To get Medicaid, my parents would be forced into an intensive review of their finances. If Dad blew the secret money during the “lookback period,” Mom would be forced to try & claw it back. If he hid it somewhere and Mom couldn’t find it, but Uncle Sam did? She could be in serious trouble.
It wasn’t even the only inheritance:
My father’s high school sweetheart left him money when she died
Last year.
“Her children called him,” my sister says. “Asked him not to take it. They needed it for her burial.”
We have to find the kids, check the story. Medicaid demands a full accounting.
I search the obits for her first name; it’s all we have.
Judy + [town where she died]
One hit. Right year, right name, right location.
It could be my family:
Judy married a man named Clifford–same name as my father. She named her first daughter Denise.
Denise.
I freeze. Denise is my sister’s name.
I text my sister. She replies, “I am going to be sick. Mom always told me that Dad insisted on my name.”
“Let’s hope it’s the wrong Judy,” I text back, but we already know it is not.
I search the court database for her probate, find her divorce instead: 1997. The year Mom found out the first time. Dad promised to end it, but he never did.
But Judy did — with the other Clifford. The mirror Clifford.
I start searching property records. Maybe Dad bought Judy a house. Maybe that other Denise — bizarro world Denise — is sitting in it right now. Maybe she is the real child, with the real inheritance. Maybe she just found out about secret money, too.
That day, I drew the Master Lock sigil. All iron gall this time: metal, like keys and locks.
Iron gall is so acidic it possesses what archivists call bite, meaning it sinks its teeth into the page. It does not rest on the surface. It cannot be washed away. Ink’s root word, encaustic, means burn. From the moment you dip in a nib, oxidation of iron gall begins: an invisible conflagration, the slow burn of rusting iron, which is how you can see the words at all. Without a dye like logwood, un-oxidized iron gall appears invisible at first, like sympathetic ink.
As the iron rusts, it gains the weight of oxygen molecules it absorbs. Words grow heavier with time. But words can only carry so much weight. On some old manuscripts, iron gall corrosion is so complete that lifting a page destroys it: the letters fall out like alphabet ash.
Is time a net loss or a net gain?
Secrets always take on so much weight with time.
Years ago, I used to cut keys at a kiosk in the mall. I know how to read the bitting numbers on the head, what the keyway letter means, and how to clone the teeth so they will slide into the lock like a forensic bite mark match.
But to make a daughter key, I had to have the father key.
I used to say that when Dad was gone, I couldn’t wait to go through his papers and learn his secrets. He had a lot of secrets. When I was a child, he took the family to a union rally in Des Moines, and when we hopped off the Greyhound bus, he embraced an elderly man and said, “Meet your grandpa.”
My grandpas are dead, I thought.
“This is my real dad,” my father said, and standing next to one another, they looked identical.
I didn’t want another grandpa. Another grandpa meant watching a grandpa die again. This new grandpa took us to his house, which he had decorated exactly like my Grandma Ashline’s house—like he had never divorced her or abandoned my father at all in some other timeline.
On the way home, my father said, “You can never tell Grandma Ashline I found him. This will be our secret.”
Daughter keys.
There were the secret siblings he sprung on my sister and me, fully grown brothers who looked like him, but not like us. Other brothers he had adopted, then un-adopted, before I was born. A sister I met for the first time at his funeral. I had known about her since Grandma Ashline died and I found a photograph in her things. By then, I knew it was better not to ask. The truth would come out; the truth always came out. And it did: two decades later.
I never thought I was trying to keep secrets, but when I started publishing essays, childhood friends wrote to ask, “You had brothers?”
There were the missing years, when Dad disappeared “up north” (his term for Northeastern Iowa, where he was from) to live with his girlfriend.
We knew about the girlfriend. We always knew.
Eight years old: I answer the plastic Garfield phone, tell the strange woman asking for my father that he isn’t home and “May I ask who is calling?”
“This is his wife,” she says, in a menthol voice.
“But you’re not Mom. Mom is his wife.”
There was his second enlistment in the Navy, when he got discharged (still honorably) for personality issues, which I only discovered when I requested his military file after he died. As I read the file, I realized that many — maybe most — of the stories he had told me about the Navy were about that enlistment aboard an aircraft carrier off the east coast, instead of his first as an aircraft mechanic in Hawaii. He just left out the location.
When I look at the Master Lock sigil now, years later, I wonder whose spinal cord I was drawing — mine or my father’s — whose secrets I was trying to unlock, and whether the distinction even matters.
Continued in next post: child labor as intergenerational trauma, with this sigil:
Gosh, can’t stop thinking of the layers & layers here re: keys — plus all that’s implied by their symbolic connections to the underworld…
Fascinating history, Karrie.