A Tin of Keys (5 of 6)
The Padlock
Mark Whitney died September 9, 1968, after a two-year fight with lung cancer.
I had been him when he was still healthy. When he was still young enough to remember wanting a wife.
But Anna had been wrong. It had never happened for him.
Most of life didn’t happen for him. No wife. No children. But no lack of wanting both in the deepest part of his heart. I knew this as well as if it had happened to me.
He died at thirty-nine and had not fully lived. He had, in some ways, merely existed.
The news, read within the confines of a side room of the Washington County courthouse, hit me like a thunderbolt. And yet, it had happened over three decades ago.
Kevin, his nephew, had been killed during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam about six months earlier.
Anna’s son and grandson—both lost within the same year. No wonder she hadn’t lasted beyond 1970. Her life had been one of so much loss.
I cried for her many times.
Meanwhile, at home, my wife was making noise about me being distant. In her words, I would go places in my mind and leave her behind.
That, somehow, hurt even more.
So, I put the keys away. I stopped carrying them.
And things with my family improved.
We rekindled our spark, renewed our vows, and spent our weekends renovating the house.
The scariest part of this was replacing the old stone basement with concrete while the house temporarily jacked up on steel posts. The sagging floors were fixed, but this led to many new cracks in the remaining horsehair plaster. Ultimately, we gutted the place and rebuilt the interior. But we kept the hardwood flooring, wainscoting, and tin ceilings.
In the center of the old basement, a root cellar sat in an arched brick support that held the central chimney. I hadn’t been in it in years until the basement replacement was part way through.
My daughter, Emily, now nearly eleven, was working with me when we found a key sitting on an old dusty shelf.
We both stared at it for a long time.
“The shelf is dusty,” she said. “But the key is not.”
I nodded. “I see that.”
She looked at me.
“Don’t touch it,” I said.
I went upstairs and drank a beer on the porch.
I spent several days brooding.
Emily wanted me to do something with the key, but I feared it.
Finally, my wife asked, “Why are you brooding again?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said.
She stared at me for a long time, went back to her crochet, and said nothing for a while as we sat in silence in the living room.
“Why don’t you tell me from the beginning?” she finally said.
So I did.
I told her the entire thing—beginning to end—I left out nothing. I told her I thought they must be hallucinations—I confessed I was probably insane.
“I knew something was going on,” she said. “But I didn’t think it was that! Frankly, I’m relieved it was that, and not some actual woman you had on the side that I couldn’t figure out.”
“Well, they were actual people. I mean, Anna was a real person. She really was born in 1900 in this house and she really died in 1970 also in this house.”
“Ugh. That’s quite morbid,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“With the key downstairs,” she said.
“I’m avoiding it.”
She was thoughtful about that, and we didn’t talk about it until the next day.
“It’s going to plague you forever,” she said at last. “Go get the key and find out where this story ends, so we can just be us again.”
And so, with her permission and encouragement, I did.
We stood in the basement together, in the dusty root cellar, looking at each other.
“Come back to me,” she said.
I nodded and picked up the key.
I woke up, dying of lung cancer.
Had I not already spent time in the courthouse, it might’ve taken longer to piece things together: the coughing fits, the speckles of blood in the white porcelain sink, the envelope from Vietnam—filthy, creased, addressed in my nephew Kevin’s handwriting.
And finally, the letter from a doctor: palliative care recommended, two years of life expectancy.
Dated nearly a year ago.
It was hard to do things. Catching my breath was hard. I was an old man at thirty-nine.
My mother, Anna, tended to me. There were a couple of tense exchanges where she knew something was off beyond her son dying.
But I never gave her an answer.
She’d mention my eyes or my face being different, feeling different. My mannerisms were off—but familiar as if from a past life.
There was never a straight accusation.
Nor was there a confession.
I spent my time there with Mark and my mother—his mother—avoiding keys at all costs.
I wanted to be with them. Even if it was just in my mind for a time. I knew I would return to my wife at some point, still standing there in the arched root cellar. So I took my time.
In some ways, I enjoyed dying. I know that is a strange thing to say, but it was true.
Despite the pain and acceptance, there was a wanderlust in me I couldn’t shake. I couldn’t tell if it was from my mind or the body I was inhabiting.
Finally, one morning, I stood, looking at the stranger in the mirror, and spoke to him.
“What do you want?” I asked as I watched his mouth say it and heard his words.
To my surprise, he answered. It came out of my mouth unbidden.
“To do something meaningful. For once in my life. Before it’s over.”
“Then let’s do it,” I said.
He responded, “I can’t. I’m a coward. I’ve always been a coward. That’s why I’m alone. I lost the one girl—so long ago—the one girl who loved me. Because I couldn’t do it. I’m scared. I’m useless.”
I don’t know if he frowned at me or I frowned at him.
“Then let’s do something. Let’s go,” I said.
“Where? What could we do?”
“We could walk out there, pick up grandfather’s rifle, go get in the pickup, drive to the airport, and fly,” I said. “Mark is out there. He’s in danger.”
“I know,” he said, tears running down our face. “He’s on his third tour. He’s made it through the first two, but I always expect to hear the worst. It will kill Mother.”
“Mark,” I said, stern and unshaking. “Kevin is going to be killed on September 9th of this year.”
“What!” our eyes went wide.
“I’m not lying,” I said. “I know. I know what’s going to happen. I know where.”
We stood at the mirror, staring at each other.
Finally, he said, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re stronger than me. Can you help me? Can you give me courage?”
“I will help you,” I said.
We stepped into the living room. The last place we had ever been just a son.
Mom was sitting in her rocking chair. She was sixty-eight and still as lovely as she was at twelve.
“Mom,” we said. “I’m going.”
“To the store? The doctor says to stop smoking.”
“We’ve got something to do,” we said.
“We’ve?” she looked at us, a nervous look coming over her face.
“Goodbye, Mom,” we said. “I love you.”
She said something, but we didn’t listen. We couldn’t listen. We couldn’t stop. We needed to keep going before we lost our courage.
We walked over to the mantel, grabbed Grandfather’s rifle, walked out the door, bought a hard case for the rifle, and went to the airport.
It took both of us encouraging each other. When one of us was down, the other picked us up.
I shared details about Kevin’s pending death. Things that could break the timeline. But I didn’t care. We had a plan.
We lied, cheated, stole, bargained, bribed, and did everything we could with Mark’s life savings.
It was hard on us, not just mentally, but physically. The coughing got worse as soon as we made it to Vietnam. The humidity made us feel like we were drowning nearly daily.
Mark was not content to just help his nephew. I had told him about several battles that I had studied. We went to four of them before September 9, 1968, wearing a stolen uniform and carrying a used M16 we picked up from a battlefield.
Mark Whitney moved about Vietnam, always carrying two weapons. The M16 and the Springfield.
By the time we attended our third battle, there was a whisper among the troops of the Coughing Man. Always being in the right place at the right time.
No one knew who he was.
A shadow, slipping in and out of things. Appearing and disappearing.
But leaving droplets of his own blood behind.
On September 7th, we found our spot in an attic and carefully removed ceramic roof tiles to give ourselves a shooting lane.
We knew where Kevin’s unit would be. We knew where the attackers would be.
We were prepared.
And then we had our worst coughing fit of our time together, and it nearly killed us.
“It won’t be long now,” he said to me that night between fits.
“We’ll make it,” I said.
We were silent for a half hour and then he said to me:
“Did you come visit me eight or nine years ago?”
“Why do you ask?” I said.
“There was a night when I was on a road trip with Kevin. We went to pick up his father’s trunk from his parents’ place in Ellsworth. I have a strange memory of that night and I feel like I am having the same feeling now, with you.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“So you came back for me again. Why?”
“For Kevin,” I said.
I felt my head nodding, not of my accord.
“For Kevin,” he agreed.
I pulled out a flask of whiskey, and we toasted each other and Kevin.
“So, you know when I die?” he asked.
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t need to. He knew I knew, and he also knew I wouldn’t tell him.
“Then we’ll just live each day.”
“That’s the plan,” I said.
The next morning we woke early. We knew we had four hours before Kevin’s unit would be under fire.
We ate a cold can of baked beans and tossed the empty into a corner of the attic.
“You should go,” he said.
“What?”
“You should leave me here to do what I need to do.”
“I’m not going to abandon you!”
“My friend,” he said. “Listen. I’m going to go through some things that you don’t need to go through. I’m going to kill people today, and you don’t need to experience that. You don’t need to wear that on your shoulders wherever it is you come from.”
I didn’t respond, pondering his words.
He continued, “And at some point, soon, I’m going to die. It might even be today if we can change things. You don’t need to feel any more of this pain. You’ve gotten me where I need to be. I’m ready to do what needs doing.”
“I’m not going to quit,” I said.
“I will not let you stay,” he said. He put a pistol in his mouth. “Go, or I end us both.”
It seemed, at first like it was an intense standoff, but I knew it was a bluff.
“You will not do that,” I said. “I can feel you. You will not risk your nephew. And I will not let you risk him. I’ll fight you if I have to.”
He pulled the pistol out and laughed at me.
“That would be a riot,” he said. “To see a dying man punch himself repeatedly in the face, or wrestle with himself over a pistol.”
I smiled with him.
And then we were quiet for a while.
“Besides,” I said. “I can’t just go when I want to go. It’s always when I turn a key in a lock.”
“Really? Fascinating,” he said.
The strangest part of two people inhabiting the same body is that one may want to move and the other may not, at which point there is a struggle for control. Other times, you don’t really care. You just feel your body moving and you pay little attention to it because you are thinking about other things.
In fact, we did more driving this way. He’d sleep while I drove. Or I’d sleep while he drove. But it only works for so long before the body is just too tired.
So it wasn’t strange not to pay attention to my hands digging through a backpack, producing a padlock, and inserting the key.
“Hey,” he said.
For the first time, I noticed my hand on the key, and I resisted with all my might.
“Goodbye,” he said. “And thank you.”
We struggled for control.
But, he turned the key.
It was the last time I went back in time.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.