Read Online Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer - Free Book Online Page A

poured what had spilled in the saucer back into the cup. He even got up himself and got the dish rag—didn’t ask my mother or me to do it—and wiped off the bottom of the cup and then finished his coffee.
    So, that Saturday, my grandfather—my father’s father—cameover, and my father and my grandfather, who was a carpenter, put the window in; at least my father tried to help my grandfather.
    Everything started out fine. My father bought the window and got all the materials ready. My grandfather was supposed to come over Saturday afternoon, and he showed up, all right, but he was three hours late and real drunk. That’s why my father had never tasted liquor, or so he claimed—I found out different later—but that’s what my father told me: that he had never tasted liquor because his father was an alcoholic.
    My mother said it different. She said that Grandpa Weber was a drunk, an old drunk , she said, a damned old souse , and when she called him that, she crossed herself.
    When my grandfather started cutting a hole in the wall for a window, we all just left him alone. There was no use talking to him, trying to make sense to him, once he got a notion in his head when he was drunk like that.
    That noise that electric saws make—that high-pitched loud sound that gets lower as it gets deeper into the wood—is what I remember about the kitchen window, that and my grandfather outside on the stepladder, sticking that blade into the side of the clapboard house, sawdust flying in his face, him cutting and cussing away. Didn’t even measure, just walked up the ladder and stuck the blade into the house.
    My father took off out of there fast, in the Oldsmobile, tires spinning and gravel spitting all over the place—he told my mother he was going irrigating—and my mother stood in the kitchen against the far wall and stared west, her hands on her ears, waiting for the blade to poke through the wall and praying for a miracle. Finally the saw blade poked through and as the hole got bigger, flies started coming in. Soon there were flies on everything; we couldn’t hardly see the kitchen ceiling for flies. My mother crossed herself and went into her bedroom. She locked the door behind her and put a towel in the space underthe door so the flies couldn’t get in. Behind that door, I could hear her crying.
    When my grandfather was done, I saw that the bottom of the hole he’d cut started at about my mother’s chin; the glass part didn’t start until her nose. She could see out, all right, but just barely. When she looked out, all she would see was sky.
    The hole that my grandfather cut was too big for the window we’d bought to put in it, so my father spent the next day patching, even though it was Sunday and there wasn’t supposed to be any servile work done. On the outside my mother painted my father’s patch-up job white. Inside, she ended up repainting the whole kitchen, and later on that week she made a special trip to town. She bought some Virginia-creeper plants—one thing always leading to another—and planted those Virginia creepers and watered them every day for the rest of the summer to keep them from drying up. She trained them to crawl up the side of the house and around the window to cover up the eyesore, which is what my mother called it: the eyesore. The old souse’s eyesore , she’d say, and cross herself.
    So when that Saturday night came around, my mother didn’t go find a bar and get drunk in it, and my father never said anything about her going to a bar, and he never said a thing about the eyesore. I never caught him so much as looking at it.
    SCHOOL WAS BACK on and I wasn’t going to the St. Joseph’s School anymore. I was going to the Hawthorne Junior High School and I didn’t know anybody because everyone at Hawthorne was Mormon. I was Catholic, so I found I didn’t like it there much at school.