Time Reveals All

I don’t know if I ever really knew my grandmother. Maybe I’m not special and no one every really knows their grandparents or even their own parents for that matter. I think there was a small piece of me that always wished I was more like her. She saw no value in the common niceties and false bravado that many people feel they have to show the people around them. My grandmother was a slight woman even frail some might say, and she had a soft voice that even as a child I knew deep down in her throat there was boiling heat just waiting for its moment to spring across her tongue.

My grandmother lost three of her five fingers on her left hand in a meat grinder before my sister and I were born. My grandfather Burl was a cruel and demanding man who forced grandmother to make fresh ground sausage for him every evening and if the long rubbery snakes weren’t being hung to cure over the back bannister when he came up the drive from work, he’d push through the door call my grandmother a “useless sow” and then grab a jug of hooch from the cabinet and drink until he was devoured by darkness in front of the television.

My sister told me my grandmother cut off her own fingers leaving her with only her thumb and middle finger. stuck them in the grinder and with the glee of a chameleon laying atop the brightest orange, fed it to grandfather. It was the best supper she had ever prepared my grandmother would say. “The best meals are the ones that come from your soul,” she’d said. My grandmother was a woman of few words. But my sister and I both recognized that when she did speak, we’d better have our ears ready to listen.

I think my grandmother liked to have only her middle finger remaining, she could flip my grandfather and the rest of us the bird in disapproval with none of us being the wiser. My grandmother would say “God has the best sense of humor and we would all be better off if we talked less and listened to his laughter more.”

The same year my grandmother lost her fingers she had a stroke. She had collapsed at the grocery mart and when she finally came home from the hospital two weeks later, she was pale and spoke less often. The stroke had caused part of her face to freeze and one side of her mouth pointed downward into a fixed scowl. There was something different about her eyes too. My sister said they had become lazy like our grandfather. I didn’t really know what she meant by that; all I remember is my grandmother could look at me with one eye while the other one kept watch over the animals in the side yard.

  My grandmother always wore pink flowered apron with two large pockets that were stained of kitchen grease and dirt from the garden. One side of the aprons pockets were always bulged with various tools and the daily newspaper and the other pocket she carried a small black notebook. I never knew what was in the notebook or why my grandmother would glare at my sister and me and then pull out the notebook and start jotting quick notes. Sometimes late at night when I would creep downstairs to try and get the last bits of my grandmother’s pie, I would see her sitting at the kitchen nook and taping things into the black notebook.

I had guessed she was keeping tabs on all our bad behavior to recall later. I remember asking my grandmother one time what was in the notebook and if I could read it. She looked at me with her eye and said, “run off Pete and go mind what’s your own.” I was intimidated by the way she’d suddenly yank out the little notebook, hold it open with her angry middle finger and then glare at me with her bent lip and squinty eye. But that look was enough that I never asked her about it again.

The weekends we spent tossing between my grandmother Helen and my aunt Selma gradually extended to weeks and even months. I think I must has cared for my mother, but I remember very little of her. She was always seeking something I don’t think she ever found. My dad left us long before I was born, and my mother left us after my fifth birthday. She left me and my sister Lolynn with my aunt Selma and somehow lost her way back to us. My sister Teeter as I called her, because she was born with one leg shorter than the other and when she walked, she reminded me of the fishing boats I would see down at the coast that would tip back and forth with the sway of the water. They always looked like they were just about to teeter over, which is sort of what my sister looked like as she tried to chase me through the woods behind grandmother’s house.

When my sister and I became too much for my aunt we were sent to live with my grandmother. My aunt loaded up our suitcases, drove the twenty-five miles from Gulfport to Biloxi, tossed our luggage out the passenger side door and told us to wait on the porch until grandmother returned from church. My grandmother regarded us on the porch that afternoon much the same as a dandelion that sprouts up in the yard. It’s there and there isn’t really much you can do about it.

My mother would take off periodically and forget that my sister and I were ever a piece of her life. I don’t blame her though. I always knew there was a sadness in her. Sometimes I wish I could recall what it was like to hear her voice, for her to say my name or call to me. I think I was six the last time I briefly saw her, but as much as I’ve tried, I can’t remember that day. Teeter is four years older than me and when I bring up mother, she tells me to forget her that there was nothing about her worth holding memory to. I can’t recall every seeing my mother happy. I guess she had to leave us to find her smile again, and over the years I have taught myself to be okay with it.

Growing up we had to scrape coins together to buy the most basic of goods. My grandmother would take on sewing jobs for ladies at her church, sell bake goods and we would eat from our garden and from a freezer stocked with meat from several members of the congregation. My grandfather worked dawn to dark at a local sawmill and would tend to upkeep of the house. So, the exposed shiplap and plaster visible through most of the rooms in the house was of little surprise.

When my grandfather died close to my tenth birthday my grandmother threw a party, fit with toilet paper banners, lemon cake, balloons and a band from the town that used silver spoons as their instruments. If there were a way to have vision beyond my grandmother’s immovable expression, I knew she was grinning. She never showed or spoke with much emotion, but I knew my grandfather’s passing had to be causing quite the elated stirring inside of her.

The morning after my grandfather’s death my grandmother took the meat grinder from the kitchen counter, planted the bottom portion of it in her garden and filled the inside of it up with food for the many birds that trolled around the house. I remember her saying birds where like Burl…they were good at pooping and eating and contributed little else to the world.

My childhood was nothing of hurt and more just happening. I was just part of the everyday. My sister and I navigated through those years similar in fashion as a maid to cleaning. You have a job at hand that has to be done, you put on the gloves, get into it and then move on to the next task. It was as if each day were the page in a book, you just keep turning the pages and eventually you come to the end. That end for my grandmother was a steeping hot July afternoon when I was sixteen. I found her laying in the back yard on her back with her left elbow bent and her middle finger pointed toward the sky. I knew in her mind; she was flipping off the world and glad her new journey was beginning.

Neither my sister nor I cried during my grandmother’s funeral or any time before or after that I can recall. I think that event dug at both of us in different ways, but like our grandmother we had become accustom to keeping those feelings sealed down inside of us.

Teeter was twenty upon grandmother’s death and she was given the house. In its deteriorating shape I was glad that burden had been placed on her and not me. I was given the little black notebook my grandmother spent so many of her years secretly coveting. When I was young, there were many times I had a strong urge to try and sneak into my grandmother’s room at night while she slept just to get a quick set of eyes on even a few random words. I think in my thought during that time it was more the excitement of not knowing, than the need to know.

I put the notebook away in a cabinet in my apartment some fifteen years ago. It was concealed under some old blankets and clothes I hadn’t gotten around to donating. The desire I had as a child to read it had long waned. I had lived all my antics as a kid and as an adult I really didn’t have the want to read and relive it all. I knew someday, perhaps if and when I become a parent that I would bring it out if for no other reason than to let my kids glow in the fact that I got into a lot of trouble too and somehow, I came through it without any permanent scars.

When I grabbed the stack of clothes out of the cabinet the little black notebook fell from the shelf and several pages tore off and were now sticking out the sides bent. As I fanned through to try and get them back into place, I noticed the pages were thick, each page had a date at the top that was underlined. Then below it said simply “Pete” and then it had a few written lines.

April 5th, 1982.

Pete – he is laughing at the way the light hits the side of the large tree in the yard. He has the most amazing smile, and his silly laugh keeps an old lady grinning.

As I turned it page, behind it was an old browning savings bond that was taped to the back page. I started to flip page after page. The entire book was filled with them. I flipped through and there are thousands of bonds and they are worth a fortune. That reality saddens me. To think we struggled for many years and my grandmother had been keeping these bonds a secret my entire life.

August 10th, 1989

Pete- he is sleeping on the sofa after getting his arm caught on the barn door…small amount of blood, he cried but was over it quickly. His hair is soft, and he is breathing calmly as he sleeps.

It was notes about me. Loving and tender notes about all the events of my life. There were pages and pages, the entire book was about me. All the annoyances I thought my grandmother was writing about…she wasn’t annoyed or bothered. She could never express to me her feelings but as I continued to read, I can start to feel the heat of the tears as they drip down my chin and onto my shirt. “Why…why didn’t she ever tell me?” I spent the rest of that afternoon into the evening reading every page, every word my grandmother wrote and unlike my mother I could actually hear her voice in my head. I could hear her saying these words to me. I didn’t know it then and I’m only realizing it now that my entire life I had wanted so desperately to hear those words from her. But now...time has revealed it all.