“If you hurry—leave right now—you can say goodbye.”
There’s a story I was told when I was young, told so many times and from such an early age, I can’t remember who told it to me first. It was about Grandpa-down-the-hill and how he got the dent above his right temple.
When Grandpa was a younger man, he had spent a hot summer on the mountain, riding the white mare he used for cowboy work. She was a tall horse, calmed with age. To hear Mother tell it that mare was steady as a rock, and Grandpa didn’t pay much attention when he rode her. He’d drop the knotted reins if he felt like it, maybe to pick a burr out of his boot or sweep off his red cap and wipe his face with his shirtsleeve. The mare stood still. But tranquil as she was, she was terrified of snakes.
“She must have glimpsed something slithering in the weeds,” Mother would say when she told the story, “because she chucked Grandpa clean off.” There was an old set of harrows behind him. Grandpa flew into them and a disc caved in his forehead.
What exactly it was that shattered Grandpa’s skull changed every time I heard the story. In some tellings it was harrows, but in others it was a rock. I suspect nobody knows for sure. There weren’t any witnesses. The blow rendered Grandpa unconscious, and he doesn’t remember much until Grandma found him on the porch, soaked to his boots in blood.
Nobody knows how he came to be on that porch.
From the upper pasture to the house is a distance of a mile—rocky terrain with steep, unforgiving hills, which Grandpa could not have managed in his condition. But there he was. Grandma heard a faint scratching at the door, and when she opened it there was Grandpa, lying in a heap, his brains dripping out of his head. She rushed him to town and they fitted him with a metal plate.
After Grandpa was home and recovering, Grandma went looking for the white mare. She walked all over the mountain but found her tied to the fence behind the corral, tethered with an intricate knot that nobody used except her father, Lott.
Sometimes, when I was at Grandma’s eating the forbidden cornflakes and milk, I’d ask Grandpa to tell me how he got off the mountain. He always said he didn’t know. Then he’d take a deep breath—long and slow, like he was settling into a mood rather than a story—and he’d tell the whole tale from start to finish. Grandpa was a quiet man, near silent. You could pass a whole afternoon clearing fields with him and never hear ten words strung together. Just “Yep” and “Not that one” and “I reckon so.”
But ask how he got down the mountain that day and he’d talk for ten minutes, even though all he remembered was lying in the field, unable to open his eyes, while the hot sun dried the blood on his face.
“But I tell you this,” Grandpa would say, taking off his hat and running his fingers over the dent in his skull. “I heard things while I was lyin’ in them weeds. Voices, and they was talking. I recognized one, because it was Grandpa Lott. He was a tellin’ somebody that Albert’s son was in trouble. It was Lott sayin’ that, I know it sure as I know I’m standing here.” Grandpa’s eyes would shine a bit, then he’d say, “Only thing is, Lott had been dead near ten years.”
This part of the story called for reverence. Mother and Grandma both loved to tell it but I liked Mother’s telling best. Her voice hushed in the right places. It was angels, she would say, a small tear falling to the corner of her smile. Your great-grandpa Lott sent them, and they carried Grandpa down the mountain.
The dent was unsightly, a two-inch crater in his forehead. As a child, when I looked at it, sometimes I imagined a tall doctor in a white coat banging on a sheet of metal with a hammer. In my imagination the doctor used the same corrugated sheets of tin that Dad used to roof hay sheds.
But that was only sometimes. Usually I saw something else. Proof that my ancestors walked that peak, watching and waiting, angels at their command.
* * *
—
I DON’T KNOW WHY Dad was alone on the mountain that day.
The car crusher was coming. I suppose he wanted to remove that last fuel