The Legend of Sander Grant

by Marc Phillips

  When his mother asked about his experiences in the various churches, Sander freely gave his insight. Jo passed some of this along to Dalton and it pleased him. His son wasn’t impressed with what he saw. That much was obvious. His determination would wane, Dalton felt sure. Jo anticipated that day too, but appended a private hope to her anticipation that Sander would then come to her and ask for another way to know God. She hoped that would take at least another few weeks, because he might also ask her to help him reconcile why he could talk to his dead grandfather but could not hear God, as she did. Jo would need an answer for that and she had yet to find one.

  The guys had taken their first trip to the hill by the pond somewhere around his two weeks of trial Presbyterianism. Jo couldn’t remember. They were all running together. At any rate, Dalton handled it much the same as his own father had. Will confessed that he had no idea how to broach the subject of speaking with the dead, and Dalton hadn’t any brainstorms on it either. So, that day, he just told Sander they were going for a walk. He said he had something of a surprise to show the boy as they neared the pond, and then he wasted no time.

  They sat beneath the oak and Dalton said, ‘Daddy?’

  This took Sander off guard, but not as much as when Will replied, ‘Hey, boy.’ Then, ‘Hello, Sander.’

  Sander sprang to his feet. ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘It’s alright, son. Please,’ Dalton said. He patted the grass. ‘It’s only your grandfather.’

  ‘Only?’ said Will. He was chuckling, seeing Sander ready to take flight and remembering the experience when he was a kid. ‘Boo,’ he said. The land rumbled.

  ‘Stop it, daddy,’ Dalton told him. ‘Hang on just a minute.’

  ‘It’s coming out of there,’ Sander said, pointing at the tree roots. ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘We buried him here. Remember? I told you that. We’re all buried here.’ Dalton searched his son’s eyes.

  ‘Is he– Are they alive in there?’

  ‘No. They’re not.’

  Will piped up, ‘Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.’ His voice was sober and commanding now. ‘Sander, sit down.’

  After a moment, Sander sat. He leaned his head toward the ground and shouted, ‘How many of you are down there?’

  ‘Quit hollering at the grass. You’ll scare the cattle,’ said Will. ‘There’s four of us. We all hear you but you can only hear me. I’m the only one with anything useful to say, anyway and–’ He broke off, then continued, laughing, ‘My pop’s name is Jedediah. He says hello. Gramps is Bartholomew, says the fence looks shoddy on the northeast corner. And Augustus is your great-great-great-grandfather. He wants me to tell you you’re a good looking kid, as big as him at nine years old.’ When Sander didn’t say anything, Will said, ‘Augustus was forty stone on his twelfth birthday. Looks like you’re gonna be a stout one.’

  Dalton watched his son closely. They shared a glance and he nodded to Sander.

  ‘I know it’s a lot to take in,’ said Dalton.

  ‘It aint a trick?’ his son asked.

  ‘It aint an it,’ Will said. ‘It’s me. You didn’t get this far in life without realizing that you’re a tad different than everybody else. This is just another one of those differences. Doesn’t make you weird, boy. Makes you special.’

  ‘Makes me nauseous,’ Sander said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dalton. ‘That goes away.’

  ‘Can you,’ Sander stuttered, ‘talk to others like us that aren’t buried here?’

  ‘We can. Don’t know many of them all that well. There’s three in south Texas with Augustus’s father, and one up in –’ He stopped himself. ‘And lots of us across the ocean that we don’t strictly get along with. We’ve been on our own for a while now, Sander. The clans split and sort of scattered to the wind. It was better that way, but we lost touch with one another and now they’re hard to find.’ Will spoke to Dalton. ‘Son, why don’t you let us get to know one another? He’s alright now.’

  Dalton hesitated, then asked his father, ‘Remember what we talked about?’

  Will sighed. ‘I got it.’

  Dalton turned to Sander, ‘You okay?’

  ‘I guess. Where you going?’

  ‘I’ll meet you back at the house. Don’t be late for dinner.’

  Sander watched his daddy walking away. A thought occurred to him and he shouted, ‘Does mamma know about this?’

  Dalton didn’t turn. And despite his warnings about being late, Sander would’ve stayed there all night, but his ancestors were in unanimous agreement that pissing off Jo was a bad start to their relationship. There would be time, Will assured Sander, to say everything that needed saying. He could come back anytime he wanted. And this he did, much more often than his father. Dalton knew the old men would start to grate on him after a while and the visits would become less frequent. Until then, he rejoiced in Sander’s closeness to his kin, to his past. Or at least that past he had permitted his own father to share. Since his boy had accepted and eventually welcomed this aspect of their difference, as Will put it, any zealous church-goers wanting Sander’s trust hereafter would have to be supremely open-minded. That, in Dalton’s mind, pretty well narrowed the field to zero.

  Meanwhile, Sander’s art lessons continued. Jason only came for scheduled tutoring sessions, which were shortened considerably and moved to Tuesday and Friday nights. As he was not done with his forays into the town’s other sundry denominations, Sander allowed no talk of spirituality when Jason came, even if said spirituality applied to the subject of art itself. Jason understood.

  Weeks became months and a new normalcy settled in on the ranch. Sander didn’t talk as much, and he moved more deliberately about his tasks in the fields, like he had something pressing to do afterward. His daddy would catch him in moments of contemplation, moments the boy had previously spent chattering on about the purpose of art, or idly soaping a saddle in the gloaming before supper. Now he sometimes stood motionless with a look on his face like he was committing an idea to memory for lack of a pencil to jot it down. None of this affected his work, though. If anything, it made him more efficient.

  After a time, Dalton wondered how much more Jason could possibly have to teach Sander. It wasn’t the cost of the lessons. With Sander’s help, business was flourishing, herd numbers stabilized and slowly increased. It was, as Jason himself would admit, that Sander’s paintings were now outstanding by any yardstick. Dalton was thankful that his son had not yet begun painting nudes, but he had to wonder how Jason imparted the knowledge – if that’s where it came from – of the human form which allowed Sander to so accurately depict people in his work. He knew his boy would be showing his work soon, and that would bring with it a whole new set of difficulties. He could already envision the media scuttlebutt surrounding the painting kid-giant. Sander would soon pass seven feet tall. Both his parents worried that his stature might eclipse his talent. Dalton privately worried that Jason might be hanging around to soak up some of that attention for himself, to take credit for Sander’s gift.

  Knowing what he did about the artist, Dalton was never again able to stay for a long stretch in the house while Jason was there. No doubt Jason thought it was an incurable case of homophobia, since Sander had told him of the family discussion they had that day in the living room. If Jason thought that, he was wrong. The differences between people were things Dalton and all his kin were very tolerant of, for obvious reasons. And Dalton knew that mistakes were valuable teaching tools. Many a time he had told Sander this, way before Jason Markette arrived. Though he failed to qualify that lesson. Didn’t, back then, feel any need to. This omission troubled him now.

  Dalton drew a hard line between mistakes made in an effort to accomplish something, and mistakes made because you’re bored and stupid and feel like you can get away with whatever in hell you want. In short, to Dalton’s mind, Jason acted as though these latter-type blunders afforded him the same insight as the former. Sander had a deep well of understa
nding in him, though, which gave him a keen eye for bullshit. With no other options regarding the subject of Jason, Dalton was banking on this understanding to bring his son through.

  In the fields, Sander expected to be treated as any other ranch hand. His patience grew, while his drive and eagerness to learn remained undiminished. He soaked up his daddy’s knowledge like a sponge, and took more advice from Will and his ancestors than Dalton would tolerate. The Grant intuition for livestock soon ripened in him and he became an indispensable aid to the operation.

  Dalton got around to calling Elgin Breeding Service early that fall. They agreed, for a fee, to come out and design, then supervise the construction of a small semen collection and storage facility on Grant land. Collection did not present so much a problem for Dalton as it did with others. Not only could Dalton keep the bulls calm in the chutes, he could pick them up and place them there. The cost of storage, however, with the requisite freezers, back-up generators, and sterile environment, was substantial.

  Dalton and Sander took the plans from Elgin and built the facility themselves. They spent every dollar they could squeeze out of the books, sold the herd back down to two hundred and seventy head, then set about building the business up once more. It fell to Sander to learn how to run the storage facility by himself. So he had a full time job by his ninth birthday, and a full load of academic courses five days a week.

  School let out for the year and this freed up much more time for Sander, but there never seemed quite enough. Summer nights were for reading next year’s text books, then his Bible, which often sent him in search of more reading material as he doggedly chased down every locatable discourse on the Moabites, the Emims, the Anakims, Zamzummims and every other strange moniker his King James had for big people. He devoured books of all feather now, except other versions of the Bible itself. This version alone was sufficient to have him on a first-name basis with Marjorie Porter at the library reference desk. Much of the gas burned in the ranch pickup was due to Sander’s frequent visits to Dixon’s Barrett Memorial Library. He had already exhausted the one at the school.

  Early mornings were for painting, then came work through the afternoon, and many evenings, schedule permitting, he spent on the hill by the pond. Sander privately considered that time as his most valuable schooling. History in its own voice, something he felt his daddy neglected to take full advantage of. Then it was back to reading by lamplight. He set a clock in his studio, against vehement protest from Jason, and minutes after the alarm went off every morning, Dalton would look up and see Sander striding across the pasture, digging paint from his fingernails with his pocket knife and donning his own buckskin gloves. His life had become, of necessity, highly regimented. He slept less than anyone in the house, sometimes only an hour a night.

  Jo saw all of this, but fought the urge to nag him about it. Sander needed to figure out for himself what was important enough to strive for and what sacrifices must be offered to achieve it. Neither were thoughts such as that beyond her son. As ever, he was learning. She didn’t know how much he was learning.

  5

  Jason understood the demands on Sander’s time. He just didn’t agree with the priority system in place. Nothing to be done about that. The boy was being pulled in half a dozen different directions and getting between him and his family wouldn’t serve any good purpose. Sander had promised that he would visit First Unitarian only after he visited the other churches on his list. Jason didn’t like that, either, but likewise kept his mouth shut. He, too, had faith in Sander’s intelligence and he could tell the boy was frustrated with his religious experiences to date.

  School was well underway again and there remained scant wiggle room in Sander’s hectic schedule. Thanksgiving was upon them before anyone around the house could entertain three consecutive thoughts without returning to the financial status of Grant Beef. Things were tight, but in the best possible way. They had a plan, of which Sander was no small part, and they were digging out as fast as their cattle could breed. While the herd numbers were low, Dalton made ends meet selling hay and, now that the semen operation was up and running smoothly, Sander was able to put in enough hours at other ranch duties that Dalton could lay off two field hands. Jo even found that she had a knack for running the New Holland tractor and could handle most of its attachments. They were making it work. Pride eclipsed exhaustion for the most part.

  It was mid-December when Sander informed Jason that he would attend First Unitarian the following Sunday. He wanted to make sure it would be a regular service and not a Christmas pageant or something.

  Jason laughed. ‘I guess you haven’t seen our place, huh? Sander, we don’t have enough people for a respectable Christmas pageant. Anyway, some of us observe Christmas and Easter, others observe the solstices. A few, like me, thank the Lord for a day off work here and there and try to avoid the shopping traffic. So, yes, this week would be a fine one to visit.’

  Sander didn’t tell his parents where he was going that morning until he asked for the truck keys. He had more than lived up to his end of the bargain and felt there shouldn’t be any discussion about it. There wasn’t, but it had nothing to do with any bargain. Jo and Dalton no longer considered that their boy was in danger of making rash decisions regarding religion or anything else. The pendulum had swung the other way. Parents have to worry about something, though, and now they were concerned that his childhood, such as a Grant boy has, was being apportioned and consumed, forequarters by the ranch and hindmost by his studies. He had to get away from it all for a while. If Jason’s church was the enticement he needed, so be it. They saw their son toting around those books on Pythagoras and Voltaire, so what harm could some left-wing tambourine-bangers do?

  Sander knew the area, but Jason was right, he’d never paid any attention to their church in driving by it. There was no sign. First Unitarian met in a two-story clapboard house in a residential neighborhood on Eden Drive, just inside the Dixon city limits. Much of the yard was graveled for parking. It was an old place, but well-kept. The bottom-story had been gutted, except for the kitchen and bathroom, and remodeled as a meeting hall. Roger Carlson lived upstairs. It was as nice inside as many of the brick churches on the highway, only much smaller. The pews might’ve held thirty before things got tight and elbows started knocking. Not a problem, however, as Sander soon learned that Roger’s flock numbered but twenty-two.

  Jason introduced Sander to most of them, and it seemed each had some claim on the improvements or operation of the place.

  ‘Sander, this is Mike, our master carpenter. George and Laura help him. Laura is also a fine bookkeeper.’ Next was, ‘Joyce, she cooks for us on Wednesdays.’ And, ‘Alfonse put this roof on – what? – last year.’ Then, ‘Neil and Carla Rae are our painters.’ And on it went.

  Sander mumbled, ‘No free rides here.’

  ‘Like a real hippie commune,’ said Randall, the resident electrician. Sander didn’t think anyone was close enough to hear. ‘I know. But that’s not really the point. Nobody has to work. Some can’t, so they help with the bills. We do what we do because nobody else is gonna do it and because it’s ours.’

  ‘Not God’s?’ Sander asked.

  ‘Heck would God want this place for? We’re the ones need the heater to work and the toilet to flush. I’m not saying God couldn’t pitch in if He felt like it. We just figured He’s got a few other things to do, so we try to keep it nice for when He visits.’

  Sander felt comfortable, like he was calling on a group of Jason’s friends. He was not the center of attention or even the subject of conversation. Most of the men wore jeans like him. They might’ve been congregated down at the Feed & Seed, absent the smell of nitrogen fertilizer and cages of Banty pullets. There were people laughing loudly about something in that corner over there, and somebody was brewing coffee in the kitchen. Nobody stared at him. Nobody whispered. There were no visitor cards, no slotted box for his ten-dollar bill.

  ‘It’s almost time,�
� said Jason. ‘Why don’t we have a seat?’

  They did, and Sander noticed the back pew had been moved, giving it twice the leg room of the rest.

  Roger Carlson came down the stairs in a huff, apologizing profusely for running late as he made his way past the congregation to the front of the room. There was neither a microphone nor a podium up there. Just a blackboard, about four feet square and two-sided, where it could be flipped on its axis. Roger was a thoroughly average-looking man of fifty-something, sandy hair and slightly ruddy complexion. He was the kind of person who wouldn’t draw attention, dressed today in a pair of cotton pants and a tweed sport coat that had seen some wear.

  Once in front of them, Roger grinned and said, ‘Good morning.’ He glanced to the back and added, ‘Welcome, Sander.’ That was it. Nobody looked around. Roger took a piece of chalk from his pocket, turned to the blackboard and wrote:

  Is God Perfect?

  Facing them, he asked, ‘Well?’ and waited. ‘Come on, now. That’s gotta inspire some knee-jerk reactions.’

  ‘Perfect in what way?’ asked a young man in the front, sensing a loaded question.

  ‘Oh, don’t go philosophical on me this early in the morning, Andrew.’ A few people snickered. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, to me He is,’ said Neil the painter.

  Roger nodded. ‘Good answer. Safe, but good.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Alfonse. ‘I mean, I don’t think perfect is the word.’

  ‘Why?’ Roger asked.

  ‘Because He repented,’ said the roofer, and Sander immediately knew where he was going with this. ‘He says so, right off the bat.’

  Roger’s smile returned. ‘Somebody’s been reading Genesis. I like that. “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” That’s chapter 6, yall.’

  He shot an involuntary glance at Sander, realizing that a mere two inches above that verse is where Moses first writes of giants. Roger heard pages turning and wanted to steer them forward from that passage and so said, ‘Let’s circle back to that – whether “it repented the Lord” really means the Lord repented. Remind me later, Alfonse, alright?’ Alfonse nodded. ‘For now, let’s jump ahead to the flood, chapter 7, starting at verse 21, I think.’ Roger waited for them to find the page.