Gramps by Anna Trujillo

Gramps

Anna Trujillo

For the first thirteen years of my life, Grandpa shared a house with Mom and Dad and me. He slept in my room – or maybe I should say I slept in his room. I’d spelled out my name, “Franklin,” in big letters on a sheet of construction paper and taped it to the bedroom door, and the next day Grandpa hung up his own sign, bearing bigger letters in brighter crayon hues, that read “Gramps.” He had the top bunk, and I had the bottom. At night he snored and rolled around so the mattress above me creaked, and I pretended this annoyed me, but really it was nice to wake up in the dark and know Grandpa was right there. It got really dark in that room at night in winter, so dark that I couldn’t see the pattern on my comforter or my hand in front of my face. I wasn’t scared of the dark, of course, but I still appreciated Grandpa’s snores. They helped me get my bearings. Let me know which way was up. That I was awake and not mired in some dream that was as thick and as black as real night. Grandpa was a miracle worker. I don’t say this lightly. He really was somewhat supernatural, though I didn’t realize it until after he was gone. That’s not to say he didn’t have his failings – most grievous among them, according to Mom, who was his daughter, was his unrelenting refusal to eat vegetables or fruits of any sort, though he did have a passion for prunes, which he slurped one after another from his wrinkled fingers whenever a canister of them appeared in the fridge. But the spinach he left untouched on his plate at dinnertime didn’t seem to detract from his ability to predict the weather (“It’s gonna rain tomorrow, Frank,” he said one January evening, even though temperatures had stayed well below zero all week, and sure enough, the next day brought warm winds and a sputtery drizzle) or his keen eyesight (“I’ll say,” he observed one cool June morning, staring out the living room window, “that birch tree there is crawling with ants.”

“You’re making it up,” I told him when my own squint out the window revealed no insects at all. But later I went outside to restock the outhouse with toilet paper – a job I despised on principle, since we had a working indoor bathroom and therefore no real use for the smelly old shack – and I saw that there really were hundreds of little ants swarming a sappy leak in the birch’s trunk). Grandpa was stooped and gray and bony, but other than that he seemed immune to the effects of age. In winter he liked to scale trees just like I did and plop out of their tops into deep snow. When he and Dad went hunting, Dad drove the truck back, and Grandpa stayed in the trailer with a headlamp, the carcass, and a sharp knife. He never failed to have the moose or caribou cleanly butchered by the time they got home, never mind the innumerable bumps in the road. And he sure could run fast when Mom caught him chucking the sweet potatoes she’d been saving for dinner off the porch for our Border Collie mix, Roscoe, to fetch. “Come here, Frank,” he said one Saturday, beckoning me to his armchair with a twitch of his wrinkled finger. He had a glint in his eye that let me know he had something mischievous on his mind. I slipped over and kept my voice low so my parents, in the next room, wouldn’t overhear. “What is it, Grandpa?” “I caught a musk in the air this morning,” he said. “There’s a bear out hereabouts.” “It’s March, Grandpa.” Still the dead of winter. “All the bears are hibernating.” “You listen to me, Frank,” he snapped. “I know what I smelled. If I say there’s a bear out, there’s a bear out.” “Fine,” I muttered. After thirteen years, I knew there was no point in arguing with him. “There’s a bear out.” This seemed to satisfy him. “That’s right, there is. And I’ll tell you what, Frank. The two of us are gonna shoot it.” “Shoot it, Grandpa?” “That’s right.” “But why?” “Because it’s winter!” Grandpa yelled. “And the floor of our room is cold! I need a bearskin rug to protect my old toes when I jump out of bed in the morning!” “All right,” I said quickly, trying to shush him. “But Grandpa, we can’t just go out and shoot a bear out of season. I don’t think it’s legal.”

“Legal, Smeagol,” he said, which made me blink, because as far as I knew Grandpa had never opened a book that wasn’t a comic, and he certainly had never read The Lord of the Rings. “I’m seventy-two years old, Frank. If I wanna shoot a bear, no one’s gonna stop me.” He was right about that, I thought. As far as I knew, no one had ever stopped Grandpa from doing anything he set his mind to. “What do you need me to do?” I asked. “Go to the fridge and get the ground moose meat your mom put there to thaw,” he said. “Get the prunes too, while you’re at it. Then bundle up and put on your boots. I’ll meet you by the outhouse in ten minutes.” “That moose meat’s for dinner,” I tried to tell him. But he wouldn’t hear it. “If I tell you to get the moose meat, you get the moose meat, Frank.” So I put on my snow pants and parka and snuck to the fridge, where I slipped the sealed Ziplock bag of moose meat into one pocket and the half-full canister of prunes into the other. Then I stepped into my boots, pulled my hat down over my ears, got my fingers lined up in my gloves, and trudged outside to the outhouse, where Grandpa was waiting with Dad’s rifle. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Grandpa said. “You open up that bag of moose meat so the bear can get a good whiff, and then you waft it in the breeze as you walk around the outhouse in a wide radius.” Several frustrating minutes followed as he explained what he meant by radius, as I was only in seventh grade and hadn’t hit geometry yet. “I don’t like this, Grandpa,” I said once I understood my part in the plan. “It sounds like you’re using me as bait.” “Don’t be daft, Frank. If you’re the bait, what’s the moose meat for?” I couldn’t think of a way to argue with this, so I asked, “What’ll you be doing, Grandpa?” “I’ll be keeping a lookout, up there on the outhouse roof. Once the bear gets in range, I’ll shoot it.” I eyed the outhouse dubiously. It was built mounted on cinderblocks, which provided some ventilation. This meant that the tip of its peaked roof, caked with snow, was at least fifteen feet off the ground. “How are you going to get up there?” “You let me worry about that.” But it turned out I did have to worry about that, because after walking all the way around the outhouse, Grandpa decided he needed me to help hoist him up.

He got a grip on the lowest edge of the roof and hauled himself onto it, finding footholds on my shoulders and the top of my head. “Not too comfortable,” he said once he was up and I was busy readjusting my hat. “Frank, go get me one of those kitchen chairs.” So I went back inside and lugged out one of the sturdy straightbacked wooden chairs from around the kitchen table. I brought it to the outhouse, and Grandpa had me lift it over my head so he could grab onto it and drag it onto the roof with him. He situated it at the top of the roof, two legs on either side of the apex, planted somewhat shakily into the snow. “Ah,” he sighed, settling down onto it and laying the rifle across his knees. “That’s better. Hand up those prunes.” I did, and he slurped three of them up in rapid succession. He nodded, satisfied. “Well, what are you waiting for, Frank? Get tromping.” The snow around the outhouse was hard-packed because Dad liked to keep it easy to access (“In case of a plumbing emergency,” he always said, though we’d never had any such emergency as far as I could remember). But a few steps out it got deeper and harder to flounder through. I hiked about fifty meters out and unsealed the bag of moose meat. The iron scent of raw game floated up into the winter air. “That’s it, Frank!” I heard Grandpa call from his perch, and I started wading through the knee-deep snow in a wide circle around the outhouse. I had to zigzag a few times to avoid clusters of trees, and the circle deflated slightly at one end where I cut across to avoid the house. I don’t know how many times I went around, wearing a path through the snow, waving the bag of moose meat to the right and the left. My legs got tired from walking, and my arm got sore from holding out the meat, and a hollow ache began in my belly that let me know it was long past my usual lunchtime. After a while I decided to call it quits.

“Grandpa?” I called. No answer. Exasperated, I sealed the moose meat back up and trudged back to the outhouse. Grandpa was still in his chair, head drooped forward, the rifle propped on one knee and the canister of prunes on the other. His snores cut through the air like a saw. I got angry then. I’d been wandering around the yard like a lunatic, waving tonight’s dinner in front of me in the hope of drawing in a bear that was probably soundly asleep in its cave, and here Grandpa was, fast asleep, his mustache sticky with prune juice. “Grandpa, wake up,” I said. He let out the loudest snore yet.

“Grandpa!” I yelled. He jerked awake as though electrocuted. “Frank? Frank, what is it?” he said. And then I watched as his chair tipped over the edge of the roof, his arms and legs waved in the air in a desperate attempt to reclaim balance, and he plummeted off the side of the outhouse onto the hard-packed snow below.

*** Later, Mom said it was lucky Grandpa only broke both legs and not his neck. Even so, it would be a long recovery at his age, and my parents agreed that our steep two-story house wasn’t built for a seventy-two-yearold convalescent. So one day when we all went to visit Grandpa in the hospital – the tray of chicken and corn in front of him was untouched, but he was happily slurping up a supply of prunes he must have wheedled out of a nurse – Mom told him she thought it would be best for him to move into the nursing home downtown. “Just for a while,” she said. “Just until you’re back on your feet.” “Old folks’ home?” Grandpa said, pausing with a prune halfway to his mouth. “I’m not moving into any old folks’ home. I’m moving to Florida!”

And that’s exactly what he did. None of us could talk him out of it, just like we’d never been able to talk him out of anything. He bought a plane ticket from his hospital bed, and as soon as he was well enough to be discharged, he ordered Mom to load his wheelchair and suitcase into the back of her car and drive him to the airport. My parents helped him label and check his suitcase, and I leaned down to give him a hug as an airport attendant waited to wheel him through security. “Grandpa,” I whispered. “It’s my fault. I’m – ” “What’s that, Frank?” he said, starting suddenly so his bony shoulder jabbed painfully into my chest. “Speak up.” But I couldn’t bring myself to say it again. “What are you going to do in Florida?” I asked instead. He shrugged. “There’s always things that need doing. Maybe I’ll shoot some of those Florida alligators. What do you think, Frank? Want me to send you an alligator-skin rug?” I laughed, but I had to fight back tears as I watched him pass through security. As the attendant wheeled him away, he turned one last time and waved his wrinkled hand. There was nothing but a twinkle in his eyes.

*** Things were different at home after Grandpa left. Roscoe moped around for days, poking his nose behind the couch and into other nooks and crannies, bewildered as to where Grandpa had gone and why there were no more sweet potatoes to fetch. Mealtimes were quieter without his cranky voice declaring that the green beans or cauliflowers or steamed carrots were poison. Mom bought a canister of prunes, and it sat untouched in the fridge until she threw it away. In fall, Dad went hunting and brought home a moose, and for the first time I could remember we had to turn the garage into a butchery and figure out how to slice up the animal ourselves. But I missed Grandpa most at night. I couldn’t bring myself to take down the sign he’d hung on the door, even though the bedroom was all mine now. For a long time I’d lie awake and stare at the shadowy bottom of the bunk above me, ears straining for some creak or snore or sigh that would let me know Grandpa’s departure had just been a bad dream, but no sound ever came. Winter came again, and the nights grew long and opaquely black. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night and had to spend several minutes reorienting myself, remembering that the nightmare I’d left behind was past and fading and the dark that cocooned me now was real. But sometimes I woke up from a dream of Grandpa hunkered in a Florida swamp, canister of prunes beside him, rifle aimed at an alligator’s bumpy head, and I’d smile and roll over in bed and think maybe that was real, too.