My Great-grandfather Turns 12 Today

by Bill Dodds

  “You may be twelve but I’m almost fifteen,” I heard Pat say.

  “You may be almost fifteen but I’m a hundred,” Charlie answered.

  “Daft,” Pat said. “Come on. Birthday or no, you don’t keep Pa waiting long.”

  Then what they had been saying finally sank in. It was the same day as when I left Fair Brook. It was just eighty-eight years earlier. “My great-grandfather turns twelve today,” I whispered to myself.

  “What was that?” Pat asked and I could tell from the sound of his voice that he was facing my way.

  “That?” Charlie said. “That was me, Paddy-boy. I’m learning to be a ventriloquist. You know what that is?”

  “I know.”

  “It’s a fellow can throw his voice. Make it come out of a trunk or a horse or a . . . or a . . . or a anything else he has a mind to make it come out of.”

  “Is that right?” Pat said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Do it again,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Do it again.”

  “I could if I had a mind to,” Charlie said.

  “Well, maybe I’ll just go over there and see for . . .”

  “I can do it!” Charlie said.

  “Make Millie talk,” Pat said. “Go on.”

  Charlie cleared his throat a few times. “I’m still just learning,” he said.

  In a high-pitched voice I said, “Hey, get you’re cold hands off my . . . bag thing.” What the heck do you call that bag of milk under a cow?

  “Bag thing?” Pat said and laughed. “‘Get you’re cold hands off my bag thing’?”

  “She’s a lady,” Pat said. “What do you think she’s going to say: ‘Stay away from my teats’? Let’s go.”

  “Sure, sure, sure,” Pat said. “Bye, Millie!”

  “The show is over,” Charlie said before I had a chance to answer.

  “This afternoon I’ll be sure to warm up my hands before I come milk you,” Pat said and laughed. “I wouldn’t want to put my cold fingers on your bag thing.”

  “Let’s go!” Charlie said.

  “I’m coming,” Pat said. “Good thing Ma made plenty of food. More than enough for the whole family and your friend back there in the funny jacket.”

  Chapter 8

  “Stretchers” and “Vaudeville”

  “Pat, no!” I heard Charlie cry and I stood up to see the older boy grabbing a pitchfork from a small pile of hay and coming my way.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “I’m just . . . ”

  “Pat!” Charlie said, latching on to his arm.

  “Who are you and what are you doing in our barn?” Pat asked. He was about eight or ten inches taller than I was. He had on overalls and a plain white, long-sleeved shirt without a collar. It was more gray than white. His hair was curly and red.

  “I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m . . .” I said and Charlie looked at me and violently shook his head “no.”

  “He’s just visiting,” he said.

  “I’m just visiting,” I said.

  “Just got here.”

  “I just got here.”

  “Came from town.”

  “I came from Culver City.”

  “Run away.”

  “I ran away.”

  “From the stage show that pulled out earlier this week.”

  “From the stage show . . .”

  “Let him speak for himself,” Pat said to his younger brother but he put down the pitchfork. “Come over here,” he said to me.

  I took a couple of steps toward the bigger boy. “Sometimes Charlie here is like Tom Sawyer and he has a little trouble with stretchers,” he said. “You got any problem with stretchers?”

  Do I have any problems with what? On the other hand, if Charlie did, maybe I should, too.

  “Well,” I said, “as a matter of fact, sometimes I have just about the most horrible time with stretchers in the whole wide world.”

  “Is that right?” Pat said.

  “Oh, yeah. Horrible time. I just . . . . Just a horrible time.” That was when I saw Charlie shaking his head again.

  “No?” I said. “I mean, no. No way, José! Not me. Huh uh.”

  “No way, who?” Pat asked.

  “I . . . I never have a problem with stretchers. Never have, never will. Not me. I see a stretcher, I just nuke it. On the spot.”

  “Does he ever talk English?” Pat asked Charlie.

  “Not much,” Charlie said. “That’s why . . .”

  “Now it seems to me,” Pat said, “if you say you have a horrible time with stretchers and then go on and on explaining how you never tell stretchers, well, then I guess that makes you someone who, for sure, does tell them, doesn’t it?”

  “A stretcher is a tall tale?” I asked and Pat hooted.

  “He’s not too bright, is he?” he asked.

  “That’s why it took him so long to find the farm,” Charlie said.

  “It took him days?”

  “You saw for yourself,” Charlie said and he touched his right index finger to his right temple. “Got a few bats in his belfry.”

  Hey, now, wait a minute . . . .

  “Maybe he escaped from some asylum!” Pat said, eyeing the pitchfork again.

  “Or a convent center,” Charlie said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know. A convent center.”

  “Oh,” Pat said, looking confused. “Of course. A convent center.”

  “But look at his funny clothes,” Charlie said and his brother nodded. “He’s gotta be from the circus or the stage, eh?”

  “I guess so.”

  Now what did they mean by that? I had on my baseball jacket, a clean sports shirt, good blue jeans, white socks and regular old athletic shoes. White with blue slashes. The kind every kid wears.

  “So he’s a clown?” Pat asked.

  “That’s what I thought at first,” Charlie said. “That’s a good guess, all right. But no. You go ahead and tell my brother what you are.”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “No, some other kid dressed up like a tomato,” Pat said. “Of course you.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Charlie said. “He doesn’t really speak English. I’ll tell you.”

  I nodded.

  “He was on the stage,” Charlie said. “Vaudeville. Traveling from town to town. A show every night plus a matinee on Saturday and Sunday.”

  “What’s he do?” Pat asked.

  “I’m a juggler,” I said. “I juggle.” I was lucky I knew that vaudeville was performers that used to go from town to town. It died out when movies became popular. I mean movies at theaters, not movies on TV or videotape.

  “He worked for a juggler,” Charlie jumped in. “He was a juggler’s assistant. You know, making sure all the balls and pins and rings and things were in their right place and . . .”

  “No,” I said. “I was a juggler.”

  “An apprentice,” Charlie argued. “Just starting out.”

  “All right,” I said, “an apprentice. But a darned good one.”

  Pat was half listening but he was staring at my shoes. There were awful nice. I had gotten them a week ago. I mean, I had gotten them eighty-seven years and fifty-one weeks from now.

  “Those shoes sure are white,” Pat said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “Town is over seven miles from here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you came all that way in the rain and the mud and your shoes are all white. And your clothes are dry.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “I got a ride. Some car stopped and picked me up.”

  “There’s no railroad line between here and Culver City,” Pat said.

  Who had said anything about a railroad?

  “A car,” I said. “I got a ride in a car.”

  “He means a wagon,” Charlie said.

  “Right,” I told Pat. “A Volvo wagon.”

  “A what?”

  “A four-door
, Volvo . . .”

  “Never mind,” Pat said. “You come with me. Pa will want to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s no problem.”

  “And he’ll want to ask you some questions.”

  “I suspect he would.”

  “And he’ll want to see you juggle,” Pat said. “We’re all going to watch you do that.”

  Chapter 9

  In a Strange Land

  I followed both of them out of the barn. The storm had passed and it was getting brighter. I was surprised to find that we were in the middle of the country. I guess it hadn’t occurred to me that’s where most farms are. I wasn’t thinking too clearly but then this was some pretty weird stuff that I was going through.

  Actually, I expected to wake up any minute and find myself back in Charlie’s . . . back in Great-grandpa’s room at the nursing home.

  I looked behind me and saw that the barn wasn’t all that big. It was about the size of a garage that could hold maybe four cars. It was two stories tall and painted red.

  There was a corral of some kind next to it. Two big brown horses were in there.

  Over to my left as we headed toward the house was another building. This one was red, too, but it was one story high. It was long and narrow, like a skinny garage. It had a regular door on the long side facing us and a kind of a big screened-in cage at the far end. There were chickens in there.

  The house itself was about a hundred yards from the barn. It looked pretty new but it was an old style. It was two stories high with a big porch wrapping around one corner of it. The house was made of wood, clapboard style: long, narrow boards overlapping each other. There were a lot of wooden curly-cues and stuff around the edge of the porch by the pillars and rails. There was a small one-story addition connected to it just off the back. The whole thing was painted white.

  We were headed for a side door next to the addition.

  The yard, which was pretty small, had a white, wooden picket fence around it separating it from the rest of the area. Inside was green grass, some flower beds and two big trees. Outside was grass and stuff that looked more scruffy and some kind of fenced-in garden that was about the size of one-fourth of a football field.

  Beyond that was nothing. I turned a complete circle and it was the same. There was nothing but fields as far as I could see except for way off, back past the barn, it looked like maybe another house was in among a few trees. That would have made it down the same dirt road that this house faced.

  Something green was growing in all those fields. It was about a foot and half high.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing toward it.

  “What?” Pat stopped and asked.

  “All that green stuff,” I said.

  Charlie had stopped, too. Pat gave his little brother a funny look and said, “Last time I checked it was corn.”

  Of course it was! I knew what corn looked like when it was growing. There were still some farms around Culver City that grew it.

  “Let’s go,” Pat said, “we’re all late for dinner.”

  That was another thing. It was too light out for dinner. Something was wrong here. It made me almost sure this must be some kind of mixed-up dream.

  “It’s dinner time?” I asked.

  “Past dinner time,” Pat said.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  Pat looked at Charlie again and slowly said, “It. Is. Dinner. Time. That’s. What. Time. It. Is.”

  “He hasn’t eaten for days,” Charlie said. “He’s kind of out of his head, kind of delirious.”

  “He’s kind of stupid is what he kind of is,” Pat said.

  “No,” I said again, tapping the top of my left wrist with my right hand. “I mean what time is it?”

  “He’s powerful hungry,” Charlie said.

  Pat tapped his left wrist with his right hand, his right wrist with his left and then tapped his head with his left as he rubbed his stomach with his right. “It’s dinner time,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I mean the number. You know. Five o’clock. Six o’clock. Seven o’clock.”

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Lost your Ingersoll?”

  “Lost my what?” I asked.

  “Your watch,” Charlie said. “Your pocket watch.”

  Pat just shook his head and Charlie shrugged some sort of apology for me being so dim. Then Pat pointed straight up at the sky.

  I looked up, right at the sun that was peeking through some clouds. Ouch! I blinked a couple of times and Pat said, “Come on.” That seemed like a mean trick to me.

  “Hey,” I said, “all I wanted to know was what time . . .”

  “Noon,” Pat said, still walking and not turning back to face me. “Way I learned it, when the sun is right up in the middle of the sky, it’s noon.”

  He was right.

  “Cool,” I said.

  That stopped them both again.

  “What?” Pat turned and asked me.

  “That’s cool,” I said. “You know what time it is from where the sun is.”

  “He hasn’t had a lot to drink, either,” Charlie said. “He had a fever.”

  “When the sun is straight up, it’s noon,” Pat said, as if he were talking to a two-year-old. That’s true, I thought, but not during daylight savings time. “The place it comes up from is called the east. The place where it sets is called the west. Every day. Same thing.”

  “I know,” I said, “but I have one more question.”

  “Just one?” he asked and Charlie laughed.

  “How come we’re going to eat dinner in the middle of the day?” I asked. Pat took a couple of steps back toward me and leaned down, his face right in front of mine.

  “We eat dinner in the middle of the day because we’re hungry,” he said.

  “And he fell on his head,” Charlie said. “Did I mention he fell on his head?”

  “I just guess he did,” Pat said and something in the way he said it helped me figure out who he was reminding me of. He was a lot like my brother Robert. I guess all big brothers are kind of the same. That was just the way Robert would talk to some of my friends, as if they didn’t have any brains at all.

  “No duh about when you’re hungry,” I said to Pat. “But what kind of dummies eat dinner at lunch time? Tell me that, Einstein.”

  That got his attention, all right. He narrowed his eyes a little bit and he said, “My name’s not Einstein. And everyone eats dinner at dinner time, Mr. Funny Shoes. Breakfast in the morning, dinner at noon, supper at night. Or don’t folks in vaudeville bother with food?”

  “Oh, we bother,” I said. “We need to keep up our strength because we have to keep performing for dumb farm boys just like you.”

  “What did you say!” he sputtered.

  It occurred to me then that I might have gone just a tiny bit too far. After all, this wasn’t really Robert I was talking to. This was some kid from the past who had recently shoved a pitchfork my way.

  “What did you say!” he asked again, straightening up right in front of me.

  Chapter 10

  Meeting my Great-great-grandfather

  Bang! All three of us looked over at the house where a screen door had slammed. A little girl in a plain blue dress that came down to the middle of her calves was hustling down the pathway from the side door to the gate.

  “Papa says . . . .” she was screaming. “Papa says . . . .” She hopped up on the lower cross bar of the wooden gate and shouted, “Papa says come in right now! He says . . . .” And then she spotted me and her voice trailed off.

  “Pa says don’t go hangin’ on the gate, Sissie,” Pat answered but he was walking quickly toward the house.

  “Who’s that?” she demanded as Pat unlatched the gate and swung it open, giving the little girl a ride.

  “That there is Mr. Vaudeville,” Pat said. “He’s come to entertain us on Charlie’s birthday.”