The grandmother believed in Jesus and in facts.
On her bookshelf: the King James Bible, an atlas, an illustrated medical dictionary, a farmers’ almanac. No romance novels. No mysteries, no books about art or photography, no poetry. Nothing whimsical. Nothing to entertain.
The grandmother’s books instructed her on life and the afterlife. You could read Scripture to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. You could look up how to treat a plantar wart, identify a black widow spider, check the fall’s frost date. You could locate Guatemala in Central America, where your Baptist church sent missionaries, and Saigon where your son was sent to war.
When her grandchildren were born, the grandmother bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias: twenty books that smelled of glue, edged in gold, filled with shiny colorful photographs and maps, diagrams of machines.
In this way, the grandmother hoped to impart how to survive in a world that was often ugly and always sinful. Facts at your fingertips could save you from ignorance and humiliation. Christ could save you from yourself.
The encyclopedias fascinated the children. The cellophane inserts of a frog’s body, overlaid with blood vessels, muscles, and bones. The articles on elephants, airplanes, and Iceland. And later, the unit on “Reproduction” with its clinical but titillating description of intercourse.
But the volumes were soon outdated. The map of Africa was wrong, and the section on space travel—ridiculous!
The grandmother was born in 1920, the year women got the vote and men lost liquor. She grew up on a hardscrabble farm in the foothills of South Carolina.
She left her crowded farmhouse at sixteen, moved into a rooming house, and worked at a textile mill. She was tired of taking care of her sisters and brothers. She did not care for children. She wanted to earn her own money, sleep in her own bed, buy her dresses, not sew them.
After three years, she married a local boy who left farming for soldiering in the Second World War. The grandmother’s husband, a tank mechanic, fought in the Battle of Normandy.
When her grandchildren asked about this, about the war, about the grandmother’s childhood and the Great Depression, the grandmother didn’t want to talk about it. The grandmother only talked about the funny, good things, not the hard, dark parts of her life, which the grandchildren heard about from cousins.
Funny: The grandmother played basketball as a girl and had a photograph of herself in her uniform—baggy pantaloons, puffy sleeves.
Sad secret: The grandmother had loved playing basketball in school, the fierce competition, the brusque women’s coach barking orders, even the miserable, modest uniforms. But she had to quit the team, because sports and girls? Don’t be silly.
Good: The grandmother recalled how her family’s plow horse adored her father. How that horse nuzzled her father’s arm and obeyed him, only him, no one else, not even her brother.
Shameful: The plow horse kept the grandmother’s family alive, laboring with the grandmother’s father, dawn until dusk, until both were covered in sweat and dirt. A bad harvest meant a bad year, it meant hunger and sickness. It meant crying babies, it meant death.
Good: The grandmother was an observant, church-going Baptist. She didn’t drink alcohol, and believed no one else should, either. For any reason. No champagne toasts. No rum cake. Also, no dancing. Even square dancing. Nope. And no gambling. No casinos, no friendly hands of poker, no lottery, no Bingo. Drinking ruined men, and therefore ruined families. Ditto for gambling. As for dancing, read Mark 6:17-28. Dancing is how John the Baptist’s head ended up on a platter.
The grandmother took pleasure in displeasure. She believed happiness and hardship were yoked. You did not get one without the other.
She did not enjoy work, but it pleased her to endure it. A paycheck from forty hours of hell—a fair exchange. And the grandmother always worked—in the mill, as a telephone operator, as a secretary—jobs she found tedious and dreary, jobs she despised. In return: two acres, a new Plymouth, purchased with saved paychecks, from money not borrowed but earned, the only kind of money she trusted.
The grandmother did not fear poverty; she feared the shame of it. Like her father’s plow horse, she labored tirelessly, blinkered and resolute. If you worked hard, followed man’s rules and God’s laws, you would prosper. Look around. Only criminals, drunken layabouts, unrepentant sinners, and the lazy were poor. The Lord rewarded your faith, your hard work and thrift. Owning your house and car—well, your neighbors could see for themselves you were a fine Christian.
Still, the grandmother struggled mightily with temptation. She prayed hard before she went shopping. She begged the Lord for self-control because she wanted to buy, buy, buy. This was after the war, boom times—everyone in high cotton. Every two weeks, on payday, the grandmother allowed herself to walk through the magnificent, marble-floored department stores downtown, appalled at her own lust for silk stockings, patent-leather pumps, pearl chokers, Revlon lipstick. As the grandmother stepped onto the stuttering, thrilling escalator of Meyers-Arnold, she felt as if a child inside her awakened, taking in the racks of dazzling dresses, the array of darling hats, the candy-colored Fiestaware, the flamingo pink polka-dotted swimsuit, the stoppered perfume bottles from Paris. Look at all the pretties, the child’s voice inside her said. I’ve been so good. Can I have that, and that, and that? I deserve it! The grandmother recognized that voice of sin, tempting her to give in to fathomless desire, daring her to spend, to splurge. The spoiled, terrible child inside her needed thrashing and sent to bed without supper.
The grandmother reeled in her own ravenous buying impulses, kept an iron grip on her pocketbook, held sacred her budget, as any deviance could destroy her life, would bring the whole thing down. On each shopping trip, she allowed herself one carefully planned purchase: a pair of white gloves, a tie for her husband to wear to church, a Sunbeam toaster. And while she left the department store frustrated, yearning for more, more, more, the grandmother congratulated herself for resisting sin, for finding the strength to deny herself all the beautiful things, for muting that wicked child’s voice.
Of course, the grandmother’s enormous reservoir of self-discipline came at a price. It cost her curiosity. Impoverished her imagination. Drained her empathy. She resented those who let the greedy tyrant of a child inside them run amok and take over, people who grew fat, drunk, in debt. If she could overcome temptation, why couldn’t they? Her introspection atrophied, her judgment calcified. Also, the grandmother cultivated a habit of denying beauty. She did not allow herself the luxury of visiting museums, listening to opera, learning the Foxtrot, watching movies, or reading about strange, dangerous ideas in the newspaper. She turned away from art in all its guises, for such beauty moved and disturbed her.
But as the years passed, the grandmother learned to curate beauty, of a sort. She sought elegance that pleased her, that she could collect, cherish, display. And like a curator, she kept her valuables behind glass, in locked cabinets, dusted and polished, to be admired and coveted, seldom used. For decades she scrimped, buying her objects d’art with cash, never credit. First, sterling silverware, fine china, a crystal pitcher imported from Ireland. Next, white carpet in the living room, porcelain vases, exquisite lamps. In her closet, fashionable dresses hung, splendid suits in sherbet pastels, matching hats and shoes, and in her vanity, Maybelline powders and creams, clip-on ear bobs, daisy brooches.
The grandmother cherished her resplendent wardrobe, yet dressed up only a few hours each week, for church. She reserved her fine china settings for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. The other 362 days of the year, her family ate on chipped plates. Plastic runners and accordion doors kept the white living room unsullied, pristine as snow. In this way, the grandmother cordoned off her life, preserving all the beautiful things, protecting them.
The grandmother was not happy but, in the wake of an achievement or a purchase borne of her industriousness, occasionally appeared pleased.
Only when the grandmother prepared lunches for the grandfather did a rare look of tenderness cross her face. The grandchildren liked to watch this. First, the grandmother tucked the tough heel of leftover roast beef between soft white bread, slathered with Duke’s mayonnaise. Next, the careful folding and pleating of wax paper around the sandwich, as if the grandmother were wrapping a gift. The grandmother poured iced tea into a thermos, then packed the grandfather’s metal lunchbox, adding a watermelon rind pickle and something sweet, a square of homemade fudge, a slice of pound cake.
But mostly, there was no tenderness. There was no time for it. Weekdays, after work, and on Saturdays, the grandmother and the grandfather labored together in their garden, where there was always something urgent to plant, pick, put up, freeze, or can—bushels of okra, field peas, peppers, figs, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, turnips, sweet potatoes. Gardening was not a hobby. There were no hobbies. There were chores. Even the grandfather’s fishing was not leisurely but purposeful. Fish to cook, to store. The mess of bream and bass, the occasional catfish, cleaned and deboned, dipped in cornmeal, fried. The rest frozen, blocks of gleaming fish stacked, like fine, veined marble, in the spare freezer.
The grandmother kept this deep freezer in the garage, filled it with food grown or caught, her need to stockpile compulsive, urgent, inherited. She clipped coupons. She saved and saved and saved. The grandmother’s parsimony was legendary.
That’s why what happened later was so hard to believe.
The grandmother turned ninety, a widow for twenty years. The radius of her life shrank into a hard dot, a pinpoint of lead. The obituary pages filled with familiar names, people she had liked or detested. Some weeks, she went to the mortuary more often than Winn-Dixie. The Baptist church’s membership withered, the preacher went part-time. Young families moved into her neighborhood—from Mexico, Vietnam, India. Strange, spicy scents drifted into her yard at dinnertime. She heard foreign tongues bickering, proclaiming, celebrating.
The grandmother still drove her beige Chevrolet. She went to church, cooked for herself and for her grandchildren on Sundays. Twice a week, she carpooled with three friends, driving to the Y for senior aerobics. But the grandmother’s carpool did not spill over into lunches or brunches or outings. The grandmother didn’t cultivate female friends. She preferred the company of men.
Yet the men in her life kept disappearing. Her husband, lost to Alzheimers. Her son retiring, moving away. Her brother dying peacefully of pneumonia at ninety, but still— how she had worshiped him, her older brother who slopped pigs with her, milked cows, taught her how to drive a tractor, who loved her fig preserves, who opened his own barber shop, thanks to the GI Bill, who raised four God-fearing children.
Next door to the grandmother, in a rental house, her nephew lived on disability, doing odd jobs for her, and gardening, the two of them working side by side for hours, every day, for a dozen years. One day, the nephew died of a heart attack. The grandmother was devastated. She took to her bed, and someone saw her cry.
The grandmother was alone, but she did not admit she was lonely. The grandmother believed loneliness was a sign of weakness. If you could not find comfort in prayer, your faith was failing. Jesus talked to you; it was your fault if you weren’t listening.
In truth, the grandmother longed for the company of a man. A man content to follow her list of chores, her plans for the day, a man happy to labor by her side, hour by hour, as her brother had, her husband, her nephew.
The grandmother’s family began to talk to her about moving. About options. They worried about her living alone. She may not have enough money for nursing care if she chose to age in place. When she heard the words retirement community the grandmother became so enraged, she trembled. She would never leave her two acres, her ranch house, three apple trees, the collapsing shed, the patio she scrubbed with bleach every Saturday, never! She refused to sign a living will or a medical directive, and for months, she did not sign a power of attorney, as her son begged her to do. The grandmother went to her bookshelf to look up aging in place, but could not find it.
So she did what she’d always done when life was bleak and hard, she raked and dug holes and planted seeds, sowed and reaped. Only, there was no husband at her side, no nephew. And the grandmother did not tolerate her family’s hired helpers, men who stepped on her geraniums, parked on the grass.
Into this solitary toiling, this stubborn deflection of assistance, into this void, stepped the Grifter.
In her front yard, the grandmother raked leaves, wearing her dead husband’s flannel shirt, her floppy hat, her tongueless Keds.
He struck up a conversation. Real nice place, he said. You keep this up all by yourself?
He offered to help her with yard work. For a few bucks.
That’s how it started.
One hundred and twenty pounds, white male, mid-forties, five feet five. The first time the granddaughter saw him, at the arraignment hearing, she thought of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit. Someone comically menacing. A feckless, sinister, ridiculous man.
But that was many months later. At first, the Grifter was seldom seen and rarely spoken of, slipping in and out of the grandmother’s house like a shade.
The grandmother had found herself some help, is all she would say. She remained fiercely independent, ferociously private. The grandmother was also oddly content, a warning sign her family missed.
One day, the granddaughter came by on her lunch hour unannounced and found the grandmother cooking a feast. Corn bread, fried chicken, okra, sliced cantaloup. There was something proprietary and sly about the way the grandmother stirred the corn bread batter that made the granddaughter feel as if she were intruding. As indeed she was. The dinner was for the man the grandmother had hired, who worked so hard for her, with her. When he was expected, she would not say. She did not invite the granddaughter to stay.
The Grifter had no family. He was dying of cancer. He needed the work. That’s what he said, what the grandmother believed.
He was a born-again Christian, he wanted her to read Scripture to him, he needed her. That’s what the grandmother believed, what she didn’t say.
The grandmother didn’t know the Grifter was shrewd, as insidious as a computer virus— malware that infects hardware, cripples networks, siphons bank accounts. He breached the grandmother’s hard wall of facts, her brittle judgment, her frugality, by finding a wormhole: her trapdoor for passion, the passion of Christ. For the grandmother had begun to conflate her faith with ecstatic release. When the Grifter, after raking leaves, asked her to pray with him, the grandmother’s pent-up fervor filled her like the whistling steam in her pressure cooker. When he asked her to read from Scripture, she took down the Bible from her bookshelf, began her singsong lamenting and reciting, her eyes damp and bright, his hot, calloused hands on her parchment-thin skin. The grandmother believed he loved her to read Scripture—that he loved her.
It was as if that child inside her from long ago, wanting more, more, more, denied for seven decades, awoke again. Yearning seized her. She did not have the will or the strength to deny that child’s voice anymore. Nor should she, for the grandmother began to tell herself the child inside her was no longer the voice of sin, but of redemption—his redemption. How she longed for it! She was saving the Grifter, saving his soul, opening his heart.
The Grifter began to call the grandmother more and more, sobbing. Would she pray for him? With him? She did, weeping too. Once unstoppered, her emotions gushed, difficult to contain. The child’s voice inside the grandmother grew louder, once again clamoring for all the pretty things, and could not be stemmed. It was only natural that after their Bible lessons, the grandmother and the Grifter went shopping. To Wal-Mart, where the grandmother bought the Grifter clothes, electronics, gift cards. To Red Lobster, where the grandmother treated him to lunch before a stop at the pool and sauna store to order his hot tub. To the bank, where the grandmother withdrew cash, for he needed it to buy his medicine, and he promised to pay back the money she loaned him, a hundred here, a thousand there.
How wonderful to feel so needed, so alive! The grandmother dressed up often, splendid in a pink suit, kitten heels, pearls and rubies.
The family asked the grandmother to dinner, but she demurred, announced she was having lunch with a friend, not that it was any of their business.
But soon it was their business.
The grandmother refused to talk about her bank account. When her family asked about it, she grew outraged. The grandmother drove to the bank and gave the twenty-seven-year-old assistant branch manager a dressing down, a public humiliation in the lobby for talking about her “bills” to her family, threatening to take her money elsewhere. I know what I am doing, the grandmother told the bank manager over and over, as he cowered behind his desk.
Sometimes she wasn’t home when her grandchildren visited, and she would not say where she was going, where she had been. It was as if the grandmother had turned into a teenager, sneaking off to see a troublesome suitor, and the grandchildren found themselves playing the roles of indignant, furious parents. Was she in love? The granddaughter recalled the reckless intoxication of her first crush at thirteen, like heroin, warm and wonderful in her veins, as the world fell away, as her life narrowed, thin as a straw, and at the end of it, the boy, the beloved. Her straight-A average plummeted, and yet she pined away, offering up her sterling academic record as a sacrifice. It did not matter, her family did not matter, her friends did not matter. Nothing mattered but him, him, him.
One day, a grandson disabled the grandmother’s car so she could not drive to meet the Grifter. The grandmother, who took great pride in her robust health, walked three miles to a drugstore, to meet the Grifter.
The family planned an intervention. There in the grandmother’s living room sat a sheriff’s deputy, the grandmother’s children, her sisters, her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews. The family never gathered without food. Hence, casseroles and pound cake covered the grandmother’s kitchen table. But no one, other than the deputy, had an appetite. The grandmother’s family, one by one, began to tell her how frightened they were of this man, the Grifter. Her sister cried and said, any day I’m going to open the newspaper and read how you’ve been violated and killed by that no-count criminal you took up with. The grandmother sat uneasy in her easy chair, her spine erect, her face curiously blank, until fury began to glint in her topaz eyes.
The deputy told the grandmother, told everyone, the Grifter had served time for possession and distribution of drugs, illegal firearms, and on and on. Also, he had an outstanding warrant, and they were going after the son-of-a-bitch. The deputy said the Grifter was a liar, that he did not have cancer, that he drew a disability check because he was an addict—some country, huh?
The deputy asked today’s date, the grandmother knew it. He gave her a long column of numbers to add. She totaled them quickly as a calculator.
The deputy failed to see the grandmother’s mail-slot mouth harden, her face burning with rage, her pride strangling her like a fist as he told her she was being taken, that the Grifter preyed on her because she was elderly and gullible. The grandmother did not talk or cry, much less admit the Grifter was a criminal. The deputy grew frustrated, everyone grew anxious, because the grandmother would not promise to stop talking to the Grifter.
The grandmother made one concession: she would go to the doctor. A check-up with a new family doctor, as the grandmother’s previous physician had died of old age. The grandmother took no medicines, her vital signs were healthy, her lab work perfect. The grandmother’s vigor impressed the doctor. Keep doing what you’re doing, the doctor said.
She is lucid and capable, the doctor said, she can manage her own affairs.
What the family was afraid he would say.
The deputy arrested the Grifter.
The prosecutor had a caseload of two hundred, but she made time to meet with the grandmother about the upcoming trial. The prosecutor wanted to put the Grifter away for what he did, for what he might do to others. Thirteen thousand dollars gone in as many weeks, plus the grandmother’s burial fund.
The prosecutor said the Grifter would not stay behind bars unless the grandmother helped convict him.
The grandmother said, I’m not going to have to get up there on the stand, am I?
Yes, ma’am. You will need to testify.
The grandmother said she would not do it. She began to shake and pressed a tissue to her eyes.
The prosecutor said, Can I be completely frank here? He wants to postpone the trial because he is hoping you will pass away. That’s what he said.
This did not phase the grandmother. Revenge did not motivate her. Revenge required admitting she’d been foolish, conceding the Grifter had deceived her. The grandmother had no room for vengeance, as shame consumed her. She feared confessing up there on the stand as her family listened, as strangers and the Grifter stared.
The grandmother was clever enough to tell the prosecutor she had helped a sinner because she was a good Christian. The grandmother said she knew what she was doing.
The prosecutor closed her eyes for a minute, collecting herself. If the grandmother claimed the money was charity, a gift freely given—the case was over.
The prosecutor said, you are a good person, and he took advantage of that. He is taking advantage of you now. He thinks you won’t testify against him. You can’t let him win!
The prosecutor told the grandmother her own mother just moved into a retirement village, and it was not a nursing home, no one wants to go to a nursing home, this was about living independently. No upkeep or broken things to fix. Gated and safe.
The grandmother said she had decided long ago where she would live and die—in her own home. She was not leaving it. Ever.
Right now, he can’t contact you because he would be in contempt of court if he did, the prosecutor continued. But if I dismiss this, he will contact you. I’ve been at this job twenty years. I’m willing to bet the Florida State-Clemson game on it, and I’m a big Clemson fan. He will be at your door again. But if you testify—
The grandmother interrupted the prosecutor. She said, I’m not doing it. I will not get up there and testify. I’ll go to pieces. I’ll die. I will kill myself first.
And that was that.
After meeting with the prosecutor, the family took the grandmother to lunch. There would be no trial, no testifying. The family was glum, the grandmother giddy with relief. The grandmother ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and iced tea, and boxed up her leftover potato chips. Then the grandmother found her lipstick at the bottom of her purse. Her lips were fuchsia, her cheeks rouged, and she smiled. She did not see why the family worried. She wanted to go home, to be left alone.
But within days, the grandmother took ill. Her vision dimmed, her eyesight failed—as if she had willed blindness as punishment, as if her myopia about the Grifter metastasized. She did not drive or cook. When the family hired helpers, the grandmother yelled that strangers were in her house.
She grew dizzy, unsteady, and fell. The grandmother’s doctor diagnosed macular degeneration and a fractured wrist.
Her family arranged for the grandmother to move into an assisted living community, Shepherd’s Flock. They did not tell the grandmother. They tried, but the grandmother threw a candlestick at them.
One day, the grandmother’s children drove her to Shepherd’s Flock. They had secretly furnished her room with the grandmother’s prized possessions, her bureau and upholstered chairs, her quilts and potted plants, and though she could no longer read, her bookshelf with the King James Bible, atlas and encyclopedias, her medical dictionary—bookmarked at diseases of the eye, which the grandmother had studied with a magnifying glass. They brought in dozens of framed photographs—of the grandmother’s husband, her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The grandmother’s room at the assisted living reminded the granddaughter of a college dorm room, artificially cozy to ward away debilitating homesickness.
Then a nurse came by to welcome the grandmother to her new home, where she would be happy now, with three hot meals every day, prayer services, Bingo, ceramics and crafts, and so many new friends to make. The grandmother exploded. She screamed she had been tricked. She demanded to leave, to be taken home. She took down the photographs of her family and threw them in her sock drawer. She did not eat for days, refused to get out of bed, had to be diapered. For a week this went on, then two.
When her children came to pray with her, she closed her eyes and told them they were evil demons, she hated them.
The grandmother did not want to live, but she was too angry to die.
Then, a miracle. That was what the nursing aide called it. A month later, the grandmother began, quite suddenly, to recover. She ate with the appetite of a farmhand, she took a keen interest in physical therapy.
The grandmother walked in the hallways with a cane, no more wheelchair. She allowed her hair to be washed and styled, her nails painted. Her strength rebounded, her stamina inextinguishable. Her doctors were impressed. Keep doing what you’re doing, they told her.
Her blindness lifted. Or so she claimed. I have prayed on it, she said, and I am going to get my eyes seeing again. She told her granddaughter she was leaving that place. The grandmother had willed her decline; she would will her recovery. Soon I will be strong enough, the grandmother said. I am going home. You don’t believe me? I will walk out of here, I will walk every step of the way to my house. I will.
It is what she said a year later in that place, and every year since. When she turned one hundred, the grandmother refused to blow out candles on her cake. She would bake her own cake, in her own kitchen, in her own house. Just you wait.
