Stephen King: Cookie Jar

All this was nothing to tell a boy of thirteen, so he merely said, “I was with the Americans who liberated two of the German death camps, near the end. It was pretty awful.”

He was relieved when Dale didn’t pursue this. His great-grandson had something else in mind. “Did you get the cookie jar out of the attic when you came home?”

“Eventually.” Rhett smiled. “But the first thing I did was to give that watch back to my brother Pete, because it was the first thing he asked for.”

“He sounds like kind of a dickhead,” Dale said, then added hastily, “If you don’t mind me saying.”

“I don’t, and he was, but he mellowed over time. He was a good husband and a good father.”

Also, he never knew about the cookie jar, Rhett thought but didn’t say. And he never saw what I saw, from Omaha Beach in Normandy to Dachau, where the dead had lain in the open long enough to lose their hair.

Rhett stayed with his father at first, his father who had grown prematurely old and moved slowly, his back humped into a shape like a turtle’s shell. Pete had begun talking about putting him in a home, and Rhett supposed that would be the best thing, although it seemed cruel—like putting him out with the garbage. In the meantime, father and son rubbed along well enough, with Rhett doing the shopping and most of the housecleaning after putting in a day at the auto-repair shop where he had caught on as a mechanic (and which he later owned).

He worked hard, but slept badly.

One night in March of 1946, after his father had gone to bed and while a sleet-thickened wind slapped at the house, Rhett went up to the attic. The cookie jar was where he had left it, behind a carton of boxed-up glassware from when a sane mother had lived in this house. Rhett hefted it, half expecting it to be light, its magic gone, but it was still full.

He took it down the narrow flight of stairs cradled against his belly and sat with it on the bed, where Jack had sat beside him so many times. He lifted the lid and breathed deep, smelling chocolate and vanilla and cinnamon and butter. Good smells. Fresh smells. Ones he had remembered and longed for in the heat of a French summer and the cold of a German winter. The smell of newly baked cookies that had always pervaded his mother’s little house, where she had danced to the Victrola and given them custard in little green cups.

My mother, the good witch, Rhett thought, and this fucking thing drove her mad. The way my memories of the war will drive me mad, if I let them. Is there always a Red Henry, a Black Adolf? Does there have to be? Why does there have to be?

The anger that had floated in him ever since Buchenwald—his own forza—coalesced into a dark cloud, and he upended the jar, spilling out a flood of cookies that overflowed the bed and made a mountain on the floor. At last, just when he began to think they would continue pouring out until he was drowning in ginger snaps and peanut-butter smoothies, they stopped. He raised the jar, tilting it up to the ceiling like a telescope, and peered in.

“What did you see?” Dale asked. “Was it just the bottom?”

“No,” Rhett said. “Not the bottom.”

Once, in late 1944, during a lull in the fighting between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the USO had arrived with a projector and a stack of film cans. There were popcorn and bottles of soda pop, and the soldiers watched, mesmerized, as a double-feature movie show was projected onto a bedsheet. There was a color cartoon (“Ehhh…what’s up, Doc?”), a travelogue about Bali or Mali or one of those places, and then a double feature of The Maltese Falcon and Yankee Doodle Dandy. But what Rhett remembered when he peered into the uptilted cookie jar was the MovieTone newsreel that came between the cartoon and the travelogue. There had been a feature about a scientific wonder of the Army Air Force called the Norden Bombsight. What he saw through the bottom of the cookie jar was exactly like that, only without the crosshairs.

It was disorienting, because he was looking down, even though the jar grasped in his hands was tilted up. What he saw was distorted at the edges, but the central image was achingly clear. He could pick out each blackened, twisted tree in the Long Forest, burned by Black John’s raiders. He could only see the top of Lookout Hill, because the rest had been obscured by drifting white clouds of forza, and he knew that everything beneath that mist—every animal, every human being—was dead. When he moved the cookie jar a bit (“Less than two inches to the left,” he told Dale), leagues of land blurred past below, making him feel nauseous. When he held the jar still again, he saw Regency Road, curving like a snake on its way between Castle Black and Castle Red, just as it had on his mother’s wall-map all those years ago, before the world had gone insane for the second time in a single century.

“I saw a horse pulling a covered wagon,” he told Dale. “A peddler’s wagon. It was just as clear as could be. The front of it had been festooned with charms to ward off evil, but they didn’t help, because two great white things came bursting out of the burnt husks of those trees and attacked it.”

“Gobbits,” Dale breathed.

“Yes. Gobbits. They were as big as timberwolves, but hairless and headless. Their shapes kept changing, as if they were made of jelly instead of flesh. I saw the man on the seat drop the reins and put his hands over his face. As if he wanted to die without seeing the horrors that were going to kill him. The strength ran out of my arms and I dropped the jar.”

“Did it break? It did, didn’t it?”

“No. I think it would have if it had landed on the floor, but instead it landed on cookies. That mountain of cookies. The bedroom stank of them.”

The bingo game was over, and the inhabitants of the Good Life Retirement Home were making their slow way past Rhett’s open door toward the next station of the cross, which would be lunch—noodles in some sort of sauce seemed likely. It was time to wrap this up, but he was not sorry he’d told the boy about his mother’s cookie jar. Best-case scenario, Dale would see it as a kind of fable. Worst case, he’d think old great-gramps had gone gaga. And was that so wrong? Buchenwald and Dachau had knocked him crooked, and he’d never been really straight afterward. Yet he had done his best in small ways—volunteering in the city’s soup kitchen, working with kids from homes that were poor, broken, or both—to straighten some things. He still thought things like that mattered; even two bits in a bum’s upturned hat mattered. The world might be as awful as ever, but at least he had never joined the endlessly warring armies of Black John and Red Henry. Uncle Sam’s army had been enough for him. When he mustered out of that one, he mustered out for good.

“By the end of the war, my dad—your great-great-grandfather—was suffering from arthritis in his hips, knees, and ankles. Climbing the stairs every evening to go to bed was slow and painful. It hurt just to watch him. It was dangerous, too, because his balance was untrustworthy. Eventually I called my big brother on the phone, and the two of us converted Dad’s study on the first floor into a bedroom. So I had the second floor entirely to myself, and considering the sea of cookies in my room after I dumped the jar, that was good. It was three nights before I could get rid of them. On the second night, he asked me what that vanilla smell was, coming from upstairs.”

“What did you say?”

Rhett smiled. “That I didn’t smell anything, of course. He said it reminded him of my mother. ‘She baked so much that vanilla was her perfume,’ he said.”

Dale wasn’t much interested in this, either. “How’d you get rid of them, Rhett? How’d you get rid of all those cookies?”