“I figure we might as well eat up that watermelon we got chilling in the springhouse,” she said. “Only the women going this time. Your uncle is likely to be a tad under the weather.”
I was real mad about that. If Uncle Vertis wasn’t there, who would kill a snake if I happened across one? Or carry me down the mountain if I broke my leg? The next day Aunt Lila and Vonnie decided to go with us, but Grandma stayed home. She said the strawberries needed tending, but I knew it was because of Uncle Vertis buying that moonshine. It wasn’t fair. Grandma was needed to keep me out of the poison ivy and to rub the fur off my peach. It was Uncle Vertis’s fault, every bit of it, and I wasn’t about to forgive him.
The next day Grandma made flapjacks for breakfast so we could try out the newly jarred blackstrap we’d brought home. Grandpa, who hadn’t had much of an appetite lately, managed to eat part of one. It was, he declared, the absolute best blackstrap he’d ever put in his mouth.
“Oh Clev, you always say that,” Grandma said.
Grandpa was having a bad day, he’d had a lot of them lately, and it dawned on me that was why Grandma was staying home. Once I figured that out, I was glad she wasn’t going with us, but it scared me too. It was the first time I ever thought the bellyaches could kill my grandpa. That he could actually die had never crossed my mind.
We drove back to Daniels and climbed up the mountain to the pines, all of us acting extra jokey. We ate our picnic of meatloaf sandwiches and watermelon, the women sitting on the ground and talking while me and Vonnie slid halfway down the mountain on cardboard we’d brought home from Calloway’s grocery store.
“Your uncle fixed up a surprise I’m supposed to show you girls.” Aunt Nalda walked us to a clearing where a swing hung from high in a lone pine tree.
Higher and higher I pumped. I could see the house and truck and make out the line the creek drew around the foot of the mountain. Flapjack, grazing in high pasture halfway up the mountain, swatted at flies with his hairless tail. But here, upwind of him, the air tasted of pine and of the cloyed sweet of decaying trees.
Higher and higher.
The mountain fell away beneath my feet.
26
All the Bells Were Ringing
There was a pall came over 211 Bibb Avenue the day my grandpa died. I don’t know how I knew, but I did, that life as I’d known it since I had memory was to change on that day. I was twelve years old.
The bellyaches that doubled him over had worsened. Finally, because the doctors didn’t know what else to try, they split him open gullet to guts. “Full of cancer,” they told Grandma. Nothing to do but sew the strangely crooked gash back together with a coarse dark thread. We brought him, weak and wounded, home to die.
Grandma put him in the guest bedroom downstairs, the one where his mother died years earlier, the one usually reserved for visiting preachers and missionaries. He lay in the big poster bed enduring pain that was unendurable.
I sang his favorite hymns. I talked to him about the almanac and the new kittens and Queenie and Bossy and the extra warm weather. I refreshed his pitcher of water and refilled his coffee cup. I read Scripture to him every morning and the Raleigh Register every afternoon, skipping the obituaries, of course. I sat in the dark of night and held his hand.
The truth is, I did none of those things.
I couldn’t bear to go into that room, not unless I had to. When I heard him moaning, I’d holler for Grandma. I’m not proud of that, but I just couldn’t.
Grandpa reached for the brown bottle of Hadacol on the bedside table. He unscrewed the cap and took a deep pull, shuddering as he swallowed it down. Hadacol was advertised everywhere—on the radio and in the newspaper and on signs along the road—and claimed to cure a whole bunch of ailments. Grandma said that Sister Wood said it helped her neighbor who was afflicted with crippling arthritis, so Grandpa agreed to give it a try. Since the Hadacol eased his misery better than anything so far, Grandma kept a bottle on hand, although the $3.50 price was sometimes hard to come by.
One afternoon Grandma was reading the newspaper to Grandpa when an article caught her eye. The makers of Hadacol were being forced to stop claiming it could cure everything from asthma to sinking spells because they couldn’t prove a bit of it. They’d got away with it by saying it was a tonic, not a medicine, and it did contain vitamin B and some other things that were supposed to be good for you.
But it was the next line that got them both stirred up.
Hadacol, she read, was twelve percent alcohol. Why, it was even being served up in shot glasses in some beer joints—it said so right there in black and white.
No doubt about it, my teetotaler grandpa was a boozer, albeit unknowingly.
And Lord help her, my teetotaler grandma was supplying him with the booze.
Even though a couple swigs of Hadacol gave him a blessed few hours of relief, from then on Grandpa refused to touch a drop. I watched Grandma turn the bottle upside down over the sink until it was empty, her mouth set.
During the warm spring evenings, we played croquet on the strip of lawn beside the house—me and Vonnie, Sissy, and the young couple from across the street. Sissy’s red-striped mallet hit the matching wooden ball and skittered my green one across
