have been stolen, right? Which meant that the place had likely remained unoccupied.
And yet the door had been broken…
I shook my head. Either way, even if someone had been there, they were long gone by now, so I put it out of my mind and decided to hit the books on the back porch for a while. Unfortunately they weren’t exactly page-turners, and after a couple of hours, I’d had enough. On the plus side, no snakes appeared, which made me wonder whether Callie had known what she was talking about.
I’ll admit that my mind wandered at times toward the lovely Natalie Masterson. She was an enigma, and I kept picturing the amused flicker I saw in her eyes as I related my slightly embellished history. But thinking about my conversation with Natalie also reminded me of the bees and the boat, which turned my thoughts to my grandfather, and it brought to mind my last visit here. At the time, I’d been a resident and while others were heading off to the Caribbean or Cancun for well-deserved respites, I made the drive from Baltimore to New Bern, seeking the comfort and abiding love that I had always sought from him as a child. He was his own cup of tea—the boat was a good example of his quirkiness—but he had limitless room in his heart for unsheltered souls. He was the kind of guy who’d feed whatever strays happened to drift onto his property; he’d set out a line of bowls near the barn, and various dogs from God knows where would begin showing up. He named the ones that stuck around after cars…As a kid, I played fetch with dogs named Cadillac, Edsel, or Ford, Chevy and Pinto. Oddly, he also named one Winnebago—it was a tiny thing, some sort of terrier—and when I asked him why, he winked and declared, “Look at the size of him!”
In his working life, he’d been employed at the mill, turning logs into usable lumber. Like me, he finished his life with fewer fingers than when he started; unlike me, it didn’t cause his career to come crashing to an end. He used to tell me that unless a man has lost a finger on the job, it wasn’t a real job, which makes the idea that he raised my mother—a sophisticated, ambitious, cerebral woman if there ever was one—rather astounding. When I was younger, I used to suspect my mother had been adopted, but as I matured I eventually came to recognize that they shared an innate optimism and decency that informed everything they did.
My grandfather hadn’t had an easy time after my grandmother had died. I don’t remember her at all, as I was still toddling around in diapers the only time we met. But I can recall my mom emphasizing that it was important to visit him, so that he wasn’t always alone. For my grandfather, there was only one woman; he’d loved once and for all, right up until an epileptic seizure took her life. There’s still a photograph of her on the wall of the bedroom, and after moving in, I couldn’t imagine taking it down, even though I never knew her. That she was my grandfather’s North Star was more than enough reason to keep it hanging exactly where it was
But it was odd being at the house. It felt empty without my grandfather and wandering into the barn deepened the feeling of loss. It had the same cluttered atmosphere as the house I’d inherited. Inside were not only mothballs and a wide assortment of tools, but an old tractor, numerous engine parts, bags of sand, pickaxes, shovels, a rusting bicycle, an Army helmet, a cot and blanket that looked as though someone had actually slept there, and countless remnants of a lifetime of collecting things. I sometimes wondered whether my grandfather had ever thrown anything away, but close inspection revealed no trash, ancient magazines, newspapers, or debris that belonged in a garbage can; there were only items that he felt he might one day need for whatever project he was working on.
On the night I received the call from the hospital, I wasn’t doing much of anything. There was no reason I couldn’t have visited him that week, or a month or even a year earlier. Or even, I knew, when I’d been at my very worst. He’d never been a man to judge, and even less likely when it came to the effects of