the occasional rattle of pages as his father read one book after another (he never tired of them; words, words, words, his dad never tired of them, and Clive had meant once to ask him how that could be but lost his nerve), his mother getting up once in a while and going into the kitchen, followed only by his sister’s worried, angry eyes and his own simply curious ones; the soft clink as Mom replenished the glass which was never empty after eleven in the morning or so (and their father never looking up from his book, although Clive had an idea he heard it all and knew it all, although Patty had called him a stupid liar and had given him a Peter-Pinch that hurt all day long the one time he had dared to tell her that); the sound of mosquitoes whining against the screens, always so much louder, it seemed, after the sun had gone down; the decree of bedtime, so unfair and unavoidable, all arguments lost before they were begun; his father’s brusque kiss, smelling of tobacco, his mother’s softer, both sugary and sour with the smell of wine; the sound of his sister telling Mom she ought to go to bed after Dad had gone down to the corner tavern to drink a couple of beers and watch the wrestling matches on the television over the bar; his mom telling Patty to mind her own p’s and q’s, a conversational pattern that was upsetting in its content but somehow soothing in its predictability; fireflies gleaming in the gloom; a car horn, distant, as he drifted into sleep’s long dark channel; then the next day, which seemed the same but wasn’t, not quite. Summer. That was summer. And it did not just seem long; it was long.
Grandpa, watching him closely, seemed to read all this in the boy’s brown eyes, to know all the words for all the things the boy never could have found a way to tell, things that could not escape him because his mouth could never articulate the language of his heart. And then Grandpa nodded, as if he wanted to confirm this very idea, and suddenly Clive was terrified that Grandpa would spoil everything by saying something soft and soothing and meaningless. Sure, he would say. I know all about it, Clivey — I was a boy once myself, you know.
But he didn’t, and Clive understood he had been stupid to fear the possibility even for a moment. Worse, faithless. Because this was Grandpa, and Grandpa never talked meaningless shit like other grownups so often did. Instead of speaking softly and soothingly, he spoke with the dry finality of a judge pronouncing a harsh sentence for a capital crime.
‘All that changes,’ he said.
Clive looked up at him, a little apprehensive at the idea but very much liking the wild way the old man’s hair blew around his head. He thought Grandpa looked the way the church-preacher would if he really knew the truth about God instead of just guessing. ‘Time does? Are you sure?’
‘Yes. When you get to a certain age — right around fourteen, I think, mostly when the two halves of the human race go on and make the mistake of discovering each other — time starts to be real time. The real real time. It ain’t long like it was or short like it gets to be. It does, you know. But for most of your life it’s mostly the real real time. You know what that is, Clivey?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then take instruction: real real time is your pretty pony. Say it: “My pretty pony’.”
Feeling dumb, wondering if Grandpa was having him on for some reason (‘trying to get your goat’, as Uncle Don would have said), Clive said what he wanted him to say. He waited for the old man to laugh, to say, ‘Boy, I really got your goat that time, Clivey!’ But Grandpa only nodded matter-of-factly, in a way that took all the dumb out of it.
‘My pretty pony. Those are three words you’ll never forget if you’re as smart’s I think y’might be. My pretty pony. That’s the truth of time.’
Grandpa took the battered package of cigarettes from his pocket, considered it briefly, then put it back.
‘From the time you’re fourteen until, oh, I’m gonna say until you’re sixty or so, most time is my-pretty-pony time. There’s times when it goes back to being long like it was when you were a kid, but those ain’t good times any more. You’d give your soul for some my-pretty-pony time then, let alone short time. If you was to tell Gramma what I’m gonna tell you now, Clivey, she’d call me a blasphemer and wouldn’t bring me no hot-water bottle for a week. Maybe two.’
Nevertheless, Grandpa’s lips twisted into a bitter and unregenerate jag.
‘If I was to tell it to that Reverend Chadband the wife sets such a store by, he’d trot out the one about how we see through a glass darkly or that old chestnut about how God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, but I’ll tell you what I think, Clivey. I think God must be one mean old son of a bitch to make the only long times a grownup has the times when he is hurt bad, like with crushed ribs or stove-in guts or something like that. A God like that, why, He makes a kid who sticks pins in flies look like that saint who was so good the birds’d come and roost all over him. I think about how long them weeks were after the hay-rick turned turtle on me, and I wonder why God wanted to make living, thinking creatures in the first place. If He needed something to piss on, why couldn’t He have just made Him some sumac bushes and left it at that? Or what about poor old Johnny Brinkmayer, who went so slow with the bone cancer last year.’
Clive hardly heard that last, although he remembered later, on their ride back to the city, that Johnny Brinkmayer, who had owned what his mother and father called the grocery store and what Grandpa and Gramma still both called ‘the mercantile’, was the only man Grandpa went to see of an evening . . . and the only man who came to see Grandpa of an evening. On the long ride back to town it came to Clive that Johnny Brinkmayer, whom he remembered only vaguely as a man with a very large wart on his forehead and a way of hitching at his crotch as he walked, must have been Grandpa’s only real friend. The fact that Gramma tended to turn up her nose when Brinkmayer’s name was mentioned — and often complained about the way the man had smelled — only reinforced the idea.
Such reflections could not have come now, anyway, because Clive was waiting breathlessly for God to strike Grandpa dead. Surely He would for such a blasphemy. No one could get away with calling God the Father Almighty a mean old son of a bitch, or suggest that the Being who made the universe was no better than a mean third-grader who got his kicks sticking pins into flies.
Clive took a nervous step away from the figure in the bib overalls, who had ceased being his Grandpa and had become instead a lightning rod. Any moment now a bolt would come out of the blue sky, sizzling his Grandpa dead as doggy-doo and turning the apple trees into torches that would signal the old man’s damnation to all and sundry. The apple blossoms blowing through the air would be turned into something like the bits of char that went floating up from the incinerator in their backyard when his father burned the week’s worth of newspapers on late Sunday afternoons.
Nothing happened.
Clive waited, his dreadful surety eroding, and when a robin twittered cheerily somewhere nearby (as if Grandpa had said nothing more awful than kiss-my-foot), he knew no lightning was going to come. And at the moment of that realization, a small but fundamental change took place in Clive Banning’s life. His Grandpa’s unpunished blasphemy would not make him a criminal or a bad boy, or even such a small thing as a ‘problem child’ (a phrase that had only recently come into vogue). Yet the true north of belief shifted just a little in Clive’s mind, and the way he
listened to his Grandpa changed at once. Before, he had listened to the old man. Now he attended him.
Times when you’re hurt go on forever, seems like,’ Grandpa was saying. ‘Believe me, Clivey
— a week of being hurt makes the best summer vacation you ever had when you was a kid seem like a weekend. Hell, makes it seem like a Sat’dy mornin! When I think of the seven months Johnny lay there with that . . . that thing that was inside him, inside him and eating on his guts . .