Winter Loon(73)

He dismissed us with a nod and a single word to me that held no meaning anymore. “Son.”

Ruby spun on her worn heels, went back in the room, muttering about this being “some bullshit alright.”



WHAT MALADY OR DISEASE OR accident brought the other patients to share the room with Gip, I wondered. A couple in the corner whispered gently to each other, the young woman touching the crippled hand of an old woman—maybe her mother—who was more corpse than human, approaching death drawing her skin into the bedsheets. The tenderness of the daughter’s touch, of their hushed tones, was a curiosity to me. I found myself staring. The young man gave me that half smile that said, “Yup, we’re in the same boat.” But he was wrong. I had no tender feelings for Gip. I tried to summon a good memory I could cling to, anything to make me tear up so I wouldn’t look heartless standing there next to my dying grandfather.

Ruby pulled the chair up to Gip’s bedside. Trembles seemed to come from somewhere in her gut. Her whole body shook as she sat. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

I sat next to her, watched the accordion folds of the respirator expand and contract. I wanted to cry for the losing of something important. I should have loved him despite it all, but I didn’t. Any spark of it was snuffed out by the knowledge of what wasn’t mine to remember. Had he ever been kind to me? Once maybe. But in hindsight, even that was tinged.

It was in the fall. I was ten years old. My mother and I were in Loma, probably so she could ask for money. She was in the house and had sent me outside while she and Ruby talked. Gip was standing on the sidewalk, a beer in his hand. He’d set fire to a pile of leaves and was watching it burn in the gutter. “Come over here, Wes,” he said. “You wanna light the next one?”

What boy doesn’t want to light stuff on fire? I walked over to him. He reached for my head, plucked a red leaf out of my hair, then held my chin in his hand, turning my head this way and that. “You look so much like her,” he said. “’Course, you look like your father, too, but your mouth? Definitely Valerie. And her skin. You got that, alright.”

He dropped his hand and turned back to the fire. “She is so pretty, your mother.” The rest was lost in the smoke from that autumn fire. I couldn’t even remember if he let me strike the match.

Sitting there waiting for him to die, I made up a happy house with flower boxes in every window and furniture that was more than moving boxes covered with tablecloths. I imagined a different Gip, helping my mother learn to ride a bike or showing her how to bait a hook. And I finally felt sad enough to well up, not for Gip but for everything he didn’t have and for what he couldn’t give my mother or me and for the pain he caused instead. My tears were angry, but I hoped they might pass for grief.

“He said once I had my mom’s mouth. You think I look like her at all?”

Ruby wrinkled her nose like she was trying to decide something. “Yes, you do, I guess.”

“You think she’s in heaven?”

She looked at me and laughed, not like I’d said something funny but like I’d said something stupid. “She wasn’t no angel, that’s for sure. She was probably better than I gave her credit for, though.”

Buzzers sounded down the hall. Ruby was lost in some kind of reverie and seemed not to notice a commotion of blue scrubs and squeaking shoes that flew past the door. She smoothed the sheet that covered Gip’s chest.

“When I was little, my daddy, he never believed I come from him. Said my mama’d taken up with some moonshiner. When I come out with the black hair, well, he said he knew right then. Time my mama died, he’d like to have tossed me in the ground with her. He’d sit on that porch skinning squirrels—used that knife you got—while my brothers, they’d take me out behind the shed and take turns on me. Daddy, he didn’t give a lick. I’d scream and holler and scratch at them. They thought it was funny. Right up until that night I took a shovel to Jim and knocked the funny clean out of him. My daddy run me out for it. Never was much for cock after that.”

“That’s awful,” I managed to say, though I would have liked to unhear my grandmother say “cock.” “How old were you?”

“I’s seventeen when I left, about the same as you,” she said, before returning her gaze to the past.

“Glad to be gone, too. I hopped the train to Virginia, worked odd jobs, housekeeping and whatnot, for years. Started working one of those dance halls after the war broke out. There’s a woman there, Maureen was her name. After the men left, Maureen and me would slow dance. Lots of the girls danced together. She was bigger than me, Maureen, real big, and she’d hold me close to her. Always liked the smell there on her chest. She’d been held close by men all night long, but she still had a touch of woman left right here,” Ruby said, tapping the place on her own chest where cleavage might have been on someone bigger breasted. “Girls came and went in places like that. One day, Maureen wasn’t there anymore. I missed dancing with her. Then I met Gip. Bet you didn’t know none of that, did you?”

I shook my head. She kept watching the wall behind Gip’s bed like a movie was playing there.

“Gip’d come in and pay for dances. He was stationed stateside, back from fighting the Nazis in France. He’d bring in hard candy sometimes or caramels. Brought me flowers once, even. He was nice to me mostly back then, not as rough as my brothers, that’s for sure. We got married and Valerie come along after that. Moved up here to get away from the heat. Didn’t know it would be so goddamned cold.”