He smelled like low creek water and sycamore leaves. Musky and sweet. He smelled like a box of Nilla Wafers hidden away from the other grandkids but shared with me.
He smelled like Old Spice.
His voice was rasped by seven decades before I came along. It told of blue catfish and brown rivers, where to find blue-tailed lizards and mossy bullfrogs. It spoke to me even as he slumbered.
It always called me “Boy.”
I remember the hitch in his gait was because of the tractor. How his wire frame survived the heavy tires rolling over it is still a mystery to all. But it was probably the stone-set of his will.
Probably the chert in his Missouri bones.
A walking stick gripped in knotted, veined hands. Hickory and hooked, parting briers in the pasture, checking brush piles for water moccasins, keeping the banty rooster at bay.
His hands and his staff comforted me.
Fingers thick and soft like leather, hard and strong like pliers. Big for a man so small. A life of manual labor and catching fish. A pinky forever crooked by the .22 bullet that shattered its middle knuckle.
This is how I found him in the old black and whites.
Blue eyes, attentive and firm, white-hot with anger when drama flared in our sometimes volatile family. Blazes bright but short and, I’m told, cooled by the years. I was never burned.
He passed this torch to me.
He left so long ago. I can barely remember him as a man, but he was more than that anyway. Father of my mother, but somehow grandfather is not enough. Kin doesn’t cover it.
I hope he would like me now.
I think he brought me here some early autumn day more than 50 years ago, watched my toddler legs stumble over wet black shale. I wonder if he sat with me in silence as breezes stirred the hackberries.
I wonder if the sunfish watched us.
So I come here looking for pieces of him, wondering if I follow his pigeon-toed steps in the tall pasture grass, if the silt-buried bottle of Old Crow was his. I’d like to have shared it with him.
A bittersweet family tradition
Everything different. Everything the same. Water shaving stone sings an old coarse song of eternity and change, unyielding and resigned. This is where grit comes from.
This is where I come from.
I step into slow currents like crawling onto a warm lap, whiskers of water willow on my skin like the scratch of chin scruff on my baby-fat cheeks. I know his voice is part of the creek now
because in its September slumber,
it calls me Boy.
This is beautiful. I can see him walking the creek bank in the picture you paint with words. I can see his hands holding you on his lap while you held your first fishing pole. He loved you so. And, would like you now.
Wonderful.