by Sandra Kring
The minister is wearing a white robe with a sash slung around his shoulder. It has patches on it, just like the Girl Scout sash the little girl who gave me the leaf wore outside to play in on Tuesdays, after her meetings. He is wearing round metal glasses and has a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard. The frayed cuffs of his jeans and the tips of his dirty sneakers show when he takes a step to the left or to the right. He talks about Jesus dying and about how women prepared his body for death. Then he veers off to talk about how we must honor God by tending to our bodies too. Oma’s head leans in a little farther when he starts in about the empty food we eat and how it’s God’s wish that we replace what our food doesn’t give us so that we can show our gratitude for the gift of our flesh. I glance at Aunt Jeana to see if she notices that Grandpa Sam’s ceremony is starting to sound like an infomercial, but she doesn’t seem to.
I can hear Connie Olinger sniffling, and a few other ladies too, but no one in our row is crying.
WHEN WE first got here, we all stood together so that the guests could give us their condolences. All of us, that is, except Mom, who went outside to sit with Peter in his SUV. Uncle Clay was talking to the guy from First National about the vineyards in Napa Valley, and Oma was trying to comfort Connie Olinger, who sobbed as though it was Barry in that casket. Barry waited beside them, nervously glancing at the door. He was wearing a short-sleeve Hawaiian print shirt and had the sleeves rolled once, to show his new “tat”—a trout leaping from a stream.
Aunt Jeana was standing in a pool of old ladies who were ogling Chico as they talked about what a “good showing” it was, with every folding chair taken and folks standing in the back of the room and in the opened doorway. “Everybody loved Sam,” they agreed.
I went to stand by Milo for a bit, but we didn’t talk. He was off in his own little world, probably still reciting the digits of pi in his head. That’s when she walked in the door: Maude Tuttle, in her big red wig, dressed to the hilt, as Oma would say. Nordine Bickett was on her arm, her hair and makeup as pretty as her lavender flowered dress.
The old women that Aunt Jeana stood with stopped and stared, as did a few of the old men standing in circles—though unlike the ladies, they wore sly grins on their faces instead of contempt. There was silence for a moment, then the soft buzz of gossip.
I went up to Maude and Nordine and said, “Thank you for coming,” as I’d heard Oma say to many while we stood in some sort of receiving line.
“Hi, kid,” Maude said.
“Maude, Nordine … how nice of you to come.” I turned and Oma was beside me. She reached her hand out and squeezed both of theirs, and the buzzing in the room intensified.
“I thought she should come,” Maude said, jerking her head toward Nordine. “I hope you don’t mind, Lillian. Course, she could be at the Taj Mahal, for all she knows, but I still thought she should come.”
Oma nodded. “Would you like to see Sam? The service will be starting soon.”
“Crissakes,” Maude said when she saw Grandpa Sam, his face caked in thick orangey makeup, his thin hair shellacked into crusty waves. His hands were folded on his chest, the right hand on top. “Who in the hell did his makeup?” Maude said. “He looks like a goddamn pumpkin.”
Maude shook her head, then she looked down at Nordine. “Do you know who that is, Nordine?”
Nordine stared down at Grandpa Sam, while we stared at her. Finally she said, “I don’t know. But I know I loved him very much.”
Others came up to see Grandpa Sam and talk to Oma, so I wandered off with Maude and Nordine. “Miss Tuttle,” I said when we found a spot to stand that wasn’t crowded—which wasn’t difficult, considering that folks scattered like stirred houseflies wherever Maude Tuttle stepped. “At Nordine’s house, when you said that my grandpa stopped my dad from hurting my mom, ‘one way or another,’ what exactly did you mean?”
“Still pickin’?” she asked.
“I know about the gun now. But my mom and my grandma remember it differently. Mom claims that Grandpa didn’t step in to protect her but only attacked my dad when he pointed the gun at him. Oma says that’s not true, that he stepped in the second Howard pointed the pistol at her.”
“I don’t know about that part. Your grandpa didn’t say.”
“Why did my grandpa go to you afterward? What did he need to confess?” I ask.
Maude pursed her lips and looked up. “He was sorry, kid. Cried like a baby when he admitted that he’d taken a life. He knew he had a choice. He told me himself that he had the kid down and he could have stopped right there.
“Maude here, she always tells it like it is. And I told him why he pulled the trigger—though I think at that point he knew why himself. I told him that he wasn’t trying to kill that boy. He was trying to kill the beast inside himself. The same beast that was looking him square in the face at that moment.”
“Okay,” I said, and for whatever reason, I didn’t cry. Instead, I took Maude’s arm, and I led her and Nordine to two vacated chairs. After they were seated, I pulled the photograph of Nordine and Grandpa Sam from my pocket and discreetly handed it to Maude. “Give this to Mrs. Bickett later, will you?” Maude glanced at it, nodded, and slipped it into her purse, and I went to join my family because the minister was about to start.
THE CHURCH organist is the same woman who sold us the lemongrass tea and herbal remedies at the health-food store. Dressed in a skirt the color of new grass, she bangs at the organ keys like a toddler pounding on the tray of her high chair. We’re supposed to be singing “Amazing Grace,” but right in the middle of it, Aunt Jeana leans over Oma and asks me, “You have his eulogy?”
She’s talking about the words she wrote last night about Grandpa Sam. She asked me to read them because she doesn’t like talking in front of crowds and because, she said, I was the one person in the family who was good to her brother while he was dying. I open my sweaty palm and show her the damp folded sheet of lined school paper, and she nods.
“And now,” the minister says, “the family would like to share some final words about Sam. Sam’s granddaughter, uh”—he glances down at his notes—“Daisy,” he says, “will read them.”
“Lucy. My name’s Lucy.”
I go up to the wooden pulpit, walking with my legs close together—because even if Mom says the adhesive on the bottom of my teen-sized pad will keep it securely in place, it doesn’t feel like it will—and I unfold Aunt Jeana’s paper. I stare down at the long list of names and dates and sketchy details. In the room, I can hear the sound of impatience: a shuffling shoe, a baby fussing, someone’s nervous throat-clearing, and the creaking of a couple folded chairs. And still, I just stand there.
“Lucy,” Aunt Jeana hisses. “Read the paper.”
And then Oma’s whisper: “Honey, you want me to do it?”
I don’t answer them. I just fold the paper back up and scoot the little square into the corner of the podium. I look out at the crowd and see a hundred eyes watching me, waiting.
“This is the first funeral I’ve ever been to,” I begin. “And I guess this is the part where we put something personal into the ceremony, so that the whole thing doesn’t sound like just another sermon—though I suspect it already doesn’t. Anyway, I believe what we say now is supposed to recap the life of the deceased.”
I look down at the square of paper. “I have something here to read about my grandpa, but … well … I’m not sure that a list of when he graduated, and married, and what he did for a living says too much about who he was. And since I came here to learn just that, I think what I’ll do instead is to tell you what I learned. About him and … well … what I learned.”
“What’s she doing?” Aunt Jeana says in a voice not quite a whisper.
I clear my throat, then close my eyes and let the words come.
“Every one of you in this room, with the exception of my mom’s boyfriend, Peter, and my twin brother, Milo—and no, we’re not identical—knew my grandpa Sam longer than I did
. He was the one you worked next to, the one who stopped people from making fun of you, and he was the one who made your kid’s toboggan, or the one who talked to you in the lobby of the First National. And the Sam McGowan you knew was friendly, and nice, and good. Well, unless maybe you were the one whose house he went to when he needed to purge his sins.”
“Purge his sins?” Aunt Jeana says, and Oma makes shushing sounds.
“Up until a couple of months ago, I didn’t know my grandpa Sam at all. But I thought about him a lot. Just like I thought about my birth father—a person most of you probably knew of before me too, at least from the gossip.
“Grandpa Sam was sick by the time I met him. He’d had strokes that damaged his frontal lobe, and his strokes made him turn the TV channels compulsively, until someone took the remote away. He said himself that his brain was broken, so I know he understood. What he didn’t know, though, was that he couldn’t work anymore. Lots of times, he’d take his lunch pail and head out the door. And once, after he’d found his truck keys, he got away and drove through three counties, probably looking for the mill, and nothing stopped him, but for the Bicketts’ garage door.
“But you probably know all of this stuff already. So I guess I should tell you some things about him you might not know.
“My Grandpa liked dogs, and women, and cinnamon. He used to live in a boxcar and had to go to work when he was still a boy because it was the Depression, and his family couldn’t afford to feed him. His dad used to beat him, so my grandpa grew up to beat people too. Good people like my grandma, and my uncle Clay, and maybe not-so-good people too, like Richard Marbles—my apologies for saying that, Mr. Marbles, if you’re here.
“My grandpa didn’t beat up my mom, but then, if you know anything about psychology, you already know that if a kid sees somebody beating up your mom or your brother, then they might as well be beating you up too, because you feel every blow in your own body, anyway.”
“What is she doing?” Aunt Jeana says, loud enough now that they can probably hear her a good five rows back. Again, Oma hushes her.
“I know a lot about a lot of things,” I continue. “I’m people-smart, and I can remember where in a book I’ve read things, right down to what paragraph I’ve read them in. My whole family is smart—my twin brother, especially—and Grandpa Sam, I’m told, was smart before he got sick too. He had a room in his house filled with books, and artifacts, and things he liked to study. He had a dog he named Feynman, after Richard P. Feynman. And he didn’t like noise when he was watching the news, or red squirrels, or blue jays, or to be called dumb. I think maybe he was the one in the family who taught my mom and my uncle that being smart is the most important thing in the world a person can be, and then this belief was passed down to my brother and me.
“Being smart didn’t help me any, though, when I came here to Timber Falls and tried to learn who my grandpa was. I learned it, all right, but not the way I normally learn things. I learned that he had a gift for working with wood. That he carved birds and bent the ends of slabs of wood so that kids could slide down hills on nice toboggans—something he himself never had the chance to do. Or his kids either, for that matter. And I learned that he once put my grandma’s head through a wall and broke my uncle Clay’s nose.” I hear a gasp, echoed by more.
“My grandpa didn’t like celery or for people to drop in and see the family messes, and he certainly didn’t like how mean he was. But the one thing he did like in this world was Nordine Bickett.”
“This is an outrage!” Aunt Jeana says, rising to her feet. “Lucy! Stop this this instant!” She turns to Mom, to Oma. “Aren’t you going to stop her?”
“I’m not trying to be disrespectful, Aunt Jeana,” I say. “I’m only paying my tribute to Grandpa Sam. To who he was.”
Aunt Jeana cradles Chico in her arm, bends over and snatches her purse from the foot of her chair, and stomps out. People watch her go, and a couple of them grin, but most just stare, their eyes wide and blinking, as if they’d expected to go to a funeral but stumbled into a circus instead.
“Anyway,” I continue, “I learned a lot from my grandpa in the few months I knew him. I learned that what we see in others is only a small part of who they really are. And that good and bad often go hand in hand. And I learned that being hurt causes hurt. What else I learned is that even empty places where a father or a grandfather should be aren’t really empty, because they’re filled with things like longing and hurt and mistrust. And I learned that love doesn’t mean a real lot if it’s felt on the inside but can’t be shown on the outside. I learned, too, that we can, and do, love people who aren’t perfect, because I really did come to love my grandpa Sam. And he sure wasn’t perfect.
“Just like I learned a lot from my grandpa’s last weeks on earth, I think he learned some things during that time too. From what I can tell, he was the kind who always did things for other people, but maybe he didn’t let people do things for him. And I know that being strong was something he thought was important, probably as important as being smart. So maybe, as we spooned cereal into his mouth and my Oma changed his diapers, maybe he learned that sometimes we have to let people do things for us too, and that it can be okay to be weak sometimes.
“And I know he learned to be sorry.
“So I guess that’s about all I have to say about my grandpa Sam, except that I’ll miss him, probably like you will. Thank you.”
The room is silent but for the clip-clop sound of my shoes on the scuffed wooden floor. And when I reach my chair, Mom and Peter and Oma reach over to squeeze and pat me and to smile in spite of their tears. Milo isn’t smiling, though. He looks mortified as he turns to Mom and says, “We’re giving our oral reports here? Nobody told me!”
EVERYONE GOES outside to smoke or to stand in small groups to wait and soak up the sunshine, which has decided to warm the day so that one can almost believe spring is coming instead of winter. Soon we’re going out to the cemetery so Grandpa Sam can be put to rest—because the frost hasn’t set hard in the ground quite yet—then we’re coming back here to the church to have the lunch the ladies in this makeshift church prepared out of Franken-free food, which pleases Oma, of course. Peter holds one of my hands, and Oma the other, as we start down the church steps.
We head toward the string of cars lined up along the street, the black hearse first in line, because Grandpa Sam is going to lead this parade too.
As Peter is opening the door to his SUV so we can slip inside, a rusty blue Ford pickup comes barreling around the corner. I recognize it immediately.
The truck stops with a screech and a thud, right in the middle of the road, and Henry Bickett, wild-haired and wild-eyed, steps out.
“Nordine? Nordine!” he shouts.
He gets out of his truck and runs up the line of cars, where people hang half in and half out, staring at him. “Nordine? Where are you?”
He spots Maude Tuttle and races toward her, darting around to where teeny Nordine is standing tucked under her arm, like a chick hiding under her mother’s wing. “Damn it, Nordine,” he shouts, loud enough that we can all hear him. “I knew I’d find you here! How many times I gotta tell you to stay away from that damn scoundrel?” He grabs Nordine by the coat sleeve and tugs her back to his beat-up Ford, raising his fist toward us and shouting as he goes. “And I want my goddamn garage door fixed, McGowans!”
chapter
THIRTY-ONE
WE’RE OUTSIDE, three days after Grandpa Sam’s funeral, standing under flurries falling down over the ten inches of snow we got early yesterday. Peter is putting our overnight bags in the back of his Suzuki, Mom is slipping into the front seat, and Oma is positioning her Angels, protect me on my journey pewter clip on the visor above the driver’s side.
We’re going on a weekend trip up to Bayfield to meet Peter’s family, including his niece who’s read Little Women fifteen times and his dad, who can still walk on his hands. Peter wants to see his family one more time, and he want
s us to meet them. He says the little break will do us good, because we’ve all been under a lot of stress.
As I watch Oma pat the angel clip after saying a prayer, I think of how she’s probably wearing that pretty skirt—shorter than she normally wears—and navy tights that hug her Tina Turner legs because of Peter’s dad. She sure asked a lot of questions about him after Peter invited us to go, and she didn’t exactly sound sincere when she said it was a shame that his flight was canceled yesterday because of the storm. “Is he heading out today?” she asked at breakfast, after Peter got off the phone with his brother. “Clay’s heading out any minute now, so I suppose all flights are good to go today.”
She grinned when Peter said his father decided to stay an extra day or two in order to meet us. And later, while I helped her put the washed bedding back on the bed Grandpa Sam died in, she got all dreamy-eyed when she said, “What do you think of the name Aphrodite? I think it has a nice ring to it, don’t you?” Aphrodite. The goddess of fertility, love, and beauty.
Aunt Jeana’s keeping Feynman until we get back, and she promised he can stay inside, as long as he sleeps in the study. Milo’s filled his dishes, plus three more, to the brim. I can tell he’s worried by the way he’s staring at the house, though, his eyebrows dipped down under his plastic frames.
After we meet Peter’s family, we’re coming back here to Timber Falls—Mom, Milo, Oma, and me—to help Aunt Jeana ready the house for an estate sale. Mom and Milo and I are also going to get measured for our clothes for Mitzy and Ray’s wedding, which is just a few weeks away. Peter’s coming to the wedding too, and even though Ray doesn’t know him well, he’s asked him to be one of the groomsmen, because he doesn’t have any brothers or male cousins and only one really close friend.
Peter’s going to Chicago first, though, because he has to get back to his classes. When we’re done in Timber Falls, we’re heading back too, in Roger’s Mustang. Milo’s first pi competition is in five weeks, and Mom thinks that she’ll have found us an apartment by then. Her first royalty check from her Christian romance is on its way, which she says means we’ll be able to rent a nicer place, maybe closer to a better park, so Milo and I can ride our bikes and, as Oma added, sit closer to the earth. We’re going to stay at Peter’s while Mom hunts for an apartment. I’d rather stay at Peter’s forever, and Peter would rather we did too, but like Oma says, Mom, she needs time to warm up to an idea.
