Barnstorming

On the green hill with the river beyond it
long ago and my father there
and my grandmother standing in her faded clothes
wrinkled high-laced black shoes in the spring grass
among the few gravestones inside their low fence
by the small white wooden church
the clear panes of its windows
letting the scene through from the windows
on the other side of the empty room
and a view of the trees over there
my grandmother hardly turned her head
staring like a cloud at the empty air
not looking at the green glass gravestone
with the name on it of the man to whom
she had been married and who had been
my father’s father she went on saying nothing
her eyes wandering above the trees
that hid the river from where we were
a place where she had stood with him one time
when they were young and the bell kept ringing
~W.S. Merwin “Widnoon” from The Moon Before Morning

I remember my grandfather as a somber man who slowly rocked in a wooden chair, staying warm by the wood stove.

That chair now sits empty in our home.

For most of his life, Grandpa drank heavily, but he wasn’t just any drunk. He was a mean drunk. Surly, cursing, prone to throwing things and people, especially at home.

Grandma used to say he learned to drink in the logging camps and I suspect that is true. He started working as a logger before he was fully grown, dropping out of school, leaving home around age sixteen and heading up to the hills where real money could be made. 

He learned how to cut down huge old growth Douglas Fir trees, skid them down the hills using a team of horses, and then roll them onto waiting wagons to be hauled to the mills.

He lived with a group of men who surfaced once or twice a month from the hills to take a bath, bootleg booze during prohibition then try to avoid being arrested and thrown in the local pokey. Once in awhile, they maybe went to church with their womenfolk.

Mostly, being a logger taught him how to curse and drink.

He headed home to his father’s homestead farm with muscles and attitude a few years later, and started the process of felling trees, creating a “stump farm” that was a challenge to work because huge “old growth” stumps dotted the fields and hills next to muddy Similk Bay. He slowly worked at blasting them out of the ground so the land could be tilled.

It proved more than he had strength and motivation to do, so his fields were never very fruitful on that rocky hillside. He mostly grew hay for his own animals. He went to work in the local saw mill to make ends meet.

He cleaned up some when he met my grandmother, who at eighteen was seven years younger, and eager to escape her role as chief cook and bottle washer for her widowed father and younger brother.  She was devout, lively and full of energy and talked constantly while he, especially when sober, preferred to let others do the talking. It was an unusual match but he liked her cooking and she was ready to be wooed to escape the drudgery of her father’s household.

They settled on the stump farm and began raising a family, trying to eke out what living they could from the land, from the sporadic work he found at the saw mill, and every Sunday, took the wagon a mile down the road to the Bible Church where they both sang with gusto.

He still drank when he had the money, blowing his pay in the local tavern, and stumbling in the back door roaring and burping, falling into bed with his shoes on. Grandma was a teetotaler and yelled into his ruddy face about the wrath of God anytime he drank, their four children hiding when the dishes started to fly, and when he would whip off his belt to hit anyone who looked sideways at him.

When their eldest daughter took sick and died of lymphoma at age eight despite the little doctoring that was available, Grandpa got sober for awhile. He saw it as punishment from God, or at least that is what Grandma told him through her sobs as she struggled to cope with her loss.

Over the years, he relapsed many times, losing fingers in his work at the mill, and losing the respect of his wife, his children and the people in the community. Grandma took the kids for several months to cook in a boarding house in a neighboring town, simply to be able to feed her family while Grandpa squandered what he had on drink.

Reconciled over and over again, Grandma would come back to him, sending their only son to fetch him from the tavern for the night. My Dad would bicycle to that dark and smoky place, stand Grandpa up and guide him staggering out to their truck for the weaving drive home on country roads. On more than one occasion, Grandpa, belligerent as ever, would resist leaving and throw a punch at his boy, usually missing by a mile.

But once the boy grew taller and strong enough to fight back, managing to knock Grandpa to the ground in self-defense, the punching and resistance stopped. The boozing didn’t.

Grandpa sobered up for good while his boy fought in the war overseas in the forties, striking a bargain with God that his boy would come home safe to work the farm as long as Grandpa left alcohol alone.  It stuck and he stayed sober. His boy came home. Grandpa saw it as a promise kept and became an elder in his Bible Church, taught Sunday School and gave his extra cash to the church rather than the tavern. He and Grandma donated a house on their property to the church for a parsonage.

Some twelve years later, sitting in a Christmas Sunday School program one Christmas Eve, Grandpa leaned toward Grandma; she saw his face broken out in sweat, his face ashen.

“It’s hot in here, I need air, “ he said and collapsed in her lap. 

He was gone, just like that. He left the rest of his family behind while he sat in church, sober as can be, on the day before Christmas.

There is no question in my mind he knew he was forgiven. He headed home one more time, not weaving or swerving but traveling straight and narrow.