sidebar
Logo Top Banner
Home
slogan Alaska Timeline Alaska Kids About
Peer Work
Family & Community
History & Culture
Digital Archives
Narrative & Healing
Reading & Writing
Libraries & Booksellers
Teaching & Learning
Contact Us

  Search Litsite Alaska
Find us on Facebook

Peer Work

Home  >  Peer Work
Second Childhood
By Robert Raven
Genre: Fiction Level: Adult
Category: UAA/ADN Creative Writing Contest

The boy sat on the porch steps and let the warm September breeze ruin the careful combing of his hair. He could hear his parents inside, behind the closed door, still arguing.

"We have to do this, Lillian," his father said.

"You have to," his mother said. "We could stay here."

"It's a family thing. We have to go as a family. I realize he's my father, but if we don't all go and help him, we'll never get him out of that house."

"So, if I'm there to give him something to insult and complain about, it'll distract him and we can get him moved finally, is that it?"

There was a pause. His father said, "Lillian."

After another pause, his father went on, "Look, I know he can be pretty uncivil these days. Even to me. None of this has been easy for him, and he really likes Danny. He always acts better around Danny."

A muffled thump sounded, maybe a footstep or something being dropped. Then his mother said, "Let's get it over with."

The door opened behind him, and his father said, "Ready, Danny?"

Without turning, the boy said, "Do we have to?"

His father came to the steps and sat down beside him. The boy heard him breathe deep, the way he always did before he said something unpleasant.

"He's your grandfather, Danny. Yes, we have to."

"He acts so weird, Dad."

"Danny, he's old. He gets tired. He doesn't hear very well, and he can't get around like he used to. He forgets things. Sometimes he remembers things that never happened, and sometimes he talks to himself. Everything is pretty confusing to him now. Gran would say he's in his second childhood."

"He smells bad."

"He smokes. It's about the only pleasure he has, except for seeing you."

Danny didn't say anything. What his father said was true; Gramp did like him and did act better around him than around his mother. Three or four years ago, when he was five or six, it had been great fun to drive out to the farmhouse to see Gramp. Gramp used to play little magic tricks, making playing cards appear and disappear in his hands, pulling a quarter out of Danny's ear, things like that. He'd been old then, but not--not really old, not the way he'd become since, grouchy and angry and sometimes saying stuff that didn't make sense and might even be scary.

"Come on, Dan, to the Batcar," Danny's father said, his way of trying to cram some fun into things that didn't have any. Danny stood up and followed.

#

His mother looked out the passenger-side window and said nothing during the entire hour-long drive. His father spent much of it talking to him.

"Gramp has to move, Danny. The farm's been sold. The state is building a highway next year right through it, and they'll have to tear down the house. Gramp doesn't like it, God knows, he's been there all his life. But there's a time for everything. We've got this really nice place lined up for him, and once we get him there, he'll be fine. He'll have new friends his age, instead of living alone in that broken-down old house, like he's done since Gran passed away."

Some minutes and about a hundred telephone poles went by outside Danny's window.

"You know he really likes to see you, Danny. It always perks him up. It'll help him a lot with you there. We won't be long. I've got to check around the house to see what needs done, then we'll just get him out to the car and head on out. I'll come back tomorrow and get stuff packed. That'll go better if he's not there."

Danny counted twenty-seven poles.

"He's kind of set in his ways, Gramp is. I guess you get that way after so many years. How old is he now, Lillian? -eighty-seven-no, eighty-eight. Eighty-eight years living in the same house. Did I tell you Gramp's father built that house? Gramp got the farm when his dad died and stayed on. That's where I grew up, too. He wanted me to be a farmer, like him."

They drove through the little town with the dead movie theater and its huge, tattered marquee, and the one stop light. It was green and they didn't need to slow down.

"He doesn't like change and he sure doesn't like to give anything up," Danny's father said, softly, more to himself than to Danny. Then, after a short pause, "He'll be a lot closer to us when we get him moved, Danny. A lot closer to you. He knows that. I think that'll help, him knowing that. Sometimes he forgets, and maybe you could remind him, you know?"

"Yeah, Dad."

Two hundred thirty-two more poles, along with fourteen billboards, lined the highway before they turned onto the crunching gravel road.

#

Gramp was sitting in the wicker chair on the porch when they arrived.

"Hey, Dad!" Danny's father called with a wave as he got out of the car. Gramp didn't move.

Danny's father led them up the walk to the porch, Danny following, his mother behind. "Danny," his father whispered, leaning down toward him, "say hello to Gramp."

"Hi, Gramp," Danny said.

Gramp looked for the first time at them. After a couple of seconds a smile creased his face.

"Daniel! If it isn't little Daniel! Come here, son, let me see how tall you are."

"Lillian," Danny heard his father whisper, "let's leave Danny and Gramp here and go look at things. Can we try to be polite, please?"

"Hi, Dad," his mother said as they passed Gramp's chair on the way into the house.

Gramp ignored her. He beckoned at Danny to come closer to the chair.

"Glad you're here, Daniel. I been waiting. Sit down there." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I got a secret to tell you. Something you and me got to do."

Danny sat cross-legged beside the chair. Like always, Gramp reeked of stale tobacco, and Danny wanted to move away, into fresh air.

"Daniel," the old man said, "you know what a time capsule is?"

Danny shook his head.

"Well," Gramp said, pausing with a grunt to adjust his feet as if his knees hurt, "a time capsule is a thing they sometimes put in the walls of buildings like courthouses. They put papers and pictures and letters and stuff in it, when they build the building, and then maybe a hundred years later, they dig it out, and look at the stuff to see what things were like back then."

"Oh," Danny said. He looked at Gramp, trying to see in the old man's eyes if this might be the start of one of those episodes where he became confused and strange and scary. Gramp was looking out across the cornfield, toward the rocky hill covered with trees that disrupted the flatter, plowable land.

"I made one once," Gramp said. "Long time ago, all my own. Put some treasures in it, too."

He fumbled in the breast-pocket of his shirt and pulled out a pack of loose tobacco and some rolling papers. Danny watched the ancient stiffened, shaking fingers fight with the tiny square of paper and the pouch. No way those fingers could ever disappear a playing card anymore. Somehow he managed to pour the right amount of the vile-smelling brown shreds into the trough of the paper, lick the edge and roll it into an ugly cigarette. He lit it with a match, closed his eyes and inhaled long and deep. A cloud of smoke emerged from his mouth and nostrils like an ancient ghost with a life of its own, drifted up and dissipated in the breeze. "I was thinking, considering your Dad and Mom are kicking me out of my house today, we might just go dig up that time capsule, and take us a looksee."

Danny looked up at his face. His glass-marble eyes were directed off at the distance over Danny's head.

"Where is it, Gramp?"

Gramp paused, off in his own world where Danny had seen him go so many times, not hearing what anybody said to him. "Out there," he said. He raised an arm and pointed a shaky crooked finger in the direction of the woods. "See them trees? I buried it real careful out there, you'll see. Come the road, they'll dig it all up through there with bulldozers. They'll dig that time capsule up, too, smash it and bury it all again in pieces and never know they done it. I used to get out there every now and then to look where it is. It ain't been disturbed since I put it there."

He puffed on the cigarette. "Daniel," he said, "You and me got to go dig it up today. Then I guess I'll be ready to leave this old house. Place won't matter much anymore."

He struggled to his feet with a grunt and a wheeze. Danny stood up and reached for his hand, in case he needed help, but Gramp waved him away. "I can still stand and walk by myself," he growled.

#

The path between the fence and the dry cornstalks was just wide enough for one person, and had a summer's growth of weeds. Even without Gramp's unsteady step it would have been slow going. He moved from fencepost to fencepost, pausing at each one as if to catch his balance and breath. Behind him Danny carried a short-handled spade and a hooked pry bar Gramp had told him to pick up from behind the garage door.

"Your Dad probably told you I'm stubborn," he said.

"Yeah," Danny said.

"Well, he's right. I am. I got what I got by not giving up. I don't give anything up easy. Anything. It don't pay."

He paused, short of breath, and with a wince stretched his back.

"Probably I got that from my Dad," he went on. "Nineteen forty-three it was, Daniel. I was right about your age. You ever hear about World War Two?"

"Yeah," Danny said. "Sort of."

"Well, back then, I didn't know much about it either, except it was scary to everybody. All I knew was, we didn't have much, money or anything else. We scraped and scratched and got us enough to eat, most days. Sometimes you just have to do whatever you can to get by."

They started off again, made six or seven fenceposts before Gramp needed another rest.

"I didn't have many friends, they'd all moved away to California or someplace, and what time I had was all to myself. I had to find friends of my own, when I was all alone. So I'd go out here to these woods and talk, and pretend there were lots of others out there with me. It got so I really believed there were. There's a lot of power in pretending. And you know what, Daniel?"

"What, Gramp?"

"It worked. Turns out there were friends out there. Oh, not like ones I could see. But I could hear ‘em. They started answering me."

Danny stopped.

"I don't know, Gramp. Maybe we ought to get back to the house. Dad----"

"No, Daniel, no! There's a thing we got to do. Your Dad won't mind."

Bent like a question mark, he leaned against another post, his face redder than usual. They had crossed a little rise and now, down the other side, Danny could no longer see the house. If Dad yelled for him, he was pretty sure he would hear, but he had heard nothing. After a moment's rest, Gramp forced himself more upright, and waved a hand at the woods, now maybe a football field away.

"I had some real good friends out there. Sometimes, especially at night, when the wind's just right, you can hear ‘em singing. They taught me lots of magic. You'll see." He started forward again, a slight stagger in his step. Danny grabbed his arm to steady him.

"Knees, Daniel, you get old, the knees go. It would be nice to be young again, it surely would." He paused for breath. "I'm glad you're here today, Daniel. Having you here makes everything all right. I feel younger already."

He stopped to lean against the next post.

"It was my friends told me to make a time capsule. Now earlier that summer the town down the road built a new city hall, and I read where they put a time capsule in the cornerstone. Had a big ceremony, even with a senator there as I recall, lots of smiling muckymucks. Then a couple days later I come out here and my friends told me I needed to do the same. Told me what kinds of stuff to put in it, to fill it with magic. Told me I'd need it someday, and then I could come back and get it. You believe that?"

"Sure, Gramp."

"Well, I guess they was right. Today's the day. Good thing you're here. I kind of expected you'd be here when I dug it up, you know."

#

Gramp led him, with painful halting slowness, to a place where the brush parted a little, and pushed back weeds and branches with his hardened hands, to give them access.

They had to clamber up a little slope and over loose eroded pieces of limestone, littered in fallen leaves. The old man puffed and grunted at every step, maybe ten yards of distance, to the base of a wall of brown-gray rock, the color of Gramp's face, creased with horizontal crevices, all shaded in the thinning canopy of oaks. There he sat down heavily.

"Bones of the earth," he said. "These rocks been here long before me, but the road people they're gonna dynamite ‘em, cause that highway's got to be straight, and by God they'll make it straight. Right through here and on through the house." He looked around at the trees. "A year from now, Daniel, all this will be gone. Me too."

He wheezed out a chuckle. "Over to your right," he said, "see that deep crack goes way back in? We got to dig right at the bottom there."

#

The work took maybe half an hour. It hadn't rained a couple of weeks, and the earth was dry, but if Gramp was right it hadn't been disturbed in many years, and it didn't want to yield secrets easily. Danny lost himself in the effort and intrigue about what they were doing. Gramp issued directions and made observations, some of which seemed to have nothing to do with their expedition. Danny managed to scrape and pry a good-sized hole out of the ground, but it promised nothing. He began to think the time capsule was one of Gramp's illusions, a dream of a past that had never happened. Maybe this digging for an imaginary buried treasure was what Dad meant about a "second childhood."

"Gramp," he said, "I don't think it's here. You sure this is the right place?"

"Daniel," the old man said, "you got to believe. This is where you just got to believe."

Danny shrugged. There wasn't a way to get Gramp to change his mind, unless he decided to change it himself. The boy jammed the spade once again into the unforgiving earth, and it met with a clank against something hard.

"That's it!" Gramp said, and he stood up. "Got to be it! I put it under this big flat rock, and then covered the whole thing up with dirt. Clear it away, now, let's see what it looks like."

Another five minutes of hard scraping on hands and knees revealed a slab of limestone about two inches thick. Danny pushed the blade of the shovel under the lower edge and lifted. The rock moved ever so slightly. Gramp handed him the pry bar.

"Give it a go with that, Daniel. It's been there a long time and is probably set in its ways, like I am."

Two or three minutes more and Danny was able to worry the stone out of its place with his hands. He slid it forward, rolled it over and revealed a hole about the size of a loaf of bread, boxed in on all four sides by upright limestone pieces. Gray clay and debris had washed into it, filling it nearly to the top, but in the middle nested something that didn't look like rock or dirt. He heard the old man inhale a hissing breath, the sound a startled snake might make.

"That's it, Daniel," Gramp said in a rattling whisper, as if afraid someone might hear. "That's my old time capsule. It's a big mason jar, inside of a leather pouch."

The old man got down on his hands and knees and began to claw at the hole with his fingers, scraping out the soil. In a matter of seconds he was able to get a grasp on the package, and lifted it up from its home of seventy-some years. His hands shook violently as he held it in front of both of them.

Danny shivered. Something about this expedition felt like digging up a grave.

Gramp's age-clumsy hands fought with the shapeless dirty packet for a few seconds, before finding the flap that closed it. Danny could hear his breath, short and panting, as he pulled from it the glass jar, unbroken, sealed on the top with a ragged ring of yellowed wax. Gramp set the jar on the ground, and slumped into a sitting position beside it. He leaned his head back against the rock wall and closed his eyes, and mumbled, "Thank you, thank you."

"Gramp?" Danny said, kneeling beside him. "Gramp, are you all right?"

Gramp wheezed in a deep breath. "Yes, Daniel, I'm all right. I'm maybe more all right than I been in a long time."

He fumbled in a pants-pocket and produced a horn-handled jack-knife, which he handed to Danny.

"Here. My fingers ain't good enough to work with this anymore. You be careful now. Use the big blade and see if you can carve away that wax so we can open it. I sealed it with wax so's it would keep out water, least I hoped it would. I couldn't think of anything better. Let's see if it did."

Danny worked at the brittle wax with the point of the blade, and in a few seconds had cracked off a big curved piece. The rest fell away. The screw-cap of the jar was rusted, but seemed solid.

"I put grease on the threads," Gramps said, "so's it would maybe still turn. Can you twist it?"

Danny tried, and to his astonishment, it gave; a little working back-and-forth brought it off completely.

He heard Gramp take a sharp breath. "Let me hold it, Daniel," he said. "Let me look down into there, where nobody's looked for seventy-seven years."

He handed the jar to Gramp, who held it and peered into its mouth. "Aaaahh," the old man whispered.

#

From an overall pocket Gramp conjured a big red handkerchief which he uncrumpled and laid out on the ground.

"Okay, Daniel," he said in a hoarse whisper, "dump it all out there."

It took some shaking, but the jar disgorged two old paper envelopes and a small brown glass bottle.

Gramp picked up one of the envelopes, loosened the flap with a delicacy and dexterity Danny didn't think his fingers had, and the whole thing unfolded to reveal a small shock of brownish-blond hair.

"Same color as yours, Daniel," Gramp said. "I cut that off of me, back then, when I was just your age. Hair don't rot, at least not sealed up like this."

Danny looked up at Gramp, to see the wisps of gray on his head. The hairs lying on the ancient folded paper could have come from his own head, but it was impossible to imagine them having ever been Gramp's.

Gramp picked up the other envelope, wedged a horny long fingernail under the flap and the brittle old paper parted along the seal with a slithery noise.

"What's in it?" Danny said.

Gramp's leather fingers withdrew a square of paper, yellowed like the envelope. "Take a look," he said, offering it to Danny.

Danny turned it over, and the hair on the back of his neck rose. It was a photograph, faded and brownish, but recognizable.

A photograph of himself.

Gramp cackled.

"I thought that might make your eyes go wide."

"Gramp! It's me! How did----"

Gramp laughed aloud, and it dissolved into a hacking dry cough he had to fight to control. Danny stared at the photo. It was like looking into an old dusty mirror from across a shaded room. Even the hair was parted on the right side, like his, with the one unruly front lock dangling down across his eyes.

Gramp beat back the cough, pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose loudly.

"Does look like you, don't it?" he said, wiping his eyes. "But it isn't." He pointed a shaking forefinger at the image. "That there is me, me at your age, back in nineteen forty-three. Your Dad ever tell you you look just like old pictures of me?"

Danny looked up at the old man; was this what he would look like in seventy years? A face all folds and creases, a few remnant gray hairs wisping up from the spotted dome of skin on top of his head, the remaining teeth browned from tobacco, reddened eyes set deep in dark wrinkled pouches, like those of a watchful lizard waiting inside a cave? Was he going to be like this, like his dad said, remembering things that didn't happen? Talking to himself, or to imaginary magic people who weren't there? He looked back at the picture. "No," he said. "At least--I don't think so."

"Well, maybe not. But I noticed it by the time you was three or so. Same eyes, same hair I used to have. Same smile. You look more like me as a kid than your Dad did."

Danny watched Gramp make another cigarette and get it started. When the infusion of smoke had relaxed him a little, the old man said,

"Well, there's just the bottle."

He picked it up and held it in front of the boy's face. No more than four inches long, it looked like a medicine bottle. The top was sealed with the same wax used on the lid of the time capsule.

"What's in it?" Danny asked.

"What's in it? Oh, Daniel, there's magic in here, real honest-to-God magic. Here. Look at it."

The old man gave Danny the bottle. He held it up toward the light of the sky filtered through the turning leaves.

"It looks empty, Gramp."

"Empty? Well, I guess it would. But it's not. Do you believe in magic, Daniel?"

Danny turned the bottle around in his fingers. Seventy-seven years Gramp had been waiting to dig up this bottle of nothing?

"I don't know."

"Daniel, for magic to work, you got to believe. That's the real magic, believing. There's a lot of magic in believing."

"There's nothing there. Air, maybe."

"You can't always see magic, Daniel, in fact you can't hardly ever see it. But it's there all the same. Just waiting for somebody to believe in it. Real magic sometimes has a way of making folks believe in it, even when they don't want to. . . ." His voice trailed off into another series of coughs.

"You okay, Gramp?" Danny said.

"Yeah, yeah. As okay as I'm gonna get at eighty-eight. You want to know what's in that bottle? Why I put that bottle in there?"

Danny nodded.

"All right, then. I'll tell you. When I was putting this time capsule together, I tried to get as much of the magic of me in it as I could." He took a drag on the wretched cigarette, making the end glow bright. "My mother had that bottle, full of some awful cough medicine as I recall. I snuck it out the medicine cabinet, dumped it and washed it good. You're going to put magic in a bottle, you can't have no damn cough medicine smell in it."

He paused, and looked at the bottle.

"So then, what I did was get the cap all ready, and blow a big breath into it, and quick cap it up, so's it wouldn't escape. Then I sealed it up with wax, just like the big jar, and that's the wax you broke off of the top there."

He handed the bottle to Danny.

"You still think there's nothing in it? You still don't believe in magic, Daniel?"

"I don't know, Gramp."

"If you saw it happen, would you?"

"Maybe. I guess."

"What do you see in the bottle?"

"Nothing."

"Okay, now, since there's nothing in it, you can open the bottle."

Danny twisted at the cap, which didn't move.

"It's been trapped in there a long time, this magic that was inside of me," Gramp said. "Sleeping, all comfortable, don't want to get out. You let it out, it might get mad."

"Gramp," Danny said; he gritted his teeth and gave it a harder twist.

The lid gave, just a little. Gramp saw it.

"Wait," he said.

Danny paused. "Why?"

"You can't just let the magic fly out into the air and be wasted, Daniel. Magic is precious. That's me in that bottle. I put me in there seventy-seven years ago, and I been in there ever since."

Danny looked at the bottle in his hands.

"It's like your dad said," Gramp went on. "I am stubborn. I can wait. I can wait longer than anybody. And I been waiting in that bottle for all them years, Daniel. Just waiting."

Danny looked back at the old man. If Gramp got too weird out here in the woods, he'd have to go get Dad and Mom and bring them out to get him, and they'd be really mad that he'd let Gramp drag him out here. Somehow he had to get Gramp enough back to normal to get him to the house.

"Okay, Gramp," he said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Daniel, I want you to have this magic, all to yourself. I want you to have all them years of me, all sealed up in that bottle, all that magic, all that time."

"You want me to open it?"

"Yes. But don't you waste it. Get it right up to you, and when the lid comes off, breathe it, feel it, catch it all to yourself, all them years waiting in there just for you."

"Okay, Gramp." He held the bottle up to his face, the neck with the lid still on, next to his nostrils. The bottle was empty, nothing but plain old air in it. For Gramp, he would play out the game, then they could go back to the house.

"Good, Daniel," Gramp said. "Now you can open it."

Danny unscrewed the balky cap, lifted it off, and took a deep breath so Gramp could see him do it.

A faint smell issued from the bottle, stale, sour, a tingle in his nostrils like a breath of peppery vinegar. For a moment he thought a cloud had slid across the sun. It grew dark, with a whistling of wind, the earth beneath his knees fell away, and he too was falling, falling, as in one of those awful dreams he sometimes had, the ones that always woke him just before he would crash.

He snapped awake, just like in the dreams, and light came back, with sparks that moved away toward the edges of his vision, and he saw in front of him the dark round hole of open neck of the little bottle, clutched in his stiffened, leathery fingers. Opposite him the boy knelt, smiling.

"Are you all right, Gramp?" the boy asked.

He stared at the boy, then at the bottle, then back at the boy.

The boy smiled more broadly, and said, "Well? Did the magic work, Gramp?"

#

"Dad! Mom!" the boy called as he ran toward the farmhouse. "Come quick!"

His father opened the door and stepped out, letting it slam behind him. His mother followed.

"What is it, Danny?" his father called.

The boy stopped and pointed toward the trees..

"It's Gramp! He's out there, and he's got really weird again! Quick, Dad!" He started a few steps back toward the woods

His father ran, caught up with him, grabbed his shoulders, and turned him.

"What, son? What about Gramp?"

The boy pointed again. "He made me take him out there, Dad. I shouldn't have, but he made me. He was okay at first, but--but then he got weird, like he does. You know. He started yelling and stuff. And--Dad, he thinks he's me!"

His father stood up and looked toward the trees. His mother arrived, breathless.

"Alan, what is it?"

"It's Dad," he said. "Danny says he's gone off again. He's out there somewhere. Come on."

He started at a trot down the fence line, the boy following.

"Wait!" she said. "Listen!"

From the direction of the trees they heard the old man's cracking voice, faint and shrill, but clear enough, screaming:

"Please, Gramp, please! Come back! I believe! I believe! Please!"

 

The End

 

 

 


sidebar
  Contact Us       LitSite Alaska, Copyright © 2000 - 2024. All rights reserved. UAA / University of Alaska Anchorage.
University of Alaska Anchorage