Read Online Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons - Free Book Online Page B

after all those lovely times he had carried her back and forth across the river on his barge, leading her to believe that she would always be cared for so sweetly. I wondered what they said to each other in the room, what they did for each other until that moment when my grandmother decided the man had had use of her heart long enough.

A WOMAN telephoned our house for my grandmother about six months after she abandoned my grandfather at the Sir Walter Hotel. She took the receiver, listened a few minutes, and then said to the person on the other end, “I imagined you would be dead.” She listened a little more and asked, “Did he purge?”
    The woman was an old family acquaintance my grandmother had not seen or heard from in years, and was calling to tell her that my grandfather had passed away at her home earlier that day. My grandmother motioned for a pen and paper to be brought to her, and she wrote down the funeral arrangements, such as they were. When she was off the phone, she turned to my mother and said, “Your father died. We need to go to Pasquotank County tomorrow.” She gave no indication of wanting to talk about it further, and went to the stove to make tea.
    My mother’s eyes filled quickly, and she dabbed them dry with a dish towel. She said to her mother, “I heard you ask if he purged. Did he?”
    My grandmother stopped midway to the sink with the teakettle and looked out the window, out toward the spot where we had seen him standing, and sighed and said, “Yes, he did.”
    The fact that he had foamed at the mouth immediately upon dying indicated that he had had a great backjam of wishes and desires and truths that were never spoken. His love for his wife and child and his remorse over having left them were expressed, at the end, in spite of himself. Out bubbled all the words he had swallowed while he was alive. My grandmother put aside everything she knew about the automatic reactions of bodies in order to hear a dead man say that he was sorry.
    I said, “Suppose he hadn’t purged?”
    My mother spoke for the two of them. “We would’ve sold him to the medical school in Chapel Hill and let them do as they pleased with him.”
    The next day the three of us went to Pasquotank County. He was laid out at the home of the friend who had called. Besides the woman, who was wearing a thin dress without a much-needed brassiere, the only person there was my grandfather’s uncle. He was the oldest person I had ever seen. He had lived on the Pasquotank next to my grandparents. My mother acted genuinely happy to see him, but my grandmother ignored him.
    When my mother asked her why she couldn’t say just a couple of words to Uncle Otha, she was told, “He does not exist.”
    My mother asked, “Still?”
    My grandmother said, “Yes. I have not forgotten, and never will.”
    Later in the day, I asked my mother about this and was told that the man had once stolen five dollars from my grandmother and then lied about it. “If he had only stolen from her,” she said, “she’d at least act like he was in the room.”
    I mentioned how very old he looked. My mother told me he was probably well over a hundred, and although he was repugnant to her mother, she held fond childhood memories of him. She and I were sitting on the back steps of the old woman’s house, sneaking a cigarette together. She said, “He was at Shiloh and loved to tell about it, although the people he told couldn’t bear it because it broke their hearts in a million places. But I thrived on hearing about it, so he talked to me continuously. Listen to this. He took a bullet in the head, and the doctors in the field got it out, cleaned the wound, and then took a silver dollar and mashed it into this thin sliver and put it in the place in his head. Isn’t that wonderful?”
    She had always been drawn to horror tales, ghost stories, and real-life accounts of the weird and unusual. Her curious nature and her mother’s profession made this more