Gasping for air

I watch as my grandfather adjusts his massive frame in the green armchair and realize I’m all alone with him in the dark front room of their Appalachian home. We’d driven twelve hours in our maroon Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser to see them, my mother’s travel games keeping us three kids somewhat occupied along with the rotation of who got to sit in the rear jump seat that faced backwards. In later years, we’d take I-64 through West Virginia, but on this trip, we traveled across our home state of Virginia on I-81 to the mountains of Kentucky. Our first stop was the Tastee-Freeze outside of Emporia for an ice cream.

Even before we arrive, I can smell the biscuits my grandmother will be baking in the kitchen, and begin to imagine the way they’ll slowly melt into a delicious buttery paste in my mouth. As we slowly drive up the hill to their small home, I catch my grandmother extinguishing her cigarette on the concrete stairs and throw it in the yard. She fixes her hair and waves us in. “Biscuits are almost ready- come get you something to eat,” she says. Along with the biscuits, she’s prepared sausage patties, homemade jam cake and fudge.

While the rest of the family gets started on the food, I find myself staring at my grandfather’s hands. He lost three fingers in a trucking accident, but I know his thick hands are still strong enough to knock me over. His feet are firmly planted in his black work boots.

He was puzzled, convinced that I would become nothing like the men he knew: strong, dominant brutes with calloused hands whose days were spent underground in the dark coal mines of Kentucky, where the beauty of my grandfather’s otherworldly ice blue eyes went mercifully unnoticed. They lived in perpetual darkness, entering the mines in the morning before dawn and exiting at dusk, the blackness seeping into their lungs, slowly robbing them of air. These men didn’t waste their breath on unnecessary words.

My mom has shared stories of the residue my grandfather carried home with him, soot covered clothes and a darkness that took over more than just his lungs. She’s told of how drinking seemed to make things better for him until it made things worse, something else to guide him away from the light while slowly, silently leaching oxygen from his blood. She’s spoken of her own asthma, and of how she knew not to ask about the black residue his hands would leave when he grabbed my grandmother’s arm or closed his hands around my grandmother’s neck as she, too, gasped for air. Everyone was suffocating in that house.

When it came to choosing my dad, my mother was careful to select a man who relishes the light. His sensitive hazel eyes are perpetually watery from being outside. His hands are soft, in spite of years of janitorial work before he joined the military, soft from working retail and the brief time he taught high school history. Violence for him is an intellectual exercise more than a hands-on activity, his military service spent on war games at sea or co-piloting an A-6 Intruder as the bombardier-navigator, miles away from the impact of his strikes. Like me, he’s dyslexic and emotional, and his words are often assembled in unconventional ways, too plentiful to be heavy or sharp. Unlike my grandfather, he does not pitch his words like a baseball. Instead, they spew like a steady barrage of unexpected ping pong balls that, while irritating if beamed in your direction, are never dense enough to leave a scar or sting when they hit you.

My grandfather stares at me from that dark corner, his green work pants barely distinguishable from the color of the fabric on the chair, his jowls steady and his thick hands clenched. I stare at him awkwardly, waiting for direction. Did my siblings leave me any biscuits? I wonder, and start to walk away.

He glares at me, angry, those blue eyes glowing in the dark corner of the room making it clear I’m not excused. He raises his strong, thick hand like he’s going to strike me. Watches me to see if I flinch. Waits for me to retreat. Waits for me to fall. He reaches out, squeezes my shoulder hard, and expels a deep disappointed sigh.