On cold Saturdays when the air was brittle, I would head out to the junior high field with Drew Griffin and Wallace Harper to practice football. One Saturday, my grandfather came out to the field. I saw him walking over the top of the hill, his right leg as stiff as a cane.
“What's your grandfather coming out here for?” Wallace asked.
“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe I forgot to do something.”
He hobbled up to us, out of breath, his face white as ice. The three of us stared at him. He drew a deep breath and spoke.
“The Lord in all His infinite wisdom has provided us with various forms of work and disport that we might strengthen our bodies to His great glory.”
I looked at the stunned faces of Drew and Wallace. They weren't used to hearing anyone speak that way except in church. My grandfather looked down and spoke quietly to Wallace.
“Son, hand me the ball and go long.”
Wallace pitched him the football and took off toward the goal posts while Drew looked on as though he were watching the end of the world. I admit I was just as surprised. Although I knew my grandfather to be able and strong, it was rare that I'd seen him have any fun, take any enjoyment from things. It was as if it weren't fitting for the former pastor of the Yanceyville Wesleyan Assembly to seem frivolous. The narrow path was also austere.
My grandfather cocked his arm and leaned on his back foot as if he had played all his life. He motioned with his hand, pushing Wallace further down the field, and Wallace shouted “I'm open!” as my grandfather stepped and flung the ball. It wobbled in the air like a goose with a shotgun wound and dropped, twenty yards short. The look of disappointment on Drew's face was profound. I felt my own face burn.
My grandfather clicked his tongue.
“Well now,” he said. “Let's infer that throwing just isn't my game. The Lord gives us talents in some areas and denies us in others.”
“That's okay, Mr. Jackson,” Drew said, speaking too loud. “It started out like a good throw.”
My grandfather held up his hand. “What I mean is I have faith that providence has supplied me the means for kicking the ball. I think I'd like to have a go at that.”
“I don't think you should, Granddad,” I said. “I mean what with your bad foot and all.”
“I'll be fine,” he said, and nodded. “You'll hold the ball for me.”
We were a good forty yards from the goalposts. Wallace carried the ball up and bent to snap it to me. I got down on one knee while my grandfather backed away. I yelled “Hike!” and the ball popped into my hands. I put it point down on the ground and spun the laces toward the goal, the way the pros did it, pressing the tip with my finger. My grandfather trotted up limping and swinging his arms, the coins in his pants pocket jingling. Then he planted his left foot and swung hard with his right. I watched it close and saw the flattened metal tip of his shoe meet the brown leather as square and solid as a hammer hitting a nail. A shock, like electricity, passed through my finger as the ball hissed away from me. I turned to watch it tumble, perfectly, end over end, and split the goalposts like a missile, still climbing. He clapped his hands together and laughed a ringing, wheezing laugh. Wallace took off to look for his ball and Drew stood shaking his head. I laughed too, and at that moment I would have happily sacrificed half my foot to be able to kick a ball beyond seeing.
Every year, on the first Sunday in March, the three of us, my mother, my aunt, and I, piled into the Dodge to visit the graves of my father and grandmother. It was always the first Sunday in March because my parents had been married then. My mother would slip quietly into the cold light of my room and shake my foot to wake me. We had to leave before dawn to be back in time for church. I would rise, thick with sleep, to the edge of my bed, and pull on my pants and shirt and boots. My mother took with us the thermos of coffee and a brown bag filled with sausage biscuits wrapped in wax paper. My grandfather never went, though we would find him sitting stiffly on the edge of the couch, dressed for church, when we got home. It always seemed strange to me that he would not visit the grave of his own wife, but the weight to the silence of those gray mornings prevented me from asking why.
The cemetery lay bare in winter, minus the gaudy field of pastel plastic flowers we would find there at Easter. As always, my mother brought a potted azalea for her mother's grave, and I staked it to the frozen earth with bent pieces of coat hanger. My aunt brought Windex and a sponge to clean the headstone. The two of them stood, holding hands, and I heard their breathing and the sound of tee shots from golfers at the driving range next door.
“I just realized, I was your age when she died,” my mother said. “Your grandfather never got over it.”
I looked up at her, but she had moved off toward my father's grave. Aunt Cleo laid a firm hand on my shoulder.
“Let her be,” she said. “She needs to be alone with him.” Then my mother stepped up to my father's grave and spent a long time reading the few words written on the black marble. She never brought flowers, but instead would suddenly and quietly drop her scarf or her hair ribbon or even a button torn from her blouse. She always seemed embarrassed by these gestures, as if we'd witnessed some kind of intimacy, which, I suppose, we had. Only once, several years later, did I see her cry, on what would have been their twentieth anniversary. Her bright tears fell, silent as snow. I could nearly taste her tears on my tongue. I was home from college then, and had missed this ritual for the past two years, nearly forgetting it. I went to her and put my arm around her waist and held tight. She lifted her arms to me. I gave her my handkerchief and she smiled and wiped her eyes. Then she left it sitting there, a small, white square atop the slab of black marble.
After the accident, all the wood-chopping chores fell to me. This was during the oil crisis of the early seventies, and we had shut off the furnace and tried for that winter to stay warm using only the woodstove. There was much work in it. My grandfather avoided the woodpile as if it were ground cursed by the devil. So, I was surprised the Saturday morning he followed me out to the woodpile and sat on the rotting picnic bench to watch me. Between his feet was his red, white, and blue basketball, and he was still winded from that morning's foul shooting. He watched me haul unsplit logs from the back of the lot, rubbing the big rust-brown spots on the backs of his hands. He picked up a stick, drew out his knife, and whittled the stick to a point. He used it to tap out church songs on the metal tip of his shoe. I looked at him every few minutes and smiled, and he nodded at me, not speaking. I propped a log up on the other stump and brought the axe cleanly down through it. It gave a satisfying dry crack, exposing the white wood inside. I could smell the sweet oak. I brought the axe down again and again, stacking the logs behind me. Finally my grandfather spoke.
“Son, I followed you out today because you have come of a certain age and I believe it's important for you to understand some of the many uses that the Lord has found for fire.”
I buried my axe in the stump and wiped my face, wondering if he meant this as some old-time-religion version of sex education. He continued.
“Now, I know you possess in your mind a certain
a priori
knowledge about this most frightening of God's creations, leastwise you wouldn't have reason to be cutting up those logs for the woodstove. But there are ways in which the Lord employs fire that in your youth you may not see nor immediately understand. Like when God used a burning bush to call Moses. That bush burned with the fire of God and was not consumed.” He stopped and wiped his mouth with his finger.
“There is a different fire that burns in the soul of a man. It is a fire that leads many down the wide path of temptation and sin. It is a fire that is a source of longing and hardship. It is a dark fire, a blood fire, a burning, dangerous thing.”
His voice rose to pulpit level as he spoke, and his eyes focused over my head. It was hard to look at him.
“Son, this fire that I've been going on about is the fire of love. Now, I don't mean the redeeming love of our Lord, not
agape
love, but the earthly love between man and woman,
eros
. For a woman, love is necessary for the nurturing of children. But inside a man it's a place of danger, like standing at the edge of a cliff. I know because once I stood at that cliff and fell into that fire. The Lord in His mercy spared me that I might tell others, and I am here today to warn you.”
I could hear Wallace and Drew on the next block shouting to each other for the football. I wanted to be with them and not here, trying to figure out what he meant.
“Certain episodes come into play, by which the Lord sends us warnings,” he continued. “There was a man who lived over in Randleman when I was a boy. Odus Jamerson was his name, though I never met him. But he was famous in these parts after what happened to him. Now, Odus Jamerson was not one who was mindful of women, who burned with
eros
. He lived fifty-three years, gratified with nothing but forty acres of soybean, a chicken house, his Indian arrowhead collection, and three decent dogs. One Sunday, though, he went to a church picnic and met up with Sarah Reynolds, who was Jim Martin's cousin.”
He stopped his story long enough to brush away a wood beetle crawling along his pant leg.
“Not many days passed before Odus took to Sarah and before anyone knew what had happened, he'd thrown the dogs out and gotten himself married. They weren't together two weeks before this so-called accident happened. The way it was told is that one day Odus Jamerson sat in his easy chair loading up his shotgun for squirrel. Sarah was out in the kitchen making candles when she heard this awful whoosh and then a noise like all the thunder in creation. She rushed out and found a thick hanging of smoke and a two-foot hole in the wall. What happened was Odus Jamerson just went up in flame. The fire came from
inside
, within him, and burnt him right through to ash. It didn't singe so much as one thread of his clothes, they were laid out in the chair right where he'd been sitting. But there were ashes down his shirt sleeves and pant legs and inside his boots. The police doctor called it spontaneous combustion. A rare thing indeed. Nothing but ash. The heat from the burning set off those shotgun shells and blew the hole in the wall. Now, in the years since, I have come to know it as portent. A sign from the Lord about the destructiveness of fire, of love, about staying away from the edge of that cliff lest we fall.”
He stopped and lowered his head, his mouth still working with small movements. The sounds from the football game were gone, and there was only silence around us. My face burned, as though heated by the image of that burning body. And his face, when I looked up at him, was distorted, the way a tin roof buckles in the sun. There was spittle on his lips, and his eyes were small and shiny like hen's eyes. I thought to ask him then about my grandmotherâfelt my first anger that he avoided her memoryâbut wasn't able even to look at him. I looked instead at the brown handle of the axe, and down, at the sharp angle made where the axe had cleaved the tree stump. An amber drop of sap rose in the cut, and it reminded me of watching my grandfather cut off his foot and the swirl of blood beneath it, and I knew it would be hard for me to lift the axe again without feeling something like fear.
I wanted to say many things to him then. I wanted to tell him how nice it was at the graveyard on those March Sundays, not too cold or sad, how good it sounded when a club struck a golf ball. But as I thought of what to say, something like a well opened inside me and all my words fell into it. So I stood there and said nothing. Finally my grandfather raised himself, gathered his basketball, and limped back to the house.
That night I lay in bed, my muscles sore from splitting wood. As I slept, I dreamt of my grandfather. He was Odus Jamerson, sitting in an easy chair loading shells into a gun. Only the shells were footballs; big, full-sized footballs that somehow fit down the barrel of the gun. Then I looked into his face and heard a whoosh and he was clothed in flame, in a fire that left him not burnt but frozen. His body was frozen solid inside his clothes and the shotgun between his knees had formed tracings of frost on the barrel. There was frost in his hair and on his eyelashes. Then his fingers and ears and cheeks began to fall off him in chunks, like ice broken from tree branches. The police doctor came in and used an ice axe to break him apart, then lifted the pieces with tongs and dropped them into a bag. I woke up shouting and my mother came in to find me. Her soft, cool hand on my forehead brought me back to sleep, and I remembered that soothing touch in my dreams.
The next morning I awoke to a brightness that filled my room as if the walls had been painted with light. I knew right away there was new snow on the ground outside. I ran to the window, lifted the shade, and watched the big flakes toss in the wind like dandelion seeds. I walked out to the kitchen, where my grandfather sat propped in a chair before the woodstove. He faced the window, light shimmering on the nickel-white fringes of his hair. His shoes sat on the woodstove drying and hissing, and he had the army blanket pulled high around his neck. A fresh stack of logs leaned beside the stove, and snow from them had melted and puddled on the floor. I went to the stove and lifted his half-shoe. It was warm and wet and heavy.
“I'm cold,” my grandfather said. I noticed his bare feet against the linoleum floor.
“Granddad, it's your feet. You should wear these.”
“No, I don't believe so,” he said, and looked away. I set the shoe back on the stove and stepped over to him, then lifted a corner of the green blanket and carefully tucked it around and beneath his feet. He smiled, his lips thin and cracked.
“Better,” he said. “Thank you.”
There are times now on Sunday afternoons when I am dozing in the recliner and my wife rouses me from it and sends me to the yard for more firewood. When days are cold enough to be bitter and the gray sky smells heavy with wood smoke, I can close my eyes and imagine him there with me as I gather the logs. He is always the same in my daydreams, sitting on a rotted picnic bench, holding his basketball beneath his arm, rubbing the spots on his hands, tapping out hymns against the toe of his shoe. On those days I wish he were here again so I could tell him some things. I would like to tell him he kicked one hell of a football. Or I might remind him of how perfectly that ball flew, and the look on Drew's face, and maybe that would make him laugh again as he did then. I would like to see that. But above all I would tell him the most important thing I have learned in the eighteen years since he died. That it is not fire we should fear but rather the desolate coldness of being alone. For it is that which robs us of life.