25
The Work of Sulphur
There’s a story I was told when I was young, told so many times and from
such an early age, I can’t remember who told it to me first. It was about
Grandpa-down-the-hill and how he got the dent above his right temple.
When Grandpa was a younger man, he had spent a hot summer on the
mountain, riding the white mare he used for cowboy work. She was a tall
horse, calmed with age. To hear Mother tell it that mare was steady as a rock,
and Grandpa didn’t pay much attention when he rode her. He’d drop the
knotted reins if he felt like it, maybe to pick a burr out of his boot or sweep
off his red cap and wipe his face with his shirtsleeve. The mare stood still.
But tranquil as she was, she was terrified of snakes.
“She must have glimpsed something slithering in the weeds,” Mother
would say when she told the story, “because she chucked Grandpa clean off.”
There was an old set of harrows behind him. Grandpa flew into them and a
disc caved in his forehead.
What exactly it was that shattered Grandpa’s skull changed every time I
heard the story. In some tellings it was harrows, but in others it was a rock. I
suspect nobody knows for sure. There weren’t any witnesses. The blow
rendered Grandpa unconscious, and he doesn’t remember much until
Grandma found him on the porch, soaked to his boots in blood.
Nobody knows how he came to be on that porch.
From the upper pasture to the house is a distance of a mile—rocky terrain
with steep, unforgiving hills, which Grandpa could not have managed in his
condition. But there he was. Grandma heard a faint scratching at the door,
and when she opened it there was Grandpa, lying in a heap, his brains
dripping out of his head. She rushed him to town and they fitted him with a
metal plate.
After Grandpa was home and recovering, Grandma went looking for the
white mare. She walked all over the mountain but found her tied to the fence