Five Tales, Too
by R.E. Volver
Copyright (c) 2012
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Table of contents
I didn’t think anything about my grandfather calling me that Friday night and wanting to know if I would go fishing with him the next day, though I should have. See, he usually didn’t like to go fishing on weekends because that was the only time he had to just sit around his house and do nothing. Even though he was seventy-four, he still had about twenty acres of tobacco and a few of corn which he tended himself.
He lived over in Jackson County, out in the middle of nowhere. There was a little gravel road that ran up a steep hill upon which was perched a four-room shack my grandfather had called home since gramma had died from lung cancer back in ’89. It wasn’t really a shack, I guess. I mean, it wasn’t made out of plywood and roofed with a sheet of tin. It was just small and really old. There was a short porch which made the place look bigger than it really was, but the paint was a chipping gray that didn’t do anything except lay there and soak up the sun. The dirty, busted shutters on the house were painted a dark, almost black green that probably looked pretty sometime before I was born, but now only made the place look haunted.
When I was a kid, I had been afraid to go up to Papaw’s shack with mom and dad. Dad had told me there was nothing to be afraid of, but I knew different. There was a big shotgun hidden away in one of the closets. I used to pry open the door slowly, hearing its awful screech, then I’d peek in to get a look at the gun. Papaw caught me one time, and I remember him yelling, “You stay away from that there gun, boy! You is too young to be messin’ with such things.” Guns had frightened me then. I’m still not too comfortable around them.
Other things had frightened me about the place. There was this big, old rooster who was blind in one eye; whenever I would get near the hen house, that rooster would let out a yell like the devil was riding his tail feathers. One time the rooster chased me two hundred yards or more down the gravel road. I ran and ran and ran, every few steps glancing behind to see that one dull eye just glaring at me with a hatred so intense I though the devil was riding my tail. Papaw had laughed himself silly about that for weeks.
I had also been afraid of the huge weeping willows planted behind the house. Those trees looked like evil spirits trying to rise, but just not being able to make it out of the grave for some reason. The curved limbs looked like the arms of a diseases corpse trying to pull its heavy, crusting body out of the dirty.
But everything wasn’t so scary at grandfather’s. He had a good-sized fishing pond a couple of miles from the house. Papaw’s land stretched for God knows how many acres, and we used to walk barefoot from his place to the pond. I loved the pond, which he kept stocked with blue gill, bass, and a few catfish. The only thing frightening at the pond were the catfish. When I was five, I caught my first one. I pulled it up on shore and watched it for a few seconds as it flopped around and opened and closed its mouth as it suffocated. Then I abruptly dropped my cane pole, turned and ran as fast as my little legs would carry me, all the while screaming, “There’s a sea monster in the pond! A sea monster in the pond!” Papaw had cackled at that one, too.
There had been other good things about his home in Jackson County. My favorite was the candy canes he would always hide when he knew I was coming. It didn’t have to be Christmas for him to have candy canes, no siree. I used to think Papaw and Santa were buddies and that was why Papaw always had those canes. He used to hid them all over his house, knowing I would look for them. Of course he didn’t try to hide them in really hard places or I would have never found them. I enjoyed that little game. It had been as if every time I went to Papaw’s, it was Christmas.
Saturday morning I drove my new truck, a high-school graduation present, up the rough, bouncy road to his house. I kept hearing my tackle box and the rods and reels bouncing around in back, but I wasn’t worried about them flying out. I was more worried about all the gravel being thrown in the air and what it would do to my new truck’s paint job.
Eventually I reached the top of the hill and parked in front of the dull, gray porch.
It was just a little after six in the morning, the sun not quite up yet, but Papaw was already sitting out on the porch waiting for me. A dented, green tackle box set beneath his chair while a minnow bucket rested against the bottom step leading up to him. Three or four rods with reels were at his feet while another was in his hands. He was casting out in the yard as if fishing.
“This one’ll work just fine,” he said, not paying the least bit of attention to me just yet.
I opened the back of the truck and got out my equipment.
He reeled his line in and hooked it to the rod. Without looking at me, he said, “Nice truck you go there. Your dad buy it for you?”
I put my tackle box next to the minnow bucket, my fishing rods on the porch, and grinned. “Yeah,” I said. “He thought I would need it since I’ll be going off to college in Florida next year.”
Grandfather put down his pole and fished into one of his overall pockets for a bag of Red Man. The moist, brown tobacco leaves were shoved into his jaw by his chunky but strong fingers. After spitting twice out into the yard, he said, “I guess you’ll need some kind of transportation being so far from home.”
“Yep.”
“How much’d it cost?” he asked as he rose from his chair and picked up his fishing equipment.
I gathered my stuff together also, grinning again because I knew what this was leading up to. I said, “About thirty thousand.”
“Good Lord, son!” he nearly yelled as he stepped down from the porch. “You mean your daddy paid that much for a truck?”
We were on our way. We could have driven, but we didn’t because we never had. I followed him north through a bunch of aging oaks, downhill on a path we had worn in over the years, and across a dry creek bed.
“You know cars are expensive nowadays,” I said before we had crossed the creek bed.
“Maybe,” he said, puffing a little from the walk, “but that kinda price is ridiculous. I remember back in ’71 I bought that old heap of mine for only -- ”
“Two thousand dollars,” I finished for him.
He turned and looked at me with a weasel-like grin on his face. “I guess you’ve heard that one before.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, a few hundred times or so.”
He laughed himself and began the climb up the short hill on the other side of the creek bed.
We continued to talk as we walked the couple of miles or so to the pond. He always talked about the old days, but that didn’t bother me. In fact, I liked to hear about how things used to be cheaper, people used to be nicer, and no damn interstates ran through the country to tear the land apart. His stories reminded me of a simpler time that I had never been a part of, an America that was long past probably never would be again. When I was a kid, I had thought that Papaw’s stories were just that, stories, but as I grew older, I realized maybe he was right, maybe things had been better in his younger days than they are in mine. After all, his generation might have had cigarettes and all that other garbage, but they were living to be eighty and ninety years old. On the other hand, my generation and my father’s, we have cigarettes and even worse stuff, but we’re all dying young. Killing ourselves, we are. I know of at least half a dozen of my dad’s friends who have died of heart attacks before they reached fifty. Heck, I’ve got friends my age who’ve been told they have gum cancer or maybe even lung cancer. Somewhere things went wrong.
“Somewhere we’ve lot sight of how things are supposed to be,” Papaw said to me as we reached the top of another hill, one which looked down upon the pond.
I agreed with him and said so as we descended this last hill.
The pond set in the center of a small valley from which no signs of humanity could be seen except for the occasional plane the flew by and the rusting barbed wire fence that was on the far side of the water. As usual, the cattails and weeds which would normally grow up around the pond had been cut away. The pond still had its deep olive luster, too. Papaw always kept the water clean from fungus or any other plants or diseases that could threaten the fishing.
We wasted no time in hooking up some minnows and setting out two lines each, one reel in hand and the other held on the ground by a tree branch or heavy rock.
“Must be too hot for them,” I said after ten minutes had passed without me getting even a nibble.
He spit into the water and said, “No, it ain’t too hot. It’s too early to be too hot. You just ain’t got lucky yet.”
He was right. The sun was up, but it was too early to be too hot for the fish to bite.
A few seconds later the lax line he held in his hands went straight. He tugged a few times and huffed and puffed more than once.
Both my lines still showed nothing.
Grandfather jerked his line a couple of times. “To make sure the hook gets caught in their mouth real good,” he had once said. He began to reel it in. At first he reeled quickly to take up any slack, but suddenly he was reeling slowly, as if the fish on the end of his line weighed a hundred pounds.
“Heavy sucker,” he said. “Six to eight pounder, at least.”
I had lost interest in my reels, my attention obsessed with this old man’s fight to bring in a fish. His rod began to curve from the weight of the hooked animal, and the line looked as if it could break at any moment.
“Come on, you bastard!” Papaw yelled and spit.
The end of the reel bent some more, and for a moment I thought it would splinter. In the water the line jerked left and right, stood still for a half a second, then began moving again. The fish must have been struggling something awful the way that line was getting tugged around.
At last I saw a silver glitter at the end of the line.
“Here he comes,” I said more to myself than to Papaw. I was excited and didn’t notice the rod I had on the ground was slowly being pulled toward the water.
Papaw yanked on his reel again and yelled at me, “Your line! Don’t let it get away!”
I didn’t know what he was talking about at first because I looked at the rod and reel in my hands and saw the line was relaxed.
“On the ground!” he yelled.
I dropped the rod from my hands and grabbed for the one on the ground which was almost in the pond. It slipped from my grasp and slid into the water.
I dived forward, making a huge splash. For the next few seconds I was blinded by the murky water, but I felt the rod in my hands. I jerked back and found myself sitting in a foot of water and mud.
Papaw was on shore laughing so hard I thought he might have a stroke right then and there. He had finally pulled in his line and I saw a six- or seven-pound bass already resting in his fishing basket.
Feel my rod was now lax, and realizing my fish must have got away, I tried to stand but fell, slipping on the clay mud.
Papaw laughed even harder.
Squinting one eye, I glared at him and said, “You could help out here, you old fart.”
A few minutes later, I was standing on shore trying to wipe the mud and pond scum from my drenched jeans and T-shirt.
Papaw already had both his lines in the water again, but was getting no bites. His back was to me as he said, almost chuckling, “I think yours got away, son,”
“Damn straight it got away,” I said, trying but not really trying to sound furious. “What do you expect when some old man’s laughing his ass off on shore. We’d be lucky if you haven’t scared all the fish away.”
Papaw cackled slightly and spit again.
The rest of our morning went like usual. Not too many bites so that our hopes rose too high, but not too few to make us pack up early and head for home.
I dried off fairly quickly beneath the morning sun, but my underwear stayed soaked and stuck to my skin something awful. Every once in a while I would squirm where I was sitting and Papaw would smile and say, “Must have worms in your pants, or maybe a fish or two from your swim.”
A little after eleven, we pulled in our lines and Papaw brought out some warm bologna sandwiches he had kept in his tackle box. Those were some of the nastiest, hard-to-swallow sandwiches I had ever choked down in my life. But I loved them. The hot, tangy salad dressing ran between the bread and rolled down my hands until anything I touched was gooey.
We sat on some rocks beneath a few trees and ate without washing our hands, which was typical. Real men didn’t need to wash their hands to eat when they’re out in the woods, I used to think when I was younger. Now I realize it was pretty much just male laziness.
I’d eaten my sandwich and Papaw was almost done with his when his head popped up and he stared over at the pond where the barbed-wire fence was.
I glanced in that direction but didn’t see anything interesting, so I stood and walked over to my stuff. Papaw just sat there staring toward the fence.
I had picked up both my reels when Papaw said, “D’you see that?”
“See what?” I asked, looking at the pond and fence once more.
He was quiet for a moment, then, “Thought I saw a groundhog or something.”
I followed his gaze, but saw saw nothing over there.
“No,” I said. “There’s nothing there. If there was, it’s gone now.”
He sat for a few more minutes, gazing toward the fence while I put out my lines and tried to catch something. Eventually he came down from the trees to the pond to sit near me and let out his own lines.
We had been sitting in an uneasy quiet for nearly a quarter hour when he breathed in heavily and glanced over at me. I didn’t know why he had been so silent since looking over at the fence, but I knew something was bothering him. I figured now he would say something.
And he did.
“I’m dying, Michael,” he said in a small voice which I would not have believed came out of him.
Sitting near him, I turned to look into his face. For the first time in my life I saw tears swelling in his eyes. My grandfather had never been a crier. Even when grandmother had died, he had not shed tears, though he had been sort of strangely quiet for a few months afterward.
“I ...” I knew not what to say.
“Two weeks ago I was out in the field cutting some tobacco when my back started aching. I figured I’d pulled something and it would go away in a few days. It didn’t, so I went to the doctor last week to see what was the matter.” He said all this while the tears broke and flowed down his face like bursting rain drops skating down a cold window. “Terminal lung cancer, he tells me. Same as your grandmother. Between six and eight months to live.”
Waves of inner pain ran through my body. I felt faint for a moment but overcame it. I hadn’t expected anything like this today. Nothing like this at all.
“Does dad know?” was all I could think to say.
“No, and I don’t want him to know.”
Emotions, fear and anger and a dozen others with no names whirled within me. I couldn’t accept that grandfather didn’t want dad to know. My father, his son, had a right to know, didn’t he? Then again, it was my grandfather’s life. But no, dad had to be told. I couldn’t bear the pressure of keeping this from my father.
“I don’t want anyone to know except you,” Papaw said wearily as the tears dried. “There’s no need for anybody to know, except you.”
His talk frightened and confused me at the same time. Sooner or later someone would find out. There was no way to keep this a secret forever. In a few more months, grandfather would have to be put into a hospital because he would be so weak and ill. That’s the way it had been with every cancer victim I had ever heard of. But I didn’t want to see my grandfather like that. He was too much of a man to have to fade away in some lonely hospital bed somewhere away from his home and family.
“I’m telling you all this because there’s something I need you to do for me,” he said.
I looked away for a second, reeled in my lines as he did his, then stared back at his softened face.
I now felt tears tracing my own cheeks. I sniffled at first, trying to stop the salty streams so this man I loved so much wouldn’t see me in a weak moment. It didn’t matter, though, and I knew it deep inside where reality has a way of keeping everything too painful at a distance. The tears poured gently and I decided to let them go. There was nothing I could do. But there were so many things to ask.
“Let’s say I did see a groundhog or squirrel or somethin’ over by that fence,” grandfather said. “And let’s say I had my shotgun with me. I could go over by that fence to see just what was over there. I could yell back to you that I saw somethin’ on the other side. Then I could lean my gun down against the fence and start to climb over.”
“But ... you would know better than to do that,” I said, my lips dry, barely able to get out the words. “You wouldn’t put your gun against the fence knowing you were about to climb over it. You would drop the gun over first or have me hand it to you.”
“Suppose I was anxious for that squirrel and just plain forgot?” he said calmly. “Then suppose my climbing over jostled the fence and caused one of the barbs to hit the trigger so the gun went off. More than likely I’d be hit.”
I didn’t like where this was going.
“More than likely I’d be killed,” he said.
I jerked my head away and looked out at the pond.
“It could happen,” he said.
“I know it could happen, but it doesn’t need to.” I felt my throat tighten and more tears beginning to come out.
“I’m an old man, Michael. A few months one way or the other wouldn’t make much of a difference.”
I said nothing.
“I don’t want to just waste away like your grandmother did. I remember she laid in that hospital bed for nearly a month before the good Lord took her. One whole month. A month of pain and suffering and weakness. A month of not being able to remember what happened to you the day before. A month of not knowing the names of the faces crowded around your bed. A month of not being able to tell -- ”
“All right!” I yelled out, balling my hands into fists before my eyes. “I see the picture!”
We sat quietly while several minutes ticked away. A frog croaked and a few fish jumped out of the water. Bubbles, possibly from the snapping turtle Papaw was always talking about, burst at the pond’s surface near us.
Finally, Papaw said, “I can’t go like that. I’ve tried all my life to be as much a man as I can, but I don’t have it in me to face something like that. Death doesn’t frighten me, but the pain and the terror sure does.”
“You ...” I stopped speaking, choked by tears.
“Someday you’ll understand, but until then ...” He couldn’t go on, either.
“What do you want of me?” I managed to ask.
“An alibi.”
“What?”
“I can’t have people thinking I killed myself, now can I?” he said, looking into my eyes once more.
“I don’t understand,” I said, and I meant it.
“All you have to do is go up to the house with me. I’ll fetch my old shotgun, leave you there, then I’ll come back down to the pond.”
I sat in painful silence. I didn’t know what to say. Life couldn’t be this bad, I kept telling myself.
“You won’t see anything. No one will expect a thing. All you have to do is tell the authorities that I had an accident. That’s all.”
It couldn’t be that easy. People would wonder. They would know my grandfather had more sense than to climb a fence while his gun was leaning against it.
“I’m old,” he said as if reading my mind. “People would just think my mind wasn’t what it used to be.”
That answered my last thought. But I couldn’t let him do it. There was no way to stop him, though. Pictures quickly went through my head of me trying to tie Papaw up or trying to knock him unconscious, but none of that was likely to be a possibility. Papaw may have been nearly four times my age, but he was still able to handle himself. I didn’t know what to do.
“Why me?” I asked.
“What?”
“Why me?”
“Well, I ... ” He hesitated, as if he was not sure he wanted to tell me his explanation. But, finally, “Mike, you’ve had a pretty good life. Your mom and dad are well off, and you’ve never had to face any harsh realities about life. Your grandmother died before you could really remember her all that well, and you’ve never had to face death straight ahead. I just thought --”
“You thought I needed this to toughen me up?” I was furious and would have blown up in his face had he been anyone but my Papaw. “What kind of male ego crap is this?”
“You could put it like that,” he said, remaining calm, “but I still think it’s time you came face to face with life. Life at its worst.”
“I can’t face this. It’s too much.”
“No, you’ll do just fine. Everyone has to face death at one time or another. You’ll just have to be strong for me.”
“I can’t.”
“For me.”
I drove down the gravel road as fast as I could, hoping to get away before hearing that awful sound. I rolled my windows up and pushed the gas pedal more, giving my truck as much as I could along that winding road. I knew what I would hear if I stayed much longer, and I wanted, needed, to get away from there before I heard it.
I couldn’t believe what was happening. But did it really matter what I believed? I believed in heaven, didn’t I? Did that matter? Nothing mattered.
Rocks flew into the air, scraping my paint job so that the next day I would have to get out my case of touch-up paint and go over my truck. But at the time, I didn’t care.
I floored the accelerator and watched more gravel get blown into the air. My tackle box and rod and reels bounced around in the back.
I was almost to the highway when I heard the blast.
I pulled my truck to the side of the road, got out, fell to my knees, covered my face with my hands, and cried so hard that blood was mixed with my tears.
The horse was dead. Pencil-length, jade-colored worms slithered out its mouth, following its hanging, jelled tongue to fall onto dry grit where they shriveled and went the way of the horse within minutes.
Jedediah brought down a boot on one of the longer worms that had been working its way toward escape in the shadow of a stone. Green splashed the sides of his boots and the man cursed.
“Damn, but that’s a nasty way to go, Silas,” he said to the donkey he pulled by a rope.
The animal brayed in agreement, then went back to munching on the little bit of brown plant life it could find.
Jed raised his eyes to look at the desert’s sun. It was noon, or as near enough as he could tell. He looked back down at the bloated carcass and the saucer-sized hole in its side that showed purple ribs sticking out.
He looked south to stare again at the animal’s trail he’d been following for almost three days. Then he looked north to see a newer trail, one not made of hoof markings but of a man on foot.