Sometimes I sit out on the porch of our family home early in the day, my parents gone to work, our boxer dog Annie sitting nearby and deeply sighing her complaints and asking when we can go back inside where it’s warm. This morning is crisp, both the air and the ground with all the fallen leaves. There is ice on the pond, the trees rattling and the hard plowed fields beyond. It’s quiet here, the outskirts of town, far enough away that one can take off walking and quickly have shoes covered in mud. I sit here sipping coffee, watching my breath, and when I hold hot coffee with cold hands I remember my grandfather.
My grandfather lived a hard life in a hard place, in a town of 500 people in western Nebraska named Trenton. The summers are scorching and dry, the winters are frozen gusty blizzards, and the highest structures within a hundred miles are the grain silos along the railroad tracks and, ten miles down the highway, a stone obelisk marking where 69 Pawnee Indians lost their lives in Massacre Canyon. Not many people remain in Trenton, but on the corner still sits a yellow house where my grandparents raised two daughters and seven sons, the oldest son being my father.
Dad doesn’t tell many stories of Grandpa. Perhaps because my own memories of him are as a decent man, it’s the uglier stories that seem most curious to me. Dad told me about the day he came home from school and found Grandpa drunk at the bottom of the steps, the only time he saw him drunk. And he told me about the week he spent in Trenton five years ago, when he went one last time to drive Grandpa around the lake, and the cancer had gotten so bad my grandfather fell and screamed and wept, and my father didn’t recognize him then, had never seen him cry.
He used few words at all, but what he said carried weight. There was a dangerous element in him, there was something I feared in him as a boy looking up to a grown man, but this also was my respect.Share on X
I’m proud of Dad for telling me that story, because he didn’t have to.
Whatever his troubles when younger, my grandfather was a different man by the time my memories began. I knew him as Grandpa Lloyd and he was a good grandpa. Back then we lived in a nearby town so I’d stay a week or so every summer in the yellow house. He took me fishing in his boat and gave me hats to wear. He taught me things like patience without ever using words such as patience. He used few words at all, but what he said carried weight. There was a dangerous element in him, there was something I feared in him as a boy looking up to a grown man, but this also was my respect.
Also he was a rascal, especially to the women his sons married–he loved to embarrass my mother. He would walk into a crowded place and bellow absurdities and grin and no one would know what to say. Some people he surely struck the wrong way, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I think this is necessary in the world. He lent our bloodline a marvelously scandalous humor which my dad inherited, and perhaps I have too. He was one of my earliest role models as a man and I am not ashamed of that.
He taught me how to shake hands.
Every day, almost to his last day, he climbed in his truck before daybreak and set out.Share on X
His hands. He was tall and trim, and his hands were lean and long and incredibly strong, even into his eighties. In my memory his hands are bloody from filleting fish or plucking pheasants, or they are flipping bacon in a skillet as I sit on a kitchen stool before dawn and watch him while everyone else still sleeps, the house filling with the smells of pepper and coffee grounds. And in my memory, his hands are always stained black with oil.
His job during the two decades I knew him was to maintain the oil fields outside of town, keep an eye on the great iron horses rocking in the wheat fields and pasture lands. Every day, almost to his last day, he climbed in his truck before daybreak and set out, usually with a dog, on empty roads into the empty prairie to check on the wells, one by one, heaving wrenches and bending his back, driving through brush and snow and throwing up gravel and dust behind him. He was always alone.
I wonder what he thought. I wonder what my grandfather thought when he drove those roads all those days.
I wonder if he thought of something funny and laughed quietly to himself. I wonder if he saw the sun come up and smiled. I wonder if he talked to his dog. I wonder if he watched the great lightning storms build and rumble and felt that awesome suspense before the sky cracks, if he ever screamed at that sky just to release something too long held.
The silence of my grandfather smells of tar and is deafening.Share on X
I wonder if he thought of his childhood, of his own father who died in a car fire when he was young, or of the woman he fathered a child with before knowing my grandmother, or the Korean War, or his children and grandchildren now scattered across the States. I wonder if he worried what would become of them all when he was gone.
I wonder if he thought of all those long afternoons drunk at the bar, of things he did then, did he feel shame, regret? I wonder if he ever felt lonely with just the cornfields and an old dog for company. I wonder if he ever felt sad, or if he feared his death.
The silence of my grandfather smells of tar and is deafening.
I guess I miss him, don’t I?
(Note: I was given the great privilege of writing the eulogy for this man when he passed away several years ago. You can find it here.)