. Jesus, I ain’t got no business talkin this way to a kid. Your Gramma’s right. I got the sense of a chicken.’
Grandpa brooded down at his shoes for a moment. At last he looked up and shook his head, not darkly, but with brisk, almost humorous dismissiveness.
‘Ain’t a bit of that matters. I said I was gonna give you instruction, and instead I stand here howlin like a woe-dog. You know what a woe-dog is, Clivey?’
The boy shook his head.
‘Never mind; that’s for another day.’ Of course there had never been another, because the next time he saw Grandpa, Grandpa was in a box, and Clive supposed that was an important part of the instruction Grandpa had to give that day. The fact that the old man didn’t know he was giving it made it no less important. ‘Old men are like old trains in a switchin yard, Clivey — too many damned tracks. So they loop the damned roundhouse five times before they ever get in.’
‘That’s all right, Grandpa.’
‘What I mean is that every time I drive for the point, I go someplace else.’
‘I know, but those someplace elses are pretty interesting.’
Grandpa smiled. ‘If you’re a bullshit artist, Clivey, you are a damned good one.’
Clive smiled back, and the darkness of Johnny Brinkmayer’s memory seemed to lift from his Grandpa. When he spoke again, his voice was more businesslike.
‘Anyway! Never mind that swill. Having long time in pain is just a little extra the Lord throws in. You know how a man will save up Raleigh coupons and trade em in for something like a brass barometer to hang in his den or a new set of steak knives, Clivey?’
Clive nodded.
‘Well, that’s what pain-time is like . . . only it’s more of a booby prize than a real one, I guess you’d have to say. Main thing is, when you get old, regular time — my pretty pony time —
changes to short time. It’s like when you were a kid, only turned around.’
‘Backwards.’
‘Yep.’
The idea that time went fast when you got old was beyond the ability of the boy’s emotions to grasp, but he was bright enough to admit the concept. He knew that if one end of a seesaw went up, the other had to go down. What Grandpa was talking about, he reasoned, must be the same idea: balance and counterbalance. All right; it’s a point of view, Clive’s own father might have said.
Grandpa took the packet of Kools from the kangaroo pouch again, and this time he carefully extracted a cigarette — not just the last one in the packet but the last one the boy would ever see him smoke. The old man crumpled the package and stowed it back in the place from which it had come. He lit this last cigarette as he had the other, with the same effortless ease. He did not ignore the hilltop wind; he seemed somehow to negate it.
‘When does it happen, Grandpa?’
‘I can’t exactly tell you that, n it don’t happen all at once,’ Grandpa said, wetting the match as he had its predecessor. ‘It kinda creeps up, like a cat stalking a squirrel. Finally you notice. And
when you do notice, it ain’t no more fair than the way the Osgood boy counted his numbers was fair.’
‘Well then, what happens? How do you notice?’
Grandpa tapped a roll of ash from his cigarette without taking it from his mouth. He did it with his thumb, knocking on the cigarette the way a man may rap a low knock on a table. The boy never forgot that small sound.
‘I think what you notice first must be different for everyone,’ the old man said, ‘but for me it started when I was forty-something. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but you want to bet I remember where I was . . . in Davis Drug. You know it?’
Clive nodded. His father almost always took him and his sister in there for ice-cream sodas when they were visiting Grandpa and Gramma. His father called them the Van Chockstraw Triplets because their orders never varied: their father always had vanilla, Patty chocolate, Clive strawberry. And his father would sit between them and read while they slowly ingested the cold sweet treats. Patty was right when she said you could get away with anything when their father was reading, which was most of the time, but when he put his book away and looked around, you wanted to sit up and put on your prettiest manners, or you were apt to get clouted.
‘Well, I was in there,’ Grandpa resumed, his eyes far off, studying a cloud that looked like a soldier blowing on a bugle moving swiftly across the spring sky, ‘to get some medicine for your Gramma’s arthritis. We’d had rain for a week and it was hurting her like all get-out. And all at once I seen a new store display. Would have been hard to miss. Took up most of one whole aisle, it did. There were masks and cutout decorations of black cats and witches on brooms and things like that, and there were those cardboard punkins they used to sell. They came in a bag with an elastic inside. The idea was, a kid would punch the punkin out of the cardboard and then give his mom an afternoon of peace coloring it in and maybe playing the games on the back. When it was done you hung it on your door for a decoration, or, if the kid’s family was too poor to buy him a store mask or too dumb to help him make a costume out of what was around the house, why, you could staple that elastic onto the thing and the kid would wear it. Used to be a lot of kids walking around town with paper bags in their hands and those punkin masks from Davis Drug on their faces come Halloween night, Clivey! And, of course, he had his candy out. Was always that penny-candy counter up there by the soda fountain, you know the one I mean — ‘
Clive smiled. He knew, all right.
‘ — but this was different. This was penny candy by the job lot. All that truck like wax bottles and candy corn and root-beer barrels and licorice whips.
‘And I thought that old man Davis — there really was a fella named Davis who ran the place back then, it was his father that opened her up right around 1910 — had slipped a cog or two.
Holy hell, I’m thinkin to myself, Frank Davis has got his trick-or-treat out before the goddam summer’s even over. It crossed my mind to go up to the prescription counter where he was n tell him just that, and then a part of me says, Whoa up a second, George — you’re the one who’s slipped a cog or two. And that wasn’t so far wrong, Clivey, because it wasn’t still summer, and I knew it just as well as I know we’re standin here. See, that’s what I want you to understand —
that I knew better.
‘Wasn’t I already on the lookout for apple pickers from around town, and hadn’t I already put in an order for five hundred handbills to get put up over the border in Canada? And didn’t I already have my eye on this fella named Tim Warburton who’d come down from Schenectady lookin for work? He had a way about him, looked honest, and I thought he’d make a good foreman during picking time. Hadn’t I been meaning to ask him the very next day, and didn’t he
know I was gonna ask because he’d let on he’d be getting his hair cut at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time? I thought to myself, Suds n body, George, ain’t you a little young to be going senile? Yeah, old Frank’s got his Halloween candy out a little early, but summer) That’s gone by, me fine bucko.
‘I knew that just fine, but for a second, Clivey — or maybe it was a whole row of seconds — it seemed like summer, or like it had to be summer, because it was just being summer. Get what I mean? It didn’t take me long to get September set down straight again hi my head, but until I did I felt . . . you know, I felt . . . ‘ He frowned, then reluctantly brought out a word he knew but would not have used in conversation with another farmer, lest he be accused (if only in the other fellow’s mind) of being high-flown. ‘I felt dismayed. That’s the only goddam way I know how to put it. Dismayed. And that’s how it was the first time.’
He looked at the boy, who only looked back at him, not even nodding, so deep in concentration was he. Grandpa nodded for both of them and knocked another roll of ash off his cigarette with the side of his thumb. The boy believed Grandpa was so lost in thought that the wind was smoking practically all of this one for him.