I held my breath as the descent began. My heart hammered against my chest. I’d driven on Odd Road dozens of times, maybe hundreds, but the rush of the initial drop always hit like a roller coaster. I accelerated through the first hairpin turn before exhaling. The narrow two-lane came hard and fast, zigging left, zagging right. Dense tree canopies created the illusion of dusk. My mother’s sedan paced down the mountain, tracing each bend and curve, like fingers on the small of one’s back. Chilly air from the car’s vents, a contrast to mid-May’s choking humidity, wrapped me in a blissful bubble.

Fifteen minutes later, I entered a sunny valley. A dozen or so single-story clapboard houses, some thickly coated in moss and black mold, lined the road’s edges like soldiers at attention. Company houses, a few still occupied, were built for miners in the 1910s by Beckley Smokeless Coal Company. The only living artifacts in Besoco, West Virginia—eponymously named after the company—my childhood community.

I stopped at the end of Odd Road, its intersection with Lillybrook Mountain Road. An old highway junction point, heart of Besoco, and precisely where, one week ago, my father, Tommy, was flattened under grinding pickup truck axles.

In front of me, on the embankment running parallel to Lillybrook Mountain Road, slits of sky blue and royal purple peeked out among a deep-green rhododendron sea. A painted wooden cross had been nailed to a tree, and another cross—a white one—plunged into the nearby ground. Both bore my father’s name, set up during last night’s candlelight vigil. I’d swiped through Facebook pictures of strangers laying carnations, releasing balloons. Blurry faces donned sky-blue bandanas to match the tree-anchored cross—and my father’s piercing eyes—crying and hugging where his blood stained the pavement.

Me and my three uncles held a closed funeral service. Family only. We didn’t know or trust anyone else in my father’s life. He’d disappeared into pills and alcohol three years ago, after the family matriarch, Mamaw, died. I spoke to my father once after that. He didn’t show up to my undergraduate commencement and died not knowing I’d finished a graduate program too.

A young mother in her late twenties, three or four years older than me, named Sherrie, had organized the vigil for my father’s friends. “Your father was a great man and loved by many,” Sherrie messaged me on Facebook. “He was like an uncle to my daughters, it was one thing that brought a smile to his face.” We messaged a few times before I ghosted her. I didn’t want to think about someone else bringing Tommy happiness. Someone who’d known him the last three years, and not before. Someone who wasn’t me.

I don’t know how long I sat and stared at the roadside memorial. My eyes strained. Tommy’s mystery friends had rallied together, assembled colorful monuments to display for all passersby. And me, in my lonely thoughtfulness, had driven here to dump his ashes on the ground. I’d been a stranger to Besoco for a long time but never felt it as deeply as right then. The lively hills that once nurtured me, they’d perished on the asphalt alongside my father.

I finally turned left onto Lillybrook, rounded a bend, drove up the gravel holler to my father’s house, Mamaw’s house, a house I no longer knew. I looked over at the charcoal-colored plastic container buckled into the passenger seat. The funeral director handed it to me the day before. An employee signed the Certificate of Cremation, verifying that my father’s body had been incinerated, pulverized—that all bone and flesh and skin and hair were now dust.

I’d already separated the chalky powder into five heavy-duty, resealable storage bags; my hands had sifted through my father’s last ashy bits. I grabbed a bag and exited the car. Heat swarmed my face. Sweat droplets formed. My insides twisted like pretzel dough. I have no idea how this works, I thought. At least there’s no one here to tell me I’m doing it wrong.

I pulled out my iPad. I wanted to be ceremonial. Somewhat, at least. Just a solemn scene backed by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Comin’ Home,” the song I’d played at the funeral. The air filled with twanging blues-rock as I began spreading my father’s ashes along the perimeter. Now he could rest next to his forever home, his nourishing oasis. Once my oasis, too.

“Been so long since I been gone,” I sang aloud, letting powder fall in an even stream along the concrete steps where Mamaw once bled heavily from a leg wound. “Tommy!” she’d yelled, gripping the galvanized pipe railing. My parents and I rushed from our singlewide trailer to find a bloody trail leading all the way to Mamaw’s remote-control lift chair. We stayed with her until the ambulance came forty minutes later.

I hummed along to lyrics of broken dreams, of dirty deals, and passed the kitchen window where Mamaw hung a wreath of tiny plastic gift boxes every Christmas. I thought about the way she’d look out at the fat, leafy grapevines. Was she longing for her son to come home? Praying he’d one day give up drugs and alcohol? I remembered mine and Mom’s long, Tommy-less nights when he parked Papaw’s truck somewhere and slept off his highs.

I peered in at the guest room where I slept during visits with Mamaw, now marred by a broken bedframe with no mattress or box springs. A tall dresser, once adorned with a turnstile of Papaw’s wooden pipe collection and an impressive arrangement of car-shaped cologne bottles, stood barren. The closet door was ajar, its interior lined with tinfoil and hanging lamps, a makeshift cannabis grow tent.

Ronnie Van Zant’s Southern drawl rang out. Like him, I wanted to come home. Wished for a return to Besoco. Instead, on this day, I’d brought my father’s remains home. To stay. My stomach stiffened as I reached his bedroom window. It was higher than eye level, but I didn’t want to peek in anyway. Everything was tossed about: empty pill bottles, old receipts and papers, shards of picture glass. Scattered and broken. In disarray, like me.

Crunching gravel interrupted my ceremonious moment: someone strolling down the holler. I craned my neck to see, and though it’d been years, I immediately recognized Kelly Glen: wire-rimmed glasses, graying black hair pulled into a loose ponytail, plain pocket tee and jeans, tennis shoes.

“Ska-lar?” she stopped.

“Hi, Kelly,” I replied, my back still to her. Lynyrd Skynyrd continued to play.

“Sorry about yer dad. He was a good man.”

“Yes, he was.” I didn’t know what else to say.

I turned to face Kelly, as the last of my father’s dusty remains dropped from bag to earth.

“So, uh, what’re you gunna do with his house?” She looked past me.

“I’m not sure yet. Haven’t decided. There are still some things we need to figure out.”

“Oh, okay,” she nodded. “Well, if ya decide ya don’ want it—”

“Yep,” I cut her off. “We’ll get in touch.”

“Okay. Well, good ta see you.”

“You too.”

I surveyed the surrounding mountains. Rocks grinding under Kelly’s shoes seemed to amplify the air. The brief solitude I’d shared with my father’s ashes, vanquished. What began as a peaceful release had become a chore. I wanted to finish up and get the hell out of Besoco.

The interaction with Kelly reminded me why Mom and I left eighteen years ago, in 1997. The oasis that once nourished me had all but evaporated. Hollowed out like the mountains. Blown to bits like now-gone peaks. A quiet pain, an eerie, isolating silence, blanketed the hills. Nothing seemed to change; people and buildings collapsed and died as time advanced. Our abandoned trailer—sinking-in floors, boarded-up windows, dust-coated furniture and toys—and Mamaw’s trashed house were both dilapidated shells among a community of ghosts.

***

An hour later I was driving across the New River Gorge Bridge, one of my father’s most cherished places. Despite the bridge’s tight lanes and unforgiving drop-off, I couldn’t help but look away from the road. On either side of me, vibrant hillsides stumbled into gurgling rapids.

At the end of the bridge, I punched the brakes and banked right onto a one-lane switchback. The car plodded downhill, passing steel arches that hoisted bridge over water. As I descended, beams and forest swallowed up sky. I wanted my father to float downstream, to become a permanent current in the New River.

We’d last been on this road together four or five years ago, cruising around tight curves in my father’s cherry-red sedan, windows down, breeze slapping our hot faces. Foghat’s self-titled debut album blared. Sarah Leeeeee! we yelled in unison. Can’tcha seeeeee! We stopped midway down the mountain. Steel shafts, thicker than hundred-year-old tree trunks, stretched over the New River, disappeared into woodland on the opposite slope. Sharp, blue bits of cloudless sky wedged between massive beams, the bridge a permanent fabric of the scene.

“It’s sumthin’, it’n it?” my father said.

“Sure is,” I gaped.

“C’mon,” he said. “I’m gonna show ya the best view o’ the bridge, hands down.”

When we reached the bottom, the car scraped over steeply graded railroad tracks, puffed across a wooden truss bridge. My father pulled onto the gravel shoulder next to a no-parking sign. We walked back to the truss bridge.

“Alright, son,” my father said. “Check it out.”

The water babbled beneath us. Rapids roared a quarter mile ahead. Above us, in front of us, in all its steely splendor: the New River Gorge Bridge, the Western Hemisphere’s longest single-arch bridge. I stood silent, never feeling smaller.

“C’mhere, son,” my father instructed. “Let me get a picture of ya.”

He directed me to the center of the truss bridge. He grabbed my shoulders, shuffled my body, stepped backward.

“I don’t know if I can git the whole bridge behind ya,” he chuckled, pushing a curly lock out of his face. “It’s too damn big!”

He snapped a few photos, trying to capture the New River Gorge Bridge’s arch hugging my shoulders in frame.

I thought about my father’s smile as I crossed the wooden truss bridge with his cremated remains. About how the river calmed his restless spirit. I parked in a gravel lot a half mile up the road and hiked across car-sized boulders to get near the water. I craned my neck to look at the New River Gorge Bridge. Beside me, a little stream emptied into the river. I sat cross-legged on a boulder, pulled out a notebook, inhaled the scenery. The last time I’d climbed these rocks, I wasn’t alone. Poetry leapt like bungee-jumpers on Bridge Day:

Steady churns, soft gurgles

of the calm current—

a small pocket of rocks

channel this watery solace

to raging rapids ahead.

The stillness here fills

an emptiness in my heart,

an unwavering peace—

only for a moment.

Curious travelers traverse boulders,

gaze up at massive steel

that arches between rich green hills.

You and I came here

on a humid day at lunchtime.

The sun vibrated overhead

while we climbed

the same mossy rocks.

You snapped a photo of me

squatting on a stone collective

above crystalline waters,

the one I used on social media,

the one on your nightstand.

I want to grip that photo,

think of how we hiked

barely touched trails

and smoked a joint.

Silent gray clouds hang above

as two rafts of people paddle

to the opposite shore; they

prepare to brave the rapids.

I, too, must prepare

for the waters ahead.

Alone.

I sat on the boulder for a piece longer, watching smeared, faceless bodies cram into a pair of vessels and hit the rapids. I pulled out another bag of my father’s ashes, tipped it into the water, and let the current carry his powdery bits downriver with the rafters.

***

A box.

A buttery smooth, six-sided container. Small and delicate enough to place on a shelf.

Perhaps a beautiful wooden composition. With an engraved image and engraved text. For years, that’s how I secretly pictured the urn for my father’s remaining ashes.

I only shared the secret with my partner, Zula, and my therapist. Urns aren’t exactly water-cooler talk at the office. Or a casual topic over dinner with a friend. It’s a conversation killer. An embarrassing mood destroyer. The vibe of the room immediately shifts when such a subject is introduced. No twentysomething trying to launch a publishing career wants to be labeled the lonely coworker. The fatherless employee. So, quietly, in my faraway Massachusetts existence, I dreamt about my father’s box.

His ashes sat, untouched, in a charcoal-colored plastic container. A drab home measuring 6.375 inches by 4.5 inches by 8.25 inches, courtesy of a Beckley, West Virginia, funeral home. The funeral home also provided a Certificate of Cremation with my father’s name in a sterilized sans serif. His cremated remains were placed in container No. 456. Four hundred fifty-five bodies had been incinerated before his. The employee who performed the cremation service signed the certificate—the only hint of a living, breathing person. Everything else was stamped. Printed. Emotionless. Dead.

***

For four years, thoughts of my father’s box bubbled. The molten mess finally erupted in early 2019. I broke down, couldn’t ignore the magmic feelings any longer. I had to find a better residence for my father’s cremated remains.

Zula suggested a custom-made urn and found a local artisan co-op. I liked a particular woodworker, who’d built an impressive replica of an old-fashioned camera. I sent a message to the co-op’s generic email address, requesting help with an urn project, unsure if anyone would answer. Surprisingly, the woodworker responded. I couldn’t believe someone would be interested, let alone a person whose work I admired. “The first idea that comes to me is some kind of turned vessel (as opposed to a box) . . .” he wrote.

A vessel? I wondered. Like, a vase?

The woodworker came to our home later in the week. A gentle handshake seemed to contradict his broad frame.

“This is what I’m thinking,” he said, immediately sitting down to sketch a cylinder-like shape. “A turned vessel.”

Vessel. The word dangled in my mind again. All I could think about were watercrafts. Like my uncle built at a shipyard. Vessels that carried rafters through the New River Gorge. Hollow vessels, void of centers.

The artisan launched into explanation: he’d turn two types of wood, fuse together their brown shades. He listed types of maple he’d like me to consider. He described the co-op machines he’d use.

“But this is obviously a very personal thing for you,” he closed the spiel. “You’re going to have it the rest of your life. And you want it to mean something.”

I peered at my notes. Turned wood. Maple. Machines. I nodded in agreement. A vessel it would be.

“Skyler, are you sure this is what you want?” Zula interjected. They scanned my eyes, searched for a clue of certainty. “Are you sure?”

Doubts percolated. Is a vessel too sophisticated? Does it fit my father? It’s not exactly the box I had in mind, but he’d respect the artistic effort, right? Self-reassurance surfaced, drowning my doubts. This guy is quite talented. If the vessel looks anything like that old-timey camera, I’ll be happy.

“I’m sure,” I replied. “It’s nice. The turned wood is cool.”

A few days later, the price quote screamed at me: Three. Thousand. Dollars. I felt like a balloon losing air, deflated, flattened. How could I scrounge together that kind of money? It cost more than my father’s cremation.

My father. What would he want? His split-tooth smile materialized in my mind. He’d balk at the price tag, that much I knew. I imagined him throwing up his lanky arms, telling me to cut a couple oak limbs hanging over Mamaw’s house. My father would want something that exuded West Virginia’s hills, I concluded. Not a fancy artistic vision in practice.

On what would have been my father’s fifty-eighth birthday, I emailed the woodworker. “I don’t feel right about the price or the design, and think I need to move in a different direction,” I wrote. My gut tightened as I hit send.

“Like your dad, like everything in your life,” Zula said, wrapping their arms over my shoulders, “it’s going to be a process.”

***

“I was thinkin’,” I said to Zula a few weeks later. “What about a woodworker from West Virginia?”

“I was thinking about that too,” they replied.

“It’d be a lot cheaper,” I continued, “and they would have easier access to local materials. There’s a place in Raleigh County, where I used to live, called Tamarack.”

“The best of West Virginia,” I threw up jazz hands for emphasis. “It’s an arts and craft showcase. Maybe I can find a woodworker there.”

“That sounds perfect,” Zula smiled.

Tamarack’s online directory listed dozens of West Virginia artisans. One woodworker’s projects caught my eye: a coffee table, a jewelry box, and a circular tabletop with a turned engraving of a compass—shades of tan, light brown, and mahogany all delicately displaying the wood’s natural grains. The woodworker’s profile read: “My work has always served a functional purpose.” I liked that. My father would like it too.

I emailed the woodworker, Zach, noting, “I would like a box as opposed to a vessel . . .”

Zach called me at work the next day. I rushed outside, spewed my vision for the urn:

I’d like a wooden box, similar in size to the drab container currently housing my father’s remains. With his name and birth and death dates engraved on it. The box must incorporate the New River Gorge Bridge. Since you carved that amazing compass table, certainly you can engrave the bridge, right? On the side? On the lid? I’m not sure about that part, but I know the bridge is a necessary feature. . . .

I stopped to breath and asked, “Whadda you think?”

“Well, I’m really honored you wanna hire me to do this,” Zach softly replied.

***

The New River Gorge Bridge is an amazing work of human architecture. It fits snugly between two mountains, rising 876 feet above whipping rapids. It’s easy to feel like a blot on a microscopic slide beneath the massive steel. In the mid-1970s, Tommy, then a teenager, and his friends snuck into the construction site, a maze of rust-colored beams jutting, curling, arching above the gorge. Tommy crawled around in one of the beams, navigating a jumbled path of bolts and metal.

I imagine the friends standing near the bald-faced strip of mountainside one summer night, crickets and cicadas chirping, moon’s face reflecting in the water below. A Deep Purple or Black Sabbath track plays on a radio. The boys clutch cans of beer and pass a joint, debating if Ritchie Blackmore or Tony Iommi is a better guitarist. One of the friends, beer in hand, dares someone to climb the unfinished bridge.

“I’ll do it,” Tommy puffs out his chest.

“Really?” the friend asks.

“Hellllll yeah!”

Tommy swigs the last of his drink, crushes the can in his fist. He approaches a beam, wipes clammy hands on his jeans, plants his feet on two welded bolts. Tommy grips and steps on bolts with each upward motion. His friends gawk and smoke and laugh and sip beer below.

“There’s an openin’ up here!” Tommy yells. “I’m goin’ in.”

“Careful, Tommy!” someone calls back.

Tommy crawls into a darkened opening between joists. The metal cools his sweaty hands and elbows. Tommy inches forward, further into shadow, out of moonglow. He can barely hear his friends’ chatters over the squeaking his body makes as he lurches along the tube. Tommy stops, and a steely silence settles in. He inhales, lets the crisp metal cradle him. He feels safe in the hollow vessel.

“Tommy!” a friend shouts, his voice echoing off the metallic walls. “Tommy, y’alright up there?”

Tommy’s moment of solitude evaporates. Time to return to his mates.

***

Zach and I talked design the next few weeks. I desired simplistic beauty—a curiosity-driving fixture that could enhance and blend into a natural scene. Like the New River Gorge Bridge. I wanted a horizontal box, and I wanted the bridge to be a central theme. I wanted the steel beams that hugged my father as a teenager to hug him eternally.

An idea I co-opted from the vessel artist was to source local wood. Zach and I agreed on maple and walnut—both widely available across West Virginia—which would be attached together, a beautiful contrast of natural woodgrains. Zach, who’d fished at the New River Gorge many times, assured me, “I want to come up with a special design for you and I think I know where I’m leaning.”

Then, he went silent for two months. Zach knew my father had been murdered. I never revealed who did it or why, afraid that any mention of Tommy’s violent past might turn Zach away. Still, I thought, maybe this project is too depressing. I let disappointment creep in and returned to my original tactic of complete avoidance.

When Zach finally emailed, he explained that he’d had a series of family emergencies. He also shared some positive news: “I am working on a prototype that I think will not only convey my vision but also aid in completion of the project. I will send you some pictures when it is complete as well as pictures of the wood I’ll be using. I think it will be great.” He added, “If you think you want to get someone else to get it done more quickly, I completely understand.” But I didn’t want to hire anyone else. Zach’s words read earnestly. They were sturdy, from the heart. Not hollow, like a vessel.

Zach sent the prototype photos as promised. I opened them on my lunch break. A lump formed in my throat. My mouth pursed. My eyes welled up. Shit! my mind buzzed. I can’t cry at my desk. It’s inappropriate for the workplace. Thoughts of being a conversation killer resurfaced. Everyone will break out their sad eyes and long sighs. I choked down the lump and exhaled. Zach hadn’t messily sketched a blueprint at my kitchen table. Or pitched a vessel concept. He took time, mulled it over. Zach cared about the project, about honoring my father’s memory. And he’d nailed it.

Early on, Zach said he wanted to build legs for the box. I didn’t think much of it until seeing the prototype. “The arch on the legs is scaled down mathematically from the actual bridge specs,” Zach wrote. Legs cut to the precise angle of the New River Gorge Bridge’s single arch. I was astonished. Instead of being an aesthetic component, the bridge was the box. My father’s cremated remains could rest comfortably inside the bridge, its arch(es) forever holding him steady. Cradling him in death as they’d done in life. “A lot of thought and precision went into the building of the bridge, and I feel the same way about this project,” I wrote back. “I know my dad would appreciate all the work you’re putting into it.”

Zach and I finalized the details, figuring out how each jagged piece of my father’s memory fit into the box. Over the next few months, Zach assembled corner joints, like puzzle piece ends, tan-and-red-striped tiger maple, beautifully contrasting rich, dark brown walnut. Extra details—a hinged lid, a keyhole—further signaled his careful attention.

The box had its bones, but still needed an engraving to signify its contents. My father’s name, birth and death dates, some kind of relational label. That was all fine, and I wanted that stuff, but it didn’t fully personify him. I needed some flair.

I recalled laying on my parent’s wide bed as my father popped in a VHS.

“Ready ta rock, son?” he grinned, then fast-forwarded until Riki Rachtman appeared on screen.

“Headbangers Ball!” Riki shouted.

My father curled up next to me. Big hair and big noise filled the room, rocking us around. We bobbed our heads in unison.

Once, at a cookout, the opening riff of “Man in the Box” roared from the radio.

“Dad-day!” I yelled, running across the backyard, flashing devil horns, heavy metal’s universal signal. “It’s Alice in Chains!”

“Sure is, son,” he said, chuckling as he tended the grill.

Heavy metal became my father’s ethos. Tommy fully embraced a freewheelin’, grimy, Sunset Strip lifestyle: long hair, black leather and spikes, drug use, women. Hair metal isn’t what I aspired to be, but it’s precisely the flair I wanted to capture on my father’s box.

As a kid, Quiet Riot’s “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” was one of my favorite Headbangers Ball videos: a longhaired metalhead, sitting straightjacketed in a padded room, tubes squirming in every direction, iconic steel mask covering his face. His mission: escape the institution and make it to the Quiet Riot show! One lyrical passage—music louder and more powerful, rocking late into the night—embodied my father’s heavy metal identity. Zach engraved it on the lid at my request, beneath the other text.

After nearly ten months, my father’s urn puzzle was complete: a gorgeously constructed wooden box measuring 6.5 inches by 8 inches by 14 inches. My palm planed the lid. I traced the arched legs with my fingers. Rubbed the corner joists. Smelled the wood. I didn’t believe in perfect, but this felt like the closest thing to it. Shortly after receiving the box, Zach’s partner messaged me on Facebook:

I have never, ever witnessed my husband more lovingly make a piece of art as this piece he has made for you and your father. . . .

He has made some outstanding pieces. But this, my friend, was truly a labor of love. I hope to meet you for a beer on my next visit [to Massachusetts].

I stared at the words, dumbfounded, unsure of what to say. It validated everything I felt about Zach, and the box. This was, undoubtedly, a serendipitous connection. A right-place-right-time-right-feeling encounter. Despite all his faults, my father, in death, delivered new friendship.

***

A container for cremated remains can take on many forms, can mean something different to each surviving person. The journey to find the right receptacle can be short and straight or long and winding. During my process, two paths emerged:

First, a vessel. Smooth. Organic. Abstract. A vessel, a craft transporting goods or people. A vessel, a vein circulating blood to hands and feet and organs. A vessel, a hollowed-out form. A vessel, a lively body.

Second, a box. Linear. Formulaic. Defined. A box, a receptacle keeping items safe and secure. A box, a container filling shelves and closets and basements. A box, a storage carton. A box, a lifeless object.

I chose a box. Six sides, each revealing a story. Tommy, a man of storied sides: father, son, murderer, victim, alive, dead.

***