I come from a long line of cowards. The exception is my grandfather, who to my knowledge has never had to rely on anyone. When he approached me after the funeral and asked for a ride to the vet, it pretty much drop-kicked me into orbit.
I wasn’t shocked that he hadn’t arranged a post-ceremony ceremony. People standing around fingering canapes wasn’t his idea of respect. I’d pictured him leaving his wife’s service early to see a man about a tractor for the back paddock. That was why I leapt at the opportunity to be alone with him on a long country road. To glimpse the sphere he inhabited. The solved world.
I drove a borrowed car to the house I’d feared as a kid. It had always felt empty and silent, a big white thing on a treeless plain in the high country, kissing distance from heaven. He’d built it from the ground up, hauling slabs of redwood from the forest a few hours drive west, the trees sometimes bought legit from fellers, sometimes purchased off the books. He had a lot to say about redwoods – they could live for thousands of years – and I came to imagine my grandparents’ home had towered there forever on that unsealed road, which led in one direction to the tallest trees in the world and in the other to a flooded slate quarry.
His life had been defined by hardship. Nobody ever discussed particulars but the set of his brow suggested the sacrifices he’d made. There were wars all the time back when he was our normal age. There are still wars but you can probably phone your mates from the trenches these days. He couldn’t imagine the conveniences we download for free, obscenities given what he would have endured, but his suffering must have instilled in him something I could learn from.
“You made good time,” he said as he opened the rear door. The dog bounded over the booster chair and started doing doughnuts. My grandfather lowered himself into the passenger seat. I was surprised by the camera around his neck, a chunky digital thing with lenses you could swap out from a bum bag. It seemed like a grief purchase, something you buy online after deciding at 3am that you’re a photographer now.
Ancient rocks thrust themselves from neatly trimmed fields. We were driving to the quarry lake. It wasn’t on any map. It was scary and cold and full of meaning. Up there in the high country the light is so sharp it shreds your crust, and when it hits the lake surface it comes at you from below as well. That light blessed both of my grandparents with squints that my childish eyes read as disapproval.
“This area was the site of some historic battle, right?” I said. I’d read it somewhere. My grandfather snorted.
Small talk is the curse of my generation.
From the back the dog’s tail set a leathery beat.
I have trouble letting things go. I can hold onto grudges like a minor European nation. My grandfather probably never considered how much the damage he’d inflicted on me had endured. To be charitable, perhaps I had indeed spent much of my childhood acting like a big bloody crybaby.
Gravel squeaked as I parked the car at the head of the track. The door creaked open and the dog shot out like a missile, kicking up rocks and disappearing into the undergrowth. She had been my grandmother’s. I looked away. Discretion is a salve that needn’t be applied sparingly.
The trail took us through a dense tunnel of knotted branches and at its end a blinding light promised revelation. When we were children my grandparents had discouraged the rumour that the quarry had been the site of a hideous accident in which dozens of diggers had perished. The system of tunnels beneath the earth had been so extensive that when the time came to convert the entire area into a lake, it had been cheaper to block the mine entrances with metallic netting than to fill them in with clay. We’d always swum with the image of corpses drifting up to nuzzle our pedalling ankles.
We stopped at the lookout and surveyed the lake below. My grandfather leaned on the railing, breath a little heavy. “Not a lot of historical battles in these parts, you’ll find,” he said. I pretended not to hear out of politeness, or, I don’t know. I probably should have said something. But my childhood had taught me that he was sensitive to correction.
The vista was arresting. The lake’s surface could have been fashioned from polished stone. Boulders had sometimes calved free from the cliffs that encircled it, and on one such rock far beneath us I spotted two human figures. They were lying as though they had fallen from a great height, but there was no blood or other gruesomeness on display. I was struck with some embarrassment when I realised that their state of dishevelment suggested that we’d caught them in the act of making love in the wild. I moved away from the cliff’s edge and I’m glad to report that my grandfather did the same.
The dog came back from further along the trail and circled us, panting. My grandfather took his phone from his pocket and held it at arm’s length. “We’re making good time,” he said. “The dog can play as long as she wants.”
I winced – he hadn’t said ‘dog’ – but I reminded myself of his age, and how men of his vintage might as well speak their own language. Then again, the man we’d known as kids would never have encouraged play of any sort, and the dog had been granted this afternoon of unbridled exuberance. I found myself wondering what he thought of it all, how he made sense of things, the way we all make sense of things. Of death, I mean, obviously, given the vet appointment.
“She used to take the dog down to the water,” he said.
I let him take the lead. He was smaller than the man I remembered.
The lake came back into view abruptly, as it always did. A switchback in the track revealed the expanse of purple and blue fenced in by the looming slabs of slate. The dog’s bark bounced from the walls of rock. The sunlight off the water scraped layers from us, stripping the very landscape to the bone. Shoulder to shoulder, I was acutely aware of my grandfather and, I had no doubt, he was equally mindful of me. I’d never tried to figure him out when I was young. I’d actively walled off the possibility that he possessed any sort of interior life, for the simple reason that I thought his lack of engagement was due to cowardice, a life spent studiously avoiding any moment he’d have to relive. But as an adult, his impassive demeanour had come to represent for me something difficult to put into words. A notion that all of the world could be borne, the horrors and the delights, if you let them touch you only lightly. Most forms of suffering erode. The hot stab of fear at the base of your neck, that goes away, the grinding jaw pain, that goes away, it all washes away in time, is my grandfather’s great unspoken teaching.
I followed the line of his gaze to the boulder we’d seen earlier.
It was empty now.
He looked at me.
“Your grandmother knew about my girlfriends,” he said.
His words began to crack at the end there, to crackle like an approaching forest fire, which he extinguished with a sharp cough. He spat something heavy into the bushes and looked back to the lake.
He had the look of someone deciding upon a fact. A solution.
“She must have.”
Before I could make any sense of this another voice announced that we were no longer alone.
“Adam, I’m talking to you. Adam. Adam. Pay attention. Adam I am talking, Adam.”
A child appeared on the path above us. His face was a cyclone of tears and recrimination, looking as hard done by as anyone ever has. He refused to look back at the man addressing him but soldiered on in vain, too young to realise that families, like coffins, are remarkably difficult to escape.
“Stop this,” said the man. “You’re not sad.”
“It’s the crying that’s becoming the problem. You listening? It can’t go on. It’s every day.”
The man pulled up short when he caught sight of us. He didn’t look as though he lived around here. He was a hulking, beardy guy with unfashionable tattoos. He appeared lost.
“We’re leaving soon,” I said.
“No, no, we’re making good time,” said my grandfather.
The dog erupted from nearby bushes and began yapping at the interlopers. The boy jumped and the man stepped between him and the beast.
“She’s no harm to anyone,” my grandfather said. “Wouldn’t bite you if you kicked her.”
His son looked between the dog and the men. “Can I?” he asked and his father nodded. He reached out for the dog, who licked his fingers.
“It was my wife’s,” said my grandfather.
“This one’s been on at me about getting one,” the man said.
“They’re a lot of work,” nodded my grandfather.
“Don’t start about the work. And I’ve been telling this one how expensive they are too. For a good one like that, at least. Way above my pay grade and the conversion rate on tears isn’t too hot right now, tiger.”
The dog was still full of energy, rolling on her back and play-kicking the boy.
“There was some kind of massacre around these parts, I heard,” said the man. “Back when.”
My grandfather’s face suggested that he wouldn’t know anything about that.
For the longest time we stood there, men staring at eternity as the boy and the dog kicked up dirt. They made a good match.
The man tapped a cigarette from a packet and twirled it in his fingers.
“What’s his name?” asked the boy.
“She,” I said. I couldn’t say the name and was glad my grandfather didn’t, either. I didn’t want to have to explain the different standards of his era, and how men of a certain –
And then he said it. He lifted his chin toward the stranger, as though ready to be challenged.
The man returned the cigarette to the packet with a pensive look.
He put a hand on his son’s shoulder. They didn’t say goodbye as they returned to the trail. The dog trotted after them for a spell, then loped back to nudge my knee.
My grandfather returned to squinting at the landscape, checking the settings on his camera, capturing the occasional light.
I bent down to rub one of her ears between finger and thumb. A feeling like velvet. A stinging sensation behind my eyes.
Then she bolted off down the track, a dust halo in her wake. Some rabbit or rodent must have caught her nose. You could hear her dashing about madly in the scrub, and as I listened to the sounds she made, free as a breath, happy as all hell, I wished that I could call her name, or that she could at least linger out here a little longer, running like that forever, living off the land, having the time of her life. But she came rocketing back and skidded to a halt with a clatter of ancient clay, in love with each moment and ready for whatever comes after.
***
CJ Garrow is an Australian writer whose work has been shortlisted for various international prizes.