Dispensations

by Randolph Thomas

  When my hands find the bar that opens the door, I push hard. My legs follow the hallway leading to the alley, to the street, the cold air rushing to meet me.

  MY FATHER’S TOWN

  In 1932, my grandparents moved from Roanoke to Cambria, a village fifty miles away in the mountains. Only a few years before, my grandfather had been a successful insurance salesman, but he’d lost many clients in the first years of the Depression and had been unable to keep up payments on their house in the city. Many rural areas to the west of Roanoke were unrepresented by his or any insurance company, and when he was given the chance to become the chief agent for all of Montgomery, Floyd, and Giles counties, he took it immediately. He had a family to think of, and he saw some potential in the move if he worked hard and met with a little luck. The single-story house they rented, and eventually bought, had a screened porch running along the front, and overlooked Ellett Road, a quarter mile from the train station and the few other buildings that marked the town’s center.

  My father, an only child, was four in 1932 and barely remembered the move or what came before. Cambria was my father’s town and he knew it like no other place. In Cambria, animals were as much a part of the town as its people. Farmers drove their sheep down Market Street and across the train tracks daily, and just about everybody, including my grandparents, kept hogs in a pen and chickens in their yard. My grandfather taught my grandmother to shoot, and sometimes when he’d come home from a day of peddling life insurance, dusty from country roads, she’d be cooking a rabbit she’d shot. My father did chores around the house: feeding animals, collecting eggs from the henhouse, and helping my grandmother tend her grapevines. They lived in Cambria until 1948, when my grandfather died after suffering a series of strokes. After his death, my grandmother moved back to Roanoke. Although she was only forty, she never remarried.

  Because of the Roanoke River flood of 1972, I have only two family photographs taken in Cambria. In one of them, my father is seven years old. Wearing an overcoat, knee britches, and a brown leather aviator’s hat, he stands at the back door of the house on a cement step. He holds a toy zeppelin with wheels and with a string dangling from its nose. In the other photograph, he is eighteen. He’s in his navy uniform, standing beside the tree in the yard with my grandfather and grandmother. My grandfather holds a straw hat in his hands. My grandmother wears a flowery summer dress. All of them smile, but my grandfather already looks distracted, thin, and frail.

  An August day almost two years after they moved to Cambria, a man named George Carter brought a loaded gun into the insurance office intending to kill my grandfather. Two other people were present, and although Carter had not threatened either of them, they both credited my grandfather with saving their lives, as well as his own. My grandfather had hired Carter to work as an agent, but found out he was distributing moonshine whiskey while he was visiting clients. My grandfather had nothing against whiskey, or even illegal moonshine, but he had fired George Carter to protect the agency he represented. Two days later, Carter burst into the office with a pistol to demand his job back. The pistol was a Colt .38, Carter’s World War I service revolver.

  One day, many years later, while we were visiting my grandmother in Roanoke, my father showed me the Colt my grandfather had taken from Mr. Carter. I was eight years old, and we were upstairs in my grandmother’s bedroom. My father closed the door. Whispering again the story I already knew by heart, he lifted the pistol out of the dresser drawer where my grandmother kept it wrapped in a cellophane bag. My father smiled down at me while I turned the gun in my small hands and studied it.

  When I was growing up, we visited my grandmother for lunch and for the afternoon every other Saturday while my mother shopped with her mother and sisters. Before each visit, my father reminded me to be respectful of my grandmother, as if a sudden outburst or rude interjection might upset an emotional balance that had been struck, with some difficulty, years before. My father was around forty then, a short, stocky man with a ruddy complexion and light brown hair. His eyes lit up when he talked about their life in Cambria. He believed I needed to know about it, to prize it as much as he did, as though our lives would one day depend on my memory of things that happened before I was born.

  MY SON, THE AVIATOR

  There was a day of grace between the day my grandfather fired George Carter and the day he was threatened by him. In that magic window of time, when my grandfather’s mortality was not yet in question, my grandfather and my father took a trip to a remote corner of Giles County to visit a client and pick up a present for my grandmother. The details are as fresh in my mind as when my father would tell me the story, and I can see him the morning of their trip, sitting sleepily at the breakfast table with his parents. They listen to the farm reports on the radio. It rained during the night, but the sky has cleared and my grandfather says the day will turn hot. My father sits across the table eating a strip of bacon. He picks it up, holds it above his mouth, and nibbles at the bottom.

  “Sit up at the table and stop playing with your food,” my grandfather says.

  My father is seven years old. Almost always, he does as he is told.

  My grandfather owns a 1928 Ford he bought before the Depression. After breakfast, my father carries their lunches to the car. My grandmother has prepared Thermoses of lemonade and coffee, along with a bag of tomato and cheese sandwiches. While he waits in the car, my father slips into the driver’s seat. He pretends to be an airplane pilot until he sees my grandfather coming and slides back to the passenger side as my grandfather climbs into the car.

  “My son, the aviator,” my grandfather says.

  My grandmother kisses both of them through the windows and stands in the yard watching the car bounce down the long driveway to the road.

  The day is hot. Soon they stop, and my grandfather drapes his suit jacket behind the front seat and rolls up his sleeves. As they travel, hot, heavy air blows in the open windows. My father watches the bumpy land, forests ripe and green, and fields and farmhouses separating the woodlands. Dust from the road trails behind the car in clouds.

  “Are counties separated by fences?” my father asks.

  “Not any I’ve seen. Sometimes by creeks and rivers.”

  My grandfather shows him a stream running parallel to the road. “It’s called Sinking Creek. Watch it, and you’ll see it disappear into the ground.”

  “Completely?”

  “Into a cave.”

  During the summer months, my father often rides along with my grandfather when he visits clients. My grandfather says he needs my father to open gates for him, so he doesn’t have to get in and out of the car. Cambria is a lonely, sleepy town, and my father enjoys getting out of the house, seeing some of the countryside, spending time with my grandfather, and listening to his stories.

  They stop for lunch at an abandoned mill half-sunken in the bank of the creek and overgrown with moss. They sit on a stone bridge over the creek and eat their tomato and cheese sandwiches, throwing bits of bread to the minnows below. It’s mid-afternoon when they reach a dilapidated farmhouse half buried in brush, sagging on one side, with a big chimney that leans away from the building, held up by mimosa branches. My grandfather goes inside with Mr. Goins, who has small, watery eyes and a white goatee, leaving my father in the yard with the Goins’s grandsons, three gangly, shirtless teenagers. My father joins them in a game of catch. As the boys toss the ball to one another, my father wonders why Mr. Goins’s grandsons are dark skinned, more like Negroes he has known in Cambria than the almost deathly white Mr. Goins. He wonders how it is possible that they are related. When my grandfather returns, he calls my father inside. They go up a narrow staircase and into a room crowded with wooden crates and furniture. Mr. Goins moves the headboard of a bed out from behind a dresser. He calls his grandsons to come help my grandfather carry the bed downstairs. Outside, my grandfather lets down the rumble seat of the Ford and they tie down the bed securely. On the drive home, my grandfathe
r explains that he has allowed Mr. Goins to pay the premium on his life insurance policy with the bed, a great bargain. The premium, which he will pay himself, is fourteen dollars. Mr. Goins’s father bought the bed before the Civil War. Now it will be a surprise for my grandmother.

  That night my grandfather and my father bring the bed into the living room and prop it against one of the pale walls. My grandmother says she will polish it the next day, after she has finished her housework. Saturday they will get up early and drive to Roanoke to buy a mattress.

  The next morning, my grandfather leaves early for work. He has a meeting with Mr. Peterson, an agent from Roanoke. They talk about expanding into Wythe County and whether or not my grandfather’s office can handle the work. As Mr. Peterson is leaving to visit a client, George Carter barges through the door facing Market Street. He has a paper bag with him. Mr. Peterson passes him on his way to the door. At her desk, Miss Clare, my grandfather’s secretary, is laughing because my grandfather has reminded Mr. Peterson that he has forgotten his hat. The phone rings, and George Carter pulls a revolver out of the bag.

  My grandfather doesn’t blink. He takes a step toward George Carter, extends his hand as though they are going to shake. Everyone else in the office freezes. Miss Clare has been reaching for the telephone, but now it stops ringing and her arm is left bent in an arc across the desk. Mr. Peterson was stepping toward the door when he saw the pistol in his peripheral vision, but now he, too, stands motionless, waiting.

  For a moment the town doesn’t move. The old man who sleeps in a chair in front of the grocery store no longer twitches from his dream. Even at the stockyard a half-mile away, the men herding cattle down the ramp into the pen halt in their steps. The auctioneer and the cattle all fall silent.

  My grandfather takes another step toward George Carter, whose eyes are bloodshot, set, and determined behind his oval glasses. The glass door of the office stands open. The dusty breeze from the street, following a passing truck, stops, and the dust hangs in the air.

  Only a minute before, my father pushed open the back door and stomped down the concrete steps at the back of the house. Sweating in his leather aviator’s hat, but refusing to take it off, he found the string attached to the nose of his toy zeppelin. He tugged the string, but the zeppelin would not move. Glancing up at the kitchen window, he sees my grandmother’s face, a still, oval question above the sink. He shouts to her, asking what is wrong, but she doesn’t answer or move. Again, he grips the string to the zeppelin and pulls with all his strength. My grandfather’s fingers curl around the barrel of the .38, and he lifts it out of George Carter’s hand.

  THE ONLY CHILD OF AN ONLY CHILD

  While I held the pistol, I asked my father if the bed Grandma slept in was the one that Grandpa bought her.

  “No,” he said, “she keeps the bed we bought from Goins in the cellar.” That afternoon I discovered the bed in a corner of the basement, a blanket draped over the headboard, an extension cord wound around it several times.

  When I knew my grandmother, she lived in a two-story house on a quiet suburban street. She worked part-time selling tickets and candy in a movie theater and developing film at a local photography studio. She lived off her wages, my grandfather’s army pension, and the remaining money from the life insurance policy that had paid for her house. Her cellar was filled with card tables, old lawn mowers and tires, broken furniture, and out-dated television sets that still worked, or could with a little tinkering. Her parlor housed stacks of bound magazines like Popular Science and National Geographic. Upstairs closets, dressers, and trunks overflowed with my father’s baby clothes, his Boy Scout and navy uniforms, my grandfather’s suits, my grandmother’s dresses and hats from the thirties and forties.

  Long before she died, my grandmother was deaf. When she worked in her flower garden, she couldn’t hear planes passing overhead or children playing in the next yard. She was deaf when my father moved in with her, after his first stroke. As the only son of an only son, I was aware that my father suffered from the same kinds of health problems as my grandfather. By this time, my father was in his sixties, my parents were divorced, and I was grown. When I visited, my father and I would walk down the street and drink a glass of wine or a couple of beers in the neighborhood bar, eat in the diner, argue about politics, and walk home to watch a movie on TV.

  Those nights I visited them, as our talk fizzled, my father’s eyes lost focus, his head dropping forward to his chest. My grandmother, occupied by unexplained errands, moved in and out of the big, shadowy living room. I felt the presence of my grandfather, and of their home in Cambria, near at hand. All of the stories I’d heard many times in childhood, some I’d always only half believed, returned, growing out of the shadows of the dusty rooms, inviting me to take part in them if I wished.

  Watching my father at rest, it was easy to imagine that he had gone back to Cambria, to 1934. Perhaps my grandfather was teaching him to fly a kite, running ahead with the string to a box kite that trailed in the sky behind him. My father chased him, his short legs beating to keep up. In truth, I never heard my father speak of flying kites in Cambria, but there were frames for kites in my grandmother’s cellar, and they lived on a hill with only one tree, where the wind in March would have been brisk. Just thinking about it, watching my father drift deeper into his dreams, I could feel the weight of the kite pulling against the wind as they passed the tether to me.

  My father had a scar on the top of his head, a wound from a sledding accident that happened when he was a child. He’d hit a fence in the dark. I saw it happening at night, in their yard in Cambria. He rode his sled directly down the big hill into a fence at the bottom.

  Slowly he stood and removed his brown leather aviator’s cap. It was full of blood. On the hill, above the bright snow, I could just make out the fuzzy light of the kitchen window. My father’s head had begun to ache, and he was sweating under his heavy coat. I looked down at the blood and felt that I was falling forward, into the snow. Somehow we mustered the strength to march the sled back up the hill to the house. This time, his hat was lost, left behind in a patch of red snow somewhere beside the fence, but it would be back again the next time we returned, clean and smelling of leather, ready to pull on.

  Sitting in the living room beside my sleeping father, I felt the earth grind to a halt, the years tumbling into each other. I could watch my grandfather disarming George Carter, lifting the weapon right out of his hand, and a second later, my father returning from his tour in the Pacific, seeing, for the first time, the changes in my grandfather.

  THE SAILOR IN HIS UNIFORM

  It’s four in the afternoon when my father’s train passes the stockyard and the first houses of the town. He is only passing through Cambria on his way to Norfolk to be discharged. He has brought along a duffle bag to drop off with my grandparents to make his journey easier. The duffle bag contains extra uniforms, a few gifts, and a few pieces of contraband, among them a disassembled Japanese rifle he won shooting pool and a number of silk ties he bought on the black market.

  As soon the train pulls into the station, he sees my grandfather sitting on one of the benches on the platform, my grandmother standing beside him with her hand on his shoulder. My grandfather holds his straw hat in his hands, and his hair is white and wild. He is nothing like the man my father remembers. He looks like a wizened elder, except that his eyes don’t follow the approaching train. When the train stops, my grandmother pats my grandfather’s shoulder. He turns his head and squints up at her.

  My father stands and reaches above his seat to take down the duffle bag. He carries it to the door and steps down to the platform. When my grandparents come toward him, he sets down the duffle bag and embraces them. My grandmother kisses my father’s cheek.

  “The good Lord has brought him home,” my grandfather says.

  My father has never heard him speak of the good Lord before.

  Gripping the top of the heavy bag, my father sees that he’
s made a selfish mistake. He says he’ll get a porter, someone who can help them with the bag, but my grandmother says there’s not enough time. She says she’ll see to it when he’s gone.

  My grandmother complains that she’s forgotten her camera, but she’ll get a picture of the sailor in his uniform when he returns. They’ll take it by the tree in the yard.

  A whistle blows, and the conductor calls all aboard. My father embraces my grandmother and shakes my grandfather’s hand. He boards the train, the steps falling under his feet. The aisle carries him back to his seat where he watches my grandparents on the platform. The train begins to move. Despite my grandmother’s protests, my grandfather leans over the duffle bag and grips the strap, putting his frail arms and back into trying to lift it.

  The train moves faster. Less than a mile away at the stockyard, the animals continue their descent down the ramp to be auctioned. The lawyers who now occupy my grandfather’s old insurance office go about their work.

  My father looks at trees and meadows flashing by the window, replaced by darkness as the train enters a tunnel, and he and my grandfather return to their travels of dusty county roads leading them to the Goins farm. The next morning, my father wakes early. A child again, walking through the house on his way outside to milk the cow, he sees the bedstead leaning against the living room wall.

  The train emerges from the tunnel, and light fills the car. In the aisle, a woman returning to her seat rocks back and forth with the movement of the train. She gives my father a concerned look, and he nods, speechless, wondering if she can read the worry in his face. Younger than his mother by a few years, the woman returns to her seat beside two children, and one of them, a boy, turns his head and stares at my father until the woman tells him to quit.