Daffodils
The air brakes screeched as the bus swung into its greasy berth at the station. Jenny lifted her head from the overstuffed bookpack she had been using for a pillow and peered into the dimness under the corrugated metal canopy where people milled and scuffled with baggage. She sat up and straightened her denim jacket, rubbed her cheek with the back of her hand and felt the imprint of the pack’s zipper running from her high cheekbone to the corner of her mouth, like a freshly stitched scar. She kept her seat while the rest of the passengers grabbed their luggage from overhead and jostled each other down the aisle and out into the humid evening. When the bus had cleared, Jenny gathered her pack and the small suitcase she had crammed beneath the seat in front of her, glanced out of the window, and there, through her own pale reflection in the glass, she saw her grandfather hustle out of the terminal, fish a cigarette from his shirt pocket and light it as he inspected the crowd filing inside. When she descended the steps onto the sidewalk, he was waiting for her, the cigarette hanging from one corner of his crooked smile.
“There’s my princess,” he chortled.
He reached down and snatched the suitcase and bookpack with one hand, and with the other he crushed her to himself, his pack of smokes and lighter pressing into her temple. He smelled like he always did, of stale smoke and cheap aftershave lotion, a strangely pleasant sweaty aroma. He was hugging her the way he had always hugged her, since she could remember him stooping to enfold her in both big arms, but now, instead of being comforted by the familiarity of his embrace, she unexpectedly thought of how much she would miss him if she were never to see him again, and she began to sob.
“What’s the matter, little princess,” he said as he let the cigarette fall from his lips to the concrete where he ground it out with the toe of his boot. He knelt on one knee before her and looked up into her tear-stained eyes.
Jenny could not speak. The sobbing had diminished, but the back of her throat was still constricted and ached with her effort to stop crying. Anyway, he knew! she thought. Why was he going to make her say it, here, in public, in front of all of these strange people? She was ashamed of her outburst, but even more ashamed to give voice to the lousy truth that her parents had divorced, had each decided to take what was their’s and move on, turning their backs on her entire world. Her anguish was slowly displaced by frustration, and she sniffed loudly and fiercely dried her eyes with the back of her fist.
Her grandfather picked up her suitcase and pack in one hand and rested the other on her shoulder as they walked through the noise and bustle of the bus station. Although she knew that she was one small, insignificant part of the hum and tumult of the busy station, Jenny felt as if she floated apart from the crowd, barely gliding over the brilliant linoleum in the frigidly conditioned air. Her life, surely, was painfully unique, she thought; she must be special in her suffering, and kind. She shrugged her shoulders so that her grandfather’s hand slipped down, and she took it in her own and led him out the front door.
Her grandfather swung her bags through the open window into the back of his old Cadillac, and she slid into the front passenger seat, the vinyl still warm from the evening sun. He nosed into traffic, and Jenny let herself be immersed in the flow of trees and houses rushing past the open window. The drive was familiar in that Jenny made it one or two times a year, but it was familiar in a way that only visits to relatives can be. Jenny noticed the big differences in the landscape as they rolled to her grandfather’s house, the new Dairy Queen beside the mall, the apartment complexes that had sprouted up out by the bypass. But it was the little differences that tugged at her. She discovered that the small brick house on the corner of Elm and Main had been painted white. The man with the horse farm beside the high school had cut down the huge oak tree in the exercise lot. The ice house by the railroad tracks had its door boarded over. Jenny had always enjoyed this small town, how it seemed to be the same, a place outside of time where she spent a few summer weeks each year, a place, like a faithful hound, that would always wait for her to return. When her mother had suggested Jenny come here to spend a while, Jenny had rejoiced in the suggestion. She had thought that a familiar place might comfort her, take the edge off her own life at home that was changing in ways she had never imagined.
Jenny glanced out of the Cadillac window and noticed that the drive-in on the edge of town, the one where she and her family and her grandfather would go to see monster movies on warm summer evenings, had tall weeds growing through the asphalt, speakers hung from their posts and dangled, and the screen had a crescent rip through the center of it. Through her new eyes, Jenny could see that everything changed.
They were out of town now, winding through the small hills to her grandfather’s place in the country. The sun had just set, and, as they swooped from hilltop to hollow in the old Cadillac, the air would chill as it rushed through the window. Then, as they rose to the next hill’s crest, the air would warm again, and clouds of insects tattered as the car barreled through. When her grandfather pulled down his long clay road to his house, and that squat, white farmhouse swung into view from behind the old maples, Jenny leaned forward and grasped the dashboard and smiled. This place had not changed. As she and her grandfather walked through the screened-in porch into the cluttered front room, she smelled the usual faint aroma of fried beef and sweet cigars. The poster of a boy on a bicycle, a safety poster she had drawn in fourth grade that had won first prize in the school competition, still hung, framed, on the wall above the piano. And, on the piano top, lined up like trophies, were seven novelty figurine ashtrays, her birthday presents to him for the last seven years. Her grandfather tossed her bags on the dusty couch, and she followed him into the spartan kitchen and then out into the small yard behind the house. He twisted on the spigot above the galvanized horse trough, and the plashy spatter of water caused Lady Belle, an old chestnut mare, to amble from behind the storage shed and stretch her long neck over the rusted wire fence, the blaze on her forehead astonishingly white in the deepening dusk. Her grandfather climbed the two steps back into the house, and, as the screen door slapped shut, he flipped on the kitchen light. Jenny walked from the trough where Lady Belle nuzzled her palm with her huge soft lips into the yellow square of light that slanted through the back door and lifted the drinking dipper from its nail by the faucet. Jenny filled it, raised the dipper to her lips, and slowly relished the cool water, its mossy, metallic tang of tin. For the first time in months, Jenny relaxed. That old feeling of warmth coursed through her, that palpable sensation of security, like when she used to sit by herself, upstairs in her room at home, on a rainy evening reading a good book, her parents downstairs, on the couch together, and she would pull herself around her, like a comfortable robe. The throbbing sizzle of cicadas wound up from the distant tree line behind the barn, now enveloped in darkness. Then the telephone jangled from the kitchen wall.
“Hey, honey,” Jenny’s grandfather said from inside the bright house, “oh yeah, she got here fine. We got in just a little while ago. We’re stretching our legs. She’s visiting with Lady Belle out back. I’ll get her.”
But when he opened the back door to call his granddaughter, he only saw the tin dipper dully gleaming on the dark grass and heard the brittle, rhythmic crunch of footsteps running through the maple woods beside the house. He stooped to pick up the dipper and went back inside.
Her grandfather was setting the silverware beside the chipped blue plates when Jenny hesitantly opened the screen door and slipped into the kitchen. Foxtails pricked her ankles through her socks from where she had run into the brushy woods and had stopped and leaned against the maple bark to see her grandfather step back into the house after he called her. She had watched him, as he had crossed back and forth before the curtainless window of the back room, put fresh sheets on the bed she would be sleeping in, and, when the hungry scent of frying hamburger wafted to her, she had come back. Now, she sat in a kitchen chair and picked the burrs from her socks as her grandfather scooped the patties onto a paper towel-covered plate and pressed them with the spatula.
“One or two, to start with?” he asked as he carried the plate to the table.
“Grandpa,” Jenny began, “I’m sorry...” but her throat tightened and she could feel the hot tears beginning to well.
“Stop that, princess. I told your mom that you had gone for a little walk. That’s all. Now how hungry are you?”
Jenny looked up at her grandfather. An old, frilly apron incongruously protected his worn work clothes. A sound escaped from the back of her throat, half-sob, half-laugh.
“I mean it now. Any more crying out of you and you’ll be sharing oats with Lady Belle out in the barn.”
The softness in her grandfather’s eyes betrayed his gruff tone, and Jenny quickly wiped her face with the paper napkin that had been folded neatly beneath her silverware.
“Two, Grandpa. And Lady Belle better watch out because I could eat a horse about now.”
Her grandfather guffawed and forked two patties onto her plate. Jenny helped herself to heaping portions of hominy and field peas, and the two ate silently, the only sounds in the kitchen the voracious clatter of forks on the chipped blue plates, the hollow tock of the clock above the stove, and the insistent ebb and flow of the cicadas outside. When they were finished, Jenny cleared the table as her grandfather scraped his chair back to retrieve a cigar from the box on the sideboard. As he began his puffing ritual to light the cigar, Jenny returned to her chair, her belly full, and gazed around the starkly lit kitchen. Although her grandfather lived by himself, his kitchen was quaintly feminine. Lining the counter top by the sink was a set of crockery hand-painted with a flower design. The curtain over the window above the sink was also flowered. A spray of dusty plastic flowers sprouted from a white vase in the center of the table, an ornate doily under it. The old chrome toaster was protected by a crocheted cover, as was the the electric coffeepot. The covers were made to look like dolls: the body sat up on the appliance while the doll’s long skirt formed the actual cover. Sitting beside each other, the toaster and the coffeepot, they looked like Fat and Skinny, just before their race up the pillowcase. The kitchen made it seem like an old woman should be heard somewhere else in the house, humming while she dusted the bric-a-brac on the top of the piano. But that woman was many years gone, and Jenny turned her attention to that woman’s photograph, where it hung on the wall over the stove beside the sonorous clock.
Her grandfather’s wife, her mother’s mother, her grandmother, had died before Jenny was born. She had died when Jenny’s mother was still a girl. She had died so long ago that she was rarely mentioned anymore, not because she wasn’t loved, but because the years had accumulated, each one with its own weight of dull, daily details, and life had gradually changed. In her absence, the usual rituals of maintaining a small farm had gone on, day after day, and Jenny’s mother had married and left home, and the old ramshackle barn had been replaced with a gleaming galvanized one, and her grandfather’s wife was simply no longer a part of the insistent world that greeted her grandfather every morning when he opened his eyes. Jenny gazed harder at the photograph above the stove, although she had seen it so many times that it had lost its meaning, like a word does when it is repeated over and over. The photograph showed a young woman standing beside an old pickup truck, wind blowing her long skirt and her long hair. Her grandfather had told her that the picture was taken after they had married and had moved to this place. But now, Jenny noticed something about the framed picture that she never had before. Not really the photograph itself, but the glass covering it and the ornate frame. Beside the picture, the clock, a white plastic circle with a circular pendulum swinging from it, the gold-toned paint covering it tarnished to a motley gray, had a greasy dust clinging to the stem of the pendulum. Tiny cobwebs, stained black by the smoke of thousands of hamburgers, joined the top of the clock to the yellow wall. But the photograph, with its lacy metal frame, was spotless.
“Do you still love Grandma?” Jenny blurted, immediately feeling a warm blush rise into her cheeks.
“Well, well, well,” her grandfather clucked as he leaned forward to tap the ash off his cigar into a cracked saucer, “that’s a heck of a question.”
“I mean, do you still think about her, even though she’s not here anymore?”
“Of course I think about her, Jenny,” her grandfather said slowly, “and I still love her very much, even though she is gone.”
“But how can that happen, when the people you love go away? How can you still love them when you know that they would rather be somewhere else, away from you?”
“Jenny, princess, you...”
“Never mind,” Jenny interrupted, her voice rising, her throat constricting, “this isn’t the same. I don’t know why I asked you that. Grandma isn’t here because she died. She couldn’t help that. She didn’t leave because she wanted to...”
“Jenny...”
“Maybe that’s better, when people die. Maybe it doesn’t hurt so bad when you know there was nothing you could do to stop them from leaving. Maybe if everyone in my family just died, I wouldn’t feel so bad..”
Jenny threw herself from her chair, the sobs heaving up from her chest like fist-sized, smooth stones. She stumbled toward the screen door, but her grandfather was already there, his arms open, kneeling, and Jenny let herself fall into his embrace.
“Shh, princess, shh,” her grandfather soothed as he scooped her up and carried her through the screen door, out into the dark yard. He sat down on the steps and held her in his lap, one large, calloused hand smoothing the hair away from her temples.
“Why don’t they want me anymore?” Jenny whimpered with the sharp intake of breath between wails.
“Shh, baby, shh, baby,” her grandfather cooed as he rocked her, “nobody doesn’t want you anymore.”
“But, they left...”
“Jenny, princess, just because your mom and dad are splitting up doesn’t mean that they don’t love you anymore. Sometimes two people change, and, when they change, they find out that they can’t be together anymore.”
“It’s not supposed to be that way. We’re supposed to be a family...”
“And sometimes families move apart from each other, princess. I don’t know that it’s wrong so much as it’s different. You’ll still see both of them.”
“But it won’t be the same.”
Princess, you know how you asked me how I felt about your grandmother? You asked me if I still loved her even though she’s gone? Well, in some ways, she didn’t leave. In some ways, she’s not gone.”
“What do you mean, she’s not gone.”
“I mean that there are many things that still remind me of your grandmother, and when I see or hear or touch these things, I feel as if she were close to me again. Even now, this many years after she died, she still leaves me gifts.”
“Gifts,” Jenny asked, her sobs diminishing, “what kind of gifts?”
“Little things that were special to her and me. I’ll find them now and again as I’m working, and they’ll make me think of her.”
“I don’t understand, Grandpa. She leaves things? Is she a ghost? Do you see her?”
“Ha, ha,” her grandfather chuckled, “I guess you could say that she is a ghost of sorts, only I don’t think she knows it.”
“I don’t understand, Grandpa,” Jenny mumbled as she swiped at her eyes with the back of her arm.
“I’m trying to tell you that even though you think your life is going to change for the worse, and that nobody loves you, you’re going to find gifts too, gifts that will remind you of the time when your family was together and help you make it when things seem really bad.”
Jenny was exhausted, and she let her head lay against her grandfather’s shoulder. Instead of anger or sadness, she felt hollow, as if everything inside her had been carved out and displaced with warm helium. She felt as if she could float up out of her grandfather’s arms and disappear into the warm country night.
“Would you like me to show you one of these gifts?” her grandfather said gently as he carried her back into the house.
“Okay, Grandpa,” she murmured.
“In the morning, then,” he whispered, and he carefully placed her on the newly-made bed. She was asleep before he could turn out the light.
When her grandfather gently shook her, it was still dark outside the window of the bedroom.
“C’mon, sleepyhead, you said that you wanted to see the gift.”
Jenny rubbed her eyes. The gift? she thought. And then she remembered what her grandfather had told her the night before, but in fragments, as if she were remembering the odd drama of a dream.
“The sun will be up soon. Let’s go while it’s still dark so we can see her bring it.”
“See her?” Jenny said, now fully awake, her eyes wide.
“C’mon,” her grandfather said, “we can have breakfast when we get back.”
Jenny followed her grandfather out the back door into the yard where it was a little lighter although the morning was still a deep gray. She followed him closely to keep from stumbling into anything, her denim jacket pulled tightly around her in the cool predawn. They squeezed through the tall wooden gate to the horse pen, and, as they rounded the shed, Lady Belle whickered a greeting.
“Good morning, old girl,” her grandfather said as he ran his hand down the horse’s silky neck, “do you want to come see it too?”
The horse followed them all the way to the back of the horse lot, where, just beyond the barbed wire fence, the woods loomed thick and dark. Jenny’s grandfather spread the wire fence, and Jenny knew to carefully duck between the strands. Once through, she spread the fence, pushing down hard on one strand with her foot and lifting mightily on the one above it, and her grandfather slipped through.
“I’ll bet you didn’t know that the first house your grandmother and I had on this place wasn’t that one,” he said, thumbing the air over his shoulder, “we first built back in these woods, before we figured out what sections we were going to clear and where the county road was coming in.”
Jenny and her grandfather picked their way down what was now a tractor path, two beaten-down trails running parallel into the dense woods.
“It wasn’t much of a house. I built it myself out of lumber I cut down making this road here. It wasn’t but two rooms. We used the big room for the kitchen and living room, and then it had a small bedroom off the back of it.”
As they went deeper into the dim forest, Jenny’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. The old path grew narrower, and the grass between the ruts sprouted waist-high.
“Anyway, it wasn’t much of a house, barely more than a log cabin, but your grandmother loved it. During the day, while I was busy running the saw mill, she spruced that place up like it was a castle. She kept the inside of that little place scrubbed up, and she raked out a little yard around the house in the clearing.”
The light was growing stronger now, and Jenny could see through the trees, maples and pines, as they walked deeper into the woods.
“She sewed curtains for the windows and crocheted a really pretty table cloth. She saved up her egg money and bought a rug for the big room, had flowers all over it. She had me put window boxes outside of every window and she planted wild flowers in them.”
Jenny’s grandfather stopped and took Jenny’s hand. They left the overgrown path and walked directly into the woods, following a path that was merely the absence of trees. The sun had dawned now, and through the trees, Jenny could make out the brightness of a clearing ahead of them.
“She worked herself to frazzle making that old place pretty. It was our first place that we owned as husband and wife, and she loved it no matter what.”
They stepped out of the woods into a small clearing. The sun was fully above the horizon now, and the colors of the clearing strengthened from grays to greens and yellows.
“This is where it was,” her grandfather continued, looking in the center of the clearing, “there isn’t anything left of the house at all now. We took it apart and used it to build part of the old shed up there by the new house. There isn’t a scrap of wood left here now. You wouldn’t even now there’d ever been a place here.”
Jenny, too, now stared at the center of the clearing, sunlight dappling the ground through the canopy of leaves.
“Except for the gift,” he said as he squeezed Jenny’s hand.
There, in the center of the clearing where no structure stood at all, was a circle of daffodils, slowly opening their bright yellow petals in the stream of morning light.