Graham Marema

Songwood

I. Grandaddy Dies

In one story, Grandaddy dies. In this story, on your way to Songwood, you’ll see a road sign with my name on it. It’s green, and you’ll catch sight of it as you turn a corner about halfway up that long long long gravel drive. Graham Grade, the sign says. A little further is Rebekah Road, then Rachel Route, named for my New York cousins. And Walker Way, for my brother. Grandaddy put them up when each of us was born, which is why Rebekah, the oldest, got Road, and Rachel, the youngest, got Route (my uncle probably should’ve named her Sarah if he’d wanted something better). The signs wouldn’t lead you anywhere, they just point off into the trees, because there’s only one road, going up. At the top of the road is Songwood. A double-wide trailer with a second story bedroom and a garage added on, a field and some trees and an old footpath leading up the hill to the water tower, and my Grandaddy, who is dead.

Well, he’s about to die. He’s standing by the tractor, and in this story, he’s tall. Well, in every story he’s tall. My mom says he’s somebody who takes-up-a-lot-of-space. Big hands, big feet, big eyes that weep from their corners for no reason in his old age, big slab of white hair that never thins, big voice that booms a little like God’s might.

Grandaddy tastes silver sweat in the corners of his mouth. It’s Middle Tennessee heat, in the buggy summer woodland outside Nashville, with the sun placing a cardboard cutout of the water tower down there on the field by the house. Grandaddy is using the tractor to till so he can plant pole beans in the fields, which Grandmommy likes in her lunch.

Actually, he’s using the tractor to churn up the dirt so he can kill the little tree seeds that have landed in the field, so he can keep it a field, so the grandbabies can hunt there for Easter eggs in the tall grasses next spring.

You know what, actually he’s not really using the tractor so much as cleaning it, because if you don’t clean those sons of bitches every once in a while, you know how they rust.

All honesty, I don’t know what Grandaddy’s doing out there in the field, and okay, you caught me, I don’t really know what you use a tractor for, or where you plant pole beans, seems like they’d get planted on poles doesn’t it? The tractor’s just a really important part of the story, so it’s got to be there for a reason, and all the time I’ve been trying to figure out what that reason might be, my Grandaddy has walked around the side of the tractor tasting that sweat in the corners of his lips, and something’s gone sideways, because the tractor blade has wobbled, and it’s fallen clean through his foot like a hot knife in a butter dish, which is how Grandmommy would’ve described it, if Grandmommy hadn’t been elsewhere.

Elsewhere, that’s where she is. For Grandmommy, elsewhere means putting on lipstick in the basement green room of the Belmont Black Box Theater, preparing for a dress rehearsal of Driving Miss Daisy. She’s Miss Daisy. Conrad O’Dwyer Donahue is playing Hoke Colburn the driver, and even though he’s fifteen years younger than her, Grandmommy still likes when he calls her Alice. “Looks like the roof is leaking again, Alice,” he calls to her from across the green room. Indeed, she realizes, it is.

In this story, I don’t really know where Grandmommy is or what she might be doing, or whether Conrad O’Dwyer Donahue is anybody’s real name, though it does sound cool, and the Belmont Black Box Theater happened to pop up when I searched for Nashville community theaters in Google Maps just now. But it sorta makes sense for her to be here, in the basement green room of a community theater with a dripping roof, putting on lipstick and thinking glamorous thoughts, which, as far as I know, are the only thoughts she has. I only know for certain where she isn’t, because that’s what’s important when this story is told, that she isn’t in the Songwood double-wide where she might have heard through the open window my Grandaddy’s shivering scream as he lies pinned to the ground by a tractor blade, bleeding and crying and dying.

This is the part I don’t believe, the part that can’t possibly be true. When I was a child, my Grandaddy was about as tall as the water tower at the top of the hill, even taller when he was at the pulpit. He spoke in church about God as if they’d just finished up having coffee together. Even I, a child prodigy atheist, who discarded God with training wheels and Flintstone vitamins, heard something like truth in his sermons, or if not quite truth, something that rhymed with it. In fact, I always thought if there was a God, He’d have to be a lot like my Grandaddy, except He’d probably say “please” more often and wouldn’t sing hymns so loud.

I can’t picture a man like that sideways, left side of his face smashed into the dirt, tasting that metal salt tang of soil, snot on his chin from the pollen in the high grass and his eyes leaking bleakly and his hair and his beard, both thick white till the day that he died, scuffed with mud like a dog’s fur. He’s screaming, he must be, because his foot is chopped in half. He’s feeling the earth beneath him, smelling blood. He’s begging for Alice, where’s Alice, and God, where’s He, there’s just no other way the story could go.

In this moment, the moment before he dies, Grandaddy thinks of my mom and her brothers. The old house in Florida. The dead wiener dog named Heidi. And grandbabies, the squeals they make in the backyard behind Songwood when they visit. A woman he once knew named Kathy Jean. And Alice the night he met her. Alice in a slinky dress on the back of a piano crooning ballads. Alice weeding through the fawning men to ask if he wants more punch, pouring a ladleful into his thankful hands when he holds them out, cupped, as a joke. He feels sorry for drinking when the children were younger. He wishes he’d gotten sober sooner. He wishes he’d responded better when the oldest came out to him, that trembling day on the porch. He wishes he could tell him, now, well, he supposes it doesn’t matter, not anymore, and Grandaddy dies.

Grandmommy finds him later that night after rehearsal, another scene I can’t believe, because I’d rather not. I do know she grows ancient, and it takes only seconds. Her tight red curls unspool, soften and gray like mold on strawberries. She sighs and expands into a heavier frame, big-bosomed, broad-shouldered, no longer the waif who once lay across the top of a piano. She suddenly wears a moomoo and a shawl, where did those come from? When I next see her, she is older, much older, the oldest woman I know, and all photos of her turn black and white overnight.

Grandaddy’s is the first funeral I attend. There is lofty, high-ceilinged singing. There are old men who cry and offer me Werther’s. There is Grandmommy sitting with her head on my mom’s shoulder. There are these little brownie things with yellow icing shaped like ducklings. My brother and I eat twelve between us. Everyone tells my brother how much he looks like Grandaddy. I don’t see it. I yank on his leg hairs during the service because it’s summer and he’s wearing shorts and he hits me and calls me a toad and my dad says Jesus under his breath and we stay after the service to see Grandaddy’s ashes interred, just us, because we’re the VIPs, my dad, my mom, my brother, my uncles, my New York cousins, and Grandmommy, who will come and live with us for several years after, live in the pink room, as we call it, and she will teach me how to project my voice and sing ballads in a way that makes boys swoon, until she dies when I’m fifteen, dies of cancer wordlessly and ancient, looking more like Miss Daisy with each passing second, she won’t even need makeup to play the part.

But back to the ashes, because this part I know to be true. They’re given to my mom in a gallon-sized Ziploc baggy, inside a bronze urn. She pulls out the bag to divide Grandaddy up a bit before the rest of him goes into the slot in the wall with his name on it. Some of Grandaddy will go to the woods behind our house, beside what my mom will eventually call the Spirit Tree, where Abby the dog and Coffee Cat the cat will soon be buried, where one day pieces of Grandmommy and one of the uncles will be. Some of Grandaddy will go to the old house in Florida. Some of Grandaddy will go to Songwood. The house will be sold and demolished by then, but my uncles will sneak up the long long long gravel drive in a silent Prius past the signs with our names, and sprinkle pieces of him there in the tall grass anyway.

Before the ashes are divided, my mom can’t believe how heavy it is. The gallon-sized Ziploc bag is full to the brim, how much of him could there be? Well, a gallon, I guess. She ogles the bigness of it, more ashes than the average human, surely. “He was a big guy,” she says, and she begins to divide.

II. Grandaddy Lives

In another story, Grandaddy lives. In this story, you’ll still pass my name on the road, Graham Grade, while you turn the corner up that long long long gravel drive. You’ll just be driving slower. That’s probably because this story feels gentler somehow, maybe because it has a fairytale twang, or maybe because in this story, it’s autumn. It has to be, because Grandaddy is wearing his hoodie with the drawstring. That’s important.

Grandaddy is in the field by the tractor. Grandmommy is elsewhere. He’s musing over a puzzle in his head, one from the newspaper he couldn’t solve over breakfast. It’s a word puzzle, but it involves math and moving letters around. He’s thinking ACF and then BOL and then Dammit, no, that’s not it, and then the tractor blade falls.

In this story, same as the last one, there’s crying and soil and sweat, the smell of blood, the tall grasses, the lipstick in the basement theater.

But in this story, there’s a voice.

When Grandaddy first hears it, he thinks it’s his father. I never met my Great-Grandaddy, but if my Grandaddy is like God, I imagine his Daddy must have been pretty impressive. The voice booms in the field and shivers the grass. It brings the smell of summer wet rain, though it’s sunny, and dry, and the middle of fall. It’s not his father, Grandaddy realizes, woozy with blood loss and fear, the voice must be God’s, a voice he’s narrated at the pulpit, but a voice he’s never heard out loud.

“Pat,” says the voice, because everyone calls my Grandaddy Pat, “Pat, I tell you what. You’re either gonna do something about all this, or you’re gonna die.”

Somewhere overhead, the water tower holds its breath. The trees clench their leaves with crinkles like wrapping paper. I advance to the next level of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on PS2, way on the other side of Tennessee. My mom sighs to a blinking cursor and tries to start a poem about a dream she had last night. My dad throws a stick for Abby the dog. My brother plots against me from his bedroom, waiting for his turn on the PlayStation. Grandmommy feels a drop of water on her head from the leaking basement ceiling, a single tap on her temple. She looks up.

Grandaddy figures the voice is right. Though the pain tangles him up, confuses him, coils around his chest and makes it difficult to breathe, he still has use of his hands, at least most parts of them. He fumbles with his hoodie, feels for the drawstring. He yanks. The string eases from its tunnel around his neck and curls into his fist, which is losing its color and strength. He ties a knot that his Daddy taught him, a sort of noose lasso thingy that has a name, but not one he remembers. The Looping Lagoon? The Belgium Strangle? What does it matter? Grandaddy’s left hand has abandoned him, but he still has use of his right. He props up his heavy torso with his left elbow, rising slow and aching out of the dirt into a sorta cobra yoga pose, dredging up dead leaves stuck to the side of his face, tangled in his blustered white hair. He sees the hammer in the tall, yellow grass. Did it fall from the seat of the tractor when the tractor blade sank? Did God cast it down from the sky? What does it matter? Grandaddy brings back his right hand with the lasso of string clenched in his fist. His arm grows heavier as his fingers grow lighter. If he doesn’t throw soon, his arm will sink into the dirt and his fingers will turn into balloons and float away. Grandaddy puts all he has left, all he’s ever had, into the toss of his arm, into the throw of the string, which arcs, falls, loops beautifully around the head of the hammer. Ten out of ten.

As Grandaddy pulls the hammer toward him, he thinks of my mom. He thinks of her brothers. He thinks of a bottle. Lord, he’d love some whiskey.

In this story, Grandaddy uses the hammer’s clawed head to pry the blade out of his foot. He marvels at how much blood a foot can give to the Earth. He crawls to the garage, elbow over elbow, through the dry grass, which chatters around his body in congratulations. He reaches the truck and his cell phone in the passenger seat. He calls himself an ambulance. By the time Grandmommy is done with her dress rehearsal, he’ll already be loaded into a stretcher, Songwood illuminated in flashes of red. Grandaddy will walk with a limp for the rest of his life. But he does not die.

Instead, Grandaddy and Grandmommy live at Songwood for many years after, up at the end of that long gravel drive. I learn how to project my voice from my choir director, and I never learn any ballads. But Grandmommy winks at me sometimes, secretively over the dinner table, something I will tell my mom about many years later, and my mom will frown and say, “Strange, I never saw her wink.” Grandmommy’s is the first funeral I attend, when she dies of cancer in my teens. Grandaddy runs the show. He organizes a family dinner with cousins and singing and he sings the loudest. He announces that he’s decided to pick up drinking again, and toasts us with a chilled whiskey on ice. At the service, he stands at the front of the church and invites folks to rise in the pews right where they are and tell stories of Alice. He tells the story of the piano, the cupped hands, the punch. Everyone says I look so much like her. I try and I try to see it.

But really, in this story, Grandaddy does die. He just dies later. In his mid-eighties, many years after Grandmommy. Before he dies, he moves into an assisted living home and preaches at a small rural church every other Sunday. He drinks. He floods his new apartment because he can’t hear the sink. In his last few years, he gets a girlfriend, a woman he knew from many years back named Kathy Jean, and he tells Rebekah Road, when she asks, that his favorite thing about Kathy Jean is her smooches. He dies simply and softly, in a hospice room where they offer a service from old ladies who stitch death shrouds for the families, and my mom puts one on his body when he stops breathing, anticlimactically, after he’s been sleeping for hours.

It’s the same ending, the ending where my mom can’t believe how much ash he turns into as she divides him into sections for the family to take. The grandbabies are banned from playing near the tractor from here to the hereafter, and eventually, Songwood gets sold. The old water tower comes down, the field grows over with pole beans. And poles, I guess. Kathy Jean has nice smooches, whoever they’re for, and my mom writes poems about Alice and Pat and she keeps them just for herself.

In both of these stories, Grandaddy is dead and Grandmommy dead too, and the sign with my name on it rusts in the woods. But in one story, God is real, and he knows my Grandaddy by name.

Graham Marema grew up in East Tennessee and often writes about Appalachia, folktales, landscape, and SPAM. She is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming, with a concurrent degree in Environment & Natural Resources. Her writing has appeared in Litro Magazine, The Dead Mule Society, and 3Elements Review, among others.