I remember once he came into the kitchen while she was doing her ironing. He said,
'Daughter, some folks have come to us for help.'
'Well',' she said, 'I hope they can wait a minute. I hope they can wait till this iron is cool.' After a few minutes she put the iron on the stove and went into the pantry and came out with a can of baking powder. She delved around in it with a
fork until she drew up a quarter. She did this again until she had a quarter and two dimes lying there on the table. She 32
picked them up and polished the powder off with a corner of her apron and held them out to him. Now, forty- five cents represented a good many eggs in those days—she was not an ungenerous
woman. He took them, but it was clear enough he
knew she had more. (Once when he was in the pantry he
found money hidden in an empty can because when he happened to pick it up it rattled, so he took to going into the
pantry from time to time just to see what else might rattle. So she took to washing her money and then pushing it into the lard or burying it in the sugar. But from time to time a nickel would show up where she didn't want it to, in the sugar bowl, of course, or in the fried mush.) No doubt she thought she could make him go on believing all her money was hidden in the pantry if she hid part of it there.
But he was never fooled. I believe he may have been a little unbalanced at that time, but he could see through anyone and anything. Except, my mother said, drunkards and ne'er-dowells. But that wasn't really true either. He just said, 'Judge not,' and of course that's Scripture and hard to contradict.
But it must be said that my mother took a great deal of pride in looking after her family, which was heavy work in those days and especially hard for her, with her aches and pains. She kept a bottle of whiskey in the pantry for her rheumatism. 'The one thing I don't have to hide,' she said. But he'd walk off with a jar of her pickled beets without so much as a by-your-leave. That day, though, he stood there with those three coins in his drastic old mummified hand and watched her with that terrible eye, and she crossed her arms right over the handkerchief with the hidden money in it, as he clearly knew, and watched him right back, until he said, 'Well, the Lord bless you and keep you,' and went out the door.
My mother said, 'I stared him down! I stared him down!' She seemed more amazed than anything. As I have said, she 33
had a good deal of respect for him. He always told her she ought not to worry about his generosities, because the Lord would provide. And she used to say that if He weren't put to so much trouble keeping us in shirts and socks, He might have time to provide a cake now and then, or a pie. But she missed him when he was gone, as we all did.
Looking back over what I have written, it seems to me I've described my grandfather in his old age as if he were simply an
eccentric, and as if we tolerated him and were respectful of him and loved him and he loved us. And all that is true. But I believe we knew also that his eccentricities were thwarted passion, that he was full of anger, at us not least, and that the
tremors of his old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief. And I believe my father on his side was angry, too, at the accusations he knew he could see in his father's unreposefulness, and also in his endless pillaging. In a spirit of Christian forgiveness very becoming to men of the cloth, and to father and son, they had buried their differences. It must be said, however, that they buried them not very deeply, and perhaps more as one would bank a fire than smother it.
They had a particular way of addressing each other when the old bitterness was about to flare up.
'Have I offended you in some way, Reverend?' my father would ask.
And his father would say, 'No, Reverend, you have not offended me in any way at all. Not at all.'
And my mother would say, 'Now, don't you two get started.'
My mother took a great deal of pride in her chickens, especially after the old man was gone and her flock was unplun
34
dered. Culled judiciously, it throve, yielding eggs at a rate that astonished her. But one afternoon a storm came up and a gust of wind hit the henhouse and lifted the roof right off, and hens came flying out, sucked after it, I suppose, and also just acting like hens.
My mother and I saw it happen, because when she smelled the rain coming she called me to help her get the wash off the line.
It was a general disaster. When the roof hit the fence, which was just chicken wire nailed to some posts and might as well have been cobweb, there were chickens taking off toward the pasture and chickens taking off toward the road and chickens with no clear intentions, just being chickens. Then the neighborhood dogs got involved, and our dogs, too, and then
the rain really started. We couldn't even call off our own dogs. Their joy took on a tinge of shame, as I remember, but the rest of them didn't even pay us that much attention.
They were having the time of their lives.
My mother said, 'I don't want to watch this.' So I followed her into the kitchen and we sat there listening to the pandemonium and the wind and the rain. Then my mother said,
'The wash!' which we had forgotten. She said, 'Those sheets must be so heavy that they're dragging in the mud, if they haven't pulled the lines down altogether.' That was a day's work lost for her, not to mention the setting hens and the fryers. She closed one eye and looked at me and said, 'I know
there is a blessing in this somewhere.' We did have a habit sometimes of imitating the old man's way of speaking when he wasn't in the room. Still, I was surprised that she would make an outright joke about my grandfather, though he'd been gone a long time by then. She always did like to make me laugh.
