The wheel turned like the spindle on my grandmother’s old spinning wheel. I pictured it turning out pieces of land like her spinning wheel turned out strands of yarn. The waterwheel wasn’t saying anything, I decided. It was making. I guess I was thinking like an engineer even back then. After a while, I lost myself in the sparkle and turn of the wheel.
The man came out. He did not have the punched look anymore. In fact, he was standing taller, much taller. Grandaddy, who followed behind him, now looked like he’d been pummeled, beaten up. The man got into the company car, wordlessly, and drove away. The cattle, which had been standing on the road, separated to let him pass, then moved back together, as blades of grass will move when a snake passes through.
Grandaddy stood straight and still while the man drove away. After the car went around the bend in the drive, out of sight, the strength seemed to flow out of Grandaddy. For a moment, he slumped, almost stumbled off the porch. Then he caught himself, kept himself under control. But I could see him trembling.
“Reed, they’re going to build a dam,” Grandaddy said to me. “Down on the Tallapoosa River. Be a big lake forming. It’ll take a few years, but it’ll reach up the creek here, fill our little valley. This place will be underwater. They want me to sell out, Reed, to leave my home.”
He turned from me, looked out over the fields and windbreaks, over the land. He clenched his hands into fists, which hung at his sides. He worked his nails into his palms.
“Ah, boy, what am I going to do?”
We went to the lawyer’s office in Anniston that afternoon, Grandaddy wearing his only suit; it was from the fifties, narrow and nondescript. Mr. Dowell, the lawyer, had helped my grandfather with the legalities having to do with my grandmother’s death, and, like all country folk, Grandaddy always came back to someone who’d done a good job for him. Mr. Dowell was not hopeful, and filled the air with talk. Talk I now would recognize, of eminent domain of the state, of the individual sacrificing for the common good, of the above-market price Alabama Power was willing to pay. But I was a boy still, and listened only with my heart.
“Oh, they offered me more than my land is worth, by any lights,” Grandaddy said at one point. Then I remember the pause, the silence, which even the verbose Mr. Dowell did not seek to fill. A silence of memories, desires, hopes for the future. Of someday passing those hopes on to Kim and me. And behind it all, pervading the silence like the smell of fallen leaves fills the autumn air, was the knowledge that this was where his Betty was buried, on top of the little hill behind the cabin, where she used to sit and paint. That grave would be sunken, flooded, washed away without a trace, and only the slap of waves fifty feet above it as a marker.
“And Betty—” Grandaddy’s voice cracked.
“I know, John,” said Mr. Dowell, ceasing his explanations, his justifications, leaning forward, wiping his sad face. “There’s just nothing I can do. Nothing. I’m really sorry.”
* * * *
Grandaddy roamed the land for weeks. He did no work, for what was the use? He came back sweaty, caked with corn loam, with a look on his face—I can’t describe that look. Imagine a horse with broken legs staring at you, begging you to get it over with. Or a soldier with shrapnel through an artery, watching his life leak out onto the earth before him, knowing what is happening.
I followed him one day, far behind, and he didn’t see me. He knelt in the cornfield, dug his hand into the dirt and raised the reddish topsoil to his nose. He smelled it. Did he remember learning to plow, back during the Depression, his father’s hands, hard as old hickory, over his own, responding to, guiding the mule? Or was it his first crop, after he’d inherited the land, when the rain had not fallen until it was almost too late, when he thought he would have to go to Anniston or maybe even Birmingham to support my grandmother and my father, when the rain had come and the corn tasseled and he had enough money to buy even an old used tractor?
With a shudder, I felt some of Grandaddy’s years upon my shoulders. I felt old and beaten down, and all I could think was that my kids would never race between the rows of corn because racing was fun. That they would never pant in this country air, on this farm, lying beside the windbreak, looking up into the blue Randolf County sky. They would never know the fall and carry of this creek on this land—only a flat expanse of featureless, dull water, if I ever brought them back to show them where the land had been.
Grandaddy crushed the loam against his face; his shoulders sagged and he did not straighten them, almost as if he were an old fallen log with a permanent depression from some boot crushing into its rotten trunk.
Alabama Power wanted him out by autumn, so they could begin clearing the vegetation from the land in preparation for the coming of the water, even though the water would not be up that far for another year after the dam was built. He had two hundred acres, and the power company was paying him two thousand each, plus the price of the cabin. It was not a bad deal.
He signed the contract in August, while flies buzzed about the heads of Mr. Funderburg, Mr. Dowell and himself. They sat on the front porch of the cabin; Grandaddy had not asked them in.
“There, it’s done,” was all he said, then walked back into the cabin, leaving the two men to depart with no farewell. But after that, Grandaddy was seldom in the cabin.
During the days, I saw him walking through the corn, or petting the cows—they never ran from him. Then one day a big truck came and took all the cows away. Sometimes I would see him in the woods, heading upcreek in the direction of where he and his Betty met, carrying a shotgun. He had not killed a squirrel in forty years.
I spent my time keeping things up, keeping the cows fed while they were still in the pasture. The garden was going to rot; I just didn’t have the time to pull all the cucumbers, the beans, the squash. Anything I did was futile, I knew even then, but there was nothing better to do.
Grandaddy was gone nights, too.
Now, you might be thinking, this will become a ghost story. About how, say, my grandmother came to speak from the waterwheel, to cry for vengeance, or, say, how, magically, my grandfather kept water from coming up his valley, into his land, by a hard dam of a wish that it not do so. Or it will be more mundane, realistic, the story of how grief weighed down a man like a heavy snow in pines, and how he either did or did not spring back up after the thaw came and the land was covered with running water.
Instead, I’m going to tell you the truth.
Because for all the structure I can find in this old universe, the symmetries and happy coincidences, I have not found an ordering, a pattern, into which that summer, the farm, my grandfather, will fit. Oh yes, I am an ordered man, an ordering man now, drawing bridges, highways—yes, even dams—watching the slow, steady gathering of equipment, material, the precise application of force, the hammering of pattern and form, strong and firm as wrought iron, into this flux, this flow, of a world.
We have kaleidoscopes for brains, you and I. Colors spin, bits of glass and paper shuffle, spin on their axes—and the whole thing is done with mirrors. All for the sake of recognition, reacting to the known, getting by. But what happens when survival is not what it’s all about? When, like a ripple, a quake, realization comes over the mind, not that it will die—for we all sort of suspect this, as time comes on, and the evidence mounts— but that life, living, is running out, that this paper bag life is full of water and the bottom is soggy and about to burst? Will the mind bend in unaccustomed ways? And that summer, did my grandfather and, just for an instant, myself, look around the corner of things, catch a glimpse around the edges of the given like a dentist looking at the backside of your gums with his funny curved mirror? Did my grandfather slip around those edges, as a squirrel will skate around behind a tree, and be wholly gone, yet wholly there? I have no idea. All I can do is tell you what I saw.
Yes, Grandaddy was gone nights, too.
He carried no light with him, but knew the lay of the land so well, every rock, every stump, that he
really didn’t need one. I tried to follow a eouple of times, but it was very dark—dark like it only gets deep in the country—and I was too scared and too tired. I suspect he visited my grandmother’s grave. I went back to the cabin, tried to sleep. Each night he would finally come in, quietly go to bed. But just before dawn, he’d wake up moaning, and sometimes I’d hear my grandmother’s name. Once he said softly, only to the still air in the cabin, “They’re taking her, Betty. They’re taking her.”
Her. The land was a she to Grandaddy. Always had been. But lately, I came to believe, he was having trouble distinguishing the land from my grandmother. Not that he was going senile, becoming confused and dangerous to himself. It was just that the farm was full of her presence. Betty walked here; she painted here. Betty and my grandfather loved here—and here. Maybe he’d always felt this way, thought this way about the land, but kept it from me, my family—not wanted to show what we’d take to be false sentiment and the longings of a sad old man.
But Grandaddy just didn’t care anymore. I remember one day, when I met him coming in from the fields, his boots red as old blood from the Randolf County clay soil.
“Reed,” he said, “she’s done with painting the corn today. Fall’s coming and she’s made all the stalks dry and brown. But she’ll be sad about it. She always loved green, new things.”
This was not the “she” of “think she’ll need a cover crop of alfalfa this winter,” or “we’ll put five more cows on her and see how she takes it.” Not the general “she” of the land, the farm. This time it was personal, closer to my grandfather’s heart.
So on the day of the storm, the first week in September, I was not surprised when Grandaddy said “She’s raising a ruckus tonight, mad over something,” as if he were commenting on some unfathomable woman thing affecting my grandmother. “We just have to sit tight and let her get over it.”
The sky got heavy and dark, like the bottom of a paper bag getting soaked with water. Then, like a soggy paper bag, it all came apart, burst open, and the water fell. It rained all day, and Grandaddy stayed in. He was not crazy, you see, not a madman running raving through storms. Lightning crashed, thunder howling after. It rained creeks, rivers. Outside, the waterwheel was spinning and creaking and throwing off water like a dog shaking himself off after a bath.
Grandaddy sat by the empty fireplace all day long, reading a Zane Grey novel, rocking in my grandmother’s old rocker. He was facing the big old tapestry his Betty wove so long ago. I was sitting at the table, drawing up designs for a treehouse I planned to build when I got back home. School would be starting soon, and my parents would be down to get me the next week.
We stayed there, inside the cabin, all day, not talking much. Grandaddy read, mouthing the words silently, and I scratched away at my plans. You could hardly tell when night fell—the sky outside just grew a little darker.
As night came on, the wind really picked up and lashed rain against the cabin’s window. It was raining less than it had before, but the wind delivered the water with more fury.
I’d grown accustomed to the waterwheel through the day, but suddenly I heard it distinctly, as if there had been a change in pitch to the squeak of it. Lightning strobed, as if God were taking a Polaroid of the land, like in those snapshot booths at the Woolworth’s. Grandaddy stopped his rocking, lowered his book.
Was there something in that wind, some ordered sound? Or was it everything, the wind, the waterwheel, the space of silence that followed the roll of thunder? A sifting of the trees through the air that said something, whispered a human word? That called my grandfather’s name? I can’t say. Or, if I’m forced to decide, I will say there was nothing there— only the swish of leaves and the rushing of wind.
“Well, damn it, Betty,” said Grandaddy, “I’ll come, then, if you want me to.”
I sat up in my chair, pushed away my drawings. This was what I’d feared: Grandaddy gone insane, chasing a ghost through the night and me having to look after him.
“There’s nobody there, Grandaddy,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm like you were supposed to do with crazies.
Grandaddy looked at me with a wry smile. What I’d now recognize as a patronizing look. And—I now believe—he had a perfect right to do so. After all, he was the oldest living male in the family, the Patriarch himself.
“I have decided something, Reed,” he said.
“What?”
“Something I have to do.”
I was silent for a long time, trying to think what to say. Finally I decided just to ask.
“What?”
The wind picked up.
“Listen; she’s mourning.”
“Grandaddy, what are you going to do?”
He got up and went to get his raincoat. I moved to stop him.
“Grandaddy, no.”
He brushed me aside not ungently, but with a firmness. His muscles were thin and strong as wire thread, muscles like the long splintering sinews of oak when you split it.
“I’m going outside, Reed,” he said to me, “and I may be quite a while.”
Then he was gone, out the door. I was scared, confused. What should I do? Call someone, my dad maybe? And tell him what? To get there right away? How could he? He was a hundred miles away, in Birmingham. I put on my raincoat and boots, then went out into the storm myself. I figured I knew where Grandaddy was headed.
About halfway up the little hill that the grave was on top of, I saw him. He was moving through the woods without hurry, but steadily, as a deer will do when it is on the move, seeking its bed for the night. The clay sides of hill were slick with running water mingled with the first of the autumn leaves. I began to climb, quickly. A bolt of lightning struck nearby, and I started; I fell, half sliding, a good ways back down the hill. I remembered the big oak on top of the hill, the one from the tapestry, the helical scar it bore of lightning from past storms. I whimpered, shook my head hard to clear the fear of dying like a moth in a bug-zapper (but this was different, because out here, the bug-zapper was coming after me), then started back up the hill again.
In another flash, I saw my grandfather. He was almost at the top.
“Grandaddy, stop,” I said, but the thunder rolled over my voice.
Finally I reached the hilltop, pulled myself into the little clearing where the grave was. There was the dark shape of my grandfather against the darker sky, like oil floating on black water.
Lightning crackled across the sky, and my grandfather flashed iridescent, his shape defined by a faint rainbow, just as oil will shine on water.
I stopped short, rubbed my eyes. But my grandfather was still glowing slightly, even with no lightning. He was a prism, split into his primary colors, only his shape remaining.
More lightning. And he was a kaleidoscope, forming and reforming in darkly shining patterns.
“Grandaddy.”
I heard a voice in my ears. Or was it the night, the rush of the creek below, the wind? More importantly, was the voice of the night, this night, a woman’s? “Let him be, boy, Reed. Let him weave himself a place.”
Then the shifting of colors spread from my grandfather into the land about him. There was a stroke of lightning, and the process accelerated. The land was unwinding on itself, unbraiding as an old rope will twist apart. Was this something my grandfather was doing, or did the land separate, pull apart on its own? I will never know, though I suspect it was a little of both, a working together so closely that neither could tell you where one stopped and the other began. A kind of marriage.
The ground, the trees, the sky, separated, shifted into points and lines of color, like a 3-D drawing when you don’t have those special kind of glasses. Then, near where my grandfather was standing, the very shape of the land undulated, shifted form beneath him. And he was shimmering, changing, too.
My grandfather wove himself into the pattern of the land. Or maybe I should say he planted himself, as a fanner will plant a seed. Just as he’d planted his Betty, thos
e years ago. Like planting, but more like mixing. How can I say this thing? How can I?
And I sat at the edge of the clearing, under the old oak, until the storm abated and the stars came out. Then I went back to the cabin, coming down the gentler side of the hill, crashing through the drying corn, walking up the driveway. The waterwheel was a blur, spinning out electricity like the miller’s daughter spins gold in “Rumpelstiltskin.” I took a breath of the rain-cleaned air and went inside.
I flicked on the switch, and the cabin’s room filled with homespun light. There was the tapestry, directly across from me, the Prism Tree my grandmother had made. I sat down in her old rocker, turned around to face the wall rug. Was there a new strand in there somewhere to reflect, to resonate with, the new strand running through the land? What would my grandfather’s color be? A steady, strong brown? The blue of loss and remembrance? The new green of spring?
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