I never really knew my grandfather. We lived in the same house for four and a half years, but in his old age he didn't know how to react to a child, and I was always too afraid. He smelled, shouted, smoked, and sneered. Lost his hearing, and his wits, and his mobility, and grew bitter because of it. His laugh was a cackle, and his features sharp, though they had dulled to my mother, and then even more as I came along. We never talked, I used to think he might have his own language and English was his way of communication back. Such, I had yet to discover, was not the case. He crafted words like a blacksmith does metal, and a shipwright wood for crafts meant to work. Though neither beauty, nor delicate, they still captured, and survived, as they were rough to serve a purpose.
A little while after that night in Paxton, I stood in our kitchen gazing at a photograph. He was gone and I was here. I never thought I loved him, but then why was I about to cry? I stared at his picture. I refused to end my stare, thinking that if I did, I would forget his face. How will I remember him? I can't think of how he looks, in a few years what if I forget all of him? I asked my mother. She was sure I would remember she told me. I stared up at her from the linoleum floor of the kitchen she had cooked him hash and eggs in. I stood wondering in that kitchen, the one he'd sit at and mumble to himself. I looked again at the photograph, and a grey moth stretched its wings sideways on the painted wooden door.
After we had sold his truck, after we had cleared his old bedroom, still after we had torn up the tile floors, carpets, and painted the walls, we would smell his pipe smoke. In our car when we'd carry the groceries, in the hall on the way to the bathroom, in the cellar, outside on the lawn. It would waft by as if he had just yawned out a billow of smoky breath. We'd look at one another, smile, and say did you? We both knew. Most of all, most frequently of all, we would smell it at the door. The front door of our dull grey-green house where cobwebs connected and in the summer, on the screen, moths would rest tired wings.
In this new looking house, I would sit in the living room and watch the grass blow and the trees sway on these cool summer nights. Never uncommon was it to see them fluttering in the air, whirling around, attracted to the gentle glow of a lamp. I would shoo them away with the back of my hand or yell at them for interfering with my TV program as they bounced back and back again to the screen. Moths were so disgusting, I determined. Creatures of the night, I thought of them, with no other use than to scare me away with their ugliness.
When he died not much inside me changed. It was quieter, but I remained the same, or so I thought until one night years later. Studying on the dark couch we had in the living room I felt a shadow fly across my face. Looking up, I saw a small, grey moth. It looped and spasmed crazily towards me. In an instant I thought of my usual routine: a swat and a glare for good measure. Yet, this time I lay down my hand and simply stated please go. As soon as it had come, the creature left. My eyes paused a moment on the photograph of my grandfather that sat on the bookcase along with his various published works. I remembered that day.
The years went on, and on. We slowly smelled less and less his wafts of vanilla pipe smoke. His presence was slowly leaving us, and the house we lived in. The house itself began to look more and more unlike the one he had left, and all his things were stuffed into the cellar office he'd used all those years. The computer we had bought him, which he had never accepted as an improvement upon his typewriter, was used and then traded for a more updated version. I never hurt another moth.
Today I was driving home and, as it was stuffy in the car, cracked open the old hand operated moon roof. A white moth fell to the floor in front of the passenger seat. I must have killed it with my hand, I thought. It is spring, and I hadn't seen a moth in quite a while. I felt for it, and continued down the road.
On my way, a thought took hold of me and I decided to take a more scenic route home. I turned into- the back entrance to the great white building and drove past, through a stone gate and under two large oaks. I crawled through on the one car paved road. I could hear the tires one the wet asphalt through the half opened window at my left. I pulled over to the side near the grass and got out. I didn't bother to lock the car, or even roll up the window I knew I was safe.
I felt the wet grass soak into my sandals as I walked solemnly through the cemetery. The sky was masked by a canopy of maple, oak, and other leaves, thought the sun was bright and made everything a bright light green. Walking over to a modest plot, I craned my head to read the marble stone that was not quite flush against the earth as the others were.
SGT US ARMY
OCTOBER 8 1916-AUGUST 11 1994
I stood and remembered his face. The wrinkles, the eyes, the sharp nose and wild hair all came back. I believed in enough to know that staring at the stone marker would do me no good. I closed my eyes and tried to feel his presence in the air around me, had he been anywhere it was with me; not in a picture in the kitchen, or on a bookcase, or off Race Point, where we had scattered his ashes, or here, at my feet.
I turned the plastic World War II marker, which this stone shared with his brothers, so that it was facing out. I took the sticker off a flag that ran up and through the marker, and turned the flag out from its folded state. Saying a final silent goodbye, something I had never before been able to give to him in life, I walked back to the car.
When I pulled into my driveway I noticed the moth body still lying on the floor mat next to me. I shut off the car, and thought, I can't just leave it. I should place it in the grass outside where it belongs, not here. I reached down to lightly touch its wings and up it jumped and fluttered into the air, full of life!
I smiled, opened the window for it, and watched as it flew out and away.
