Author’s
Note: I wrote the following entry in my journal on March 15, 1996 after walking
across the lake on the bare ice. This
may be the longest piece I have posted here. I hope the length does not discourage anyone. Though it needs some editing, I have decided
to post the piece just as I wrote it back then.
Finally,
this: I really miss you Grandfather. All
of this—and so much more—is for you.
Backward
but Still Walking
Why are the lights flexing brightest behind us those
marking tragedies? What cruel and
certain sovereignty, what fuel, what necessity holds our memory against
misfortune for a lifetime, but sets free the joke that doubled us over only a
week ago?
Walking today’s frozen lake, my thoughts turned back
on me once again, grim lights come calling, the trainman’s lamp waving at the
point on the line where the cars of the train leapt off track and plunged down
a ravine. I thought about my grandfather
and how he lived his final days in silent defeat, most of his loved ones having
near the end sprinted to reach death before him. His wife.
His child. A brother who,
heartbroken because his grown children disapproved of his new love, shoved a
hose from the exhaust into his car window and idled out of this existence while
sitting still.
Even before that his mind began to fail him, his
thoughts sinking like hapless beasts into a kind of quicksand from which they
but occasionally dragged themselves free.
And he had become so frail. I
sometimes got him out of the house and brought him out to the lake to fish from
the dock. It would not take much to
convince me that taking him fishing in those fading days was the best thing I
have done in my life so far. He loved
fishing. On those days when I promised
to take him fishing, Grandmother told me that he often rose from bed before
five in the morning, dressed, ate breakfast, gathered his rod and gear, and
then sat in his chair on the front porch patiently waiting for my arrival. Sometimes he sat there for three or four
hours. “George!” she carped at him,
leaning out the door, “What are you doing out there? Mitch said he would pick you up at
nine!” He just grinned at her, his
small, furry dog wagging furious approval at his feet. Nothing but happy critters flailing atop the
quicksand.
Out on the lake, backward but still walking, I glanced
to my dock, now distant and stilted through a foot-and-a-half of ice, drifts of
snow dragged overtop it. For some reason
that silly song started up inside me...“Raindrops keep falling on my
head...just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed...nothing seems to
fit.” I continued shuffling backward,
thinking about what Voltaire said: “Anything too stupid to be said is
sung.” And I remembered clutching my
wobbly old grandfather the last time I guided him onto that dock, his dog
playfully nipping at his slip-on shoes, as she often did when he ambled about. I thought about how he kept a shoehorn atop
the night stand beside his bed, how he and grandmother slept in separate beds
with three foot between them. How,
before the doctor made us take away his truck, he tended to nose the vehicle
off the road in whatever direction he was looking.
I didn’t really do any fishing myself the last time
out with him. Once I had plunked him
down in chair, I fixed him up with gear and pitched the hook out into the lake
just a few feet off the end of the planks.
The late spring sun stood right overtop us. And the perch happened to be voracious that
day. He must have caught thirty of
them. One after another, he reeled them
in, flopped them onto the dock at my feet so I could remove them from his line. “Take that thing off,” he would say to
me. His dog, meanwhile, bounced all over
the place, plowed into me every time I knelt to bait his hook with another
nightcrawler.
Forward, but no longer walking, I listened as a crack
advanced from one shore of the lake to the other. During especially harsh winters, the ice here
might reach a depth of two feet. Stories
of pressure ridges aside, lake ice, though inconsistent and brittle, has
fantastic structural strength, easily capable of holding a runt like me once it
reaches a few inches in depth. Inch for
inch in depth, I was told it will support more weight than concrete. I have been told by someone else that you
could safely run a freight train over a lake frozen over with only six inches
of ice. I am somewhat suspicious of the
last claim, but I know for a fact that as water freezes, the molecular
structure alters dramatically, creating durable tetrahedrally coordinated
lattices and hexagonal crystals of
uncanny strength. The density of ice is
actually less than the water from which it formed because in freezing the
hydrogen bonding increases, forcing the molecules to clasp more of their
neighbors and align—this rigid alignment actually frees up a little space
between them on some sides.
Grandfather was the first grown man I ever heard utter
the word “fuck.” My father did not
swear. I never once heard my father say
that word—maybe another symptom of his seeming lack of most normal human
passion. We were bouncing high across
the Big Belt Mountains in my Father’s old pickup when my grandfather, pointing
to a fence crossing an incline beside us, said: “Someone got one of those
fuckin’ coyotes.” I might have been six
at that time. And I looked over to see a
coyote’s carcass draped over the strands of the barbed-wire like a tattered
stole.
I recall those moments in time as vividly as I recall
any others of import. Until then, I
had foolishly imagined “fuck” a word invented and used by the older boys in our
town. They swung that word around as if it
were a club or knife—something meant to inflict damage or startle. And after hearing my grandfather say it, I
glanced over at my Father to gauge his reaction. I saw none.
A kind of taboo lifted just then.
I understand that words are just words.
We inject them with false and imagined meanings as is our wont.
The summer before my freshman year of high school,
Grandfather drove me and my oldest sister down to the southeastern corner of
Montana. He wanted to show us the
highways he helped to construct in the last years of his career as a
heavy-equipment operator. I suspect a
certain pride filled him as we sailed over the macadam ribbons of his making,
much the same as the one I feel entering a well-lighted building I have helped
wire. I captured a horny toad in some
badlands near where the Battle of Little Bighorn cost Custer his life. From out the window of our room in Hardin,
late at night, I watched a couple of drunken locals fist-fight in the street,
both men too drunk to inflict any serious damage.
But by the end of his days, Grandfather could hardly
fling his bait off the dock. The
transition from constructing the wide interstate highways that feed goods and
people to a prospering nation to a weak old man who requires his grandson to
take him fishing is not an easy one. But
Grandfather really came alive as I drove him through the wide valley we call
home, pointing out new homes, game animals when he saw them. He took in everything. “There’s the Merritt place,” he’d say every
time we drove past one of the ranches near Lake Helena. “I knew that old Merritt. Quite a bird, that man.”
Then everyone started dying around Grandfather. I have never managed to fully shake from my
head the memories of that morning we drove home from the hospital to tell
Grandfather that Grandmother had passed on late in the night. Three of us were in the room with her when
she went—me, my sister, Debbie, her husband, Norm. Stupid with grief, we just sat there in her
room for a while, uncertain of what we should do next. When one of the nurses asked me if we had any
final arrangements made for Grandmother, I replied, “We are going to incinerate
her.”
My sister had to laugh. “You mean cremate her,” she corrected.
I didn’t know what I meant.
After a while we drove home to tell Grandfather. How do you tell someone that their love of
over fifty years has escaped without them?
What good words might dull the blow?
We just walked in and told him, then watched as he collapsed, slumped
down as if instantly his bones had dissolved into the flesh around them.
I saw my Grandparents kiss only one time in all my
life, but I know they loved each other in the same standoffish way as most of
their generation. They shared many hard
times, including the Great Depression.
They kicked around all the Western states before settling here in
Montana to give Mother a more stable childhood.
They drank heavily, fished the streams for trout; Grandfather brought
down a bull elk nearly every fall.
Grandmother learned to drive a car while in her mid-fifties and soon
became “Granny Go-Go” for all her traveling with her diminutive friend Dorothy,
a onetime dancing partner for the actor Gary Cooper before he left Helena for
fame. I remember all of us kids
gathering at the picture window of our house to watch her drive up in her first
car, a brand new Ford Falcon. She took
up oil painting. Grandfather worked at a
thousand hard jobs. He nearly lost his
life near Townsend when a rock crusher captured his arm and dragged him into a
churning belt that did not recognize grease from blood. He clung to his life for many touch-and-go
days, refusing to allow the doctors to remove his mangled arm, which they
wished to do. For the rest of his life,
that Frankenstein arm hung crooked at his side, more for show than work.
When the sound of a big jet descending from the clouds
pulled me from within my own thoughts, I realized that I had tromped nearly a
mile down the smooth surface of the ice, to the place where the painted shale
hills very nearly pinch the lake in two.
The air smelled of snowmelt and sky resting a little too heavily on
pine. Reversing my direction, I started
for home again, carrying the sun on my back as did the Navajo Sun god. According to their mythology, he crossed the
sky packing the Sun every day, and then hung it on a peg in his house at
night. I do not like the summer Sun, the
heat. But on winter days I enjoy nothing
more than a warm poultice of sunlight held against my flesh, my clothing. I would gladly pack it up the steepest
incline around me.
Still, sun or no, I could not manage to shake my grim
thoughts. Some people live most of their
lives as part of a couple, their marriage defining them in most all aspects of
their days. This could be said of my
Grandparents. I cannot remember one
without remembering the other. And the
thing is, Grandfather just plain shutdown after Grandmother died. His life ended with hers. He didn’t last long.
If Grandfather’s death left us kids despondent, it
absolutely crushed Dallas, his dog. I
tried taking her to my house, but she whimpered and slunk around the place and
refused her food. Thinking she might be
okay at her own home, I had a friend move into Grandfather’s house to live with
her while we tried to sort out the estate.
I let him stay there for free as payment for sitting the dog. Dallas drove him crazy. She spent every waking moment hunting the
house for Grandfather. Every new sound
sent her running with tail wagging hopefully.
Round and round the house she went.
In her own brand of protest, she began dropping stools on the
floor. After much debate, my sister and
I decided that we would have to put her to sleep—a deed which sounds much nicer
than it should.
I foolishly thought I might take an active role in
this. We made arrangements with a local
veterinarian, and, on the day in which we chose to end the dog’s life, shoved
the poor creature into my car and drove to the veterinarian’s office in
Helena. Dallas was pretty excited about
taking a ride, which got to me right from the start.
Things turned hideous when we reached our
destination. The dog began to quiver the
moment we pulled into the parking lot.
She stiffened, as if turned to wood, when I scooped her up and carried
her inside.
“Are you sure you can’t find some way to keep the
dog?” the veterinarian assistant quizzed, having seen too many healthy dogs put
to death in the name of sloth and indifference by people too busy to give a
damn. Dallas kept looking at me with
those big wet and bulbous eyes of hers.
Never one to pocket an emotion, my sister, in a dangerously low voice,
said, “Do you think this is something we want to do? Do you?”
The assistant, a young woman who, by the looks of her
wide frame, had not missed too many meals in the last dozen years, wisely
changed her line of questioning. After a
short wait, the vet came out from the back rooms. He asked if one of us would care to be
present when he administered the death-giving injection. That is about the time when I began to shake. My sister looked at me. I looked at the dog. “No way,” I said. “I can’t do that.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll do it.” Cradling the dog in her arms, Debbie followed
the vet into a room in back. Tears
escaped my eyes even before I made it back outside. I could imagine that dog looking up at me as
the cruel trick that is death poured through its body when the vet injected his
mean potion. I imagined the dull horror.
Outside, I stood below a pair of Russian olive
trees. A strong wind kicked shed leaves
around their gnarled trunks. I wept like
a schoolchild. A long time later, my
sister came outside. “I’m sorry,” I told
her. “I’m too weak.”
“She went fast.
She was shaking, so I held her.
She just went to sleep.”
We held each other for a while, the dead leaves
running and jumping at us there below the trees. I felt as if we had just killed everyone in
the family.
To this day, thinking about that brings me to tears.
Reaching my dock, I jumped onto the planks and booted
holes in the drifts. I drank in the good
air, the sun. In spite of it all, I am
dumb enough to be happy most of the time.
Sometimes, driving across the wide valley, I look out at the passing
homes and alfalfa fields, and say, “There’s the Merritt place over there.”
--Mitchell
Hegman
