He really would give anything away. My father would go looking for a saw or a box of nails and it would be gone. My mother used to keep what money she had in the bodice of her dress, tied up in a handkerchief. For a while she was selling stewing hens and eggs because the times were very hard. (In those days we had a little land around this house, a barn and pasture and henhouse and a wood lot and woodshed and a nice little orchard and a grape arbor. But over the years the church has had to sell it all off. I used to expect to hear they were planning? to auction off the cellar next, or the roof.) In any case, times were hard and she had the old man to deal with, and he would actually give away the blankets off his bed. He did that several times, and my mother \was at a good deal of trouble to replace them. For a while she made me wear my church clothes all the time so he couldn’t get at them, and then she never gave me a moment’s peace because she was sure I was going to go off and play baseball in them, as of course I did.
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 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-do-wells. 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 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,
