Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

170 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Debra Gwartney
man who’d had a heart attack down in Mesa two days earlier. I took a
bite and turned to throw her a line, spoken with my mouth full to the
lips: I wasn’t going. My mother stepped back, shocked, I think, by a
willfulness that was unlike me, her obedient oldest kid. She was about
to respond, to yell or cry, but I ducked into the stairwell to get away. I
didn’t understand my own refusal to do this part of the burying, this
last look before he went under for good. And I wasn’t sure why I was
shaky and hot with rage just thinking about it. Who was I mad at?
Death? My grandfather for leaving me? Or was I smart enough back
then to be mad at my grandfather for leaving my mother?
My grandmother Mamie, in a space of five years, had watched
four of her own babies die at birth. I’ve heard that for a long time she
rarely spoke and refused to sign her name to a letter or a check or,
later, to a school form for my mom. She buttoned herself tight as a
cardigan sweater. As the only child of that distant mother, my own
mom had attached herself to Grandpa Ron when she was a toddler.
She’d stayed attached. He was her protector and the even keel of his
uneven family. If Grandpa Ron lost faith in my mother when she got
pregnant at seventeen, I—the result of that high school tryst—never
detected it. He was steady for her, and for me, until he was gone.
Grandpa Ron was a different kind of man than the men of my
father’s family, who also lived in the same little town tucked in the
eastern side of Idaho. The Gwartneys were livelier and adventurous,
quicker to fury. A horse, a Scout truck, or a broken faucet was a stupid
son-of-a-bitch when Grandpa Bob got fed up. My father’s son-of-abitch
was even louder than his father’s and often came with a kick or a
whack, though my sisters and I were usually just dummies. Sometimes
we were ding-a-lings.
At Mamie and Grandpa Ron’s house, we were either pixies or
pills when we got in the way, but mostly we were invited in and fussed
over, Mamie proclaiming that my brother needed a haircut and
pulling him up on a stool next to the sink, already reaching for razorsharp
scissors, or sterilizing a needle because my sister’s thumb had
gone red and full of pus around an old splinter. These grandparents
barely got by like everyone else, but they had an aura of the economic
well-to-do, a kind of gentility respected by most everyone in town.
Owning the newspaper got them in with the social crowd, I suppose,
but they also had a charm and generosity toward others. When they’d
moved to Salmon as a young couple with their one surviving child