‘It was like steppin up to the bathroom mirror meanin to do no more’n shave and seein that first gray hair in your head. You get that, Clivey?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. And after that first time, it started to happen with all the holidays. You’d think they was puttin the stuff out too early, and sometimes you’d even say so to someone, although you always stayed careful to make it sound like you thought the shopkeepers were greedy. That something was wrong with them, not you. You get that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because,’ Grandpa said, ‘a greedy shopkeeper was something a man could understand — and something some men even admired, although I was never one of them. ‘So-and-so keeps himself a sharp practice,’ they’d say, as if sharp practice, like that butcher fella Radwick that used to always stick his thumb on the scales when he could get away with it, like that was just a honey of a way to be. I never felt that way, but I could understand it. Saying something that made you sound like you had gone over funny in the head, though . . . that was a different kettle of beans.
So you’d just say something like ‘By God, they’ll have the tinsel and the angel’s hair out before the hay’s in the barn next year,’ and whoever you said it to would say that was nothing but the Gospel truth, but it wasn’t the Gospel truth, and when I hunker right down and study her, Clivey, I know they are putting all those things out pretty near the same time every year.
‘Then somethin else happened to me. This might have been five years later, might have been seven. I think I must’ve been right round fifty, one side or the other. Anyhow, I got called on jury duty. Damn pain in the ass, but I went. The bailiff sweared me up, asked me if I’d do my duty so help me God, and I said I will, just as if I hadn’t spent all my life doin my duty about one thing n another so help me God. Then he got out his pen and asked for my address, and I give it to him neat as you’d like. Then he asked how old I was, and I opened my mouth all primed to say thirty-seven.’
Grandpa threw back his head and laughed at the cloud that looked like a soldier. That cloud, the bugle part now grown as long as a trombone, had gotten itself halfway from one horizon to the other.
‘Why did you want to say that, Grandpa?’ Clive thought he had followed everything up to this pretty well, but here was a thicket.
‘I wanted to say it because it was the first thing to come into my mind! Hell! Anyhow, I knew it was wrong and so I stopped for a second. I don’t think that bailiff or anyone else in the courtroom noticed — seemed like most of em was either asleep or on the doze — and, even if they’d been as wide awake as the fella who just got Widow Brown’s broomstick rammed up his buttsky, I don’t know as anyone would have made anything of it. Wasn’t no more than how, sometimes, a man trying to hit a tricky pitch will kinda take a double pump before he swings.
But, shit! Askin a man how damn old he is ain’t like throwin no spitball. I felt like an ijit. Seemed like for that one second I didn’t know how old I was if I wasn’t thirty-seven. Seemed for a second there like it could have been seven or seventeen or seventy-seven. Then I got it and I said forty-eight or fifty-one or whatever-the-frig. But to lose track of your age, even for a second . . . shoo!’
Grandpa dropped his cigarette, brought his heel down upon it, and began the ritual of first murdalizing and then burying it.
‘But that’s just the beginning, Clivey me son,’ he went on, and, although he spoke only in the Irish vernacular he sometimes affected, the boy thought, I wish I was your son. Yours instead of his. ‘After a bit, it lets go of first, hits second, and before you know it, time has got itself into high gear and you’re cruising, the way folks do on the turnpike these days, goin so fast their cars blow the leaves right off’n the trees in the fall.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Way the seasons change is the worst,’ the old man said moodily, as if he hadn’t heard the boy.
‘Different seasons stop bein different seasons. Seems like Mother has no more’n got the boots n mittens n scarves down from the attic before it’s mud season, and you’d think a man’d be glad to see mud season gone — shit, I always was — but you ain’t s’glad t’see it go when it seems like the mud’s gone before you done pushed the tractor out of the first jellypot it got stuck in. Then it seems like you no more ‘n clapped your summer straw on for the first band concert of the year when the poplars start showing their chemises.’
Grandpa looked at him then, an eyebrow raised ironically, as if expecting the boy to ask for an explanation, but Clive smiled, delighted by this — he knew what a chemise was, all right, because it was sometimes all that his mother wore until five in the afternoon or so, at least when his father was out on the road, selling appliances and kitchen ware and a little insurance when he could. When his father went out on the road his mother got down to the serious drinking, and that was drinking sometimes too serious to allow her to get dressed until the sun was getting ready to go down. Then sometimes she went out, leaving him in Patty’s care while she went to visit a sick friend. Once he said to Patty, ‘Ma’s friends get sick more when Dad’s on the road, d’ja notice?’
And Patty laughed until tears ran down her face and she said Oh yes, she had noticed, she most certainly had.
What Grandpa said reminded him of how, once the days finally began to slope down toward school again, the poplars changed somehow. When the wind blew, their undersides turned up exactly the color of his mother’s prettiest chemise, a silver color which was as surprisingly sad as it was lovely: a color that signified the end of what you had believed must be forever.
‘Then,’ Grandpa continued, ‘you start to lose track of things in your own mind. Not too much
— it ain’t being senile, like old man Hayden down the road, thank God — but it’s still a suckardly thing, the way you lose track. It ain’t like forgetting things; that’d be one thing. No, you remember em but you get em in all the wrong places. Like how I was so sure I broke my arm just after our boy Billy got killed in that road accident in ’58. That was a suckardly thing, too.
That’s one I could task that Reverend Chadband with. Billy, he was followin a gravel truck, doin no more than twenty mile an hour, when a chunk of stone no bigger’n the dial of that pocket
watch I gave you fell off the back of the truck, hit the road, bounced up, and smashed the windshield of our Ford. Glass went in Billy’s eyes and the doc said he would have been blinded in one of em or maybe even in both if he’d lived, but he didn’t live — he went off the road and hit a ‘lectric pole. It fell down atop the car and he got fried just the same as any mad dog killer that ever rode Old Sparky at Sing Sing. And him the worst thing he ever did in his life maybe playing sick to keep from hoeing beans when we still kep the garden.
‘But I was saying how sure I was I broke my goddam arm after — I swore up n down I could remember goin to his funeral with that arm still in the sling! Sarah had to show me the family Bible first and the insurance papers on my arm second before I could believe she had it the right way around; it had been two whole months before, and by the time we buried Billy away, the sling was off. She called me an old fool and I felt like putting one up on the side of her head I was s’mad, but I was mad because I was embarrassed, and at least I had the sense to know that n leave her alone. She was only mad because she don’t like to think about Bill. He was the apple of her eye, he was.’
‘Boy!’ Clive said.
‘It ain’t goin soft; it’s more like when you go down to New York City and there are these fellas on the street corners with nutshells and a beebee under one of em, and they bet you can’t tell which nutshell the beebee’s under, and you’re sure you can, but they shuffle em so goddarn fast they fool you every time. You just lose track. You can’t seem to help it.’