It had never been easy, but Muriel was finally happy with where the rugged path of her life had ended up. She vividly remembered the day that Jimmy was born and she was magically transformed from a middle-aged woman into a grandmother. Horace had still been alive, but dementia had reduced this once-vigorous redwood tree of a man to a gnarled and crooked branch. He appeared frightened and confused in the obligatory photographs that were snapped of him holding his new grandson. By the time his granddaughter Jennifer was born, a year and a half later, he was resting peacefully in a corner of the cemetery while Muriel emerged from his shadow and embraced her new identity.
She had been a very young seventeen when she had married Horace, who was twenty-five and being shipped off to Guam to service military vehicles during the Vietnam war. Her honeymoon night, spent in an old cabin on Horace’s parents’ farm, was the first time she had ever had sex. She had felt God’s eyes watching her, and he must have done more than just watched because eight months later she gave birth to her only daughter, Janice. Premature, she was too small for a bassinet and had to be brought home in a shoe box.
Horace returned to the family farm when his two-year stint was up, but there was something different about him. He was fond enough of Janice, but would obviously have preferred a boy. While Muriel showed her how to cook and clean and otherwise look after men-folk, Horace taught her how to work on the tractor. When Janice was twelve she stopped going with her father out to the barn. She became moody and started frowning at the horizon.
Janice earned a basketball scholarship to the state college thirty miles away and she never really came home. That had hurt Muriel. She had thought Janice was ashamed of her humble roots. She had come when Horace suffered his stroke. She didn’t hold his hand, she just stood and stared at his eyes above the oxygen mask, so much like the bass that used to gaze out of the bucket on their fishing trips. There had been no wedding for Janice, but at least she had brought Jimmy and Jennifer to the old family homestead and left them there for a few weeks every summer.
Jimmy ran in the house and interrupted Muriel’s ruminations. “Grammy! Grammy! Come look at what I found! An awesome fort!”
It was a hidden room under the barn. Jimmy had been playing in the old chicken coop and part of the old flooring had given way. It probably dated back to the Civil War, but its contents were much more recent. There was a cot and a half-empty jar of vaseline. Jimmy’s eyes teared up with disappointment when Grammy Muriel had a contractor come out and fill the hollow with concrete. She also wanted an answer to the question, “But… why?”
Literature in Small Doses 