Excerpt
As it often had over the long span of nearly fifty years, my dream woke me up. It became crystal clear, familiar, like a twin brother, a part of me. For one moment it was right there full, real. Then once roused I felt the sadness that it was again only my dream: I couldnt really fly away, fly away, up, up over all the troubles of this life. I sat up then, in the dark, listening to see that I hadnt disturbed my sleeping wife. I moved carefully to put my back up against the headboard, to embrace the memories that always followed my dream, my grandpap dream.
There he was again on his wood railed, long, narrow back porch, just rocking and spittin, rockin and spittin Redman. To a ten-year-old he was ancient, over ninety with every hard year hed survived clearly showing. All his foolish youthful energy burned up, forever gone. He would never again move from chore to chore, dream to dream. His straggly, oddly-spaced, white whiskers were accented by long hollow cheeks on a narrow serious face. Still there was a down-in sharpness about his eyes that could hold me even and steady. Always a taciturn man, hed become in these, his last years, nearly wordless. After the death of his daughter, my grandmother, hed gone inside himself to stay.
The yellow, brown permanent stain where his tobacco juice ran down the right side of his chin was a fascinating trademark to me. Grandpap always spat over the back porch railing into the flower garden along the base of the house, where the foul expectorated liquid soaked into the soil of earth my brother and I could get all the fishing worms we wanted with just one spade-full.
As I had all my life, I had dreamed about the damned terraces in Grandpaps backyard, long steep terraces. Hed kept them precisely cut, and the four sets of cement steps down their middle to the alley perfectly trimmed, until he could no longer bend to the task. Then the four hour back breaking job of looping a rope around the mower handle and lowering it down, then busting your guts pulling it up each and every square inch of these wide terraces had fallen to my father, then to my older brother, finally to me. Lord, how I hated that job as no other since. From that summer of 57 forward I compared all hurtful chores given me to those terraces. None of them ever took their measure.
To get through it Id learned to set goals. Getting the top two terraces complete was the first tall hurdle. Happily the completion of the bottom two terraces led, in season, to the rickety grape arbor down near Grandpaps work shed beside the alley. Once down to the thick arbor Id take a long break gorging on the fat dark purple concord grapes, my deserved reward. Of course, after the juicy break it was always tough to get going, enough to please my elders. For all the years since that one summer Id dreamed of escaping those terrible terraces, of sprouting wide feathery wings, of launching myself off the top terrace at a full run to soar up and up like a commanding eagle, to ascend high above the noxious works of mere earth.
Sitting up in bed in the dark reminiscing about Grandpap had become an oft practiced rite of mine. One I gladly indulged in each time I had the dream. I could picture him there on the back porch as if no time had passed, certainly not half a century. Grandpap, old Harry, was reputed to have been the hardest of workers at the iron mill, stalwart in life, now imbedded in my dreams. A hell of a good man, Id been told, and it was easy to believe it from my ten-year-old perspective. Id finally come to know, after thinking on it many, many times, that my memory of grandpap was so richly meaningful that it produced the dream because of his words, something he seldom gave. When he gave them, they were few and final. Sometimes hed fall asleep in his creaky rocker one foot up on the white peeling railing while I was trimming. Often I stopped to rest, to get a glass of water from the cool pitcher grannie had put on the top step. Id sit there in the summer heat and humidity looking up at his lean suspender-striped frame. I would wonder whether hed yet forgiven me for what I had done last fall. That previous November, while rooting in his cellar, Id noticed all the caps on his home brewed wine bottles were loose. I tightened them. Two days later every bottle of the fermenting wine had exploded. Theyd painted the plastered walls beneath their shelf in magenta stripes and splotches that never did scrub off. The look on grandpaps face when hed come down just behind me to investigate, to see the disaster Id managed, had been enough to thoroughly shame me.
I sat there in the dark reviewing my dream, my memories, smiling, thinking he might at that moment be doing the same somewhere nearby in the next world. The nights hushed moments passed while I remembered. I summoned up that one day in his shed, with me underfoot. Hed been hammering on his hand-made heavy rope handled tool box to repair a loose section when he lost his hold on it. A nasty shiver of wood slashed deep into the flesh of his left hand between the thumb and his first finger. I stood transfixed, my eyes wide, wanting to scream out for him because he hadnt. I watched him calmly withdraw the bloody wood sliver, reach up to the overhead shelf and get down a can of kerosene, then douse his ugly wound. He wrapped it in a convenient dirty rag, retrieved the heavy fallen tool box and continued his repairs without uttering a word or a curse of anything. He hadnt even looked my way to see my reaction. I turned and rushed outside, slamming the door, breathing hard as if Id been in a fight.
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