by Ninie Hammon
“Now, get yoreself up here on this porch so’s I can have a look at you. My eyes ain’t what they usta be.”
He suspected her eyes were every bit as sharp as they had ever been, but he welcomed the invitation and fairly bounded up onto the porch.
Then he stood self-conscious for a moment until she reached out to him.
“Ain’t you gonna give yore Granny no sugars?”
He folded the old woman tenderly into his arms. She smelled of homemade soap and felt much more frail than she looked. She hugged him back, tight, and made a little groaning sound in her throat. When he gave her a kiss on her wrinkled cheek, he could see the bright sheen of tears in her eyes.
“C’mon in this house, son,” she scolded, and shooed him toward the door. “Me and you, we got us a powerful lot of catchin’ up to do.”
Will hated trailer houses; he had long suspected that hell itself had been designed to fit on a trailer hitch. The horrid tin boxes might be all a lot of people could afford, but in his eyes they were a blight on the landscape that stuck out on the mountainsides like pimples on an eighth-grader. If the decision were his, he’d make it a felony to bring one into Eastern Kentucky, and he’d blow up the ones already here. Mountain people would be better off in caves.
For all that, he was struck by several things when he stepped into this one. It had a large family room, separated from the open kitchen by a counter. A table and six chairs sat at the kitchen end of the room, a couch, two comfortable-looking chairs and a television set occupied the other end. A Nintendo that dangled from the television like a small tumor obviously provided entertainment for her herd of nameless grandchildren.
Neat, tidy, and clean. Will knew without looking that you could safely perform open-heart surgery on the kitchen floor. The room was bright too; most mountain homes were dreary. You needed a lot of windows to ward off gloominess when the sky never glowed yellow and pink at sunrise or ushered in the night in a blaze of a red-gold sunset, and when a day’s 14 hours of sunlight translated into 9 hours of shadow. This room owed its cheeriness to patio doors that opened on the deck that encircled the whole structure. Will had admired its craftsmanship from the road. Whoever had built it was good with his hands.
A fat tabby cat lay in front of the doors awaiting a sun that wouldn’t shine through them again until tomorrow. The furniture was well-used but not beat-up and rickety. And here in the land of velvet-Elvis paintings, Granny’s walls were exquisitely bare. In a culture skewed toward rubber tomahawks and Precious Moments figurines, Granny had adorned the room with striking artistry.
Simple carvings, beautifully crafted sculptures, and detailed relief murals—all made from some form of coal—were displayed like beautiful ornaments on a Christmas tree.
A menagerie of small figures—cats, goats, ducks, raccoons, mama bear and two babies—sat on shelves above the couch. An eagle snatched up a rabbit off the coffee table. A bookcase with no books was home to several busts, no one Will recognized except Granny. It was a remarkable likeness. Her face had not been glamorized; the artist had perfectly captured the simple dignity of her plain features and translated them into something like nobility.
What particularly drew Will’s attention was a scene etched in relief on a slab of some form of coal that had been polished as shiny as the hood of a new car. Probably 3 feet wide, it hung above the fireplace mantle and Will stepped closer to get a better look. The detail in the artwork was astonishing. Three miners, lunch pails in hand, strode side by side toward a mine entrance in the background, so lifelike they could have been walking out of the room. Even shown from the back, each man was an individual. The one on the left had his helmet cocked back on his head and wore his pants tucked into his work boots. The man on the right wore a kerchief tied around his neck and was dressed in a T-shirt that showed his muscular arms. The man in the middle was the tallest and thinnest of the three. The shirt stretched tight across his broad shoulders was tucked into a pair of jeans rather than work pants, and he carried his helmet in his hand.
Will felt a sudden chill. The hair stood up on the back of his neck and goose bumps popped out on his arms. No, these three miners couldn’t possibly be…
He turned to ask Granny about the mural—and the artist—but she loaded and fired first.
“Sit yourself down here on the couch. The spring’s broke in that chair and it’s all lumpy like, and that recliner goes all the way back if ’n you ain’t careful. Liked to dumped me out in the floor the other day.”
She sat and patted the cushion next to her. Before Will’s backside ever touched fabric, she said pleasantly, “I know what you come home for, son. But you don’t. You think you do, but you’re wrong.”
Will collapsed the final 6 inches onto the couch when his knees buckled out from under him. Well, Granny always had been open and direct.
“You wouldn’t never left in the first place ’thout you had a powerful reason.” She paused. “You pro’lly don’t think I understand that, but I do. What I don’t git is why you stayed gone so long.”
Oh, he had a reason to leave all right. But some days he had the eerie feeling that he hadn’t left voluntarily at all, that circumstances had hurled him out into the darkness and he’d searched for 20 years to find his way back.
He took a deep breath. “I came home because…” Then he chickened out. “…because it was time.”
Will had a speech all worked out. Had practiced it in his head dozens of times. Now, he couldn’t remember a word of it. No, that wasn’t true. He could remember it. He just couldn’t screw himself up to actually saying the words out loud.
It was like she’d read his mind. “You and me, we got a lot to talk about. You got stuff to say. I got stuff to say. But we don’t got to say none of it right now.” She patted his arm. “’Cept maybe ’bout your daddy. Do you know that he…?”
“Died. Yes, I know.”
“Didn’t nobody have any idea where to find you to tell you ’bout it when it happened. He wasn’t much of a father, but he was the onliest one you had, and I was powerful sorry to put him in the ground ’thout you bein’ here. How’d you find out?”
“I called the post office 5 or 6 years ago, said I wanted to ‘verify’ his address and they told me he didn’t live there anymore. Said he’d been dead for 9 years.”
Will had been in a hospital in Atlanta after he’d staggered out into the street and got hit by a taxi. He shouldn’t have survived the altercation. But drunks were like rag dolls; they rolled with punches that would have killed the sober. Absent the blessed, blurring oblivion of alcohol, the images in his mind resolved into a focus as sharp as an assassin’s dagger. As he lay on crisp white sheets that smelled like starch instead of vomit, the lonely ache had overwhelmed him and he had reached out—not to connect, just to peek into his world from the outside through a slit in the curtains. He hadn’t been surprised that his father was dead; he had been surprised by the effect the news had on him. He had pulled out the IVs, slipped out of bed, dressed in his filthy clothes and disappeared into the night—was blind drunk in less than an hour. Booze dulled the pain of his broken ribs, but not his broken heart. He hadn’t been grieving his father’s death; he’d been hiding from other losses he didn’t want to know about.
“Even if I’d been notified, I wouldn’t have come home for the funeral—for the same reason I never came back at all.” Will drew in another deep breath and braced himself. “And that was because…”
“Didn’t we just agree we was gonna work up to that? We got plenty of time.” She reached out and touched his cheek, her big hands soft as a butterfly kiss. “Of course, Bow always said if ’n you got to eat a frog, don’t look at it too long. And if ’n you got to eat two frogs, eat the big ’un first.”
Bow. She’d always made a little sighing sound when she said his name, and she still did, even after all these years. Ricky Dan used to say his parents had “a thang,” the whatever-it-was that kept a marriage a love affair through
a man coming home every night exhausted, with nothing left of himself to give his family. So dirty the black wouldn’t come out of his skin. And with his fingers smashed, and you felt relieved it wasn’t worse. Through squalling babies, lay-offs, strikes, near-misses in the mine and always, always, always too much month left at the end of the money.
Sometimes, she didn’t tell Bowman things—a bill had come they couldn’t pay, the car was leaking oil or the tires were bald. She organized her whole world around making sure he didn’t worry; a distracted miner was a dead miner.
Will had watched Ma pack her husband’s lunch pail in the morning hundreds of times. Years later, he had come out of a blackout slumped on the back row of a Catholic church during communion, and he’d watched in a daze. That was how it had looked when Ma loaded that bucket. She had worked to make everything perfect, sparkling clean, set in that metal box with so much love, care, and concern, it was sacred.
The first thing she put in the bucket every morning was a neatly folded piece of paper, down on the bottom, under everything else. Will asked her once what it was and she’d smiled the kind of smile he wouldn’t understand for years and said it was “’tween me’n Bow.” Will tried a number of times to get a look at one of the notes, searched Bowman’s pail after he got home from the mine but could never find one. He always wondered what Bowman did with the notes after he read them.
Will became aware that she was silent, quietly studying him. She could sit so still she didn’t even appear to breathe, erect as a piano teacher, with those big, man’s hands folded in her lap as prim as Cinderella waiting for Prince Charming to ask her to dance.
Will felt suddenly disoriented, like he’d been living for decades outside the province of the normal laws that governed the universe—light, dark, and gravity. And now that her presence had invoked those laws again, set the world back aright, the globe was spinning so fast he couldn’t seem to catch up with it to jump on.
This, here, now, was real. Had all the rest of it been illusion?
“I’ve got a lot of frogs to eat in the next few days, Ma…Granny.” He looked into her cinnamon eyes, not cloudy like most old people’s eyes, but with whites as clear as snowballs. “Bigger frogs than you can possibly imagine. Frogs with claws and jagged teeth and…” He literally shook; a tremor ran through him like he’d received a low-power electric shock. “I’ll get to them all. I have to get to them all. I’m—”
“Plumb wore out is what you are.” She stopped. “And there’s some’m wrong with the way you talk, too.”
If his gut hadn’t been tied in knots, Will would have laughed. The 18-year-old kid who’d fled the mountains two decades ago had been determined to erase his past. But to do that, he had to leave his Eastern Kentucky accent behind, too. If he’d known when he started how hard that would be, he’d probably never have attempted it. He began by teaching himself to listen, really listen to the speech patterns around him. Then, he practiced for hours, pronouncing words the way others did. It was way harder than creative cursing; the process took years. It would have been easier to learn a foreign language.
It also took years to accept the paradox, get comfortable with the contradiction in his sense of who he was and where he’d come from. He had desperately wanted to blot out every trace of his past; at the same time, he’d been passionately proud of his heritage. He wouldn’t let anyone make fun of his beloved mountains, cracked a lot of heads defending hillbilly honor.
It was ironic—back in the mountains now—he was the one who sounded like a foreigner.
“I guess I picked up how folks outside the mountains talk,” he lied.
“Well, you’d best put down whatever t’was you picked up out there in the wide world. I cain’t hardly understand nothin’ you say.” She leaned back and sized him up. “And when was the last time you had a hot meal or got a good night’s sleep?”
“It’s been a while.”
“I thought so. Well, the bed in the spare room—you b’lieve I got me a spare room now? You grew up sleeping on that lumpy ole couch I had to hide under a quilt, it was so worn out and ugly. The bed in my spare room here’s got a feather mattress. You go to sleep on that and you might not wake up for a week.”
Sleep in Granny’s guestroom—how did we get here? I can’t stay!
“That’s okay, Granny. I’ll get me a motel room in Pineville or…”
“You’ll do no such of a thing!” she snapped in a loud voice that was whisper soft. “You ain’t gonna come here after all these years and not stay in your own home.” She leaned toward him. “You ’member that poem ’bout a hired man you’s supposed to memorize—the one that didn’t even rhyme? It said home’s the place that when you got to go there, they got to take you in. This here is yourn.”
If it hadn’t been for the Sparrows, Harlan County Social Services would surely have taken Will away and put him in foster care. His mother left when he was 5. It was soon after his father began to cough up blood and maybe that was why she left, though most said the flamboyant Winona Calhoun was too shallow and self-centered to stick it out with a simple miner like Wade Gribbins. No one was surprised when she took to hanging out in Harlan when Wade was at work and then ran off with some coal company big-shot she met there. No one except Wade. He was shattered, never recovered, became the empty husk of a man who expected nothing from life and gave nothing back. He’d said once that Winona’s leaving had sucked all the air out of the world and he couldn’t catch his breath.
After Will’s mother left, the Sparrows stepped in and took up the slack in the boy’s life. Not in any official way, nothing was ever said about it, at least not that Will heard. He just began to eat his dinner at their house when his father worked night shift in the mine. Slept over some nights. Then most nights. Over the years, Wade Gribbins got sicker and slipped further into a darkness deeper than the mines. Granny and the other neighbors did for him the best they could; Will took up permanent residence on Granny’s lumpy couch and kept his clothes in the bottom two drawers of Ricky Dan’s dresser. Eventually, Wade was declared permanently disabled; he could finally quit his job in the mine and draw full workmen’s comp benefits. But by that time, everything that mattered in life had long since passed him by and he wore the hollow-eyed stare of a refugee whose village had been burned and family massacred. Will saw his father almost every day, but had only a handful of memories of the man. Now and then, he spent the night in his own bed, drifted off to sleep to the rhythm of his father’s hacking and coughing in the next room.
In every way that mattered, Granny Sparrow had been his mother, which made Ricky Dan his brother. The three daughters had never felt like sisters, though. The youngest was 13 years older than Ricky Dan; they were like visiting aunts whenever they dropped by. And Bowman…Bowman was the patriarch, strong, quiet, and reserved, the rock of the family—of Will’s family. There was no way around it—this was Will’s home.
And he’d traveled almost a thousand miles to get here so he could destroy it.
“’Sides, I got to put some meat on them bones.” Granny flashed an engaging, tight-lipped smile. It crinkled the skin around her eyes like cracks in a windshield running away from a rock. “Yore so skinny you got to stand in the same place twice to cast a shadder.”
Before Will could protest, she reached over and took his hand in both of hers, smooth now like maybe she didn’t work in the garden anymore. She grabbed his gaze and held on.
“You got a duty to the people that cares ’bout you, son.” There was a slight tremor in her soft voice. “Not to do for them but to ’llow them to do for you.”
Game over.
“Of course, I’ll stay, Granny. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
The glow of delight on her face warmed him as a tropical breeze warms cold fingers. And chilled him, the way liquid nitrogen freezes everything it touches.
“But only if you promise breakfast with homemade biscuits and that white gravy you make that’s got big chunk
s of sausage in it.”
“We’ll see.”
Ahhh. We’ll see. The response of infinite possibilities. As often positive as negative so you could never predict the eventual outcome. It was Granny’s habitual response to almost every question asked her. “Can we go sangin’? Can we hunt crawdads down Lizard Lick Creek? Can we go play in the traffic on the four-lane?” We’ll see.
“Scrambled eggs and bacon too.” Will continued, as he warmed to the prospect. “A plate full. I know there’s just the two of us, but I promise I can eat enough to—”
“It ain’t just the two of us.”
Oh.
Was one of the girls staying with her? Maybe her husband died or was killed in…?
“You should have told me. I’m glad you’re not alone. Who else lives here?”
She looked strangely awkward. “That there’s another subject I kindly needed to work up to.”
There was a sudden noise from the other side of the trailer. A door opened and then slammed shut, the sounds in rapid succession like a child running into the house from outside.
Granny called out, “C’mon in here, Sugar, there’s somebody I want you to—”
But the person burst into the room before she could finish the sentence.
Suddenly lightheaded, Will watched the room expand crazily, saw the corners move backward farther than the dimensions allowed. Like a room in a freak show. Or a nightmare.
Standing in the doorway leading into the kitchen was Ricky Dan Sparrow.
Will probably would have cried out if he’d had the air. He might even have run screaming out of the room, but his legs would have refused to carry him.
One afternoon when Will was 9 years old, he’d come up the road from school and could hear Ricky Dan’s raised voice even before he stepped up on the porch. But he couldn’t catch Ma’s softer words until he got close. He’d heard them argue about school before. Ma telling Ricky Dan he needed to “apply himself more”—that was what she called it—and Ricky Dan firing back that school was boring and every kid he’d met was a biggity britches.
