Goodbye
Grandae Coop
M. Demetrice
Copyright © 2015 M. Demetrice
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Goodbye
Grandae Coop
All things go back to dust.
I sit on the stairwell on the first floor of Memorial Hospital alone with my solemn thoughts. Above me, I can hear the sounds of people footsteps as they make their way clobbering to their destination. Cold concrete and the accumulation of dust and dirt from passenger’s shoes is all that keeps me company while I sit on the steps that lead to the second floor.
All things go back to dust.
Why can’t I just forget these words? Words that float to my lips, enter my mouth, bounce off my teeth, land on my tongue and then slip down my throat, making its way to my stomach. I tasted them. Bitter and tart.
“Don’t die,” I beg out loud. My words echo off the walls and return, permanently settling themselves within me, sending a cold shiver that makes me woozy.
“All things go back to dust,” Grandae Coop had told me many times. I heard it first when my cat, Brownie was run over, then, when my favorite horse Willie broke his leg and had to be put down, however; the day my parents were killed signified the meaning of my grandfather’s statement.
Now it was Grandae’s time to go back to dust.
I exhale, feeling time pressing down upon me. I’ve been sitting in this stairwell for hours. Outside, the people of this city were going about their lives, working, schooling, and just living life. I’m sure like me, some were suffering alone – not seeing the sun kissed blue sky and the wispy clouds that slowly sailed with the pleasant wind. Inside, I was missing the sounds of the birds singing happily to the spring joyful weather. Here, where I sat was gloomy. The forecast for rain, one hundred percent.
The door opens to the stairwell and I smell my brother’s odor before he even spots me sitting. It was the scent of a wood burning cast iron stove and the smell of bacon – and also, the smell of a sterile hospital environment that only knew sickness and death . . . but sometimes life. But more death than the blessing of life, I’m sure.
“It’s over,” he says, sitting beside me. His shoulder touch mine and I can feel the stillness of his words through them. Complete stillness. The stillness that only death could bring. He sat still a long time it seemed, maybe waiting for me to say something but what was there to say? I couldn’t even find words for my own thinking. I had no words to speak out loud so I said nothing.
His shoulders shook, displaying his grief. I somberly glance at him. His dreads barely swayed with the shaking of his shoulders. He had them since fifteen years old. One of the things our parents did not agree with but allowed, because he was the smart one who had never since he slid from my mother’s womb, given them grief.
Instead, I was our parent’s grief child.
Being a child who brought nothing but grief to churchgoing parents – I had no experience in consoling those around me. Why should I? My job was to terrorize emotionally and sometimes physically.
My brother’s entire body now shook inside the calmness of the stairwell. I heard no one walking above us. He shook in silence, crying in grief.
“She watched, Keet. Watched the damn monitor until it flatlined. I never want to hear that sound again,” he pause, attempting to suck in the grief but the pain of the moment too great. If my mother was here, she would use her hand to wipe away the snot than trailed past his mouth and down his chin – I saw from the corner of my eye snot mingling with tears – tears quiet as rain falling on cotton. “Grandma Zi. She watched him go. She watched him take his last breath.”
All things go back to dust.
Those words were playing around in my head. Bouncing from left to right and right to left. How could a man that once stood six foot three, two hundred and twenty pounds go back to dust? Grandae Coop was a man strong and burly. He was a sharecropper until his back could no longer allow him to do what he loved – work the earth springing forth food, which tasted like manna itself.
Those words my grandfather told me that day smothered the sounds of my brother’s suffering. I was no longer in that stairwell but back at my grandparents’ home – that home deep in the country that today most people knew nothing about. Their home, over an hundred years old, built in the year 1897, years after the slaves were free but long before segregation was even believable, built by my grandfather’s father, stood tall and proud, surrounded by a garden my grandmother tended and a farm that still today, fed my family up until my Grandae was too sick to farm.
When my brother’s tears subside, I go into my pocket and pull out Grandae’s handkerchief. It was long past white, more a beige color with years gone by and it’s many washings, and handed it to my brother. My brother with his face wet and snotty stared in dismay at the handkerchief before wiping his face clean.
“Keep it.”
He frowns, embarrassed by his tears, and informs Grandma wants to see me.
“Mind your Grand Elder, Keet,” he warns. I nod in promise and stand, my bones popping and straining under the weight that was not from eating but from loading and stocking farm equipment and hay.
I left the stairwell thinking that I was strong. I could face the woman whose husband had just died, however, when I see Grandma Zi, I fall to the floor, my knees buckling and my body going to complete mush. A nurse races to my side, asking if I was okay. I slowly nod, not really okay but giving the only answer that will send her away – my eyes never leaving Grandma Zi. I stand with the nurse’s assistance and make my way to Grandma Zi who stands looking over my grandfather who lay motionless, attached to tubes and wires, his skin grey and ashy.
“Child, look. Look at what your Grandae has become,” her East Texas accent echoes around me causing my skin to prickle with goosebumps.
I take my eyes from hers and glance down. What I see is not Grandae Coop with the skin of a gray cadaver but his silhouette – a silhouette of blackened ash.
“Look, child.”
I blink away the image and now Grandae Coop sits up, his steel brown eyes on me, piercing. Just he and I are in the room. Grandma Zi is gone, along with the nurses and the tubes and wires that had been connected to him.
“All things go back to dust, Keet,” Grandae states.
“Do they really?” I ask, taking in the form of his live body that is swathed in a gentle pale light.
He laughs and I smile for Grandae’s laugh was huge and carried for miles into town. People in our community would always say: “That fool, Coop, laughing the game away. Look like we eating chicken again tonight.” My grandfather had an enormous laugh that was contagious – it was sunshine during gloomy times.
“Of course they do,” he answers, swinging his legs on the side of the hospital bed. “Sit down son.” I sit next to the man I knew was gone yet I somehow had conjured inside my mind.
“Listen to your Grandma, boy, you hear? Everything she say is true and can be proven. Don’t give her no grief, you hear?” I nod. “Answer me when I’m talking to you, Keet,” he sternly commands.
I answer with reverent quickness. “Yes, sir. I will. I promise.”
“Okay. Now I’m going to take your word,” he pats my hand. It was c
old that touch. Stiff and cold.
“Grandae?” I begin. I knew this moment was about to end so I wanted to say the one thing that clung desperately at my heart.
“Yes, son?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Boy, you don’t never have to be sorry. Things happen. It was my time.”
I fight back a sob that quivers at the back of throat. “But you dead because of me.”
“Yeah. But I was already sick, son. My time was just cut off a few days. Don’t tell your Grandma but Friday I would have had an aneurism and died feeding that old sow,” he chuckles and shakes his head. “Death is funny. Funnier than the best dirty joke.”
“Nevertheless, Grandae, I’m sorry all the same.”
“Nevertheless,” he copied. “Child using them big city words. Nevertheless,” he repeats with another chuckle. “I remember when you were a child. You didn’t talk much, could barely get a mumble out of you. Your parents took you to one of those high-priced specialist. There was nothing wrong with you. The specialist said you would speak when you were good and ready. I remember the day you spoke – truly spoke. Do you remember what you said?”
I give a weak smile and nod for I had heard this story many times. So much in fact, that I had gotten tired of it but with the knowledge that this would be the last time I will ever hear my grandfather tell it – I wanted to hear it a million times over if it kept my grandfather here.
“You said, ‘Grand Day’. You looked up at the sky and repeated it. I said, ‘Yes, grandson, it is a Grand Day. You gave me the biggest smile I have ever seen on a child. Made my eyes water it was so beautiful.” I give a bigger smile, imagining myself speaking those words. “From then on out, every time you saw me, you would say Grand Day until eventually you and your brother were calling me, Grandae Coop.” Grandfather shook his head, wiping his eyes – the memory too much too bear. “I love you, Keet.”
“Love you, too, Grandae Coop. I’ll miss you and I promise I’ll look after the farm.”
“I know, son. You might be the black sheep of the family but you keep your promises and I know it’ll be done.” He gives my shoulder a reassuring squeeze with his strong cold hand and lies back down. I watch him lay there, tears blurring my vision and trailing down my wide face. When I wipe them away, I am back in the moment with Grandma Zi standing watch, looking down at my grandfather asleep in death and the nurses back at their workstation nearby.
“All things go back to dust, Keet,” she whispers, caressing grandfather’s forehead. “You will be missed my Coop but we will not be apart long, you’ll see me sooner than you think.” I take my eyes from her caress of my grandfather and study her features. She stands tired but strong, wearing two-day-old wrinkled clothes.
“Grandma, I’m sorry – I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” I do my best to hold back the grief but my voice quivers wanting to release it. I shake my head denying its request. “I’m sorry.” I repeat softly.
“Boy. Don’t be. Now never bring it up again.” With that, my lack of defiance is forgiven and like an atoned sin, is also forgiven. She nods toward my grandfather. “Now say goodbye so we can go home. Not much we can do here now that he’s gone.”
I look down at the man who gave me my first and last whooping and bend down and place a soft kiss to his forehead. The lines of it are both rough and smooth. I wanted to run my finger across its groove, but, instead, I rise and take one last look at him as he rest there waiting to be tended to for a funeral and then to be laid deep, only to return to dust. I step back, the feel of my grandfather’s skin lingering delicately on my lips.
“Goodbye, Grandae Coop,” I whisper.
In the background, my brother steps into the room having fled from the silence of the stairwell that I wished to be sitting in. He cries out, holding onto Grandma Zi, his head smothered in her shoulder and his dreads spread out in a fan on his back.
“Goodbye, Grandae Coop,” he mumbles through his wails of grief, his voice muffled against the shoulder of Grandma Zi.
Consoling my brother, Grandma bids farewell to the man who stole her heart fifty-seven years ago. “Goodbye, Coop, we’ll see each other again before the dust settle.”
“Goodbye,” I mumble under my breath. A goodbye I wasn’t able to give my parents when they both had been taken away by a rare tornado.
. . . goodbye . . . goodbye . . .
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