Freddie Owens - Then Like the Blind Man - Orbie's Story

My shirt was still damp from the rain, but the day now was bone dry and hot. No puddles. No sign of rain anywhere. Wind howled over the hump. Half a white dandelion-puffball twirled in front of me and twirled away. I looked out along the neck of the Dragon. Beyond the head, waving in the light, I could see the shiny tops of a few poplar trees. I started along the spine of the neck, picking my way toward the head where the two dead trees bowed, waded through gooseberry bushes out to where the dragon’s head ended — out to the very end of its nose — and looked down. There I saw the grassy roadbed and the railroad tracks. I saw Willis and Chester, waiting under the poplars. I was on top of the fist of rock I’d seen when we’d first rode up. Vines and little bushes grew all down the front.

“Ah Willis!” I shouted.

Willis looked up to where I was and smiled. “Ca-Come down, boy! Dey a path!” He pointed to a place above where the vines started. A narrow ledge went down from there, down the face of the rock and disappeared behind the vines.

“Ain’t wide enough!” I yelled.

“Ya’ll gots a hold on dem grape vine!” Willis shouted. “Come down dat way! It easy!”

“It don’t look easy!” I shouted. “Shit Willis!”

Willis picked up a rock and threw it halfway up. “Right in dare! It get wide!”

“I don’t know Willis,” I said, but I started down the ledge anyway, my back to the rock. I tried not to look down. I grabbed for the vines, knocked off a bunch of grapes and heard them smack against the rocks down below. I grabbed out again, got a hold of the vines and started down. The ledge was broken and not much wider than a six-inch plank but the vines, they steadied me. I held on, working my way down until the ledge finally widened and the going got easier. When I got all the way down, I ran over to Willis. I had a bunch of grapes in my hand.

“Dem grape mmmake you sick,” Willis said.

“I don’t care.” I put one in my mouth but it was so bad sour I had to spit it out.

Willis laughed. “You a sight! Pine needle all ova you!”

I looked back at the fist of rock. From this side you couldn’t tell it was the front part of a dragon. You couldn’t even see the horns.

“There’s a cave Willis.”

“Cave?”

“Uh huh. In that ridge. There’s a cave-room down in there.”

I looked at Willis. “I was gone a long time.”

Willis shook his head. “Fifteen minute. Maybe twenty.”

“Liar,” I said. “Didn’t you get wet?”

“Na-uh.”

“The rain! Didn’t you see the rain?”

“It didn’t rain,” Willis said.

“It did! Look at my shirt!” I pulled my tee shirt away from my body so Willis could feel of it, but it was already dry.

They brought Granpaw back from the hospital on a Friday, the second day of August. His right eye stared straight ahead. The left stared off to the side. He sat in his wheelchair all day — day after day — out on the front porch or in the front room. Sometimes he hollered out words. “Tribulations!” he would yell, or “Goddamn!” Sometimes he called Momma, ‘Mattie’ and Granny, ‘Ruby’.

He called me ‘Jessie’ once. I was trying to tell him about Moses and the cave. I even showed him the rattlesnake skull. “You see it, don’t you, Granpaw?”

“Jessie,” he said. “What you doing with that gun?”

I was holding up the pan of water. Granny scraped the beard off Granpaw’s neck with a straight razor she held up like a wing. Every now and then she’d splash the pan-water with the blade. Silvery soapy water now, water mixed with old beard.

All of a sudden, Granpaw got up out of the wheelchair and started grumbling about his hat. No drooling. No retard sounds. Just crabby old Granpaw-words, like before.

I was glad.

“You’ll fall, Strode,” Granny said.

“I had it on just this morning!” Granpaw said.

“You ain’t had nothin’ on that head except what little hairs you got. Hat’s where it usually is, on that nail by the door.”

Granpaw put his hawk eye on me. He put it on my chickens, Elvis and Johnny, both half asleep on the front porch steps. He put it on Willis, who sat with his back against a post drawing on a pad. Granny had tied a towel around his neck. Foamy white shaving cream hung off the end of his chin. It was spread like cake icing up one side of his jaw.

Granny gave him a hard look. “Strode? You back?”

“I’m tired of sitting around here.” Granpaw ditch-walked over to Willis and put his hand out. “What you doing there, boy? Let me see.”

“Praise God, he is back,” Granny said.

Willis smiled and handed his paper up to Granpaw.

Granpaw wiped off his chin with the towel and looked at the paper. “Sumbitch.”

“Don’t be saying that,” Granny said.

“This here’s good as one a them camry pictures, Mattie! Just you look!” Granpaw turned with the picture and showed it to Granny and me. It was a picture of Granny shaving Granpaw — of me standing next to her with the pan of water. Granpaw had a dumb look on his face, mouth half open.

“We always knowed Willis could draw,” Granny said. “You best sit down now.”

“Time I was gettin’ back to the fields,” Granpaw said.

“Not while I’m alive,” Granny said.

Granpaw put his hand up to the back of his neck. “I feel like I been asleep a long time. I had a bad dream Mattie. I dreamed we was about to lose our place and they wasn’t nothing I could do about it. Have I been?”

“Have you been what?”

“Sleepin’, by grabs!”

“You can see where you’ve been. Look at that picture Willis made.”

Granpaw looked again at the picture then let it go down by his side. “I remember Ruby. I remember her face. It was all beat up.”

“You had a stroke,” Granny said.

“A stroke? Hell!”

“Don’t be saying that. You was up Glascow the better part of a week.” Granny took the water pan from me and dumped it in the yard. She wiped the razor on her dress. “That Glasgow Doctor said you’d never talk normal again.”

“Get me my hat, Orbie,” Granpaw said. “I got to go see about my crops.”

“No now,” Granny said. “If you was to have another stroke, that’d be it. ‘Sides, the farm’s took care of, for now anyway.”

“Hell it is,” Granpaw said.

Granny put her foot down when it came to working in the tobacco. You couldn’t keep Granpaw in his wheelchair though. He always had to be off doing something. Always somebody had to watch him too. Momma, Granny, Miss Alma. Sometimes Willis and me. Sometimes just me by myself. Granpaw didn’t seem to mind or even to notice very much — just went along being his crabby old self, doing small things here and there around the house.

Sometimes he’d get started on something, forget what he was doing, then remember again. Sometimes he’d go like before, all zombie-eyed and still. The day after he got up from his wheelchair, I saw him in the middle of the pigs with a slop bucket; just standing there, looking off at the hills back of the barn. The pigs were humping and shoving themselves around the bucket, waiting to be fed. I yelled from the yard, “Granpaw! What you doin’?” He just stood there, frozen. Granny and Miss Alma had to go bring him in.

While they were walking him back to his wheelchair, he came back to himself. “What you two hussies doing with an old man like me?”

“Lawd, Lawd, Brotha Wood!” Miss Alma laughed. “You the devil, sho ‘nuff!”

“I’m serious,” Granpaw said. “Ya’ll was takin’ advantage of me, wasn’t you? Helpless as I am.”