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 behind the corral, tethered with an intricate knot that nobody
used except her father, Lott.
Sometimes, when I was at Grandma’s eating the forbidden
cornflakes and milk, I’d ask Grandpa to tell me how he got off the
mountain. He always said he didn’t know. Then he’d take a deep
breath—long and slow, like he was settling into a mood rather than a
story—and he’d tell the whole tale from start to finish. Grandpa was a
quiet man, near silent. You could pass a whole afternoon clearing fields
with him and never hear ten words strung together. Just “Yep” and
“Not that one” and “I reckon so.”
But ask how he got down the mountain that day and he’d talk for ten
minutes, even though all he remembered was lying in the field, unable
to open his eyes, while the hot sun dried the blood on his face.
“But I tell you this,” Grandpa would say, taking off his hat and
running his fingers over the dent in his skull. “I heard things while I
was lyin’ in them weeds. Voices, and they was talking. I recognized
one, because it was Grandpa Lott. He was a tellin’ somebody that
Albert’s son was in trouble. It was Lott sayin’ that, I know it sure as I
know I’m standing here.” Grandpa’s eyes would shine a bit, then he’d
say, “Only thing is, Lott had been dead near ten years.”
This part of the story called for reverence. Mother and Grandma
both loved to tell it but I liked Mother’s telling best. Her voice hushed
in the right places. It was angels, she would say, a small tear falling to
the corner of her smile. Your great-grandpa Lott sent them, and they
carried Grandpa down the mountain.
The dent was unsightly, a two-inch crater in his forehead. As a child,
when I looked at it, sometimes I imagined a tall doctor in a white coat
banging on a sheet of metal with a hammer. In my imagination the
doctor used the same corrugated sheets of tin that Dad used to roof hay
sheds.
But that was only sometimes. Usually I saw something else. Proof
that my ancestors walked that peak, watching and waiting, angels at
their command.