Wishing Ribbon

Grandpappy Mason never did like technology, and the day the package came by drone — it nearly sent him ass over teakettle. You’d think a man like him growing up in the middle of nowhere Appalachia would be used to seeing all sorts of strange birds and creatures, but the second he spotted it, he leapt from his rocker and started swinging at it with his cane like it was a hornet’s nest after him. Even Gamgam thought he was crazy, and she had a little flip phone to call me when I had to take her to Walmart and their doctors’ appointments.

He nearly took out the rotors before I was able to stop him and tell him to relax, that it’s some sort of delivery service, but no! It was some devilry, he said. I tried to get him to look at the package — addressed to him, no less — but he would not have it, and God help me if I took it into the house. He had the decency to lend me his trusty pocket knife and readied his cane to beat the devil out of whatever jumped at him. I think it caught us both off guard when I took out a different pocket knife. When I lifted it up to show him, he nearly ripped it from my hands, nevermind the pocket knife he let me use. There were other things in the box too: letters written from Gamgam, a series of intricately tied cotton ribbons, and even a photo of Gamgam in her younger years, faded with age.

I stared slack-jawed at him, and he was the same to me. Gamgam nearly fainted at seeing the picture of herself when she was younger, and I had to help her sit down on the porch. Grandpappy took his seat beside her, thumbing over the letters and tracing every word she wrote in crisp blue ink.

“I thought I lost these—“ His voice had been shaky, like a fawn in spring. “I haven’t seen them since the war—”

That was a touchy subject. No one asked Grandpappy Mason about the war. For all we knew, he went overseas and came back with a thousand yard stare and bad limp in his leg. Even Gamgam kept her lips buttoned tight and never let on more than she cared to.

Grandpappy let her take the letters and look over them, and I could see her dry her misty eyes. “I thought you were a gonner when I sent these.”

“I felt it.” His eyes drifted over to the cotton ties, each dyed a bright color. I could see a flicker of fear and awe as he took it into his hands. Each knot was clean and crisp, as if it hadn’t aged with the letters and the photos in the box. “God— It was like an angel told me to make this. Put everything I loved in these knots when I was in the POW camp. Felt like an idiot but I had no other choice—“ I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he stopped, choking on his own emotion as if he continued he would crack.

Gamgam took his hand into her’s after a moment, feeling those daisy-chained knots. Petting them with an unspoken praise. Even I reached out to touch them; they felt soft like a baby’s blanket.

“How’d they come out so soft when they were in the POW camp?” It felt wrong. “Why’s it with your stuff, Grandpappy?”

He was at the end of the ribbons when he looked at me. “Cause I prayed, and I begged, and I asked that if there was some God out there He’d make sure I got home to your Gamgam.” He looked at her, and there was a youthful mirth in his face that shone from the crevices of age. “My Annie-May. And I got told to let go of the material goods. To give up what I had left — the letters, the photo, my knife — and hold onto that ribbon no matter what happened.

“Couple days later I was freed. Don’t know what happened to any of it, but I was headed home.”

I was still skeptical of it. “Do you think it was God?”

Grandpappy stared at me. “I don’t know if it was God, the Devil, or something else. But I owe them a lot of things, including you.”

Gamgam hung the cotton ties on the fireplace mantle a couple days later. There was something different with the way Grandpappy looked at the sunsets from his rocking chair, as if he had just greeted a childhood friend.

I wasn’t rightly satisfied with his speculation, but I couldn’t find too much about those cotton ties with the war. It was only a couple months later I found a little book about those daisy chained pieces of cloth, used to tie up well wishes and hopes into trees — but maybe that higher power asked him to make do with what he had during the war, and was just doing their part to return goods back when they were done.