My Papa's Chair -- Final

PaPa’s brown naughahyde chair sits by the side window. A green glass ashtray rests on the floor where the footstool juts out when he’s sitting. A pipe – the mouthpiece chewed -- is laid carefully in the center of it. Three cans of Prince Albert are lined up in the windowsill, the rectangular four-inch high tin canisters arranged in order of how full of tobacco they are. We grandchildren prank-called people on the party line – when Rodie Huggins up the road wasn’t gabbing on it – to ask if they had Prince Albert in a can. “You better let him out then,” the cousin charged with making the call would yell and hang up the phone, and we’d all convulse in laughter, the boys punching each other in the arm..
My PaPa was never sitting in the chair when we called. We would never have dared call if he had been. It wasn’t that we were afraid of him. Just the opposite. Instead, it was the idea of not disturbing his quiet dignity. Of not showing disrespect to his neighbors he’d lived around for 60 years. We didn’t want to disappoint him, somehow.

I remember being 16 and staying alone for an extra week with my grandparents – a special treat that didn’t happen often enough. It was summer in Alabama, hot, sticky, 95 degrees. My grandfather was 79 years old, and he was hoeing in the garden – an acre filled with butterbeans and corn and tomatoes – that he always planted 100 feet from the house. He had on his work overhauls, the faded ones, with a yellow plaid shirt with sleeves that came down to his elbows. His arms were tanned and ropy with muscle, even though he was an old man. When the sleeve happened to move up, a glimpse of pale white skin with tiny blue veins in it would show – sun never saw that part of his arm. He pushed up his straw hat and wiped his sweat-beaded brow with his nicely pressed white handkerchief; then he folded it back just so along the creases and stuffed it back in his chest pocket. His hats, his overhauls, his boots were all a part of who he was. He had his pair of work overhauls, his neatly starched, dark-blue going-to-town overhauls, and his dark church suit. He had three hats: the straw work one with the sweat-stained crown, a newer, cleaner straw version he wore to town, and his taupe fedora he religiously wore to church. He had two pairs of boots: the mud-caked work boots with tired creases in the ankles and the brand-spanking new going-to-town boots. The neatly polished black shoes with the black laces were for going to church. Except for what he was wearing, his clothes were lined up neatly in the closet he shared with my grandmother, the closet he built himself when he built the five-room house they shared for so many years.

PaPa always seemed to have a blue truck – except for the seafoam green one he bought one time. It was the ‘60s, after all, and you were supposed to live dangerously. Living dangerously might not have been his style, but saving money was. My grandparents’ farmhouse sat in a plateau at the bottom of one big hill and the beginning of another one that led down to a shallow creek. PaPa went to town once or twice a week, although when some of the grandchildren were visiting he took more trips to the triangular-shaped store where the roads forked at Needmore. He bought us bottled orange drinks or “pops” for the cousins from Ohio. But it was the journey home that we all anticipated. We crested the top of that last hill and started toward the house. The outline of the roof peeked through the trees. PaPa – without saying a word -- snapped the transmission smoothly into neutral, took his foot off the brake, and coasted – at an ever-increasing speed -- down the hill. The windows were down, and the wind blew harder and our hair whipped faster around our faces. With a slight right turn, we sailed into the pebble-strewn driveway, right up to the vine-covered front porch, before he jammed his foot on the brake. It was the thrill of a lifetime.

He milked the cow every morning for the first 10 years of my life. He got up at dawn, dressed in his work overhauls, and headed across the two-lane road. Two green chicken houses – the industrial-sized ones – surrounded the house, one behind the double clothesline in the back and one on top of the slight incline across the road, in the middle of one of the cow pastures. The milk cow stayed to the left of the chicken house, the one that housed the blue tractor that if we were lucky we got to ride on with PaPa. He’d go to the gate and call the cow with a little whistle. It was brown, and it had horns, and it was tame. She’d trot to the gate, walk serenely out and head almost unprompted to the barn across the road, ready to be milked. PaPa would come in the house with a full tin bucket,, steam rising slightly from the warm milk. I would never drink it.
When I was 11, we came to visit. The cow was gone. I don’t know what happened to it. The milk in the refrigerator was pasteurized, in a carton, bought at the store. Things change.

Papa loved to sit on the front porch, most often resting in a straight-backed kitchen chair, maybe leaning it against the wall, pipe in hand. If the grandchildren stopped, even for a moment, he talked. He loved to talk. He told stories about serving in the army during World War I. I think about it sometimes, the stories I wished I had paid more attention to and that I had written down when I had the chance. He was 19 when he went to war, a boy fresh off the farm from Alabama. I remember him telling about being on a ship going to France and a German U-boat firing torpedoes at their ship. Other boys didn’t know what the torpedoes were, yelling about the logs heading for them. I’ve often wondered if he was one of those boys.
My cousin Mike says he told him stories about the girls, the French girls. I’ve seen the postcards he bought. But he never told me those stories. Instead, he told me about someone in his camp who bought a monkey, a monkey that got into lots of trouble and was one of his fondest memories. It was only after PaPa started telling me stories that my mother realized her father hadn’t been a cook in the army, but an orderly. It suddenly made sense to her why he was so helpless in the kitchen.

My brother and Wayne were the two youngest grandchildren. When our families visited at the same time, PaPa took them to the “crick” at the bottom of the second hill. It ran its course through the middle of the “bottom pasture”; sometimes cows were there, sometimes not. The creek was clear some of the time, although it had an orangey tint to the water from the clay banks that bordered it. PaPa, however, did not go fishing when the water was clear. “Fish can see you if there’s no mud stirring,” he told the boys. They nodded in agreement. Of course. But he took them for treks through the woods bordering the pastures. They climbed the hills, hopping from one fallen log to another or sighting good places to dig worms. If they got thirsty, PaPa stripped leaves off of the bright green “cowcumber” trees and fashioned cups from them – cups that held cold water from the spring that bubbled under the bluff. In the winter, the boys and PaPa went squirrel hunting. PaPa toted his .22 rifle and the boys triedto walk as quietly as they could, their hands jammed inside the pockets of their corduroy jackets. Even when he was 80, PaPa could sight a squirrel 100 feet away and knock it out of the tree with one shot. Andy and Wayne smiled. Of course.

He wasn’t always a grandfather. At one time he was a 25-year-old farmer marrying a blue-eyed girl with long dark hair on a February day when it snowed. Both families waited; his about-to-be mother-in-law baked a chocolate cake, a novelty in northern Alabama when a customer had to mail order the cocoa from a New York catalogue. The preacher, who promised to be there come rain or shine, didn’t show up in the snow. So the about-to-be groom rode on a horse to a nearby town to fetch a preacher. He found one.
Then he was a father of seven children, a father who plowed fields with two mules during the day and laughed when his second youngest daughter – my mother – clucked her tongue and imitated him -- “Git on up Belle” -- at the mule when she was five years old. He smoked his pipe and read the Bible aloud while my mother sat in his lap. He stayed up in the middle of the night when my mother had an earache and blew warm smoke into her ear when she cried with pain. It was magic because the pain always went away.

The year my grandparents married, my PaPa carved a rolling pin for my grandmother out of a single block of wood. It was a light golden color, made out of pine, slightly uneven on one side where my grandfather pressed too hard on the planer when he was smoothing the wood. But it worked. It helped make thousands and thousands of cathead biscuits. It helped make hundreds of blackberry pies, made from berries picked by my grandfather and sometimes my grandmother from the prickly, scratchy bushes growing wild in the ditch across the road from the house, berries that occasionally came at the cost of chiggers or scratched arms. It helped shape dumplings for the chicken stew and pot-pie crusts, hundreds of them consumed at a metal kitchen table loaded with bowls of “country” food that always held a bowl of English peas – my grandfather’s favorite – the bright green kind from the frozen food section at the Piggly Wiggly in town. That rolling pin was an object of fascination for children who would rub their hands on the sides of it and for grown-up grandchildren who would good-naturedly jest about who would get it one day. It became a symbol, somehow, more than just a rolling pin.

My PaPa sat in his brown naugahyde chair, smoked his pipe, watched Wheel of Fortune religiously at 7 o’clock every weekday evening, and went to bed at nine every night, even when company visited and the house was full of people. When a car rattled by on the road, PaPa pulled back the white sheer curtain to see who it was. More likely than not, he recognized the car, knew who it was.
After my grandfather died, the family gathered – all of us, the ones from South Carolina and Ohio and Tennessee along with the Alabama ones. When my brother and I pulled into the driveway, only one other car sat there. No one pulled back the curtain the look.
It was one of the saddest, loneliest moments of my life.