The mountains were beautiful, and that's why Larry went. His girlfriend went for the conference, went to hear what the world-renowned medium had to say about death and the dead, but Larry just went along for the ride. And for die view: five thousand feet up in the mountains of northern Georgia, he hung out in the small cabin they rented, ran along the river, took in the sights. He ate meals with the conference-goers, and listened to the stories they brought back each day. It was, he remembers, the week Waco burned, but in Georgia the mountains were quiet.
It was after dinner one day when the medium approached Larry to ask why he wasn't taking part in the conference. You don't believe we can contact the dead, the man asked, and Larry replied that yes, as a matter of fact, he did. He just wasn't interested in doing it with thirty other people.
"I'll tell you what," said the man. 'We have a channeling session tonight. I won't charge you. You should come."
And Larry thought, what the hell. That night he arrived at the huge conference center carved out of the hills, and headed to a small room that opened off of the central, cafeteria-style area. The other conference members were there, seated in a circle; the medium sat at the head, and he spoke to them one by one. One by one, he asked the name of a loved one, offered information he shouldn't have known, and the room filled with tears and I love you's, I miss you's, you'll do fine's.
And then it was Larry's turn. I don't know why he chose the way he did. Maybe he couldn't think of anyone else. Maybe he wanted a laugh. Or maybe he saw then, long before I would, the tangled lines we all wove, and whom they led back to.
"Call Clifford McEntarfer," he said.
Western Pennsylvania, 1920s
The trees in the woods are rain-black, and Clifford and his son walk among them. Clifford doesn't need a path. Wesley follows behind. The two make an odd team: Clifford is tall and confident, his steps sure and quiet, rifle up high and ready. His eyes, searching out the hidden space among the trees, reveal the restless energy of a man who can't be still: idle hands and the devil, and such.
Then there's Wesley, behind. Short and round, his face still soft and boyish. His steps drag, and he carries the rifle loosely, barrel hanging downward. He's not as agile as his father and he knows this, an embarrassment. He rolls his eyes as he steps over a fallen branch, and then struggles to catch backup with his father's strides.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps he's decided already that this is his day. He's done. He walks angrily behind his father, or nervously, testing each moment, each step, now?
Something happened in the woods between your grandfather and your great-grandfather, my dad's cousin Larry has told me. Something Larry knows of only vaguely: has gleaned through watered-down family stories, die kind we all carry, until what's left isn't really a story at all, just the outline of one. And the knowledge: something changed between them out there, Larry says.
Perhaps the day is bright. Sharp. The dry leaves below their feet, wordless shouts in my grandpa's ear.
Clifford leads the way to a cluster of three trees that form a small semi-circle, the perfect place to hunker down and wait. Wesley lies himself down miserably. He's always hated hunting. He certainly isn't any good at it. His father keeps his voice low as he repeats advice he's offered a thousand times, but disappointment drips through those instructions like sap. Pathetic. They leave Wesley even worse, all awkward and bumbling for the stickiness.
He hates his awkwardness. He hates the way the brown velvet sides rise and fall within the scope, his own finger trembling on the trigger. He hates the recoil that knocks him back, hates the clean-up, hates the weight of the deer: the warmth and the way the body bumps against his thigh as he holds the back legs high, averting his eyes, following his father home.
Perhaps Clifford forced him out there that day. The day he'd been counting toward because of the home football game everyone was going to, the cheerleader with soft, curly hair or green eyes and halftime, when he'd maybe get to talk to her. That morning his father said, quiet but forcefully, the way he always talked: Wesley* get your rifle.
And the anger roared inside Wesley all morning. He did as he was told, got dressed and grabbed the rifle, but he didn't speak. Defiance was almost unheard of from him, the oldest. Even unspoken, it lay thick in the rooms of the house, thick like smoke. Thick like a woven quilt in June. The younger children, Joyce and Edie and little Martin, they quieted themselves and kept to their rooms.
Clifford acknowledged nothing. He was not a man who second-guessed himself.
And so they headed out. Sixteen and vengeful, Wesley leaned sharp into brittle twigs and leaves that crackled like firecrackers each time his father took aim. Just the right moment. He coughed strategically, the way teenagers will when they're supposed to be quiet, math tests and productions of Romeo and Juliet. Clifford's temper wasn't quick, but it wasn't often tested. Snap. Snap. Snap, until he turned and Wesley saw his chance, sixteen years of anger exploding into sixteen years worth of never-saids. Accusations burst forth beneath the bare branches and bounced off the dark wide trunks of the trees, and scared all the deer away for good.
My father doesn't think so.
Wesley, my grandfather, my father's father, hated hunting—yes. And
yes, he stuck up to his father a few times: if you don't like my house, he said once, then you don't have to visit, but don't come here just to criticize. So Dad says: maybe.
We can only imagine, and so we do; no one alive knows what happened out there. I draw my version from the Grandpa I knew: an imposing man—not intimidating, just large, and with presence. Grandpa looked eerily like Wilford Brimley, from the old oatmeal commercials. His voice in my memory is a bellow, ninety percent joking, just a tiny bit scary He never once let me win at checkers, a fact I loved him for, and he wasn't afraid of anything: wasn't afraid to take a cookie from the bulk food bins when he \vent shopping and to at it right there in the store, to wink and give me one too. Plus, as a small-town pharmacist, he was virtually famous. Everyone downtown knew him.
But Dad knew both Wesley and Clifford. He saw them together, and I never did. Turns out there was something my grandpa was afraid of. Dad remembers Clifford's visits: the way Wesley, a grown man, would tell his father the liquor in the kitchen was just for cooking. The way Clifford would insist on "fixing up" his son's house; the way it could have been kindness but was not. Instead, the first blow of Clifford's hammer was assault number one on Wesley's manhood: can't keep your own house up for your family? And Wesley, of course, would feel obliged to help, but then he'd use some tool wrong, and Clifford would berate him and then there you have it: assault number two. And it would go on like this, my father says.
The image of my grandpa made bumbling and clumsy is new, a wrong tool in and of itself: a piece that doesn't fit. But it must have been a part of him somehow, because Dad's sure that's who was out in the woods that day. They hunkered down there, hiding, and along came the perfect shot. Couldn't miss. Except Wesley did. He'd loaded the gun wrong, or his aim was off, or he spotted the second deer, the small one, just before he pulled the trigger. The Wesley I knew was a gentle man. Large and loud, yes, with bristly-cheeked bear hugs you couldn't squirm out of, but somehow—gentle. He claimed to hate the cats the family owned once, but when he thought he was alone, he'd talk to them, soft.
No vegetarian, but not a man who would have enjoyed killing his meat himself.
My Grandpa screwed up. Or else refused. And came back less a man, in both their eves.
Up in the mountains, Dad's cousin Larry did believe. He's no nut, not the kind of guy to sit around a ouigie board or live his life according to some horoscope. Still, he'd had some experiences he couldn't discount. There was the night in college when he woke to his grandmother's voice—a grandmother miles away, one he rarely even thought of, but there was her voice in the dark, calling his name clear as any sound he'd ever heard. And the next day, the phone call: his grandmother had died. A few years later, Larry dreamed he saw his Uncle Owen standing in an airport, wearing fishing gators and waving goodbye. The next day, another call: Owen, too, had died. Had drowned, in fact, on a fishing trip, when his gators filled with water.
So Larry believed, at the very least, in the possibility of connection with the dead. About this guy, though, he wasn't so sure. He was determined not to give the medium any clues.
"Clifford McEntarfer," the medium said. "A strong name. And what's yours?"
"Larry Bayle."
The man nodded. "Ah, another strong name."
Yeah, Larry thought, what are ya gonna say? Ah, and there's a weak one?
It's late summer a few months ago, and my parents and I drive out to an Italian restaurant in Bemus Point, a small beach resort town perched on the edge of western New York's Lake Chautauqua. We eat, and watch the sun set over the lake, and then we head for the car.
"Hey Dad," I ask on the way, "where's the Red House?"
"It's over there," he says, pointing diagonally back into the Point's tic-tac-toe board of tiny streets, "but it's not red anymore. Do you want to see it?"
I think I remember the Reel House. It was the summer cottage my grandparents owned until I was a young child, the place they brought Dad and Uncle David for summer-long vacations when they were kids.
Dad drives over to the cottage, which we slow past in the twilight, and he's right: it's white now I was wrong: straining through the darkness for anything familiar, I come up blank.
Dad points across the street. "And that cottage over there was my grandfather's."
I look at him. "Grandpa's father had a house across the street from him?" I strain now out die other window. "How did Grandpa feel about that?"
"Well, ya know—I don't think he was thrilled. His father made him nervous." Dad drives a moment in silence. "On the other hand, look at the street he bought a cottage on."
We've reached the corner, and I stare through the darkness again to read the green sign.
"Clifford Street."
When people describe my great-grandparents, they describe my great-grandfather. His tiny wife Louise, they say, was sweet, or gentle, or even the quiet force behind him, the one who could say, now, Clifford, stop and he would. No amount of prodding can convince them to go further. She's not the one they remember.
When they describe my great-grandfather, they describe him driving The stories abound, though I've only discovered them, only asked for them, recently. He'd set goals for himself: he'd have to make Raleigh by four, regardless of exhaustion, regardless of children in the back stiff with fear they'd pee on the seat. Clifford drove through blizzards so bad, he had to stick his head out the window just to see. He had to drive on and off the road the whole way, just to figure out where the shoulder was.
God forbid he just stay home.
Perhaps I'm too hard on him; probably I am. What I knew as a child about my great-grandfather was this: he was domineering. He was a Methodist minister. And he wrote Dad before my parents' wedding to tell him not to marry that Catholic girl.
That was all I needed to know. Religion's always been a touchy subject for me. Mom took my sister and me to mass each week, gave us heaven and the Hail Mary. Dad argued with my baptismal priest: told him there was no original sin in his kid. So in a very private way, I grew up both deeply religious and as skeptical as they come. My father taught me to despise nothing so much as hypocrisy in the name of religion.
And die man who would have kept my parents apart in that name? For whose God my mother wasn't good enough? Well, he was dead; I can't claim to have thought about him all that much. But when I did, I ,,knew him as an awful man, one I would have hated had I known him.
Simple as that.
Tonight in the car, though, for the first time I want to know more. On the drive home, I pelt my father with questions: what was Clifford like? Did he yell a lot? Was he cruel, or just misguided? And especially, where is he in all of us, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren; how far can one person's influence reach? As he drives, Dad fills die car with stories I've never heard, with people I've barely ever spoken to and to whom I should, he says. I find myself thinking of butterfly wings, and hurricanes. Of the small updrafts that stirred or were stirred in the way-back forgottenness of all of our lives: the ones that lifted leaves and then branches and somehow morphed into each of us, spinning like tops through this world. Believing we spin of our own volition; sending out updrafts of our own. I don't believe in fate, but I'm not talking about fate either. I'm talking about a simple matter of cause and effect.
I've always had a vague notion that Clifford's influence ran like a shadow}' streak through the family In my imagination, he raised his fist and his children cowered, and the thunderous downward crash of it sent even his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren's hands to their ears, and buckled their knees.
In a way, I was right. And yet the stories I've gathered since, the way an artist might gather bits of colored glass and stone, they draw themselves together into a form infinitely more complicated, more shaded and subtle and true.
Aunt Edie, I always thought of as fragile. I don't know why. She was enormous. My grandparents watched my sister Caitlin and I while our parents worked, and occasionally Grandpa's sisters, Edie and Joyce, would drive up from Erie to visit. They'd bring a little white poodle whose ear they had stuck through with a pink bow, and they would sink heavily into the couch to discuss boring adult matters with Grandma and Grandpa. Gait and I didn't listen. The aunts were of little interest to us, except perhaps because of their size: the two fattest people we had ever seen. Their girth held our attention for a bit, but mainly we liked the poodle, and felt sorry for its ear.
So I don't know where I got the impression of Edie as fragile. I don't suppose I ever will; I haven't seen her since I was a child, and I don't suppose I'll see her alive again. Perhaps I caught a snatch of conversation I wasn't supposed to hear. Knowing what I know now, I wonder about the kind of wound that lingers deep in the bone, after the skin and the scars have healed. Could the stench rise up from the dead parts after so long? Could it become a part of a person, like a chosen perfume, and when you smell it you understand things you can't quite put into words?
Western Pennsylvania, 1950's
She loves him passionately; of that I'm sure. His name is a silent refrain on her tongue, a secret jewel; washing the dishes, making her bed, she turns it over and over in her mouth, lingering on the sharp cool edges. Rounding corners and opening doors, she molds her face.
She would be shy. The one who ducks her head and gets tongue-tied, while her sister Joyce puts her in her place. Joyce and Wesley, I've heard, were the good children, the ones who pleased their parents. Little Martin I don't know about.
Edie, I think, is a disappointment.
They have to meet in secret. He is Catholic, Italian, and my father thirty years later will have a distance and a freedom Edie doesn't. Even as I abhor the prejudice, the romantic in me revels in the secrecy. Did he come to her window? Did he throw stones?
Did she sneak out late at night? It's odd to picture people you've only known wrinkled and stiff-kneed as anything but. My mother, who is not even wrinkled and stiff, or not so much so, always told us that she never misbehaved. Never? we'd beg, and then run to her mother and siblings: never, they'd say, and smile. And so I've never been able to picture her in anything but her Catholic school uniform, never been able to hear anger or sarcasm when I imagined her child-voice. It's even stranger to picture Aunt Edie young and in love. She would have set her hair for him.
She would have raged against Him. She would have learned to separate the pieces of herself: to fold and tuck away the full-swing throes of early love. The world would have spread itself before her all at once, full and ripe and terrible, with him or without.
One night, she sets aside her best dress. Her hands shake. The clock drags its feet. Finally, she slips into the dress and out the window, and her footsteps on the empty road, in her best shoes, are fast click click clicks in the dark. They meet beneath a tree, say, or at the fountain downtown— no, too public, so the tree, meet beneath a tree that reaches down like a wing to fold them in, and then they run together, holding hands, no time for greetings save for her nervous giggling.
She thinks, I'm home.
She thinks, He'll kill me.
Did she think he wouldn't have to know? Because, she came home. They ran off together, eloped, got married, and then they kissed quick and hard and she ran home, and slipped back in the window. And lived like that how long? Days? Weeks? I wonder what made her tell. Did Clifford make one remark too many about Catholics? Did the baby begin to pull the seams of her dress? Did they wait that long? (Did they need to?)
Perhaps one night after dinner, the family (minus Wesley, off at college, and Joyce, married) sits together in the living room. Clifford works on a sermon while Louise reads a book; Martin finishes his homework, and Edie sits with her own out in front of her, her eyes not even angled toward the page. For all of their faults, they are a close family, and in the living room she feels that closeness. She feels their very pulses as one, and it roars in her ears and is riot hers; hers flows the other way.
Anger and disappointment grow suddenly trivial, familiar even compared with separateness, which she doesn't know and cannot stand a minute longer. She doesn't tell them out of strength. She doesn't tell them out of anger or righteousness or pride or even love. She tells them out of desperation. She spits it out and then she closes her eyes. Please.
For forty-some years, my grandpa sat in the very last pew at church. He went. He went, and every evening he led his children in Grace, but on Sundays he rose that tiny flag of rebellion. Clifford used to make his children sit in the front row, where he could watch them from the pulpit. For the rest of his days, my grandpa would sit as far from those eyes as he could.
Edie disobeyed one man and was abandoned by two more: by the boy beneath the tree, who left both wife and son, and by a man named Lee who married her for love, and promptly died. She never finished high school, never finished the GED she started. Dominated by her father first and then her sister, Edie grew into a vessel easily broken, always left behind.
Larry grew up across the street from Clifford: knew the most important tiling was, Be Good When Grandpa's Here. His mother— Edie's sister Joyce—was another version of her father, strict and overbearing. The things she'd say in front of those boys, my grandmother will say— in front of Larry and his brother, humiliating stories Grandma won't repeat. I've only met Larry a few times, but he exudes a kindness—and a roughness intertwined, remnants of the angry cousin my father remembers as a boy. The teenager to whom the sixties, long hair and weed, and more than weed, were so incredibly appealing. Approval was a rare thing in that house, and religion ever-present, and Larry—he roared for years against its walls.
At first, the medium told Larry, "I'm having a hard time with this one." But then it all came flooding in: "I'm seeing... organ pipes," he said, "like the kind you have in church." And Larry pictured his grandfa ther in the pulpit and thought, okay... that's weird.
"Is this your grandfather?" the man asked, and when Larry nodded, he went on: "He says to tell you you're just at the tip of the iceberg."
Well, what the hell did that mean?
"And don't get too full of yourself."
And without even understanding, without even knowing what he would get full of himself about, Larry thought: well isn't that just the old man to a T?
Then Larry spoke up. "Tell him I was right about Nixon and Watergate."
Their old argument, fiercely battled out over dinners and the evening news. As if Clifford, dead or alive, could resist that bait.
And so there Larry sat, surrounded by people in the midst of deep emotional moments, of crying and love and forgiveness—and my father's cousin argued politics with his dead grandfather.
I met Larry a few years ago. I didn't mean to. I've met my share of Dad's relatives and did not plan to be around when this one came. Larry and his wife Gerda showed up early, though, and caught me on the back deck. And, who knew? They were funny. They were liberal. They worked with children, Larry running a Boys and Girls Club and Gerda as a child psychologist, and when they weren't at work they ran together on trails. They were Vermonters. Dad, I said afterwards, someone in your family's cool.
Larry looks like a McEntarfer: broad face, large nose, creases like trenches down the sides of his mouth. Dad says he's the one with insight into the family, so I call him up. We speak, and he e-mails me a picture of Clifford and Louise, my great-grandparents. They sit on the steps of a clapboard house with my uncle David—chubby, perhaps two years old—between them, gazing seriously off to the side. Behind them an old-fashioned black mail slot reads, in white lettering Rev.C.A. McEntarfer.
I study the picture, and then I e-mail Larry back. They look so nice, I write. And.. .normal.
They do. Louise wears a striped blouse tucked high on her waist into a long, light-colored skirt. Her dark hair curves in around her head, just below her ears. Her smile is wide and eager; she leans forward at an odd angle and holds her arms stiffly, as if she's about to stand up and offer you something, a treat hidden in her right hand.
Clifford wears a white collared shirt, a dark tie, and gray pants. One giant hand lays open on his leg, the other grasps his wrist. His glasses have thin metal frames, and his dark receding hair is parted over to one side. The look on his face is almost.. .goofy: a large nose hanging oddly out over his cheeks and his chin and his smile, so that they all look like they're set too far back. Not a bad-looking man, but an odd one. He doesn't look stiff or stern at all, but at ease, as if he's just in the beginnings of a chuckle.
Larry e-mails me back: They were nice. 1 hope I haven't made it sound as if they weren't.
Not you, so much as everyone I've ever known.
Larry says family was important to my great-grandparents, the most important thing Clifford's drives through the snow were for family: to get his children to the hospital; to reach his dying father. He and Louise had fought to form their own family. Louise's parents were well-to-do, entertaining such guests as Admiral Robert Peary in their parlor, which I imagine all blue and white, lace and china. Clifford's father built houses, and in the winter he cut down giant blocks of ice to sell. Clifford helped. He was helping the day they arrived at Louise's house, where blue and white had turned black, curling in the flames.
Louise's parents sent her to California for die summer, hoping young love could evaporate into the distance and the giant redwoods she visited, but she set her jaw on the train and came back more determined than ever.
They were in love.
I have not imagined them in love. And when the boy came, so early and tiny, his eyelids transparent and his fingers like little alien tentacles, they fell in love with him too. Even through the screams, which drove Clifford from the house. Louise's breasts have nothing to offer the child who's come too soon, so Clifford knocks on doors all over Chicago, soaking in the April rain. Do you have a baby? Do you have some milk—Please, I’ll pay you for some milk.
The love in that house took a different form from the love I've known. It was real. Still, Clifford and Louise were strict, and Clifford was not afraid to take off his belt. He locked a grandson out of the house for coming home late, and threw him out for good over dancing with a girl. Was he a child abuser? I don't think so. He was a man you could not please. He was a man who didn't yell often. Instead, he choked you with his silence. He lay his disappointment like a load of bricks onto your back; not enough to break you, but you couldn't help but bend.
And they did; we did. My family is littered with the remnants of him, with lives he reaches out to today as clearly as he did to Larry that night in Georgia. Lives molded as if by ghost hands—hands they may never even have seen.
Never once did I imagine we'd been affected. My grandfather's life was one of quiet rejections: he moved his family an hour away from Erie, became a pharmacist and not the minister Clifford wanted. As for us—Mom and Dad and Gait and I—I always assumed those rejections had protected us.
And yet, Larry says part of that legacy is Clifford's need to push, to be working, doing something. His grandchildren knew a visit from Grandpa meant they'd be forced into hard labor, helping to redo the kitchen floor or add a bathroom on. He was unstoppable, a man who made it through blizzards and found his son milk. It's a need Larry thinks led to Louise's death, several months after Clifford crashed their car on a drive down to Florida. Clifford was in his eighties, Larry says, and probably exhausted—but he wouldn't have been able to stop.
Larry says, We McEntarfers, we're hard on ourselves. We don't accept human frailties. This from a man who says he's only just begun to learn that if he heads out for a twelve-mile run and feels awful, he can go home after five. The world rolls on.
All those years, and he never knew.
It's a trait I see in my father too. When I was a child, one of the stories that defined Dad for me was this: he signed up for football in high school and was awful: overweight, and the giant hill behind the field hell ten times over, every practice. He knew he'd have to quit, but then one day he heard some other boys, boys with sculpted muscles, naming the kids who wouldn't make it. Ticking the names off on their fingers, while my father listened in the weird locker room light.
Dad, of course, stuck out the season—made up his mind the minute he heard his name. In the end those boys were impressed, and told him so.
Dad taught his children well. Hustle was his big word during Little League, a skill he valued far more than catching or hitting. Neither he nor Mom cared if we were sports stars (which was good; we never were), but they, and especially he, cared about hard work. You never walked out onto the field or back to the dug-out; you hustled. It's a trait I see in my sister now, in die sixteen-hour double shifts she asks for at the nursing home where she works, earning money for grad school, and in her obsession with earning an A in every college math class she took.
Gait and I grew up different as two sisters could be, but we did share a dad. In college, I'd slip into the music building to practice my flute late: eleven, twelve at night. The only one there, and that building breathed with me and was mine. Night was often the only time I could find to go but also, I loved it. Alone up there, I'd practice music the way my father'd taught me. The way no one wanted to hear. You pick a measure, he'd say, and you play it over and over again until you've got it. I think I took his advice to an extreme. I played those measures looking at the music and looking away; I set the metronome slow and cranked it up and up and up. I set goals: ten times in a row perfect at this speed, and when I didn't get it I stamped my foot like a child, and started again. Not until college did I understand the preference normal flute-players have for slow, pretty pieces. I liked the fast stuff, the finger-twisters, the parts that required little musical skill beyond a type of rote gymnastics on the keys. Music I couldn't muscle my way through, I long had neither talent nor desire for.
Pushing, I know, isn't always a good thing. My father's tendency led to the one thing I've ever said that I'd take back, if I could only take back one tiling. He was running for the school board, and he'd worked like crazy for the election; every weekend he was out campaigning door to door, or hammering signs into grass. After he won in April, he volunteered for every meeting, every teacher interview, every function that he could. We joked about it, Mom and Gait and I: rolled our eyes behind his back and got annoyed once in a while, but nothing major. Mom had seen this before, and she knew even more than we did: It'll pass, she said. So we waited.
I don't remember why Dad and I argued that day; we didn't argue often. We were out back by the pool, scooping dead leaves from the surface. Summer vacation had just begun, and a month-long school trip to Germany loomed ahead. I was excited, but so scared of being homesick my stomach had been aching and churning tor months.
I don't remember why we argued. I remember that it made me so angry, sixteen and so angry I only wanted to hurt him. I'm leaving three days, and you don't even care! You care more about the school board than you do about me!
And I ran inside.
My words weren't exactly earth-shattering, hardly the worst thing a teenager's ever said to a parent, or perhaps that I've even said to my own. But these ones stick. When he came in, his eyes were red. I'd made my father cry. My attack was exaggerated, but it held a shred of truth that burned in his skin, and in my own, like shrapnel. I was with Mom in the living room, crying myself. 1 didn’t mean it. We made up, but the entire trip I burned again each time I remembered what I'd said. A crazy teenage fear hung over me all through Germany, gripping my hands knuckle-white to the seat as I crossed my first ocean: I was sure I would die before I ever made it home. My words, then, would hang before his memory of me like spite incarnate, the rest of his life.
Ok: I was a dramatic kid.
At least I can blame the whole thing on my great-grandfather.
I know that's not entirely fair—and yet, if he'd leave me alone, maybe I could sit still when an assignment due next month isn't finished. Commercial breaks would stop giving me guilt trips, reminding me of laundry to be put away or dishes to be washed, and the three minutes I have to get them started.
Still, that work ethic is one of the characteristics I've always been most proud of in myself. It's one of the lessons from my father that I cherish the most. Influence, I suppose, is a funny thing—not dominoes at all, but something far more complicated. A matter not just of depth, but of direction and degrees. It's not as if I'm a product entirely formed from my great-grandfather. There's him, there's his wife, there's Grandma and Grandpa, my parents, and of course, twenty-three years of living. The ways I'm not affected by him, and the reasons why, are far more important than the ways I am. And still, whole sections of my life, whole values, whole memories, my bristly fourth-grade softball coach saying you're a tough kid, ya know that—they are the result, at least to some degree, of a man I've grown up learning to despise. After all, if he'd had his way, I'd never have been born.
What bothers me more, though, is the notion that he may not deserve my hatred. My dislike, certainly; my disapproval and perhaps even my pit)'. But to despise him?
Larry says his grandparents loved one another deeply, and they loved their children.
Ron, his brother, remembers Clifford taking him out in his boat, just grandfather and grandson. He knew I needed that attention, Ron says.
Clifford's youngest son Martin says, they did the best they could with what they knew
Well, that's a scary thought.
But suppose it's true. I think, probably, it is, and it makes me think. I have issues of my own: I duck my head like Edie did, if for different reasons. How will the lips of my great-grandchildren curl because of me?
I liked my great grandparents better when they were monsters.
In fact, Clifford and Louise probably had the best intentions. They loved their children and their grandchildren. They carried Grandpa on a pillow, and I believe they'd have turned die city of Chicago upside-down to find him milk. Raising children means protecting them, and in their minds I suppose even my mother constituted a threat.
I don't excuse them on all counts. Clifford, I think, had a cruel streak; he enjoyed humiliating people, enjoyed his son's awkwardness with a gun. He was racist and prejudiced, the worst kind of preacher. My great-grandparents (for it was she who could have and did not say stop), they built up a house of love, but also one of fear and shame and disappointment, a house that spawned houses upon houses of the same. Clifford and Louise have ravaged my family like a storm that blows in fast, and then for weeks you're gathering bits of lawn furniture and die children's toys from the neighbors' yards.
And yet, they are the people on the front stoop, the world spread out before them. A woman with a hidden gift. A man about to laugh.
Western Pennsylvania, early 1900's
Union City, Pennsylvania sleeps, and buries itself in snow As the boy makes his way to the barn, snow gathers on his dark coat and his hat, on his eyelashes so that the world, or what he can see of it, shines: circles of light from the streetlamps drawing themselves out long into beams.
It's two in the morning. Clifford is thirteen. The barn door opens heavily and he steps in fast to save the heat, then stands stamping his feet, letting out a loud breath that hangs in front of him. The very movements lie's seen his father make. The barn smells of manure, and hay and warmth and is a known thing; Clifford breathes deep.
Then he gets to work. This he also knows. Later, after school, he'll head out with his father to cut down blocks of ice into chunks small enough to be sold. Once they're cut, they'll haul them to the shed and bury them in sawdust for insulation. The cross-cut saws will tear their ways slowly through the ice. Clifford's arms will be warm and heavy with the work, but his fingers, curled around the saw's wooden handle, will grow cold there, stiff as frozen sausages.
Mornings, he works alone. He leads a brown horse from her stall into the center of the barn, then drags a chair over to stand on and harnesses her to the plow—no easy task with gloves, but he's practiced. When he finishes, he opens the door again and leads her out.
Clifford's friends from school are warm still beneath their blankets. If they wake, they'll listen for the ringing of the clock downstairs and smile in relief at the hours left. Mornings, Clifford doesn't allow himself to think of them. Snow falls on Union City, Pennsylvania, falls on the rural road spreading out before the plow and behind it, and the streetlamps unfold their lengthened selves like graceful arms spread open. Clifford holds the reigns as he's been taught and stamps his feet to keep warm. When he gets home, he won't complain. He'll eat, and help his brothers and sisters eat and then they'll all head off for school. After-school there's chores, the ice, and homework.