Every Thought Captive…BENEDICTION: A Short Story

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 1:6-13

I open my eyes. This dull gray light slipping through the window blinds is blurry to me. I reach over to the nightstand, feel about for my glasses, put them on. The room about me, my parent’s guestroom, is dark. Obviously, the sun is not up yet. My wife is asleep next to me. We were just visiting for the weekend. And I am awake.  

Just yesterday there had been a partial solar eclipse. I ease out of bed and step lightly past the pack-n-play where our baby lays. I open the bedroom door, walk out, close it slowly behind me. My two big girls, though still little themselves, sleep in the bedroom opposite.  Just yesterday everything had turned the shade of a charcoal sketch.    

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We had left Dallas early. The sun came up. Then, about mid-morning, everything edged toward dusk for a while. By the time we turned onto the dirt road, the sun was shining again. Our car rattled over the rock my father and grandfather had laid by tractor, building up the road. We drove past the pond, up the hill, curved right, came around a tall pine tree to the left, and down the hill beyond my grandparent’s house. The horse pasture was on our right. I was a boy the last time I saw horses there. I never asked what happened to them.  

We came up another hill and parked in front of my parent’s house. The dogs were barking as usual. I waited for my mother. She would come out of the house onto the porch, walk over just smiling and smiling, and give us big hugs. But she didn’t. We got out of the car and went inside the house. Hello. Lunch was on the stove, the range fan humming. Hello! Nothing.  

I walked back outside. There on the hill across the way, red oak trees here and there, is the house I grew up in. My sister and her family live there now. A pine plantation, rows of middling loblolly trees, hem the house in from the back. I looked and didn’t see anyone. Across the hay pasture and up to my grandparent’s house: nobody. I stood there on the front porch. I thought to myself. Something is wrong.  

I heard the tires crumbling rock first. A yellow jeep drove fast down the road. It was my aunt, my father’s oldest sister. She doesn’t drive that fast, I thought to myself. The jeep turned in at my grandparent’s house. No lights flashed. No siren blared. An ambulance pulled out from behind the house. It drove up the road and disappeared around the bend.  

When my mother returned, she told me PawPaw had fallen. Maybe a stroke, I don’t know, she told me. They had found him on the floor in the doorway to his shop behind the house. His face drooped to one side. He was conscious, still able to talk, a bit slurred. They were taking him to the hospital in town.

After this, I don’t know how long it was; I can’t remember. Not long. All I know is that I was driving to the hospital alone. My mother had gone ahead of me. My father was stuck on a job over an hour away from town. My phone dinged. It was lying there in the console. The screen lit up. I glanced down. Read the message. Mom Cell: “He is gone.”  

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I take off my glasses, put in contacts, dress, and step outside on the back porch. Down the hill, across the creek bottom, a line of tall shadows can be made out dimly as woods. The air is light and crisp. The lingering summer heat has lifted. The humidity has passed away. It is October in East Texas. Joy comes with the morning. I do not feel it.

I start off down the hill. Heavy dew gathers on my boots, collecting sandy loam, wild seeds, and grass stems. I reach the foot of the hill and walk onto a mowed path, headed to the woods. The light in the bottom is shy of a bruise. I stop and look back up the hill from where I have come. There is my parent’s house. No lights are on. It is silent. Over there is the house I grew up in. In-between and farther back is MeMaw and PawPaw’s house. No. What do I call it now? MeMaw’s house? I turn and keep walking.

Somewhere nearby, across the creek, a crow calls out. But my ear is elsewhere. I am listening for the pop-pop-pop of a nail gun, the shrill buzzing of a table saw, the low idling of a tractor. My grandfather would not be up working this early. I know. He is gone. I know that. I still listen for him.

Nearing the pond, left low and muddy from a long summer drought, I see two white tail deer, watching near the edge of the woods. They stand very still and erect above the tall grass. A thin veil of white mist filters the air. I walk closer. How close can I get? The deer slip into the woods and disappear. Everywhere I look there is this deeply known thing of remembering.

Past the pond now and into the woods, I see the deer stand where I have hunted. I have sat there on a fall morning—the leaves of the trees turning rust, oxblood, and gold—and watched dove alight on the dewy grass, wood ducks fly over, sparrows and wrens flit branch to branch. I have seen the invisible become visible: one moment the thin, quiet trees, the next, standing there among them, a white tail buck. I have listened to the chorus of bird song and breathed the freshest air, free of charge. I have sat there in the dark beside my grandfather, puffing chilled breath, no words said, no words needing to be said, together, watching for first light.

I walk beyond the path and into a clearing. I step under the outstretched limbs of an old willow oak. Enormous roots hulk out the ground, disappear. I walk close enough to touch the dark gray bark, turning black here and there, hard and smooth, with narrow ridges. I stretch my arms out wide, measuring the trembling rings, rippling outward, marking all the years, hidden within this wood. The willow oak reaches as wide as my left hand is from the right.

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What I remember most, I think, is his hands. I remember how big my grandfather’s hands were, those long fingers, that vast palm. “Put it there, partner,” he’d say, engulfing my hand in his. There was power in those hands, hard and work-worn. They were not perfect. His hands came into tenderness just about the same way wood is finished. My grandfather liked woodworking. He would run course grit over the rough places, sanding and sanding, switch to fine grit, and refine the little imperfections. He did not create the wood, its inner character and shine. He only received what was hidden, worked to reveal the loveliness of the given woodgrain. He would slide his fingers over the finished wood, smooth and pretty. His were hands that strove for excellence. His care and skill could transform a dead tree, give it new life. And I will also say this: his hands made well whatever they touched. My grandfather had the hands of an artist. He spoke with his hands.  

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I tell this as I see it in my mind’s eye. Some details, I admit, may be the mingling of memories. The mind and imagination see through a glass, darkly. I seek to see what is worth remembering as clearly as I can, never enough. Still, I will look through affection at what I have known. Perhaps I shall see things I have missed.  

My grandfather sat in a recliner, his hands in his lap, fingers interwoven. My grandmother sat in a chair to his right. The lights were turned off. With all those big windows, overlooking the pastures and woods, the sun shining, there was no need for bought light in that house. My grandfather built it. He laid the wood floor, those wide yellowpine boards, nailed them in. The fireplace centered the room; the brick chimney rose high into the vaulted ceiling, ribbed with boards stained lightly. Deer mounts hung on the walls. Draped over the railing to the upstairs loft, a horse saddle collected dust.

Sitting there, just visiting with his grandson, he got to talking. For whatever reason, and I can’t remember how we got on the subject, my grandfather told me that he kept my older sister and me when we were little while my parents went to work. He spoke slow and deep, at times, almost mutteringly. His gray mustache barely moved as he talked. I was still in diapers, he told me. He stared off as he spoke to me, a man with a child in diapers myself. He told me my aunt had moved back home. This was my father’s baby sister. 28 years old, she had brain cancer. And here was this tall man in Wrangler blue jeans, sitting there, just saying something that happened to be on his mind. A surgery weeks before I was born gave his daughter a chance to live and severed her short-term memory. My grandparents had to inject her with an experimental cancer treatment derived from Rosy Periwinkle. She was their flower child.

My grandfather was just talking, telling a memory as only he knew it. Chemo injections, cleaning up vomit, between these, he said, “I was changing yourdiapers.” His hands rested there in his lap. He did not look at me. He said, “Those were hard days.” My aunt lived until I was in my early thirties.
Together, my grandparents had known what it is to sit in the dark. Together, they lived in the house with all that light. Hand in hand, they kept the light within a promise: to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till . . ..

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The willow oak’s long, spear shaped leaves have fallen, lay scattered on the ground. Here, a wild acorn, strewn among the virgin pine and hardwood trees, given to soil and light, sprouted. A shoot reached up. The sapling grew, spread its leaves, and welcomed all the little hidden lives of this place. Withstanding the flooded creek, fierce wind, lightning, and drought: the willow oak saw the woods cut down, the land ploughed, cotton picked, man’s long ache, sweat upon the face, the creek bottom given up to pasture. The pasture returned to light. The old stumps have all rotted now. The woods return. Beneath a blushing sky, the willow oak bears witness.  

And there is this other tree with healing in its leaves. I do not see it now. It is planted by streams of living water. It reaches out within the light of that dawn without daybreak. Night will be no more. God’s face will be upon all His children. Jesus Christ will be brighter than the sun.  

My grandfather, he is gone. But I know something else too. Where love is there is light and light comes by tender mercy and tender mercy comes to wake the dead.
I stand beneath this willow oak with its immense trunk and watch light break through its outstretched limbs, set it aflame, shatter into streams of gold. I turn and look back up the path I have come. The woods and pastures and hills are gilded in light. This life, this breath, this everything is given, not earned.  

I start to walk home. Far off, atop the hill, little children call out.