We watched out the kitchen window until the tailor finally got off the city bus up on Worley Road and walked down the red dog road to our house. He carried a beat-up leather satchel stuffed with drawings and swatches and chalk and a measuring tape.
We all gathered in the front room to watch. After careful deliberation, Grandpa chose the perfect cut and fabric and fit. The tailor measured and pinned and jotted and measured some more, muttering foreign words through a row of pins bobbing up and down in his mouth. Grandpa’s new suit would be the dark-gray pinstripe worsted-wool three-piece double-vent cuffed-trousers notched-lapel model, with a watch pocket in the vest.
After the tailor left, I watched as Grandma poured Argo starch powder from a maroon cardboard box into boiling water, stirring until it was thick and shiny. She dropped a shirt into the pot, poked it down with a big wooden fork, then fished it out and dropped it into a metal tub until it was cool enough to wring and hang out to dry. The long, double clothesline sagged with a week’s worth of just-washed clothes.
“We are either the cleanest bunch on earth or the dirtiest,” Grandma said.
I believe she was leaning toward the dirtiest.
I curled up in the swing, looking at Rosie the Riveter on the cover of a brand new copy of The Saturday Evening Post. They should have put my mother on that magazine.
The shirts on the line flung empty arms into the wind until the rigor mortis of the starch set in. Off to one side, Grandpa’s khaki workpants did a stiff-kneed country jig, one knee up then down, up then down, then kick way out. The warm wind died down. Lightning bugs blinked Morse code back and forth in the dusk.
“Come wash up,” Grandma called out from the back door into the lavender twilight. “And don’t be dawdling.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said.
After supper Grandpa got out his wood shoe-shine box and began to polish his black wingtips with a little spit and a can of black polish so intoxicating the Pentecostals might have outlawed it if they’d known about it. Once the polish dried, he whipped a felt-covered brush back and forth to coax out the shine. He held the shoe up to let me see myself reflected in the mirrored depths.
Grandpa’s face reflected darkly behind my lighter one as he held the shoe in front of our faces. I watched as he put his shoe-shining kit back in order, the polishes and brushes and cloths lined up just so. For the first time I noticed his black hair was thinning and a little gray showed in the mustache he always wore. Although he was strong from working hard all his life, at five feet seven or eight and one hundred fifty pounds soaking wet, as he said, Grandpa wasn’t a big man, yet he stood like a giant in my eyes. Although I wanted to be just like him, I looked closely and could not find a single feature to match up with one of mine. And yet I knew that if you skinned us inside out, you’d find we were both stuffed full of peach pancakes and thick bacon from breakfast and the blood that ran through him ran through me and joined us like only people in your family can be, and not all of them even, and not all the time. But me and Grandpa were. He taught me that the places and people we come from sear into our very being and follow us all the days of our lives. That faith and family twine around our limbs like grapevines. That they are the ties that bind.
On Easter Sunday morning Grandpa put on his new worsted wool suit and clamped elastic suspenders to his pants front and back. Garters, a strange contrivance of wide maroon elastic bands, were fitted above his calf and clipped to his socks to hold them up. A round watch attached to a gold chain draped across his chest and disappeared into the watch pocket in his vest. His shirt was starched, his shoes shined, his hat and his Bible in his hand.
Grandpa was armed to fight the Devil.
Holding himself still behind the walnut pulpit, Grandpa waited for his congregation to settle. He started quiet, but as voices from here and there in the pews began to encourage him with shouts of “Amen!” and “Praise God!” and “Thank you, Jesus!” his voice rose to a crescendo I likened to the voice of God. Oh, he could work up the congregation with fearsome warnings of the fire and brimstone awaiting those who didn’t repent. He was awful longwinded though, so I was glad when the cadence slowed and I knew he was winding down. Soon he’d call for everyone to stand and sing Hymn No. 164, “Blessed Assurance,” or maybe he’d announce Hymn No. 87, “Lord Lift Me Up to Higher Ground.”
The Pentecostals weren’t too good at singing, but a few voices lifted true and clear over the drone and drag of the congregation, and I hear them still. “Precious Memories,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and Grandma’s favorite, “His Eye is On the Sparrow.” “Rock of ages, cleft for me . . .”—I thought it said, “Rock of ages, Clev for me.” Clev was my grandpa’s name. So that was my favorite hymn.
There was praying too.
Grandpa would say, “Brother Riley Davis from over in Crab Orchard is here visiting his mother who’s doing real poorly, and he asks us to remember Mother Davis tonight and lift her all the way up to Heaven to be healed by the Lord God our Master Physician.
“Brother Slade Williams, would you kindly take us to the
