Picking Up Roots

Pap was drunk the entire week after Gram died, right up to her funeral. He didn’t leave the cemetery shed for anything. He and Santiago Holmes sat there drinking Jack and Buds with Santiago leaving every now and then to tend to some piece of maintenance in the cemetery or to restock their supply.

“I’d go out to the store around 5pm and get us the necessary supplies to get through the night,” Santiago told me not too long after Pap passed, “we needed a bottle of Jack and two racks of Buds and maybe a package of hot dogs to heat up on the grill.

“I thought I knew from drinking, but Pap, man, he could pack it away. And it didn’t mess with him. He stayed steady. If anything, the steel in his eyes hardened, but he kept quiet, to himself. We didn’t say two words any of those nights. I think that’s why he let me hang around with him; I knew how to keep quiet.

“We’d sit in the shed, Pap in that beat up rocker he kept there and me on a bucket, and we’d put ‘em back and watch the sun go down over the trees. We’d sip ‘em slow letting the icy coldness of the beer cool the burn of the whiskey on our throats.

“Around 8pm, I’d grill up the dogs. I never had to force the food on Pap. I think he knew it’s what she would have wanted. That was the great thing about him: he did for himself, but he always took your Gram’s wishes into consideration. You could learn a lot from that.

“At some point, Pap would end up falling asleep in the rocker. It wasn’t much of a surprise as he’d been putting them away all day. I’d head up to the apartment and have a nightcap before turning in. When I came down in the mornings, Pap would be sitting in the rocker with a Bud, rocking back and forth nice and easy. We wouldn’t say anything, and I’d head out to get the early chores done.

“I wasn’t upset for a second about the extra work I had to do that week. Some men might’ve gotten a hair over their ass about having to put in the extra time, or effort, not me. Death is death, and everyone dies, and it isn’t worth getting yourself tied up in knots about, but your Gram, she was the wind in Pap’s sails. She kept him on course. A better woman hasn’t been placed on this earth, though your mama comes close. It does take time to grieve a woman like your Gram. I don’t know that your Pap ever came to terms with her passing. He was always a little off-balance, more ornery, a little meaner without enjoying it after she went.

“He was mad at the world and tried to fight the whole damn place to ease his rage at her passing. We all know how that battle turns out,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes going off somewhere only he could see.

I was so young at the time I interrupted with a question about how the battle turned out.

“You can’t fight the world,” he replied, “or at least, you can’t fight it and expect the outcome to be favorable. Life is going to move on as it moves on, and this world of people, places and things is not going to bend to the will of one individual.

“So you got dealt a bad hand, or you got hurt, or something didn’t go how you wanted it to go, maybe someone died, that is life, and this world doesn’t care. Some people in it, like your Gram, might try to lift you up, but the world is going to keep turning, whether you’re up or not. Life goes on. You can’t rage against the world. You’ll wear yourself and just make yourself angrier.

“Believe me, I’ve been fighting everything and everyone since I was 18. Pap was the one who gave me a chance, but I didn’t much listen, I just kept roaring at the world, pushing against it, resisting, and look at me now. I’ve got next to nothing. For all the fighting I’ve done, I’m still just a lousy drunk.

“You can put all this negative ‘woe is me’ energy out there into the world, and fight everything you think is a wrong or a slight, but it’s never going to fill that hole inside of you that you’re trying to tape over with the anger.”

Seeing the confusion on my face, Santiago tried to simplify his point.

“Would you run head first into a concrete wall?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, saying you did, would you do it over and over again to try and bring the wall down?”

“No, that’s stupid. You’d knock yourself out.”

“Right, that’s what fighting the world is like.”

“And you’re saying Pap fought the world?”

“He tried to.”

“How?”

“He had been grumbling to me for years about how the Mt. Hope Cemetery Committee needed to stop people planting flags next to the stones of their loved ones on Memorial Day. They’d get caught up in the cord on the trimmers and were a real pain in the ass. 

“Well, he had enough, and he started writing the committee every week about it. They’d didn’t write back, call or acknowledge him in any way, but he just kept on writing them.”

“He did not.”

“He did. Did you know that when your Gram got her first diagnosis, he wrote to her doctors each week, and to specialists across the country, asking what else could be done, and were they doing enough? He’d read about something in some old magazine and ask why they weren’t trying that. He’d call them on the phone and tell them they were failing and promise to write to the Board of Health to have their licenses taken away.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“That’s fine, you don’t have to, but it’s true. He raged against these things that either didn’t matter or were beyond his control. That’s why losing your Gram hurt him so much; she balanced him out. 

“She also took pleasure in his getting worked up. When he’d go off on one of his rants, or do something to put a burr in the side of members of the community – such as hiring me – your Gram would smile and encourage him, because she knew it gave him some small sliver of joy.

“She loved him, and he loved her back somethin’ fierce. Pap knew just what she did and what she meant to him. You might have thought he was just some ornery old man, who didn’t love anyone, but he was whip smart. He knew had a good woman, and he loved her.

“When we got to the seventh day of drinking, the night before your Gram was to be buried, Pap set out to dig the plot. I went with him, but I was just along to carry tools and the cooler.

“Pap was as determined as I’ve ever seen a man. It was going on midnight when we set out. He’d been at it with the Buds since breakfast, but you couldn’t tell by looking at him. Most men would have been falling over themselves, but Pap seemed to have grown. 

“I’d always known him to be powerful, but a little hunched in on himself. As we walked down to the plot, he stood straight and tall, even under the weight of the plywood stencil we used to mark the plot.

“You know this already, but he had picked out a beautiful spot for her, right in the shade of those pines, looking out on the river. The night had cleared and the sliver of moon cut a shimmering path across the water and up to her stone. You couldn’t have asked for a better place for a soul to rest and look out on the world, at least if you believe in the spirit looking on from the afterlife and that sort of nonsense.

“What you don’t know is Pap dug that hole himself. By hand. He edged around the stencil, cut the sod into squares and removed each one as gentle as thought it were an egg in his hand. Then he set to diggin’.

“It was a perfect night for the work, no so cool’s you needed a coat, but the heat not oppressive either. There was a nice breeze coming with the moonlight up from the river. I was worried there wouldn’t be enough light to dig, but the moon was giving off just enough. It didn’t matter, Pap had dug so many, he could have done the work blindfolded.

“He was a strong man your Pap. Country strong, the muscle built through good hard work. He didn’t say a word the entire time we were out there, just set to the job and worked like a machine, shovelful after shovelful flying from the hole landing in a perfect pile on the uphill side of the plot. 

“I tried to help, but there was a sad firmness in his eyes that said ‘no,’ this was his job and he was the only one who could do it. It wasn’t worthy of the tractor and it certainly wasn’t worthy of a slob like me. I did what I do best and leaned on my shovel and made sure the beer didn’t get warm.

“I’m sure it sounds like what people expect of me when I sat I stood there drinking beer while Pap dug that hole, but there was nothin’ for it. I was in awe watching Pap assault that hole, sinking further into the earth with each shovelful of dirt.

“They don’t make ‘em like Pap anymore, that kind of hardness, that loves the work and embraces the challenge of doing something physical. The shovel looked so small in his hands, and the power, whether out of rage at your Gram’s passing or just from the years of working the cemetery, the dirt flew fast in an unwavering rhythm.“That’s the thing no one can find today, the rhythm of the work. They don’t see the music of it. Pap found it that night and the dirt sang from the hole. In no time, he was tamping down the sides, making the edges perfect for her.

Gram died when I was 11, almost 12. That’s a weird age for death. On the one hand, I understood she was dead and gone, and I felt sadness, but more because I’d lost something, or maybe because it’s what I thought was expected of me. 

On the other hand, I was too young to realize how much would be missing from my life because of her passing: the stories, the history, and the love. That’s what I should have been mourning. Santiago Holmes used to say, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” It took me a long time to understand what it meant.

From nowhere, Gram was diagnosed with lung cancer. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette in my lifetime, and when I asked Ma, she said she’d never known her to smoke. 

Gram did love to cook. Not too long ago I read an article saying smoke from cooking was now being linked to lung cancer. Sometimes it feels like there’s inherent risk in everything, no matter how mundane. Gram was an excellent cook. I can still taste her Bolognese.

Her death was a long drawn out affair. Eight months in, the diagnosis was terminal. Nine after that the cancer was in remission. Four months later it was back. Two months after that she was gone.

Watching her decline was more difficult than her actual death. She cooked until she could no longer hold her wooden spoon. It had eaten away at her figure. By then she was little more than a pale sheet stretched over tiny bones.

Pap couldn’t stand to see her this way, so he found frequent excuses to spend more time in the cemetery shed. Sometimes I would walk over hoping for a ride in the backhoe and I’d hear him talking to himself, pleading, “please don’t take her. I will do better. I’ll do anything you ask of me. I can change myself, but I can’t live without her.”

I’d turn as quiet as I could, somehow knowing this was not something I was supposed to see, and head back to the house where I’d find gram and give her a big hug. I didn’t say a word to her about what I’d seen.

Still, I think Gram knew Pap would struggle without her. Gram always knew. When I came in from the shed, she’d squeezed me even harder than normal, like she had before her strength was stolen.

Ma did what she always did when things were difficult, she turned in on herself and worked harder, as though the work could stop the inevitable. There was more determination in her movements and not a single one was wasted. She continued to work two jobs, but she also started cooking and dinner and she carved out time to take Gram to appointments and treatments. I never saw her shed a tear or ask why this was happening Ma just kept going.

Gram passed in the evening, while I was sleeping. When I woke the next day Ma came in to tell me the news. I can still see the sadness hanging about her face. For as much as she worked, she was smiling most of the time, but that morning, the hurt tugged at the corners of her eyes and tears pooled, but she wouldn’t let them fall. They made her eyes shine in the sunlight.

The night before we’d been to visit her in the hospital. Her condition had deteriorated, but the doctors were continuing to treat her as though she had some time left. I missed her around the cottage, so I was excited at the opportunity to see her.

Pap, who hated hospitals, hadn’t left her beside since she’d been admitted. He’d left Santiago in charge of the cemetery, hoping for the best. He was waiting in her room when we arrived.

“She’s been taken out for a procedure,” he said, with a glance at my mother that meant something I was too young to understand – they’d found a middle ground in Gram’s illness and were speaking in civil terms to one another, “she should be back soon.”

“How was she feeling?” Ma asked.

“No better, no worse. I think she’s ready.”

“They think she’s close.”

“They haven’t said it in so many words, but she has the look.”

“I can imagine. Are you?”

“Is anybody ever?”

“I suppose you’re right. Can we sit with you and wait? He wants to see her.”

“Yeah, that’ll be fine. It shouldn’t be long now.”

The normal harshness had left Pap’s voice, replaced by a heavy sadness. His chin quivered as he spoke to Ma, and I think he was fighting back tears. I wasn’t sure how to act, having never seen such vulnerability in Pap before.

I followed Ma’s lead and we sat in silence with Pap for half-an-hour, but Gram didn’t return. I had a queasy emptiness in my stomach making me feel hungry and sick at the same time. My stomach made a noise, and as it was close to dinnertime, Ma told Pap we’d head home to put dinner on.

We’d just exited the elevator and were headed towards the door when a set of swinging doors opened and Gram was wheeled through on a hospital bed.

The bed and the sheets were white as was the gown she wore. She was so pale from the toll the cancer was exacting it was tough to tell where she stopped and the bed began. 

She was moving fast as the nurse pushing the bed appeared to be racing to catch the elevator we had just left. Time slowed down for a moment as Gram raised a weak hand to us, and attempted a smile, though it was difficult to see with the oxygen mask covering her face.And then she was gone. Whisked away down the hall towards the elevators. Ma handed me the keys and told me to wait in the car before running down the hall after her. It was the last I saw Gram. It is burned into my brain forever

The Tortoise was a dive of ill-repute down by the river. It’s clientele smelled worse than the polluted Melanski. The bluer than blue-collar workers drank there. Some were seasonal workers who picked berries in the summer and apples in the fall before heading to warmer climates for the winter. Most often it was filled with workers from the textile mills stopping in to warm their stomachs before heading home in the winter or to cool off with an ice-cold beer after a hot summer day.

Now, the heart of the Tortoise was Berwick’s population of drunks and ne’er-do-wells – a population that increased with the closing of the mills. They kept the seats of the bar filled from the time it opened for the graveyard shift workers still hanging on at the mills at 6am until its doors shut at 2am. Many were the nights Pete Smallman the rat-faced owner, allowed them to curl up in booths or around tables and sleep it off, confident they’d repay the kindness with a couple of rounds when they woke up.

The police spent a minimum of two nights a week at the Tortoise breaking up fights. Throughout the year brawls would break out between out-of-work drunks who needed a night away from home. In the summer and fall they sprinkled in bouts between the seasonal workers and the locals, who appreciated neither color nor foreign tongues. 

It was inevitable the question of who was faster, a tortoise or a hare would come up, and then one of the regulars would turn on his stool and ask a seasonal worker if he thought, as a black man, he had cornered the market on speed. The other men at the bar would laugh and the seasonal worker, whether his English was good or not, would understand he was being offended and rise up to challenge the speaker.

Knives were frequent guests at the Tortoise and with the police would always come an ambulance. More than one combatant over the years had ended up down the road at Mt. Hope, its proximity to the bar a metaphor lost on the bar’s patrons.

Santiago Holmes was a regular at the Tortoise. He was there so often; he had his own stool in the darkest corner, with a two-stool buffer between himself and the next drinker. When he first started drinking, not when he had his first beer, or got drunk off champagne at one of his mother’s parties, but instead, after his parents were gone and he started drinking, he’d come to the Tortoise.

At the Tortoise if you looked old enough – even if you didn’t – and weren’t scared off by Little Jimmy, the massive tattooed cousin of Pete Smallman who worked the door with two knives in eight-inch leather sleeves riding on each of his hips, you could get in. His doughy gut, the black eyes that peered out from behind his bushy black beard and the knives had turned more than one aspiring underage drinker away.

By the time Santiago decided to stop drinking in his rooms above the garage, he’d been working for Pap for a month and had the rough, wiry look of one who spent their day at hard work. The layer of baby fat he’d had through high school melted away with the work and his face took on a more angular, hawkish appearance. He still possessed the arrogance of the elite, which gave him the courage to get past Little Jimmy for the first time at the Tortoise.

Up until that point, his journeys out in public consisted of trips to the grocery store, where he felt the burning hatred in the eyes of the unemployed mill workers’ wives as they passed food stamps or a few precious dollars into the hands of the cashiers. Though the trips were infrequent, he knew he was loathed. Pap took a certain amount of glee in recounting the town gossip he’d picked up over beers at the Tavern of whatever Gram brought home from her ventures into town. Santiago knew where he stood.

After a month, the edge seemed to come off the anger in the stories Pap told, or so Santiago felt. He was still young enough to think drinking alone wasn’t a good thing. Weighing those two ideas, he decided it was time to try and head out into the world for some company while drinking. The town couldn’t stay angry with forever him just because his last name was Holmes, or so his thinking went. Never having had to mix with the blue-collar majority of Berwick, he didn’t realize he could not have been more wrong in his assumptions.

The mill workers of Berwick kept desperate hold of their grudges, not letting go for anything, or anyone, even if the grudge had been resolved. In 1970, the mill workers went on strike for higher wages and a better pension plan. Mr. Holmes, already beginning to feel the financial strains, gave in within a week. More than 40 years later men would gather at the Tortoise and refer back to how ill-treated they had been in 1970 as they discussed their current financial straights.

So when Santiago passed by Little Jimmy and entered the Tortoise, all eyes fell on him. This was normal practice for anyone who entered the bar. What was not normal was the cold fury each set of eyes held.

Many would have crumbled under the weight of those glares, or at worst, have turned and left. Santiago, felt the rage in an instant, and realized people weren’t close to done with their anger. In that moment, he realized he would be treated as an outsider for the rest of his days. He also realized he didn’t give a damn.

He met each set of eyes with a fury of his own; the pent up rage of having been abandoned by his mother and deemed an outcast by a town that didn’t know him reflected back at these hard drinkers in the glare he cast upon them. He took his time, making sure he looked deep into each set of eyes, meeting their hate with his own, until they were forced to look away.

Having established that he would not be bullied, Santiago took the only available seat at the bar: at the far end from the door next to the bathrooms. Pete Smallman, who believed all dollars were created equal, placed a Bud and a shot of Jack in front of him.

As he would every night from that day forth, Santiago sat taking long pulls of his beer and short sips of the whiskey, staring hate out at the world until he felt the arms of drunkenness, calm some of his pain.