june 1K

1991

Ray was sixty-five and pinning his daughter’s bed sheets to a clothesline – the bed sheets of his daughter who died last night.  Sobering, he thought, was this year, in which he retired from the paper company and lost his only child.  She was forty, his daughter.

He met his daughter at her work every day for lunch, and one day she said, “I’m pregnant.”

“But you’re thirty-nine,” he said.

“I already decided,” she said, “to keep it.”

She did.  And they continued to have lunch every day.  And he went to child-birthing classes with her.  He rubbed her sore back and shopped for a car seat.  He assembled the baby’s crib, and that’s when they decided she should move back home.

Home was over a hundred and fifty years old, on ten acres, and big.  Ray lived there alone, until his daughter got pregnant, and then she moved back in with him.  They painted the nursery yellow.  On the way home from the sonogram, they stopped at the hardware store and picked out a pale pink for the nursery’s trim.

When it was “time,” she was forty, and he drove her to the hospital and held her hand for eight hours.  When she named the baby Samantha, he leaned over and kissed both of their foreheads one at a time and cried a little.

“That’s the second time I’ve seen you cry,” she said.

The other time was when she got married, he thought.

The nurse took Samantha away, and his daughter slept, and the nurse and a doctor came back to tell him that there were potential complications with his daughter’s recovery.

He brought his daughter home, and she tried to nurse the baby for a couple of days, and then she hemorrhaged one night, and Samantha became Ray’s baby.

Ray thought about all of this while he pinned his daughter’s washed and bleached bed sheets to the clothesline, and he knew he couldn’t linger much longer because he wanted to be there when Samantha woke, and he vowed to always be there.

1994

Ray was sixty-eight and pinning his three-year-old granddaughter, Sam’s bed sheets to the clothesline.  Last night she wet the bed again, but he had had his fill of diapers.  Three decades operating the corrugating machine had rendered his fingers taught.  The clothespins were fidgety little alligator mouths that snapped when they slipped from his fingers.

The job done, Ray scanned the front pasture for Sam, who he’d last seen chasing a butterfly.  Butterflies know no boundaries, he thought, and Sam was trotting toward the railroad tracks that trace the eastern property line.  Panic struck his chest, and he ran east.  The uneven ground was not friendly to his knees, and if he fell, he thought, Sam may never be found.
He remembered his vow to always be there for her, and that day he was.

Butterflies loved the weedy goldenrod that grew wild along the railroad, and Ray scooped Sam up and took her home for a snack and wondered who would take care of her if not he.

2003

Ray was seventy-seven and pinning Sam’s washed and bleached bed sheets to the clothesline.  Though he tried, he couldn’t recall how his ex-wife had handled this day with their own daughter.  Sam had showered and eaten and ran out for the bus quickly this morning, and long after she’d left he discovered the spotted bed.

Sobering, he thought, as memories of his daughter’s death knocked around his heart.  A clothespin slipped from his fingers and snapped the air like a startled alligator.

2007

Ray was eighty-one and draping Sam’s sheets over the clothesline.  She was sixteen, and before last night, he hadn’t seen her for two weeks.  Last night she stumbled into the house, banging around, startling him.  He opened her door and found her passed out in a puddle of vomit.  He leaned his cane against her dresser, then himself against her dresser, and he cried.  He cried because he was tired but even more because she was home.

It was a long night but nothing a bucket and a glass of water couldn’t fix.
The next morning he stiffly awoke in a chair by her bed, which was empty again.

2009

Ray was eighty-three and laying awake in bed.  The front door closed.  Footsteps scaled the old staircase and creaked into Sam’s room.  He couldn’t remember the last time she was home.  He didn’t blame her and was here for her, even if he couldn’t get out of bed and tell her.

God had given him a healthy, sturdy body that had got him where he needed to go, until tonight.  I think it’s done, he thought.  It didn’t seem fair that he didn’t have the strength to say goodbye and say that he would most likely die tonight and to please not leave him lying there another month or two.  And then he cried, not because he was dying but because of the thought of Sam finding him after months of nature’s cruelty.

And then his door creaked, and his heart skipped.  That girl of his came into his room quietly and quietly knelt at his bedside.  She slid her hands around one of his and looked into his eyes.

“Grandpa you’re crying,” she said, and she cried too.  “That’s the second time I’ve seen you cry.”

You must remember that night when you were sixteen, he thought.

“I remember,” she said and leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.  She laid down next to him and put her arm around him and said, “Thank you.”

Sam was eighteen and pinning Ray’s washed and bleached sheets to the clothesline.  She vowed to keep the land and the house and fill it up with people she loved.

She strolled along the eastern property line, along the railroad, until she came to a patch of goldenrod.  She knelt among the butterflies and picked the wild, yellow flowers for the funeral that afternoon.