“I don’t know the truth about anything,” I said. “You and I were spared at the Ardennes. Maybe it was for a reason. Maybe we’ll see the reason down the track. That’s the way I look at it.”
Before he could speak again, I went outside and helped Rosita unload the automobile.
Later that night I got my notebook out of my suitcase and wrote down a line I remembered from the Book of Psalms: For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart.
Then I added my own words: Lord, deliver up poor Hershel, because some very bad people are fixing to eat him alive.
GRANDFATHER WAS AILING, and Rosita and I flew back home to see him. He had reached a stage that elderly men enter when they see specters, sometimes those of old friends, beckoning to them from a shady copse or a roadside cemetery overgrown with mesquite and blown with dust and tumbleweed. His pale eyes seemed distracted, his attention drawn by voices or the sounds of cattle moving in large numbers across a river that had turned bloodred in the sunset, sounds that no one else heard. He slept with his Colt 1860 Army revolver, five chambers loaded, the hammer resting on the sixth chamber, which was empty.
My mother asked him why he needed his revolver.
“So I’ll be ready for him when he comes,” he replied.
“Ready for whom?” she said.
“Death.”
His ankles and feet were so swollen that he had to wear extralarge rubber boots resembling the ones Frankenstein’s monster wore in the movies. Our family doctor forbade him to get on a horse, or to drink whiskey or smoke a cigar or pipe, or to ingest sugar in any form.
For Grandfather, that meant he should fire up his pipe right after breakfast, have a bowl of homemade ice cream incised with a half dozen Oreo cookies for lunch, drink a glass of straight whiskey by three P.M., and saddle and get on his horse.
“You have to stay off him, Big Bud,” my mother said. My mother called him by his nickname, I think, because she could not bring herself to accept him as her father. But how could I judge her and her siblings when I could not forgive my own father for abandoning his family? I felt sorry for Grandfather. I believed he was truly contrite. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in his contrition.
“You don’t need your horse. I drive an automobile and can take you wherever you want,” my mother said.
“Emma Jean, go fix yourself a pork chop sandwich or a bowl of grits with a big piece of ham hock,” he replied. “Pour some redeye gravy on top. Try to gain some weight, or tie a rock to your ankle. You’re skin and bones. A puff of wind would blow you off the planet.”
“I have the fragility of a dandelion?”
“That cuts to it.”
“You’re not going to talk to me like that, Big Bud.”
“You’re absolutely right. I’m going out the door and ride my horse,” he said.
Some might say Grandfather’s stubbornness about his horse was motivated by denial of his physical infirmities. They saw only the outside of Grandfather. When he rode into the woods, his rubber-booted feet wedged so tightly in the stirrups that sometimes he had to pull his right foot out of the boot to dismount, he was not simply resisting the earth’s gravitational pull. He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes and motorized vehicles and telephone wires and radios that surrounded him now. In his way, I think he had already taken leave of us.
The woods in late autumn had become his private sun-dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church. In the columns of light filtering through the canopy, he may have seen the ghosts of John Wesley Hardin and Bill Dalton and Quanah Parker. The saloon girls might have been there, too, most of them as small as Orientals, wearing dresses as tight as sealskin. There was a free lunch on a bar, a faro table, a rotating wheel with numbers on it, men who wore bowler hats and carried derringers under their sleeves, vaqueros and cowboys with coiled lariats hanging from the shoulder, bowie knives on the belt, some wearing wide-brim tall-crown hats that cost a week’s wage.
They didn’t care if he wore a badge or not. They were all cut out of the same fabric, or they wouldn’t have chosen to live and die and be buried in a godforsaken landscape where their grave markers would soon be gone. Susanna Dickinson, the only white adult survivor of the Alamo, was in the cathedral, too. Grandfather knew her when she lived in Austin; she had told him what really happened inside the walls on the last day of the siege: the Mexican soldiers who were so numerous coming over the walls they fired into one another; the drunk Texas soldier who hid in the rubble and begged and was executed; the stench of the bodies piled like cordwood and burned.
Grandfather’s stor
ies were wonderful. He said the horns of the cattle glowed with electricity when a storm was in the offing. With the first pop of lightning, the herd would stampede and flow like a brown river through the ravines and dry washes of the Arbuckle Mountains, trampling wagons and tents into splintered wood and strips of canvas.
I don’t think he rode into the woods in anticipation of his death. I think he went there in preparation for his return to an era that, for him, had always existed just the other side of the horizon. Others watching him ride along the river’s edge saw an old man who was not willing to let winter have its way. I think Grandfather did not see the woods or the river but had already begun his journey on an infinite plain, one unmarked by fences or human structures, one whose mesas and buttes and dead volcanoes and ancient riverbeds antedated the arrival of man and even the dinosaurs. For the first time in his life, he no longer carried the thick gold pocket watch he had bought in Mexico City in 1910.
The snake was a diamondback, the kind of rattler that usually hid in rocks and sunned itself on hillsides and wasn’t drawn to dank woods piled with autumn leaves. Just as Grandfather’s horse stepped across a log, the diamondback made a sound like seeds rattling inside a dried poppy husk, then popped Grandfather’s horse on the fetlock. The horse crashed through the trees and brush and raked Grandfather out of the saddle on an oak limb.
We found him by flashlight two hours later. He had been stirrup-drug twenty yards across hard ground. His eyes were closed, his face spotted with drops of mud that looked like insects. I could not feel a pulse in his throat; I placed my ear against his chest. His skin was as cold as marble. Then he moved. “Is that you, Weldon?” he whispered.
“Yes, sir.”
“You were always my son rather than my grandson. You know that, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Is that your mother behind you?”