[This piece was written some two decades ago. About a couple of days almost sixty years ago. – JDW]
Honest to golly, my folks rushed us out of town a couple of days before Mother’s Day. “You’ve haven’t been here for the last twenty,” my mom said, “why bother for this one?”
“This could be the last time we see each other alive,” I told my father, “I could go before you do.”
“I’ll manage,” my father said
Just as we’re leaving. “You don’t have to call so often,” Mom says. “Just drop us a note once in a while.”
Called the folks to wish my Dad a happy 75th. He’s a day older than JFK would’ve been. First person in his family to graduate from high school. First man in recorded family annals to live past thirty-eight. Of course, it shows to go you, he’s the first male of the clan to retire.
He has come a long way.
At age twelve, he became a professional truck driver. Eighteen, he was taking care of two baby sisters. Grandfather, who meant as little to me as Adam since he was long gone before my birth, dropped dead one day at Brady & Standard Chevrolet/Oldsmobile where he was bull goose mechanic. Burst appendix, I think.
Grandma was institutionalized for taking the Great Depression too personally. I visited her once at Hill and Dale Asylum when I was maybe eight. It was the biggest building I had ever seen made out of blocks. Big as a school or a hospital or a prison. There was wire on all the windows, a tight weave of metal strands the size of her frail wrists.
It was a Sunday and we had taken a drive on a sunny afternoon after church. Another Mother’s Day. I remember now we almost drove right past the massive brick pillars at the entrance. The car skidded in the gravel. My brother and I, both bug-eyed at this development, slowly turned. We looked at each other, some unspoken agreement – this was not going to be just another Sunday drive in the country – passed between us in that moment.
Then we pasted our little faces to opposing back seat windows.
Place could’ve been a small liberal arts college from the outside. With a very strange student body.
It was a regular nest of cuckoos. Totally loony tunes. Immediately, I saw Tyrone was trying to get really small. I myself was shooting for something invisible. I realize now the difference in modus operandi said much about the kind of men we would become.
Grandmother wasn’t in her room, which was a monochromatic amalgam of a number of layers of different shades of white paint and the dust of the dying and doomed. It smelled sour like crazy people had lived here forever.
She seemed as sane certainly as the doctor who greeted us by telling my parents they’d have to come up with another $12 a month. Grandmother glowed I remember, not a wrinkle on her face. I looked into her eyes cause I had read American Indians said you could tell if a person was crazy just by looking in their eyes. Her crystal blue light eyes almost worked like mirrors. I couldn’t see into her, but I could see a little of myself.
I appeared older with a moustache. A romantic leading man look on my face, set into an old woman’s vision.
Grandmother smiled out of her entire face at me and said, “Junior, you know I’m not crazy, don’t you.”
“No, ma’m. I don’t know that.”
“That’s right, young man, you don’t know that,” she said. Then she laughed.
Like a crazy woman might laugh in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
Tyrone was mouthing words. At first I thought, hopefully, he had been possessed by some lunatic spirit. The second mime around, I could read his silent lips. The Indians were right.
The next time I saw Grandma, she was laid out at Jimmy Ryder’s Funeral Home in a fancier-than-I-expected box not much bigger than she was. Black silk dress. Face dusted and painted. Her eyes were darker, like the light had gone out inside her head.
There was a smile on her face.
My father had worked at the funeral parlor as a younger man. It was a small town and he was a hard worker, so by this time in his life he had pretty much worked for everybody for miles around. Jimmy Ryder gave Dad a good deal on the coffin and some prime real estate at the Mount Pisgah Cemetery.
When we went to get the double string of pearls and the diamond ring from Grandma’s nearly departed body, They were gone.
“Follow me,” Dad said to Mom. “Bring the boys. There’s something I want them to see.”
Jimmy Ryder had to get the jewels out of a box in his own desk. “They seemed safer with me,” Jimmy Ryder told my Dad. Laid them on the table in a manila envelope.
Dad didn’t move to pick up the envelope. He just looked at the fat face of Jimmy Ryder, wondering I guess, what the fit and just punishment might be for a wealthy man who would betray an old friend by stealing from the friend’s dead crazy old mother.
Who didn’t have anything else in the whole world worth stealing.
Jimmy Ryder was sweating like a mountain in springtime. With a nervous smile, he shook open the contents and my Grandma’s jewels spilled onto the desk top. A sparkle of gold rolled across the oiled wood surface. With a motion I couldn’t see, Dad’s hand shot out and he caught the sparkle as it was beginning its descent to the floor. He opened his fist, out flat, palm up, waist high, like he was a waiter with one bonbon on his tray.
It was Grandma’s wedding ring, a plain little band of 14K gold. I could clearly see the simple narrow circle. Dad had already told us how innocent folks often leave jewelry on a loved one’s corpse, thinking the sentimental baubles are going in the ground with them. Like the Pharaohs or Indian Chiefs. The jewelry never gets there, plucked from the nattily attired bones, it’s like stealing from dead babies.
Dad just stared at the draining Jimmy Ryder and I thought maybe Dad had some strange power whereby he could just open up little holes on the outside of a person’s body. And all the juice would pour out, like it was streaming out of Jimmy Ryder.
Jimmy Ryder would be today a desiccated shell, a dry seed pod of a crooked undertaker, if my mother had not said, “I think I’ll put those trinkets in my purse.”
With that, she picked up the envelope and started to mothergoose Tyrone and I toward the door. I was leaning backwards as much as I could to hear my father’s parting words.
“A large donation to the Salvation Army in my mother’s name might buy you some tornado insurance.”
I remember thinking at the time that seemed silly. We never had tornados in upstate New York. And Dad never told us what he wanted us to see.
That was a long time ago.