While Billy and Clever are in the kitchen stirring us up some lunch, I’m picking through Grampa’s dresser drawers. His worn-at-the-seat jeans. The bleached undershirts he wears no matter how hot. I run my finger across the pearl buttons of one of his Texas shirts. The kind you see on rodeo riders. I’ve never been in his room without him. Pressing my face into his pillow, there’s a faint smell of trout twisting out of the lake. My salty tears aren’t helping. They’re only reminding me how the two of us had planned on doing some ocean fishing someday. “The Atlantic spreads out like a Texas prairie,” Grampa told me, thrilled. “Fish the size of calves. Ya’d have to see it to believe it.”
Above his cherrywood bed there’s a portrait of him and Gramma Kitty. They don’t look much older than me and Billy. I’d give up my favorite No. 2 if I could climb into that picture and feel all that love blanketing me and… focus, Gib, focus. What does he always tell me when I get to yearning like this? “What sense does it make cravin’ something ya can never have? That’s like a whippoorwill wishin’ it were a sparrow.”
Oh, Grampa.
What else is he gonna need in the hospital? His deerskin slipper? Yes, he’s awfully fond of that slipper. I check under the bed for it, sending dust bunnies on high. There it is, next to what looks like a wooden hatbox. As I slide them both out and set them on top of his chenille spread, a voice in my head tells me to go ahead and open the box, and it isn’t Grampa’s. He’d raise holy hell if he knew I was going through his personals. I trace the smooth raised-up letters. A M. Addy Murphy. Bet he whittled this box for Mama when she was a little girl. Wonder why he never showed me this before. The top comes right off. There’s a jumble of stuff inside, but what catches my eye right off is the pink ribbon tied around a curl of dusty brown hair. And a letter.
June 2, 1970
Dear Daddy,
Might as well get straight to the point. I caught Joe cheating with the art dealer who owns the shop where I exhibit my paintings. (Calm down. Remember your heart.) After we drop Gib off at your place, the two of us are heading to a cabin in the Cumberlands to try and work things out. Don’t worry.
Love,
Addy girl
Well, goodness. Daddy was cheating an art dealer? So that’s why Miss Lydia can never see him up in heaven when she does one of her ACTUATIONS. This also answers my pestering question as to why he’s not buried with my mama. My grampa despises cheating of any kind.
“Soup’s almost on.” Clever sticks in her head, and seeing what I’m doing, gets herself comfy on his bed. “Whatcha got there?” Boy, she could stand a bath. She smells like giblet stuffing right after you scoop it out of the bird.
I hand over the letter from Mama I found in the box. Clever moves her lips when she reads, so it takes her some time. When she’s done, she shakes her head. “Another man shows his good-for-nuthin’ side,” she says, mimicking her mama to a T, but then adds with some wistfulness, “Do ya think they’re all like that?”
“My man doesn’t have a good-for-nuthin’ side,” I say. “He wouldn’t cheat an art dealer.” (Billy doesn’t even like art all that much. He’s more the rugged outdoor type.)
“You gonna be all right?” Clever asks, eyeing some coins Grampa left on his bedside table. “ ’Bout your daddy, I mean.”
“A course I am. If he wouldn’ta died in the crash, I’m sure he woulda paid that art dealer back.” I set Grampa’s red-striped pajamas into the packing box next to his whittling knife and records. “Bad timin’ is all.”
“But that’s not what…,” Clever says, choked up some since daddy talk is generally considered Verboten: A taboo subject between us. (Her not knowing… you understand.)
“Yes, my daddy was another man who truly loved his woman.” I’m back to gazing adoringly at the picture above the bed. By the blissful smiles on their faces, anybody can see that Grampa and Gramma were enraptured in love just like me and Billy and Mama and Daddy. “True love must run deep in our family, wouldn’t ya say?”
“Deep as hell,” Clever replies, real huffy.
(Jealous, is all she is.)
“Well, I’m gonna give Miss Jessie a jingle down at the hospital, ” I say, replacing Mama’s letter in the hatbox and putting it back under the bed. “Put those coins back on the bedside table, hear?”
Out in the parlor, I dial up the numbers printed on the hospital card and say, “Charlie Murphy’s room, please.”
On the other end of the line, the phone’s ringing and ringing. Miss Jessie finally picks up and says in a running-out-of-breath voice, “Hello?”
“Hey, Miss Jessie. I’m just about set to head over to the hos-”
She interrupts with, “Oh, Gib, where ya been? Ya better get down here quick. Time’s runnin’ out,” and hangs up without even saying see ya later alligator.
Clever is plumb wore out. It musta been all that daddy talk drained her or maybe it’s coming up with THE PLAN that made her get-up-and-go get up and go. I got her set up real nice on the flowered sofa on the screened-in porch. Two pillows. A packet of crackers sitting alongside her bowl of chicken noodle. Billy, him being such a long drink of water, managed to tape her beloved movie poster up on the ceiling so Mr. Paul Newman and Mr. Robert Redford can watch over her while she rests. Billy and Keeper’ve gone off to check on the mooring of Grampa’s boat to the dock, so me and Clever are alone when she asks, “What’d Miss Jessie say?”
“She said time was runnin’ out, but I could tell that she was in a hurry. She musta read the clock wrong.”
I checked the hospital card AGAIN after speaking to her, just to be sure. Visiting hours are definitely ’til two o’clock. I got plenty of time to get done what I gotta get done and still get over there.
Clever asks, “We clear on the plan?”
“Maybe ya better go over it again.”
She sets her spoon in her bowl, and says, “First off, don’t you dare tell Billy what you’re up to. He’ll try to stop you, on account a him being so righteous.”
“Check.”
“Second off, go and break Cooter out of jail. Miss Florida will never forgive us if he’s found hung, and ’sides that, we owe him. From the old days.”
“Check.”
“Last off, you’re gonna take Grampa’s things to the hospital and have a real nice visit.” Fingering the rose she’s got in her hair, Clever adds with a smile, “Tell him for me not to worry. The flowers are doin’ mighty fine. ’Specially the Texas ones.”
I’m sure Grampa won’t mind being last off. In fact, he’d be disappointed as hell in me if I didn’t take care of this Cooter problem first ’fore I go see him. It’s the cowboy way to stand up for a body that cannot stand up for hisself. ’Specially one that is about to get his neck stretched in a permanent kind of way. ’Specially since that neck belongs to Cooter. Grampa’s as fond of him as he is of Billy. All those years calling birds and cooking together up at the diner have bound those two together like biscuits and gravy and birds of a feather.
After I get Clever replumped, she hands me the still half-full soup bowl, saying in a barely-there voice, “Gib?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re gonna stay focused and remember, ain’t ya?” Her lids are heavy and her breath noodley when she takes a good hard look, first at the ceiling poster, and then back at me. “Don’t think I could bear it if ya let me down, Butch.”