by Will Allison
I never forgot that vow, though when I was old enough to understand what it meant, I told myself it was just talk, that my grandfather would never intentionally leave me. But in the end, Cal was true to his word. When his mind started to go, he fought back with a handful of sleeping pills, leaving me the farm where I now live with my husband, Lyle, who was hired to renovate the farmhouse in the months before Cal’s death.
My grandfather first told me he was sick during the spring of my sophomore year at Carolina. He was starting to slip, was how he put it. “Maybe it’s something and maybe it’s not,” he said. “The doctors don’t know for sure yet.” It was early April, and I was at the farm for our weekly cocktails, the two of us sitting out front beneath the mossy live oaks, a pitcher of Cal’s peppery bloody marys on the wrought-iron table between us. I watched Lyle and his crew stacking steel beams alongside the house as Cal told me that over the past few months, he’d begun forgetting things—names, appointments, the day of the week. He figured it was probably old age, no reason to get all bent out of shape, but just to be safe, he’d gone to the VA for a checkup. They’d given him a physical and a mental-status evaluation. Now they wanted him back for more tests. I stared into my drink, thinking about how he’d forgotten my birthday that fall, how I’d been so busy with classes and pledge meetings that I blew it off, even though it was exactly the sort of lapse I’d always been on the lookout for. Cal patted my knee and told me to cheer up. “Like Yogi Berra said, it ain’t over till it’s over.” Then he stared into his drink, too. “Course, he also said the future ain’t what it used to be.”
The pecky-cypress paneling in the master bedroom of our house is pitted and scarred, the handiwork of a thousand woodpeckers, or at least that’s what I imagined as a five-year-old. When I’d asked Cal about his funny-looking walls, though, he told me the pockmarks weren’t the result of woodpeckers or worms or beetles, as many people believed, but rather a rare and little-understood fungus. “What makes pecky hard to find,” he said, “is that you can’t tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open.”
When he’d purchased the farm, in 1939, the house wasn’t a house, it was a grain barn. He divided the building into rooms and framed doors and windows using wood from an old sharecropper’s cabin. After that first drafty winter, Josie shivering next to him in bed, he decided to insulate and panel their bedroom walls. He originally thought he’d get the wood from the Colonel’s sawmill, but this was the Depression: Cal couldn’t afford to buy lumber, and the Colonel couldn’t afford to give it away, not even to his own son. The best he could do was let Cal help himself to the scrap pile, which was where he found, underneath an old tarp, a load of pecky cypress, enough to panel the bedroom and his workshop. In later years, people would develop a taste for pecky and an appreciation for its scarcity, but in those days, it was considered junk wood. Josie didn’t care; she said it had low-country charm. Mainly, though, she was pleased that Cal went to all that trouble for her even as he worked twelve-hour days trying to establish their dairy farm. Her gratitude was not lost on him, and for the rest of her life, whenever he wanted to please her, he embarked on some new project to make the house more comfortable. Just before my mother was born, he added on a whole second story, and in later years he expanded the dining room and added a built-in china cabinet, then converted the front porch into a sitting parlor with French doors. In 1969, he was halfway done painting the house a minty shade of green that Josie picked out when doctors discovered the tumor in her breast.
After Josie’s death, my grandfather let the house fall into disrepair, but during the fall of my sophomore year, when he first began having trouble with his memory, he sold off several parcels of land and started using the money to fix the place up. Though I didn’t know it at the time, he did this for me, for when I inherited the farm.
At seventy-two, he was no longer able to do the work himself, so he hired Lyle on the recommendation of an old army buddy. In those days, Lyle was more handyman than general contractor, but he worked cheap, and my grandfather liked his manners, the fact that his family was well off, the fact that he’d been smart enough for grad school but then turned his back on all that academic baloney. Inside a month, Cal was inviting him to join us for happy hour. By then I already had my eye on Lyle—a shirtless guy tuck-pointing a chimney apparently being one of my weaknesses—but he seemed more interested in Cal’s company than mine, so I played it close to the chest.
That all changed on the afternoon my grandfather told me he was sick. He’d just finished filling me in on his visit to the VA when Lyle and the two guys who worked for him came crawling out from under the house, brushing soil from their jeans. That week they were trying to fix the sloping floor in the living room. The joists beneath the oak floorboards were supported by heavy girders cut from the heartwood of long-leaf pines, and their plan was to reinforce these girders with steel beams, jack them up, and then build concrete pillars to stabilize the floor. After his crew knocked off for the day, Lyle joined us and began to report on their progress, and soon talk turned to the next project, a new roof. My grandfather didn’t mention his health again, but I could think of nothing else, and as he and Lyle droned on about shingles and soffits, I stared out at the fields that once fed Cal’s registered Guernseys and quietly plowed my way through two more drinks.
When the sun started to dip behind the bluff, Cal left for his monthly poker game at the country club; as he drove down the lane, he flashed us the peace sign, something he’d picked up from Lyle. Once he was gone, I lit a smoke and emptied the last of the pitcher into my glass. “You ought to make sure he pays you before he blows his brains out,” I said. Lyle smiled, then quit smiling when he saw I was serious, then smiled again because he didn’t know what else to do.
“Come again?”
I sent him inside to mix another pitcher, and when he returned, I continued to get embarrassingly drunk and told him everything, all the while vaguely aware that I was trying to seduce him, never mind that he was twenty-four and I was only nineteen. When I got around to the part about Cal planning to “take matters into his own hands,” Lyle was doubtful. “Isn’t that just something people say? To give themselves a sense of control?”
“You don’t know my grandfather,” I said. I hoped Lyle was right, though. It had always terrified me to think Cal would end up like the Colonel, but even that would have been better than no Cal at all. Still, the few times he’d alluded to killing himself—usually in the fading twilight of a vodka-soaked cocktail hour, and usually in the context of what his father ought to have done—I’d simply nodded along, trying to maintain the sort of grown-up composure he admired. I understood, even as a child, that I was always being compared to my mother, contrary, contentious, confounding Maddy. “You,” he’d say, tousling my hair, “you I don’t have to worry about.”
But of course he worried anyway, and as I sat there with Lyle, listening to the crickets and watching the Spanish moss flutter in the breeze, I began to understand why Cal kept inviting him to join us: He was worried about what would happen to me after he was gone. He was worried about me being alone. By now I’d started to get weepy, and Lyle put an arm around me, telling me things would work out. The fireflies were just starting to appear as I took his hand and led him into the house, through the French doors of the parlor, past the pocked paneling of the workshop, and upstairs to the bedroom with faded Day-Glo walls and the curio cabinet lined with my mother’s arrowheads.
A few days before semester’s end, Cal was scheduled for a neurological exam at the VA, but he missed the appointment. Dr. Miller assumed he’d forgotten—a symptomatic memory lapse—but I chalked it up to my grandfather’s dislike of hospitals, and who could blame him, given the way things had turned out with Josie and my mother? It was decided that I’d take him to his next appointment. On a Tuesday morning in early May, I hurried through a biology exam and then drove out to the farm. When I arrived, I found Cal in his workshop, a st
ifling, narrow room crowded with fishing poles, hand tools, gardening tools, faded seed packets, scraps of sandpaper, bits of wood, rusted Folgers cans filled with nails, screws, washers, nuts, and bolts. He invited me in. On his workbench was a brown prescription bottle; he’d been grinding up pills with the porcelain mortar and pestle he’d once used to mix medicine for livestock. As he poured the powder back into the bottle, he said that if it turned out he was sick—and nobody was saying for sure he was, don’t go burying him yet—but if he was, this was how he’d do it. Sleeping pills. Twenty of them dissolved in a stiff drink were guaranteed to do the trick. I picked up one of the bottles and examined the label, feeling suddenly hot and dizzy, as if I’d just downed a handful of pills myself.
“Why not just use a shotgun?”
“And mess up this pretty face?” Cal tapped his watch and turned to go: We didn’t want to miss another appointment.
In spite of the tough-girl act I put on for Cal, I never could stomach what passed for mercy on a farm. Over the years, I saw him put down more animals than I care to remember: sick cows, sick goats, and sick chickens; rabbits maimed by cats, cats mauled by dogs, dogs hit by cars. “You don’t let a suffering thing suffer,” he’d say. One hazy morning when I was ten, I went to the mailbox and found our coon dog, Leopold, lying in a ditch beside the highway, bleeding from the mouth. His ribs quivered as if he were torn between the need for air and the pain of breathing. My grandfather brought his shotgun, took one look at Leo, and did what needed to be done. When I heard the gunshot, what I felt was relief, but also a kind of hatred.
Lyle stood in the middle of my grandfather’s workshop admiring the pecky cypress while I rifled the shelves above the workbench. “You know what this stuff is worth?” he said, tracing a finger along the pale wood.
“He got it for free,” I said. “Ask him. He loves to tell the story.” When I didn’t find what I was looking for on the shelves, I checked the window to make sure Cal was still practicing his golf swing, then moved on to his tackle box. As I scanned the trays of iridescent flies, Lyle told me about a friend of his whose father once owned a lumber mill up in Spartanburg. He said that when they cut open a cypress and discovered it was pecky, they used to shut down the whole operation, drive that one tree to market, and split the profits. “Then they’d take the rest of the day off,” he said. “All thanks to some worms.”
The pill bottle was hidden among spools of fishing line in the bottom of the tackle box. I handed it to Lyle. He unscrewed the cap and looked inside, frowning. For a minute or two we just stood there, listening to the sounds of his crew tearing off the old roof, the hollow pop of Cal giving flight to another ball. Finally Lyle said, “So what are you going to do?” I’d been hoping he’d insist we talk to Cal, take away his pills, put him in a nursing home if that’s what it took, but Lyle just stood there squinting in the hard light that slanted through the window, looking like he wished he were someplace else.
“You don’t think I should do anything, do you?”
“I didn’t say that,” Lyle said. “But it is his life, right?”
I put the pill bottle back in the tackle box and pushed past him on my way out. He caught up with me in the kitchen pouring a shot of whiskey. When he started to apologize, I cut him off. “And the worms in pecky cypress?” I said. “Any idiot knows it’s a fungus.”
The neurological exam raised red flags, so the next week, I took Cal in for a dizzying alphabet of tests—EEG, CT, MRI, PET, SPECT. Then it was back to the psychiatrist, this time for neuropsychological screening, a series of interviews and written tests that left Cal exhausted and irritable. Dr. Miller kept telling us it was a process of elimination; they had to rule out a thyroid problem, stroke, depression.
By the time it came, the diagnosis was no surprise. “Dementia,” Dr. Miller said, “of the Alzheimer type.” We were sitting in his office at the VA. Cal didn’t even blink. “Of the type, huh? You sure you got the right type?” Dr. Miller understood that he was being mocked, but he kept his cool, explaining yet again that an educated guess was the best he could do.
I’d learned all about Alzheimer’s in middle school, when I studied up on it in the school library. I read about the change that occurs in the brain, the formation of a mysterious, gummy plaque whose presence can be verified only by autopsy. It had made me think of our pecky cypress walls, and sometimes I imagined my grandfather dead on a conveyor belt, a buzz saw slicing into his head as curious lumberjacks leaned in for a look. Of course, whereas a pecky cypress shows no external signs of its illness, an Alzheimer’s patient shows plenty, so I’d compiled a list of warning signs in my notebook—memory loss, difficulty performing familiar tasks, problems with language, changes in mood or behavior, etc. For years I watched my grandfather and waited, ready for doom every time he so much as misplaced his keys or confused the names of my friends.
And now that the dark clouds on the horizon had finally rolled in, I found myself facing an even worse wait. The doctors told Cal he might last three years or he might last twenty, but Cal knew that in our family, the disease tended to hit hard and fast, and he seemed determined not to put things off. It made sense that he’d want to take care of business now, while he still had the presence of mind to do so. The day after he was diagnosed, he met with his lawyer about putting his affairs in order, and that weekend he made clear to me that he wanted to finish work on the house as soon as possible. “How soon?” I asked him. It was after the end of spring semester, a Saturday morning, and we were unloading boxes into the swaybacked barn that once sheltered his farming equipment—tractor, sickle mower, silage chopper, disc harrow, bottom plow. The cannibalized remains of an old combine still filled one corner, but the other machines were gone, sold at auction in 1977, the year Cal buried the Colonel and herded his cows between the milking parlor’s stanchions for the last time.
“End of summer,” he said. “Labor Day at the latest.”
“That’s not much time.”
“Lyle’ll manage,” Cal said, lifting another box from the pickup and piling it onto a wooden pallet alongside the combine. We’d been clearing out the attic so Lyle’s crew could add new insulation, and we were down to the last load, mostly boxes containing my mother’s belongings. After my father skipped town, Cal had gone to the little lake house where we lived, packed her stuff, and stowed everything in the attic. As a child, I wasn’t supposed to go up there—Cal told me there were bats—but that never stopped me. I’d spent hours going through her clothes, poring over her photo albums and scrapbooks. Now, rearranging the boxes on the pallet, my arms felt dead, like elastic bands that had lost their snap. Cal was tireless, though. His sun-leathered hands looked as if they could still wrestle a breech calf from a panicked heifer. While he went back to the truck, I took a breather, digging through a box until I found my mother’s wedding dress in its plastic dry cleaner’s bag. It was more sundress than wedding gown, a bit too Summer of Love for my taste, but as I held it against me and swished from side to side, I could see its appeal. When I glanced up, Cal was standing in the doorway of the barn, a wistful smile on his face. “You know, I never did think I’d see you in a wedding dress.”
“And maybe you never will,” I said. I was hoping to hurt him a little, to remind him what he had to live for, but Cal just seemed confused. He started to say something and then stopped, staring at me as if I were a familiar face he couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t until he turned back to the truck, clearly shaken, that I understood it wasn’t me he’d been talking to.
I moved back to the farm the following weekend. Cal tried to talk me out of it, suggesting I stay put in the sorority house, but I said I wanted to spend more time with him, and he couldn’t argue with that. For the first few weeks, life wasn’t so different than it had been the previous summer. The doctors had fine-tuned Cal’s medication, and it was possible, watching him peruse the newspaper or tie a fishing lure, to imagine his diagnosis had simply been wrong. Then June melted away into J
uly, and the blast-furnace heat of midsummer seemed to slow everything down, including Cal. Simple conversation began to confound him, his thoughts like knotted rope, and twice he got lost driving in town, unable to solve the once-familiar streets. Determined not to embarrass himself, he gave up his poker game, turned down fishing trips, stopped answering the phone.
We continued our Friday cocktails against doctor’s orders, but even with Lyle there, those evenings were strained. I’d never realized how much you talk about the future until the topic was off limits. With nowhere to be, Cal invariably ended up drunk. Lyle encouraged me to water down his drinks, but instead I poured him doubles, so he’d sleep sooner. By then I was spending two or three nights a week at Lyle’s apartment, hurrying home each morning so I could have grits and toast waiting on the table for Cal. After breakfast, he’d spend a few hours doing whatever he could to help Lyle, but the afternoons were ours. When we finished lunch, usually leftover fried chicken or barbecue sandwiches bought for the workers, we’d head out to his makeshift driving range, a onetime soybean field he’d seeded with Kentucky bluegrass after he gave up farming. For years he’d been wanting to teach me golf; now I took him up on his offer. We’d start by walking the range together, gathering balls in an old milk pail, and then he’d coach me until the afternoon sun drove us inside, all the while fielding questions about my mother and Josie as I worked to keep his memory sharp. I wasn’t really expecting to hear anything new, but after fifteen years of mostly dodging the subject, Cal surprised me by talking more frankly about his problems with my mother. In between pointed critiques of my grip and stance, he confessed to having been overly protective and overly strict, not letting my mother live her own life, as she used to say to him.