Free Tietam Brown by Mick Foley Page A

whereabouts unknown, and I thought about my horrible, wonderful, miserable, ridiculous dad.
    Five minutes passed. Where had he gone? Tietam’s couch was saggy. Kind of ugly. My father didn’t strike me as a reader. More of a look-at-the-pictures guy. I thought about the book in the basement. Oversized and thick. Like a scrapbook, possibly. A book that might shed some light on my father’s past so that I could better understand my own.
    Five more minutes passed. The book was calling to me. Like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” this book was a living thing; it wanted me to hear its stories, to see its ghosts, to share its secrets. I had to look. I took the stairs two at a time.
    I pulled the bare bulb’s string and followed the ax’s shadow to the book. I took it gently from the floor, taking care not to disturb the rattraps as I did so. But the springs were snapped and caked with rust; their intended prey had taken refuge a long time ago. I brushed dust and rat poop from the book’s brown leather cover. Old traps and new poop.
    I opened up the cover, my pulse racing as I did. The first page fell out from its binding and fluttered to the floor. A black-and-white photo of a soldier. World War II I guessed. A soldier who now lay amid feces and mildew, underneath a canopy of panties. The soldier deserved better. I picked up the photo and placed it back inside the album. The photo had been torn in half and yellowed tape in thin neat strips served to reconcile the soldier’s image. My grandfather? I looked for some family resemblance, but I couldn’t really tell.
    I turned the page. My father. No guessing here, although he was obviously a good deal younger. Maybe eighteen, nineteen, twenty at most, and in a fighting stance. Maybe he was a boxer, it would explain the scars and broken nose. But in this photo, Father Time and human hands hadn’t yet left their mark on Tietam Brown. His smile was sly, and full of hope, as if there was no goal he couldn’t reach. I think I could have stared for hours if not for the fear that I’d be caught. He could come home at any second. I had to proceed with rapid diligence.
    A simple headline filled one page, reading RIOT IN MONTGOMERY. No story, no date, just three words.
    A page from
Ebony
magazine came next, a strange choice for a white guy like my father. A guy who listened to Barry Manilow. Although I think there was a black guy in the Village People. I wasn’t really looking when the eight-track went whistling out the window.
    The picture was unsettling. The beaten face of a teenage boy who’d been killed in Mississippi. Why would my father have this photo in his scrapbook. Did he know the boy? Did he know the killer?
    Another strange photograph, this one from an Augusta, Georgia, newspaper. A woman wrapped in a bloody sheet, talking to police. A headline reading PECAN HEIRESS FENDS OFF ATTACK, and a story I was in too big a rush to read. My heart was pounding beneath my flannel. Butterflies flapped inside my stomach. I couldn’t let my father catch me here. What did all this mean? Was my father some kind of lunatic who kept photos of his victims, or just a practitioner of naked exercise who kept the panties of his conquests?
    There were other articles, all from southern newspapers. Birmingham, Nashville, Greensboro, detailing the fight for civil rights. Sit-ins, marches, and a troubling one of a fireman with a fire hose blasting a black child off his feet.
    Then the
New York Daily News,
the only entry from the North. A two-page story of a man who had moved up from Atlanta and was trying to feed the poor. A black man with quite a biceps on him, holding a small child. The man’s name was Eddie Edwards. Maybe Tietam knew him. Maybe they had boxed together, even if the guy looked much bigger than my father.
    Finally a story about the first landing on the moon. All in all quite interesting, although it wasn’t quite what I had