C
onway, South Carolina is kind of the opposite of a miracle. It’s where air is synonymous with insects and water. It’s a fifty-mile snake that starts at a place of prayer—a diner, a stoplight, a gas station bathroom, maybe even a church—and folds back and forth across cornfields and crows and burnt barns long abandoned. It’s a trailer park waiting to be bought up by suburban developers, as well as the sun-husked men who laugh as they shingle roofs, bright-toothed when it’s 110 degrees humid. It’s a lot of things, in truth. But what do I know? To me, Conway is only Grandfather—seventy-five and laying his deathbed.
As a rule, don’t write about a dying grandfather. As a rule, it’s a story that’s been told—if you absolutely must, the grandfather should only be a small piece of another story. As a rule, when you talk about Grandfather, you’re talking about something—someone—else; it’s slippery, and so much will go unsaid. As a rule, it’ll be out of love, but the kind of love where you make it about yourself—your resentment, your potential, your growth—and you’ll use the pronoun he to sidestep the questions. As a rule, this will serve as metaphor, bridge, and barrier between you and Grandfather—he will hate the you he doesn’t yet know. As rule, you will try your hardest despite this. And for what?
he said he would love a visit from you, my mother texts me. She follows her first text with a second: maybe he’ll let u shoot his guns 😍
At the door, Grandfather says, What’s up, man? and How’s it going, brotha?
Pride is: He kicks a valium under the counter, after he drops it. But not before muttering nigger to an empty room.
Straw men scare crows, that much I know, but as clichéd as it sounds, Grandfather is already dead. His once–barrel gut cut in half, his belt a tourniquet to wiry limbs, his veins all saline—all IVed and needled and full of petals. Even so, handshake, not hug. Palmful soft as wet clay.
As a child, I remember Grandfather driving me and my siblings around in one of his twenty trucks. A fire engine, perhaps. The red of it, as we revved around his backyard, glinting in the suburban New Jersey sun. My mother taking pictures, in most of which, he musters a smile. Now don’t get dirt on the paint, he’s saying, as he helped us onto the roof, letting us snap his suspenders along the way.
A door-to-door carpet cleaner interrupts, asks for that sample back, Neighbor.
Plain black tee and blue jeans and a two-dollar Walmart hat. I’ve dressed as heterosexual as I could, as if I were the grandson he imagines—or the grandson I imagine he imagines. I talk squats, Glocks, and Home Depot. I don’t talk of why we talk about these things, though, not because I feel hard, but because I fear the men who fear feeling soft. I brush my hair back beneath the cap for the fourth time this minute. Grandfather says, You don’t wear many hats, do you?
An ache at the back of my skull: memory of my last visit to this state. I was here for a rugby tournament because what else? A Residence Inn on Myrtle Beach. And a walk down the strip, looking for dinner. And my floral-ass shirt. And a man shouting faggot. And blood. And how an empty beer bottle flies from a moving vehicle. And how I learned the difference between sea salt and blood salt, how air carries them differently, as in how the one thins and the other saturates a space. And the question of stitches but thankfully, according to the team medic, not deep enough for stitches. And bystanders galore. And what to say when no one says anything. And a black truck hollering away into a black night.
Grandfather bought all new tools. He’s too weak to use them, so when he asks me to install an air-conditioner unit, I let him instruct me. I hand him a factory-packaged knife, and he says, You need a damn degree to open this thing, and I think, Or maybe a knife, and Next-door Neighbor, who has invited himself over, says, Excuse my language, but that’s a nigger knife, and neither of us respond until Grandfather says, Slit my fucking throat with it, and Neighbor says, Don’t say that—don’t you ever say something stupid like that.
I’m white, he’s white, the whole room is white, so white it uncomfortably hums, and we sit with the sound, unable to acknowledge it. Or maybe, we say, it’s the air-conditioning unit, now groaning with life. Yes, we agree, that’s what that noise was. Yes, we are all cowards, yes, that’s it.
I’d like to believe I’m doing something in recording (and yet censoring) nigger. I make excuses. I say nothing until now.
On Valium and Xanax. On Advair and ProAir and Spiriva and Breo. On Coreg, SoloStar, Lipitor, and aspirin. On Percocet, Vasotec, Ceftin, and Precision Xtra, on Ranexa and BD Pen Needles, on Silodosin and Metolazone and Pantoprazole and Alprazolam, and even something aptly named Warfarin.
Medical records say, after Neighbor found him unconscious on his doorstep, Grandfather’s heart functionality dropped to 25 percent. Data shows the normal heart pumps two to three times that. And the medical term for a broken heart, I learn, is not heartbreak but something so mathematical, it sounds dirty. Something called Low Ejection Fraction. I think of the nearest hospital—not a hell of a drive but an hour away—and Grandfather’s second stroke, fourth heart attack. Or how it took three nurses to restrain him and three needles to find a vein. Dying—it’s what grandfathers do. But this? Grandfather, put the knife down.
The fake grenade on his coffee table has a pin and a plaque that reads: complaint dept. take a number
That night, I sleep on a bed of guns. There’s no metaphor in that. The bed frame is propped up on boxes labeled ruger and boxes labeled glock and boxes crudely sharpied shotgun shells.
Sharon, Grandfather’s second wife who no longer lives with him, left all her sweaters, and they soften his closets. I decide to sleep in my favorite, all oversized and baby blue. Indulgence is lavender detergent and lace pillows and turning my back to an open room. In the moments before dinner, a few pushups remind me my heart’s not yet failing. (Twenty-four hours here, and I’ve gone all American Psycho.) The urge: Grandfather’s house both over- and under-lived in, his borrowed time, this non-talk of masculinity, this town and its hard-eyed boys measuring each other at gas stations and pawn shops, always the function of a hardware store between them.
Through the window, a pink spoonbill tiptoes over some hay-grass, and I think, You, too?
My mother texts me and asks how the house looks, and I say, cute, i guess, and my mother says, cute? that’s a new word for you 😀
The TV repeats a story of a Honduran boy, Oliver Funes Machada, or Oliver Funes Machado or suspect or whatever according to Grandfather (so long as the non-Slavic sound gets repeated), who if I remember (in)correctly, according to Fox & Friends, decapitated his mother and is coming for you. The report doesn’t say fear, but it says fear. I’m saying fear, but also, I mean something else. Grandfather gets the story he wants and nothing of the psychiatric drugs Oliver was on, nor the years of self-isolation he faced, nothing of Oliver’s blood, Oliver’s mother, her hopes and dreams for her boy, a man now, I guess. Nothing of the horrible ease with which these folks disappear. Not because they lack a story but because of the Who, who witnesses them. Layers inserted, layers forgotten. I can’t say there’s any deeper truth in reiterating this moment, but violence has no endings. Only beginnings.
You vote? Grandfather asks. I say, Yes, but not for who. Good, he says, Vote like you intend to kill.
As a sort of bonding exercise, I suppose, he shows me his favorite handgun. A blackened, metal thing. A commie killer, he calls it, words borrowed from his friends who fought in Vietnam. His hands shake, struggle, bumble—can’t rack the slide. Help me out here, he says. With a little pull, one that feels heavier than it should, the mechanism clicks, clean like a lock. He points to his chin and says, How about you put me down like a dog?
I don’t say anything real this whole trip, but I say to him, Don’t say something stupid like that.
Not to romanticize, to idealize, to condemn. Not to profit off of, at the expense of this slow death I witness. Not to carve myself free from a bloodline or the failure of others. Not because I think it’s a good story, but because I’m terrified. Of what may be and what already is.
A text from my mother: if he’s expressing that he wants you to stay, that’s pretty rare. plus, it could be the last time you see him. not to sound morbid, just stating the facts.
Here, Grandfather grumbles into the sky, and the sky rolls the sound around in its mouth all night. Here, young men become old men too soon, and he’s already an old man. Here, men drink down their livers and tongues and blame Black and Brown Americans for their erasure—these men, oh, the glass bottle of them—and yet a canvas flag, all star-spangled-bannered, blocks the window to Neighbor’s yard. Here, there—they’re. Some Gertrude Stein shit. I’m trying to find the good in Grandfather. The lesions blue and red and purple, plotted along his arm. The promise of him already unsteady in his New Balances.
He wakes up in the morning. It takes him until 11 a.m., but he wakes up in the morning.
Fry him a catfish. Get it to talk of the landscape, the bottle caps it’s swallowed, the swamp silt and chicken farm runoff which either poisoned the fish or made it taste that much better. Hear him chew to the tune of buttermilk, salt, and Food Lion white wine. Hear the lemon pepper and onions, how they run three generations deep. He doesn’t smile much, but he smiles at this.
Highway 90 South: First Baptist Church, Second Baptist Church, Lifeway Church, the One True Baptist Church, the Church of Churches Baptist Church, an unmarked strip club, bait shops, signs to Myrtle Beach, the Blood of Christ Baptist Church. Overhead, the sky tears and folds like soft bread. From the driver’s seat, I see he’s struggling to breathe.
Grease Monkey and Wheels were two nicknames he held in his youth—perhaps from the time he flipped his truck fishtailing train tracks, only to walk away and rebuild the vehicle from the ground up. Years later, he painted the name of his first two children on its doors—on both sides: suzie, lee and drove around for the whole town to see.
Boys don’t talk about these details, sweet Sharon once qualified. And I thought: Sharon, without them, I’d have nothing to say.
At my age, my father was Father. At my age, Grandfather was Father, too. At my age, I can only imagine myself as a dead end for my bloodline, Bersani’s graveyard. It’s no wonder I type Father and can’t help but let the word slip into further.
We drive over another bridge on US-501. Beyond there, says Grandfather, then ’yond ’her, then yonder.
Metronormativity: a word he’ll never learn. For this, though, I don’t exactly blame him.
Six and a half decades, Grandfather is New Jersey born and bred. But after a few months, he calls Conway home. I suppose, by blood, I’m a Yankee too. Then again, North Carolina is the closest thing to home. Some days, I breathe the word y’all and others find myself spelling colour with the U. Still America, American. If American, by his standards, then we speak American, or what he means to be English, then technically, we speak Latin with French and Spanish and Persian and German, plus Greek, Fon, and a number of other languages. If Conway, South Carolina, then consider genocide—the massacred Pee Dee and Waccamaw. If Conway, by way of white colonizers, then a name of Gaelic descent, Connmhach, translating to head-smashing—alternatively, Conwy, a town of Northern Wales, itself named for the river on which it’s built. If Latin, then contrary to popular belief, it’s with-way and not against. If Con-way, then definitely not Kellyanne Conway and misnaming things that aren’t. If Conway, I want everything Grandfather to unearth itself. I want this town to reckon with its bones and begin again.
Tell me, Grandfather, who are we really?
He used to give church sermons in Spanish, I remember my mother saying. He thought it was the most radical thing. He’d walk right up to the podium and start speaking, though no one ever asked him, and we’d laugh a little and let him go.
And I’ve caved once more. I tell this anecdote as if it’s a pat on the back.
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by the Platters plays on the oldies station. If I could, I’d sing: They said someday you’ll find / All who love are blind / When your heart’s on fire, you must realize / Smoke gets in your eyes.
He would’ve joined the army when he was younger, would’ve eaten better, would’ve stayed up north, would’ve stayed married to my grandmother, would’ve been sweeter to Sharon, would’ve loved better, would’ve been less bitter, would’ve, would’ve, would’ve…
There’s a point in the drive when I just start crying. It’s silent. I decide I don’t care if he sees me. Looking ahead, hand on the wheel, I ask him how he feels about dying. He says, I’m a burden on everyone.
Then, I’m in so much pain.
I did vote. I voted, and though I didn’t say it, he wrote the words for me. Vote like you intend to kill. I voted and I thought of him and I wondered if, in the moment, some part of me was dying like Grandfather after all.
Finally, North Myrtle Beach: the water is blue, the sand hot. I’m still wearing blue jeans, white hat, and black shirt from yesterday. My head is tender. A headache. But he wanted to see a beach—one last time—and I’m happy to. Because there, he says, To be young again and It’s beautiful.
When I look out to where the ocean cuts the horizon, softly, I can forget about the towering concrete hotels, the oil drums they pump out into the sea, the dead birds, the dead fish, the roadkill, the black trucks in daylight, the men yelling, always the men yelling…
Grandfather holds my arm. He steadies himself on me, as we shuffle over uneven sand.
For a second, it’s hush enough to hear a gull’s feet.
I can’t forgive the sun, but it will set. And in the morning, the earth will have shifted a degree or two, and we’ll call this a new day.
Twenty-two years of living and I guess I don’t really know him, but I tell him I love him, because in the moment, I do, and he says nothing back.
By the time I’m gone, Grandfather will be asleep in his armchair. He will have catfish in his lap. He will have jaundice and skin so thick it doesn’t look real. And yet, the life won’t quit him: thirty-five years longer than his body should’ve. God bless, we’ll say, and then, a miracle. God bless, a miracle.
Miles away, he snores, and the breath blows roses from his arm.
Miles away, I pass a cemetery. Funeral flowers tumble into the road and then disappear. Maybe they become something gentler, much more beautiful.