Grampa Earl - a forgettable character

Retirement has offered time for reading and reflection that long weeks and days and middle-of-the-night phone calls do not afford. For some reason - and who knows what prompts a random thought or memory - but perhaps the recent Father's Day, I thought of my Grampa Earl. Even now, as I think about it, I don't think I ever called him Grampa, which would be a title of endearment he had not earned. Maybe just Earl. I'm not sure my Mom ever called him Dad, either for that matter, but I'm not sure. Again, unearned endearment. 

My memories of him are from just a few visits and the few times my Mother spoke of him. She never had stories, just statements and not even full statements sometimes when she caught herself in memories she did not want to resurrect or share. I do know that he was an alcoholic. I have compassion for addicts, but sometimes their trail of destruction is simply too worn to find it. Mom just said he was an old drunk, the type that made them scramble to hide the knives when they heard him stumbling home. The kind that would give her a bike for her birthday and sell it within a week to buy whatever it was that he drank. The kind that may have crossed boundaries with his daughter - that was one of the statements Mom couldn't finish, leaving me to know just from the look on her face what she could not bring herself to speak aloud.  

I know that he was a sharecropper in Arkansas and in the Missouri bootheel, because Mom sometimes spoke of picking cotton as a child with the bleeding fingers and dragged burlap sacks which occassionally would contain a rock or two to add to its weight when measured by the buyer. He and my Grandma Nellie bore four offspring that I know of. One was my uncle who killed himself in a one-car drunk driving crash; the other was the uncle whom they would not allow out of prison to attend his funeral. The funeral was on my 10th birthday, so I remember it.

The two girls fared better. My aunt somehow got to St. Louis and married a factory worker in the post-war (WWII) industrial resurgence that gave them to ability to live in a decent suburb of cookie-cutter houses. She also gave my Mom a place to go when she ran away from home with her 8th grade diploma in hand. There she lied about her age and name and got a factory job, met my Dad, home from the War, and got married shotgun style over the Arkansas border where a teen could get a marriage license. My sister was born shortly after Mom's 17th birthday. Only death did them part. 

We visited Earl just once at his trailer (the Ozark kind, not the handsome manufactured home of today's time) where he was allowed (I assume, for I don't know how he could have paid rent) to reside to be a caretaker of sorts on some acreage near Bowling Green, Missouri. My Gramma Nellie had abandoned the hell he had created for them long before and had married a much more stable, but less colorful man whom I did call Grampa. Grampa Charlie. 

The only thing I remember about the visit to Earl's was his telling me about the goats he watched over. The faintin' goats. I suppose I expected grandfathers to tell tall tales - I never knew my paternal grandfather - so when he told us that if you sneak up on one of these goats they would faint and fall dead over I believed him. But when my brother and I went searching the field for a goat to frighten into catatonia, we had no success. I have since confirmed that such a thing exists, but, as I would have said at that "I ain't seen it."

My Mother, out of biblical mandate to honor one's father and mother, did allow Earl to visit our home at least a couple of times. It was a courageous and magnanimous thing for her to do. Earl was a hoot, and did tell tall tales. Our television got only two stations but he managed to find - perhaps on the mysterious UHF channel that was a second dial on our TV that was otherwise untouched - late night wrestling of the totally faked kind. He would grumble with his cigarette dangling that they didn't cheat fair. 

His cigarettes are one of my clear memories of him. He rolled his own and it was quite a fascinating process. He needed a set of rolling papers and an oval-topped tin can flask-looking container of Prince Albert tobacco, a wooden match, and saliva. He had a bit of palsy, or maybe his short-lived sobriety at our house gave him the shakes, but as he formed the rolling paper into a half shell gutter with his finger, he tipped Prince Albert and let his palsy get just the right amount of tobacco falling out into the paper. With his other hand, he closed the tobacco lid, then managed to roll the paper with more skill than a Chipotle burrito maker. The real magic happened at the final stages when he raised the tight bundle to his tongue and, again aided by his tremor, licked the seam for a seal completed with the twist at both ends. The match could be lit on a friction strip on the matchbox, but that was for women. He struck his with a stroke along his thigh over his rough denim jeans and managed to meet the flame with the cigarette eventually.

His cigarette-holding fingers, the index and middle, had brown stained half-moon indentations from the years of constant cradling a cigarette. Without the benefit of the pot smokers' forcepts or roach clip, he dragged every possible puff down to the nib, resulting in those leathery notches in his fingers. 

His few visits only lasted until Mom saw that mouthwash, cologne, and rubbing alcohol began to disappear, meaning it was time for him to go home. He died in 1979. My Gramma went to the funeral, and not only did I not understand why, but she cried. I was perplexed, but a rookie in the world of grief. Maybe one simply cries at funerals. Maybe she cried for lost opportunity. Maybe it was regret that she put up with him as long as she did and her children suffered for it. I don't know. 

I don't have any personal bad memories of Earl, nor personal offense. But the borrowed bad memories - most unspoken - of my Mother's make me angry at the old sonofabitch. But he did give me my Mom, I'll grant him that. And for that I will always be deeply grateful.