Grandpa? she said in her mind. Are you sleeping? But she knew at once that he wasn’t. It was something else, something terrible and final that at first she didn’t want to name. She bent over him, and touched his face. A hand was squeezing her, squeezing her, squeezing the breath out of her. She took his arm, shook it harder and harder. “Grandpa. Grandpa, please. Please, Grandpa!”
She flung herself against him. “Don’t,” she cried. “Don’t do this!” His body resisted hers, as if pushing her away. She sat up, looking around as if there might be someone who could help her. A red-wing blackbird lighted on one of the stiff, tall grasses and whistled.
“He’s dead,” she said. The words sounded stupid and senseless. At once she put her head down on his chest and listened. Had he been out here ever since she woke after the storm and found him gone?
For a long time she sat next to him on the wet ground, brushing away the flies that tried to settle on his lips. The sun moved higher in the sky, pale and partially obscured by clouds. She smoothed his hair, stroked his hands and, bending over him, put her cheek against his.
Once she began to dig a hole, scrabbling out the earth with her fingers. She wanted to bury him, right here under the apple trees. Sweat ran down her back, her arms ached, and she had to stop and rest. On her knees she dug again, with a stick and then a stone to scoop away the earth. She was able to make only a shallow hole, not long enough, not deep enough. Without a shovel she could never hope to dig a grave. She gave it up. Flies buzzed around Grandpa’s mouth and eyes. She pulled grass, made a grass whisk, and kept them away. She hated their greeny-black bodies, red eyes, and ugly, hairy feet.
The sun passed to the other side of the house. Jenny went to the wet fields and picked asters and goldenrod, fading purple, fading gold, royal colors, an overflowing armful, more and more until they spilled out of her arms. She carried the flowers to the apple tree and put them on Grandpa. But it seemed silly to see Grandpa with flowers covering his chest and his chin. Impatiently she brushed them off and laid them all around him.
It was getting late. The day was passing. Jenny felt stiff and chilled, hungry and thirsty. She ate an apple, went to the well for water, and while there thought to wash her hands and face.
She went back to Grandpa and it seemed important to arrange the flowers again. She didn’t want to leave him. She hadn’t ever wanted to leave him. She brushed flies off his mouth. “Goodbye, Grandpa,” she said. Then she set out down Turkey Hill Road, down the two hills, to the main road to find a house and people.
Chapter 27
The day that Grandpa died, when Jenny ran down the road, when she ran two miles to the nearest house and, knocking on the door, begging for help—that day, her mother, hearing Jenny’s voice on the phone for the first time in nearly a week, having worried and suffered over her, hardly reproached Jenny at all.
“Come home,” she said. “We want you to come home.” And when her mother heard that Grandpa was dead, she said, “We never thought of the farm, we just didn’t think of it. Oh, if we had only thought of it in time, we might have saved him.”
Jenny went home on the bus. Grandpa’s body was collected by the State Police. Due to the circumstances under which he died, an autopsy was required. The autopsy report showed that Carl George Pennoyer, white, male, aged eighty-three, had had an undetected case of cancer of the throat, and had been suffering from bronchitis, but that death had come as a result of exposure.
The funeral was held quietly. The family was exceptionally nice to Jenny in the days that followed. “You must have been scared,” Gail said respectfully, and Valerie told Jenny about death rituals in different societies. Her parents put up with her silences and brooding moments. They didn’t ask her to do anything in the house and allowed her to stay out of school several more days.
Nobody mentioned Grandpa within Jenny’s hearing. If she tried to say anything about him, they changed the subject. About their running away to the farm and about his going out in the night to the apple tree, Gail blurted out that Grandpa had been crazy. She was hushed at once, but Jenny understood that this was what they all felt. They didn’t want her to think about any of it. They didn’t want her to brood, be morbid, or unhappy. “It’s a blessing to forget,” her mother told her.
Jenny, however, thought about Grandpa every day. She didn’t forget him, or anything that had happened. She thought about why and how he had died, and worked it all out in her mind.
Barefoot, coatless, he had gone out into the velvety night, in the aftermath of the storm, followed the wet path to the old tree and lain down under the dripping branches. He hadn’t been out of his mind, crazy, or senile. He hadn’t fallen and been unable to rise. He had known exactly what he was doing, she was sure of that.
Neither of them had said it to the other, but they had both known they couldn’t make it at the farm. Living there had been a fine, beautiful, and impossible dream. There had been too much decay and destruction, and Grandpa had not had the strength left to cope with years of ruin. But rather than go back and let himself be put into a home, to sit all day in a numbered chair and look at pictures blinking across a TV screen, he had gone outside and gone to sleep. No, she mustn’t say that. He had died. He had hated it when people didn’t say what they meant, covering up a true word with a phony one. She seemed to hear him say in his harsh voice, I haven’t gone to my final rest. I’m dead.
She began school again, and walked every morning with Rhoda. After school, she played with Ethel, did homework, and helped her mother. On Saturdays she went to the movies, shared caramel corn with Rhoda, and shopped for shoes or a new skirt. After a while she was able to laugh at Ethel and elephant jokes, and everyone seemed pleased and relieved because she was being normal again.
“She’s gotten over it already,” she heard her mother say to her father. “The young have short memories.”
“It’s a blessing,” her father said.
Unobtrusively one day the Boston rocker disappeared, along with the few other things that had remained to Grandpa. Later, a new color TV set came in, and there was talk of buying wall-to-wall carpeting for the living room. Gail began to complain about Jenny, and Frankie was deprived of his allowance for a month for failing math. Life was normal again.
One Friday night, Mr. and Mrs. Duvail, friends of Jenny’s parents, came to the house to play cards. The green card table was set up in the living room. Mrs. Pennoyer brought out coffee with the best cups and a Danish pastry with thin, sweet white frosting. Valerie came upstairs to be introduced to the company; Frankie left the house to run, and Gail went to a party. As Jenny sat at the dining room table doing her homework, she couldn’t help overhearing the conversation in the next room.
“… a tough old bird,” her father was saying. “He was the type who wanted to die with his boots on. And he did, God bless him.”
“Frank means he was never really bedridden.”
“Wonderful thing.”
The voices murmured. They were sad and satisfied. “He was really a clean old man.”
“That’s just what I was saying to Gerald.”
“Toward the end,” Mrs. Pennoyer said, “he was a little confused, but what could you expect? Eighty-three.”
“A good long life,” Mr. Pennoyer said. “I won’t kick if I live that long.”
“Eighty-three! A wonderful age.” That was Mrs. Duvail.
“They don’t make them like Pop anymore. Here, have some more cake, Gerry. Amelia baked it specially for you.”
Jenny put her head down on the table, her arms over her ears, but she could still hear them, going on and on about Grandpa: “… he just lay down and died, as if he knew it was his time … didn’t suffer a bit … a real comfort to us that he went so easily …”
Who are they talking about, she wondered. Who? And then she had to get out of there. She had to run out of the house, run and run, run as if she’d never stop, run long enough to outrun the sad, hypocritical voices. Run until the voices were gone and she
could again remember Grandpa the way he really had been, and the way he always would be to her—just Grandpa.
About the Author
Norma Fox Mazer (1931–2009) was an acclaimed author best known for her children’s and young adult literature. She earned numerous awards, including the Newbery Honor for After the Rain, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Dear Bill, Remember Me?, and the Edgar Award for Taking Terri Mueller. Mazer was also honored with a National Book Award nomination for A Figure of Speech and inclusion in the notable-book lists of the American Library Association and the New York Times, among others.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1973 by Norma Fox Mazer
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7087-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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A Figure of Speech Page 14
