Little Joe looked at Grant, horrified. He dragged himself to his feet and hurried down the side aisle and out the door before his parents reached the end of the aisle.
The rest of the funeral was as quiet as Henry Olson himself.
On the way home, Slider said, “It’s my fault, Mamie. I plum forgot him that night.”
“Dad, if it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine. It’s my fault we had to go get stuck in Grand Forks. All ’cause of that stupid shooting the Christmas lights.”
Slider nodded and scratched the back of his head, pushing up his hat. “Funny, isn’t it? How one stupid little action has repercussions forever and ever? Like a stone on a glass-smooth pond. Endless circles.” He put his hand on Grant’s shoulder. “Don’t go feeling bad about this, though. You got enough to worry about right now, and I reckon Mamie was right. I just kept Henry from doing this for the last several winters, but I reckon it was just a matter of time.”
After Mamie went to change clothes and was out of earshot, Grant said, “Dad? Askil was right, wasn’t he?”
Slider laughed a big belly laugh. “I reckon he was, son.”
Grant went on, “I hate Big Joe so much, I was glad he got kicked out, but I couldn’t help laughing either.”
“You’re not alone, son. You’re not alone. Big Joe was the only one too drunk to be quiet about it. At least Henry would have loved what Askil said, and he would’ve liked Big Joe getting kicked out better than the whole shootin’ match that priest did for the service.”
Twenty-Two
Spring
Days passed with more and more noon-times way above freezing. Snow from the March first blizzard shrank almost as fast as it had come. By the second week in March, the only remaining snow was piled in dirty gray mounds on the north sides of buildings. The coal burners in Larkin didn’t have to work as hard.
When he woke up on March fifteenth, two weeks had passed since the cast came off. Before anyone else was up, Grant sat down in the kitchen and flattened out his arm, setting his upper arm on the table and pushing down on his fingers with his left hand until his arm was a straight line. It hurt like a son-of-a-gun. He held it, stretched and hurting like that until tears sprang to his eyes, but he kept pushing. He’d never throw a fastball if he couldn’t release with full straight extension on his arm.
Five minutes after school let out that day, Grant arrived for his job for Sims’s Mercantile, now that he had two arms again. In January he had asked Sims if he would hire a one-armed worker, so he could pay for the Christmas lights, but Sims said all he really needed someone who could lift and carry boxes and stack shelves, so he’d have to wait until he got his cast off.
Sims showed him how to unpack the shipment he got from the livery, and where to stack the new jars of honey, bags of flour, sugar, and tea. Grant had a hard time lifting with his weak arm, but he wasn’t going to let Sims know that. He found a way to do what he had to do, mostly one-handed. And Dr. Bronstein had told him to start lifting with it, so here was his chance.
Each day, all day long at school, Grant stretched his fingers and his arm, and scratched his arm, and if he wasn’t writing, he squeezed the red ball under his desk. Under his flannel shirt, his arm skin was still pink like a baby’s, but was losing the old, scaly look of a grandfather. When he was alone, he tried whipping his wrist as if he were pitching. It hurt all the way to his shoulder. But he did it anyway. Over and over and over.
Sometimes during warm, sunshiny days, Grant’s mother let the coal stove go out in the middle of the day and opened the windows and all the curtains wide to air out the house and let the sunshine keep the house warm. She only relit the fire in late afternoon when the sun dropped lower in the sky and the temperature fell with it. That, she said to Grant, saved coal.
Every day, Grant stretched his arm and lifted more and more weight with it. He squeezed the ball in his pocket whenever his hand wasn’t busy with something else.
The snow melted, then more fell, and it melted again the next day. The snow on the roads disappeared, so the boys used wagons all the time now instead of sleds to get coal from the train cars. Sometimes the wagon wheels mired down in the mud, and they took turns pulling and pushing each other out of the muck. By the time they got home, they were muddy to their hips and cold and wet. And each of them got yelled at in turn for tracking mud into his own house. Lorraine Woods brought a wheelbarrow one night instead of a wagon, and it was only slightly better because the wheel was bigger.
She said, “I hope I get enough coal for three days, so I don’t have to come out here all the time.”
But when she heaped coal onto her wheelbarrow, she could barely lift the handles, and had to dump half her load to be able to get it home. She picked a spot in the high weeds by the water tower, in hopes that it might be there when she came back.
When Grant got home from pulling his wagon, his arm ached like the dickens. But he didn’t complain for fear Mamie would say no baseball for a boy who couldn’t do his work.
He started lifting milk cans in Sims’s store when nobody was watching, to pull his arm straight and to try to get some muscles back. He still felt as flimsy as a girl, but every day it seemed like he was a tiny bit stronger.
By April first, it didn’t hurt as bad and wasn’t pink anymore. His pitching arm was still way skinnier than his left, but he didn’t look like he belonged in a freak show anymore. Grant also finished paying for the Christmas lights. Sims told him he didn’t have to work every day after school anymore, but if he stopped in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he could keep earning some extra money.
Grant tried to do a push-up. His elbow hurt so bad it made his eyes burn, but he tried every day until he could get his arms straight. His eyes ran with tears from the pain, so he had to try when nobody was looking.
He had to get his pitching arm back. He had to.
Twenty-Three
Grandmother
After school one cold, gray, wet Wednesday in early April, Mamie met Grant at the door, dressed in her going-to-town dress, her camel-colored coat slung over the back of the davenport with her hat beside it.
“Mom. What’s wrong?” Grant looked at her somber face.
“My mother. The doctor says she has a cancer, and she refuses to go the hospital. Of course, knowing her.”
He and his mother looked each other in the eye, remembering the last time they had seen Grandmother.
The door swung open and in stepped Harley and Shirley, bringing the smell of damp spring wind with them.
“Mom? What’s wrong?” Shirley asked.
“Your grandmother’s sick. I don’t know how sick, but I’ve got to go see her. I might be gone a couple days. You three will need to take care of each other. Slider will be here, and he promised to come home early while I’m gone and not go to Grumpy’s at night, but you need to help each other out, you hear?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Grant nodded. “Sure, Mom.”
“I don’t want you to go!” Harley stuck out his lower lip.
Grant understood. He wished Mamie didn’t have to go on this trip, either.
“Who will feed me?” Harley wouldn’t let up.
“I will,” Shirley said, “and Dad will. Hush up. It’ll be fine.”
“I wanna go with Mama!” Harley said, his voice turning into something of a wail.
“Absolutely not. You’d miss school.” Mamie took his chin in her hand. “My mother—your grandmother—isn’t exactly a fan of children.”
“That’s an understatement,” Grant said.
Mamie looked at him sharply, but one corner of her mouth went up in spite of herself.
“Who’s gonna take care of me?” Harley wasn’t going to let it go.
“We will,” Grant said. “You don’t want to go. Believe me, you do not want to go. I’ve been there.”
Grant thought about the only time he remembered seeing his grandmother. He’d been six years old, Shirley had been three, and Harley wasn’t b
orn yet. Mamie, Grant, and Shirley packed up for a trip to visit their grandmother.
After driving three and a half hours, they got out of the car in front of a cabin surrounded by stakes for beans and crawling pumpkin vines. A woman met them at the door, a broom in hand, an astonished look on her wizened, toothless face.
“What you doin’ here?” she’d asked Mamie. “What you want?”
“Hello, Mother,” Mamie had said. “I brought my children to meet their grandmother.”
“Grandma, sckramma,” Grandma had said. “What ya’all doin’ here, really? You need a few square meals or somethin’? Did that confounded ball-playin’ sheriff throw you out?”
“Of course not, Mother.” Grant could hear steel in her voice.
“So what you want, then? Why you showin’ up on my doorstep with your own young’uns?”
“To visit. To let you know your grandchildren.”
“Ha!” She shrieked in what was meant to be a laugh, showing her gums in her toothless face. “What makes you think I got an iota of interest in snuggling grandbabies for? I got too much work to do for that. Ain’t I done my fair share raisin’ you and your sisters and that good-for-nothin’ brother of your’n? I ain’t got nothin’ else to give no babies of your’n or anybody else’s.”
She squinted her eyes, so that her face reminded Grant of a crabapple. Shirley backed up so she was packed as hard as could be against Mamie’s skirt.
“Skeered a me?” the old woman asked Shirley, and Shirley nodded, the back of her head smashed against Mamie.
“Smart girl. And right pretty children, I’ll say that for ya. O’course, that handsome ball-player would sire some pretty babies.”
Grant remembered trying to smile at her for saying something nice about his dad. The old eyes narrowed in the crabapple face, and she didn’t smile back. “What? Your mama tell you to do that?”
“Do what, ma’am?” he croaked.
“Don’t you be ma’am-in’ me, young feller, just ’cause I said you had a pretty face. Why you smilin’ at me like that?”
Grant had frowned, confused. He didn’t want to be pretty, anyway, but what she’d said made him think he looked like his dad, and he liked that.
“There. See? Scowly, sour-faced children. Had enough of them in my life. And I’m busy. Don’t you see?” She waved the broom at Mamie. “I have work to do. Beans are ripe. I’m canning today. I don’t have time to kiss babies or sit and visit. How on earth you manage, with two little ones, to think you have time to drive to see me and sit and visit? You cuckoo as a cuckoo clock? Get on home and do your own work, and don’t bother me with your babies. You got yourself hitched to that fancy ball-player.” She cackled as if this were all funny, a joke she’d known long ago. “You made your bed. You lie in it.” She seemed to think this was very funny.
Grant looked at his mother’s face. Her eyes were flashing mad and sad at the same time. She stared at Grandmother. “Mother,” she said in a deadpan tone of voice, “don’t you think you’ll regret this? I don’t want anything from you. I didn’t come here for anything. I just came to visit. I brought you some home-canned meat and some jelly from our raspberry bushes. I brought you food. I didn’t come to take anything.”
The crabapple expression changed, just a little bit. Grandmother stamped the broom on the top step. Working it up and down, stamping, stamping. She worked the lips in and out of her gums in the same rhythm. She didn’t say anything, just rested a dried-out-looking, brown-spotted forearm on her broom handle when she was done stamping it.
“But I guess that’s that, then. Goodbye, Mother.” And looking down, “Let’s go, Grant. Shirley.”
Grant turned, not eager to get back in the car after such a long ride, and especially when he had to go to the bathroom horribly and she’d talked him into holding it just until they got to Grandmother’s house, but that didn’t look like such a good idea anymore. “But I have to—”
“We’ll stop in two minutes. I promise. Just go now. Get in the car.” Her voice was even, no nonsense, and Grant and Shirley looked at each other, understanding somehow that they needed to be on their mother’s side in this stand-off, and they climbed back into the hot back seat.
“Weeelll.” Grandmother’s voice stretched to the car as if it were a long tether, like a clothesline. “I s’pose I could use some of that meat. Meat’s hard to come by for an old woman.”
Mamie went to the back of the Plymouth, opened the hamper, and took out two quarts of canned meat and one pint of raspberry jelly. Grant knew she’d brought more than that, several jars more of each, but she closed the hamper again when she’d pulled them out and walked over to her mother and extended the three jars.
The wizened grandmother smiled, her toothless smile. “That’s good. That’s good.” She didn’t say thank you, and she didn’t say that’s nice. She just said that’s good as if Mamie owed it to her and was paying a debt. Grant was glad his mother hadn’t given the old woman all the food they brought.
“Goodbye, Mother,” Mamie said, got in, closed the door, started the car, and drove down the bumpy lane.
Grant and Shirley watched over their shoulders all the way down the lane, taking in the brambling raspberry bushes, and a garden with beans and pumpkins and strawberries, taking up every last inch of space they could see on all sides of the tiny gray-slatted house, and their grandmother standing there on the stoop, cradling the three jars like babies, until the car turned out of sight.
“Mom, I have to—”
“I know. We’ll stop at the gas station,” Mamie had said. “Thank you for doing as you were told.” And she sniffed.
“Mom, it’s an emergency.”
So she pulled to the side of the road and Grant stood in the ditch and peed for what seemed like forever and ever.
They stopped at a big flat rock beside the road and had a picnic of canned meat, bread, and jelly.
While they ate, Shirley asked, “How come your mama doesn’t want us?”
“She’s not my mama, Shirley.”
“But you said she’s your mama.”
“No. I said she was my ‘mother,’ but she was never, ever a mama.”
“Why’s she so mean?”
“My father took off west to work on the railroad when I was five. Supposed to send money home. He didn’t. Never once. No money, and we never saw him again. Never heard from him again. She worked her fingers to the bone to feed us. All she knows to do is work. There’s no joy or love in being a mother for her. Only work.”
“But,” Grant said around his jelly sandwich, “you work hard, and you still love us.”
Mamie looked up at the clouds and blue sky above their heads. “She wasted all the rest of her energy hating my father. I think her heart shrank to the size of a pea. She’s right. She’s got nothing left to give anybody. Hating’ll do that to a person.”
Neither Grant nor Shirley had ever mentioned their grandmother to Mamie again. And over the last seven years, Grant had come to understand the difference between a mama and a mother, just like having Slider for a dad or Big Joe for a father. When he thought about his grandmother or about Big Joe, he remembered to be thankful.
* * *
Now Mamie pulled her coat on. She hugged Harley to her chest and kissed his cheek, then she hugged and kissed Shirley. To Grant, she said, “You’ll see to them, right?”
“Yes. And good luck with her.”
She touched his cheek with the back of her hand. “Roast with potatoes is in the oven for supper. Should be enough leftover for tomorrow if you and your dad put it in the ice box. Check to make sure the fire keeps going, will you, Grant?”
And she was gone, her suitcase in the back seat, and shifting the Plymouth into first to ease it down the street.
They watched her go.
Twenty-Four
Billiards
When the car disappeared around the corner, Shirley said, “Now what?”
Grant said, “Let’s go find Slider.
”
After Grant checked on the coal fire in the stove—it seemed banked up just fine, and the smell of roast made his stomach rumble—they shrugged back into their jackets. Grant grabbed his wagon so he could go straight to the train from downtown, and they traipsed down the street.
Slider sat on his usual stool at Grumpy’s, but he was sipping a glass of Hamm’s beer, not a vodka sour, because it was late afternoon.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Grumpy said. Askil Snortland moved down a stool so all three of them could sit together beside Slider. It was chilly in the bar, with no fire, but the smell of burnt tires lingered in the air. Grant grinned at Askil, thinking about Henry Olson’s funeral.
“Your ma get off just fine?” Slider asked. Grumpy pulled three root beers and set them on the counter.
Grant met his dad’s eyes over his brother and sister. “I wouldn’t want to be Mom right now.”
“Your grandmother is a difficult woman,” Slider said. “But she is your grandmother. And your mama can take care of herself.”
“That’s for sure,” Grumpy said.
Grumpy, Askil, and Lawrence Messner looked up as if hoping for a story, but when none was forthcoming, they turned back to their drinks.
“Dad?” Shirley asked, taking in the tavern with wide eyes. Grant realized with pity that she’d probably never been in here before. Mamie maintained that it was no place for a young lady, and Shirley always put her hands on her hips and said “No desire to be a lady,” to which Mamie always replied, “Someday you’ll thank me, young lady.” But here she was, out with the boys at the tavern.
“Hmm?” Slider responded without looking at Shirley.
“Can we play billiards?”
Slider looked around the room. “Well, I guess there’s no reason why you couldn’t play one game.” His eyes settled on Shirley. “How is it you even know about billiards, Shirley?”
“I read about it in a book,” She said, jumping down from her stool.
“What’s bill-ard?” Harley asked, sliding off his stool, too.
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