1
David Kaurala
WRT 150-28
Narrative Draft
Ship: S.S. Jack Kerouac
Tie Another One On
Grandfather and I stood side by side in front of the ancient, motionless man. We bellied up to the metallic box together. Intoxicating floral and medicinal scents swirled into the sobs behind us. He handed me a key, told me to stand up straight, stop crying, and hurry up.
“We are here for them,” he said, throwing his thumb over his shoulder, “not for ourselves. Put that key in his pocket. He’ll need it to come home.”
I remembered when the ancient man rocked in his old chair, a limp cane dangling from its arm, white washed eyes draining out into whoever was in front of him. I reached over the coffin and slid the key into his cold, breast pocket. Grandfather watched me, next to me, blistered hands trembling like an alcoholic pouring a morning drink. Noiseless Norwegian words escaped his narrow lips. With his heavy hands on my shoulders and dry eyes, he and I faced the rest of the mourners.
My mother once told me that when they officially mapped the Keweenaw Peninsula, a road was named after our family, Dextrom Road. I didn’t believe her until they put the sign up. It is still there today, unpaved and twisting past blown up breweries, thimbleberry patches, empty beer cans, and continues on past our family farm head first into Lake Superior. The same way it was carved by my ancestors, an arterial bridge connecting to a new beginning.
My grandfather drove Dextrom Road twice daily no matter what the weather. His parents remained in a small house a mile from the road in the middle of the valley, where a small creek bubbled nearby in the summer, but never completely froze in the winter. They were beyond seventy, yet hauled buckets of crystal clear well water and arm loads of splintered wood into the aged house. My great grandmother kept a small grove of plants and ash berry trees to the east and a raspberry patch not even her oldest son’s wife could pick from. Great grandfather, too, had his trophies. Deer antlers pounded into the woodshed, so old they splintered the sun like an ungodly albino oak tree breaking out of a cellar. “No wood no heat, no deer no meat.” That they said all the time. My grandfather brought them everything else they needed from town.
My grandfather was the last of the giant Norsemen with a beard as thick and dark as the cedar swamp on the end of the farm. His hands were stained from the earth and kept a copperish hue. Days working a second job on rooftops had left his skin tight and bronzed against his hard muscles, especially when standing next to the other miners who were white as drowned worms. Most of them went straight from the belly of the earth to the danker bars for their fill of drink. “Booze hounds and hash slingers,” the giant bearded Norseman called them. He was their superior in the mines, my mother’s father, my grandfather, Karl Ben-Hart Dextrom. His judgments had their faults, a half empty bottle of Wild Turkey under the kitchen sink. He called it bird’s milk when we poured it in to his coffee morning, noon, or night depending on the shift. I would dip my cookies in it and feel the soft sweet crumbs burn down my throat, much like the glares his wife gave me when he let me stay up late and watch “Sanford and Son” or “The Benny Hill Show.” My grandmother told me it would rot my brain. He always remained in his quiet element pure as the precious metal he dug for everyday for over twenty years.
Grandfather had always navigated Dextrom’s gravel road in a hunter’s orange 56 Chevy loaded with odd tools and groceries like a resurrected battered Viking ship on top a of white wave full of plunder after an exceptionally good pillage. Fearless and with eyes smiling, he busted through the snow and bounced amongst the tools on the dusty bench seat laughing at the thought of a seat belt while his head bounce wildly off the interior. He had a great scar. Once while driving his arm was out the window and a branch refused to give in to his will and snapped his forearm. The doctors took bone from his leg to save his arm. He missed one week of work, but never a single trip to the small farm house where he was born.
It was my turn to stay with my grandparents. All the grandchildren took turns. Crying, strangled phone bells, the pounding of fists, the combination forced me to my bed’s edge and then the top of the stairs overlooking the living room. I heard that his father’s heart had stopped one mile from the road in a small farm house by a bubbling creek that never completely froze, even in the winter. That was all I knew until now except that his hand trembled ever so slightly in front of the ancient, sleeping man.
I watched him leave the house. My grandmother on the phone, I tried to put my boots on, but he had boarded the Chevy half dressed and half out of his mind. I stood in front of the picture window watching. He reached in the glove box for a pinch of Copenhagen, which he hadn’t touched for years, got back out, threw something in back of the truck and drifted off towards Dextrom Road. Tonight the snowy white mounds would part while the tires gripped the frozen gravel until it screamed to surrender. The truck came to a halt in front of the open black mouth of an idling hearse, empty.
“My mother still down there with him?” he asked. The men’s heads were anchored to their feet kicking snow around.
“Now Karl, no disrespect, but we can’t do nothing until the ambulance arrives,” one of the men offered, “and the ambulance tried coming down Bunker Hill. And got stuck in the snow.” They both pointed east at the same time avoiding eye contact and continuing looking at their kicking feet. In the distance all of them heard the sirens, the vain attempts to rock the vehicle out of the frozen ditch, and watched the lights lash out against the snow, exposing its blue and red dance with the open sky above. First he cursed them as cowards and then reached into the back of the truck and started down the hill, not towards the house but the barn.
“Jesus Christ, we just did this last winter when old man Eddie died.” His voice traveled the valley and back seeming to nudge the ambulance from its frozen tracks pushing it closer.
The ground shook when the Evinrude snowmobile started as if Thor had dropped his hammer. The hearse drivers watched the tiny light cross the white plain to the house, an out of season firefly looking for a place to land. When the ambulance arrived, sirens off and lights beckoning the dead, he emerged from the blackness—a single light into a field of swirling cold color. An angered, somber, older bearded man, a widow, and his dead father tied to a child’s sled being pulled behind the noisy retriever machine that glazed his face in a fine ceramic dust and lips bluer then any lake he had ever fished.
The men from the funeral parlor quickly untied the body and apologized the entire time as they put him into the hearse. My grandfather drove his mother away, this time much slower and the usual smiles drained from his eyes.
“We are here for them, not ourselves.” I looked up at the clean shaven oldest of the Norsemen. There were wrinkles I had never noticed, a new plumb bud in his lip, and the sweet smell of bird’s milk tied to his words.
“Go and see how your mother is doing,” he told me, and turned back towards the ancient, motionless man.