Grandfather's Ride in Space

         Grandpa was always singing.  Mostly he sang the same song, bursting out of total silence in a cascade of syllables which began and ended disturbingly abruptly with a climax of two taps of his walking cane on the oak floor. Everyone in the vicinity glanced cautiously sideways at him when he did that, because you just never "knew" about Grandpa.  He was not a native Arkansan, having moved to the Ozarks for his health after delivering mail in Kansas throughout the Dust Bowl years. Braving rain, sleet, snow and billowing suffocating dust settling deep in his lungs, my grandfather doggedly kept the mail going to the people who stuck it out and stayed on through those hardest times. The resulting emphysema drove him out of the plains into the hills where the air was cleaner and he could breathe for a few moments without coughing.  My father followed him to the mountains later on, due to my grandfather's excitement about land values. 

        "The land's cheap here," he wrote to my father, who was recovering in hospital from D-Day wounds, "but you have to be careful they don't throw in twice as much as you plan to buy--trying to get out of paying that tax, you see . . . ."  Things were different then.

         Grandpa always wore a striped long sleeved shirt, a string tie, and khaki pants with suspenders--on special occasions adding a black swallow tail coat and a beaver top hat.  He spent afternoons in a rocking chair on the front porch of his house, sitting among the souvenir baskets and split oak kitchen chairs that advertised the staples of his souvenir shop, The Shady Rest.  My grandmother, always busy cleaning and cooking, handled the customers quietly, hoping they would actually buy something instead of browsing for a moment and asking to use the bathroom. If they did need the facilities, which they usually did, that involved a trip to the outhouse a hundred yards behind the house and still far too close. My Grandpa counted the money, bought goods from the traders who drifted by, and spat tobacco on any car which parked too close to the porch.  His favorite pastime was tallying the vehicles that passed the shop.  An exciting day was sixty cars, I remember.  It was the busiest highway in the area.

         One afternoon when my grandmother had walked the quarter mile to our house to visit us, my grandfather had the chance to count something very unusual.  As he related to my father later that day, while my father twisted his cap nervously in his hands and wondered whether Grandpa had completely gone mad, he was sitting in his chair on the porch when a silver saucer ship settled down onto the dirt parking lot between the house and the highway.  A hatch opened and three small people in odd tight clothing stepped out.  While he sat too stunned to move, they gathered around him and lifted him out of his chair, carrying him to the ship and aboard.

         Much of what happened on the ship is lost to history. I remember lying on the floor to the side of Grandpa's footstool and hanging raptly on every word. He was so excited he kept running short of breath and having to start again. Grandpa said that from his seat up front by the window of the saucer, with the crew sitting politely to either side of him, he could see that they lifted way, way up in the sky, so high he could see the whole country rolling past below. Not just the local hills and fields and streams, but "the whole damn country, Jim!" from plains to mountains to ocean and on past the curve of the world.  Some time later, after certain things happened that were never fully disclosed to us, the same ship brought him back to the garden lot atop the hill, across the road from the Shady Rest, leaving him there alone and astonished among my grandmother's tomatoes and string beans, so he had to struggle down a steep embankment covered with kudzu vines just to get back to the porch.  He could have walked around, down the short wagon track that was our small portion of the Trail of Tears, but he took the shorter and more difficult route instead.  People in my lineage are like that.

         Grandpa realized quickly that my father didn't believe a word of his account, beyond his sitting in the rocker on the porch, and angrily refused to say anything more his adventure ever again. For quite some time everyone in the family thought my grandfather was crazy and was especially nice to him, but he saw through that enforced politeness instantly and reacted with fuming silence. His reputation was somewhat restored when a few days later, while hanging the family laundry out to dry, my grandmother and my mother saw three silver saucer ships hanging motionless over our house. My father was the only skeptic, probably because he didn't get to see anything.

         That summer was a season of delicious fear for the rest of us, even without the aliens in the parking lot. My sisters and I played "outrunning the saucers" instead of tag and I panicked one day when the screen door stuck closed and I couldn't get to safety in time, even when the "saucer" was nothing more than an empty grocery bag blowing across the yard. Every day the radio would blare an ominous warning from the Emergency Broadcast System and we'd stop whatever we were doing until officially reassured it was "a test and only a test." At night sometimes we'd go out in the yard in the dark clear summer air and watch the little blinking star of Sputnik wink its way across the sky. Some people said there was a little dog in it, but as hard as I'd try I couldn't hear him barking, so I wasn't sure that was true. Some people do exaggerate. Once my grandmother asked my father nervously if the Russians could drop bombs on us from up there. My father knew things about war and we all silently waited for his response, but he just shook his head and said he didn't know. We all knew he meant they could.

        In the years that followed, everyone but me forgot the story Grandpa told. Other more famous people soon rode rockets into the sky, but Grandpa was never impressed with that. He silently "knew things" and kept his secrets until he died. I had my own reasons for remembering that summer, the year my grandfather was our first man in space. That was the year the aliens came and gave me a vision.