My family sometimes calls him The Colonel, partly because of the Army and partly because, back then, men were harder on their boys. With five to raise, I imagine orderliness was paramount. But he isn’t hard on me—the first granddaughter.
We are going to Kate’s house, my artist cousin on Dad’s side who lives in Wheelersburg, Ohio. I’ve always been a little jealous of her; a little in awe. Not envy that I feed daily, just an occasional jealousy whenever someone mentions her accomplishments: commissioned art for people whose names matter; trips to Bali, California, Maine.
This trip is supposed to be: Drive north, retrieve Kate’s paintings, drive south. A long enough trip for a break from my children, but not too long to make me wish it was one way. Sometimes, children and single parenthood can do that to you.
I drive Grandfather’s Lincoln. It’s a cruise-ship type of car, floating on the ocean of graying asphalt. Up and over the swells of I-64, through the mountains of Morehead, flattening out again at the banks of the Ohio River. I drive because he can’t. Macular degeneration was kind enough to wait for my grandmother to die before it called on this man beside me. She needed him. The disease can’t seem to figure out that I still need him, too.
The fog is sudden and thick. Nothing gradual. Just not-there and then there. Gray-white in the shadowed parts and orange creamsicle colored where the sun slants through the mountains. The fog is a solid thing that vanishes headlights and taillights and road signs and the familiar markings that help me find my way. I’ve heard people say it’s the clouds come to sit down, but orange creamsicle clouds just make me hungry. I lick my lips.
“There are those rosebushes again,” he says.
“What?”
I try to keep my eyes on the swallowed up taillights in front of me, but somehow the vanishing fog has just come out of my grandfather’s mouth. It fills the miles of years that expand and contract between the two of us. It pulls my foot from the gas pedal.
“The rosebushes. I see them more and more. There is a name for it, a scientific name,” Grandfather says. “I don’t remember.”
He waves his hand, thinner now with age and thick with brown spots and deep purple bruises. I release my grip on the steering wheel one hand at a time and wipe the sweat from my palms onto my jeans.
Rosebushes.
“Sometimes, they are on the sides of the road. In the beginning, they were. Sometimes, they move across the road. Sometimes, they are over you, too,” he says.
Rosebushes. And they move.
Suddenly, I realize this is something I never knew before: the movement of the roses. And Grandfather says they are beautiful, and he says they are on me. For a reason I cannot explain, I want to scratch, but I am afraid to. I am afraid that all my inside parts will somehow taint that beauty that I desperately need to feel in these broken days of my life. I am afraid that he will know what I have tried so hard to hide, the marriage I couldn’t hold together. I am afraid it will somehow harm his heart and mold our being together into that shape where shame creates a distance and casts hard shadows no light can penetrate.
“Do you think that’s crazy?” he asks. I think he wants to look at me, but he looks out the window instead.
The fog swallows the road and it swallows the lines and it swallows the lights that I judge my distance by. Grandfather sees rosebushes that move and the very speaking of it swallows those things that keep us apart in his car.
“No, sir,” I say. “That’s not crazy at all.”
I know in this moment that later, I will examine my response, turn the conversation over and over, scratch it down between the blue lines of paper with my favorite pen. I know this is a healing talk. I know in this moment that I answer quickly, and with such assuredness, that I speak the truth, because I am a writer. It cannot possibly be crazy to see things that no one else can see because I do it every day of my life. The movement of the roses is strong and wonderful.
And then, the fog is gone. As quickly as it came and swallowed us up, it went away. On the other side, I can see. Yet, I tap my brakes, as if the brake is the anchor that holds me to something that cannot be forgotten. As if I can decide, then and there, to freeze what just happened in the fog.
The movement of roses is a connection. Tenuous, perhaps, but something he and his boys will never have. Something that even Kate, with all her opportunities, will never possess.
Slowly, I remove my foot from the brake pedal and push down, forward, on the gas. Grandfather doesn’t even notice. He’s admiring the rosebushes.
“Tell me a story, Grandfather.”
“Grant has them, the stories, recorded on the tapes from when …” he stops. “You know, at Henry Clay.”
I don’t volunteer to fill in the blanks. I have heard the tapes. I have heard the stories from the war that Grandfather told to the students in that Lexington auditorium. I don’t help him name the time. I’m not certain it would matter.
I squint against the sun and press on, north and east, into the light that no longer hides behind the mountains, no longer fires the fog.
“No,” I say. “A story I haven’t heard before. Something new. Something different.”
He places a hand on his knee, adjusts the cane that rests between his legs. I wonder then if he resents using it. Resents that he has to lean on something. Resents that he cannot remember anything right anymore.
I feel sad. There is something that cannot be helped inside his head. As if the fog has swallowed his remembering. The words just out of reach in a darkened, hidden place where the sunlight offers no help. I know this something-new-type-of-connection between us is his help. I will be his remembering. I will chart this course with him; for him. The car passes the white and yellow painted lines, the rusted metal guardrails, the crooked and abandoned houses that are like buoys far back in the fields among the cows.
“I haven’t thought of this in a long time,” he says after a mile or two. “One Sunday afternoon …”
He tells me a story no one else has ever heard. A story he will not remember in just this way again. It’s a story of new Army recruits way back when—their training, their study on the war-art of protection. Necessary things of men.
In two places at once—the story; the Lincoln—I, a 40-year-old woman who has never been this way before, sail along with a 90-year-old passenger who navigates by things that fail him. Somehow, we catch the ebb and flow of this time, this road, this movement, these words.
This is a new story. A strong and true current. Nothing else matters.
“The rosebushes are all over you, darling,” Grandfather says in the end.
I don’t touch the brakes. I just float.