Gramp

He died, finally. Gramp was old, the oldest person I have ever known. I loved him but he was almost ninety years old and could hardly see. Everyone in the family said that it was time. I came home early for Christmas break but not for the funeral. No-one seemed to care whether I was there or not. It was more important to Dad that I help him clean out Gramp’s house. Dad grew up in that house and there was an outhouse in the backyard painted the same mint green color as the house. Dad said that they were still using the outhouse in the fifties.

Mom made potato pizza bake the night I came home. I grew up hating it but it tasted kind of good to me. I wasn’t good at college eating yet. My first semester was filled with cereal, bread and more bread. Once in a while, the dining hall made fried chicken and we’d eat it and pretend it was better than it was. That night at dinner, Mom explained that the reason she didn’t make chicken much was that Dad didn’t like it. He had eaten too much of it growing up. She said Gramp had killed a chicken every Sunday night and they ate chicken all week. He would kill the bird right in their yard. That seemed crazy to me. It wasn’t like they lived on a farm. I couldn’t believe I had not heard this story before but there was always more left to know about people. Dad was sweating a little and he didn’t say much, just kept eating. It was hot in the kitchen as the pellet stove was on high.

Gramp wasn’t exactly a hoarder but he had a lot of things and his house was very dark. All the light coming in was blocked by thick curtains that he never opened. You could visit him on the sunniest day and you had no idea whether it was the middle of the day or the dead of night. Gramp would serve me water and very soft cookies and we’d watch game shows after school sometimes. I remember sitting next to him watching TV and my legs didn’t reach the floor, they stuck straight out in front of me.

The TV was at the end of a very long room which felt like a hallway and it was stacked on top of another old, broken TV. My favorite part of this room was the photo table. It ran along the side of the room. I never counted but I think there were at least fifty framed photos lined up on it. Some sat in front of others blocking them so to really see everything, you had to pick them up and hold them.

Gramp framed everything from school photos to diplomas and cards that were special to him. I could never figure out why he choose to frame some of the things he did. He even had a flyer for a chicken BBQ from 1972 in a frame. When I asked him, he said it was the best chicken he had ever eaten and he wanted to remember it. Sometimes he had no answer as to why certain things had been framed. He also had a strange habit of not taking the price tags or stickers off any of the frames. Sometimes they even covered part of the image. Still, I loved standing there and looking at them.

He’d yell to me to come out to the kitchen or settle down on the couch with him. It was a special thing to go over and see him because he usually came to us. My sister was three years older than me and she never liked spending time with him. In fact, she was even nasty about his visits. He always drove over to our place even though it was only a five minute walk. I’d watch out the window as he backed his square, brown car into our dirt driveway. He moved slowly and before he even got in the door, Tessa was ready for him to leave. The older she got, the more annoyed she would get with him and finally, she would just stay in our room when he came. Sometimes yelling to him to say hello and sometimes pretending she wasn’t even there.

He came every day during the week at 3:30 pm. He always had two bread bags; one with yesterday’s paper for my parents and one with cookies for us. The cookies were always very soft. He kept a crust of bread on them in his old, brown cookie jar. He said it kept them fresh and even made them taste better. I thought they were too soft but I always ate at least one. If we had milk, I’d pour a glass and just listen to him talk. He told me everything. Everything about his neighbors and everything about his body, what kind of poop he had done that day and what the snot he blew out of his nose that morning looked like. Grandma Mary had died over twenty years earlier and Gramp came to see us and he went to church every week, he shopped for food and came to our house for Holidays but that was it.

When he died, I felt it hard. I just didn’t tell anybody. My sister lived five hours away and she didn’t come down to help with the house. Mom had recently started working again and couldn’t help. Dad didn’t care.

We got there early filled with garbage bags and wearing old clothes. The first thing Dad did was pull back all the downstairs curtains. We both coughed from the dust and my eyes itched. There was a small chair set up by a curtain in the front window where he had sat and watched the neighbors. I could hear his voice telling stories about them just from looking at that chair. After reporting on his bathroom habits, he’d tell us about Gary across the street who always came home late to a dark house. No porch light and no lights coming from the inside. Sometimes Gary would even pull in the driveway with his headlights off. Gramp watched as he opened his front door and the lights would come on inside the house. Cheryl, Gary’s wife would run at him and start slapping at him hard with both her hands. Gramp said it didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear them, he could see exactly what was being said. Gary was sleeping with the lady who ran the sub shop and had been for years. Everyone in town knew it.

Dad wanted to start in the room with the photos and he asked me to get us some water and to open the back door to let some air in the place. The front door was blocked with an old dresser. It had been for years. Gramp said he had no use for that door and didn’t need anybody watching his every move when he came in and went out of the house. Dad just let it be.

Gramp’s big, green refrigerator was the most colorful thing in the whole kitchen and when he got it, he invited us all over to take a look. It had a huge sticker on it that said Green Dot so that’s what he called it. It drove Mom crazy that he wouldn’t take the sticker off. I realized as I entered the kitchen that I had never even opened a cupboard in that room. The first one I opened was filled with SPAM. There were maybe thirty cans of it neatly stacked and the next one had cans of baked beans, saltines and boxes of cookies. I found two jelly jars and filled them with water from the sink. I opened the back door even though it was very cold out. Dad was right, the air felt good.

I handed Dad his water and he drank the whole thing down and then he opened a drawer under the photos. Inside were cancelled checks, junk mail and more photos. The drawer was long and there was dust inside. Dad opened up a box of garbage bags and started throwing the old checks and mail into them. Mom would have shred the checks but she wasn’t here. I was following his lead and opened the other drawer and there was only one thing in it. It was a little black notebook. I picked it up and opened it. The first page was blank but when I looked at the last page, I saw these words in Gramp’s handwriting: Just look under my bed.

I held the book up to Dad and read the words at the same time. He took it from me and looked at it for a long time. Then he told me to follow him. The three bedrooms in the small house were all on the second floor. Once when Gramp was sick, I went up to his room to see him but that was years ago.

Dad stood outside the door of the room. It was very neat with a dark wooden dresser and a beautiful matching bed frame. There was a large portrait of Jesus with a red heart that almost seemed to glow above the bed. The closet door was closed tightly but the window was raised enough that the room was cold. Dad walked over and shut it and it made a loud sound. He pulled the bed away from the wall, not asking me to help. Underneath it, the wide floor boards looked like they were loose. He bent down and pulled at them. They lifted easily and I could see two garbage bags flattened out. There was another little black notebook on top of one of them. I bent down and opened it and on the first page, it said: Here. Here it is.

Our dog sat looking out the front window and barking every time a car flew by. I stood in the hallway outside our bathroom door and watched Mom and Dad carefully counting the bills that covered the kitchen table. There were two hundred one hundred dollar bills, some were crisp and some were crumpled. Gramp had been sleeping on top of twenty-thousand dollars. Mom and Dad drank beer and laughed a lot that night.