Dirt: To and Fro

6

It is God who girds me about with strength
and makes my way secure.
He makes me sure-footed like a deer
and lets me stand firm on the heights.
He trains my hands for battle
and my arms for bending even a bow of bronze.

Psalm 18:32-34

1950

My grandparents’ house was on a bluff above the Arkansas River. This was before the river had dams and it was a wide, treacherous, sluggish stream flowing out of nearby Oklahoma. Levees tried to keep it from the fertile floodplains and it was hemmed in by the flinty outcroppings from the Boston Mountains to the north and the Ouachita Mountains to the south.

The front porch looked out over the river. Flagstones led from the porch out to the edge of the bluff. A winding series of steps went down the face of the bluff to the road below. On summer days I was sometimes allowed to walk to work with my grandfather; he in a suit and straw fedora hat, I in jeans and tennis shoes.

The steps were made of stone and concrete. Aged wrought iron railings on the downslope side were entangled with honeysuckle, Boston ivy, and grape vines. I often picked up a stick and rattled it along the rails to clatter my way down the hill, warning the rabbits that we were coming, listening for their dash into the thickets. Sometimes I counted the steps to the road below, the same road that ran from the back of my grandfather’s house and around the hill, the road he drove in his Hudson Hornet most days. When we reached the road we crossed the railroad tracks and walked the three blocks to his office at the Myers Commission Company.

At the end of the day, we walked back. By then the summer afternoon heat was full upon the streets of Van Buren. By the time we reached the railroad tracks my grandfather had taken off his coat and had once or twice wiped the leather sweatband of his hat with his handkerchief. Then we started up the steps. I hopped and skipped up them two at a time, pausing at each landing to wait for my grandfather who walked at a steadier pace. My grandfather’s approach was to lightly touch the iron railing at the bottom step and begin a slow, steady climb, placing his heavy wingtip shoes one after the other, one step at a time, carefully, patiently, inexorably making his way up the hill.

From time to time I was able to sneak up on a garter snake sunning itself or a toad lurking in a damp shadow. Or I might stop and pluck a honeysuckle blossom. I’d bite the end off and suck the green-sweet nectar.

Halfway up the bluff I was ready to sit for a moment, perhaps to pick at a broken piece of concrete or a loose stone. My grandfather came on slowly, steadily, breathing lightly, enjoying the walk up the hill. He watched me with a benign air, but never slowed his pace, shooing me forward when he caught up with me, watching me scamper and puff my breath out and wipe my face on the sleeve of my shirt. On a turning when we could see the river, Papaw looked out across the floodplain on the other side then glanced at the sky to check the weather. He might point something out to me — a new sandbar in the river or one of the rowboats used by the rough men who set trot lines for catfish and primeval alligator gar.

At the last turn, when there were only another 20 or so steps to go, I would be exhausted. Grandfather, never slacking his pace, always took my hand. 

“Just a bit further,” he’d say, “I’m an old man and you are just a boy.” 

I always found something new and fresh in myself as if energy flowed out of that huge hand that wrapped around mine. I would pick up my pace, skipping up the steps but never letting go, like a puppy on a leash dashing ahead, pulling back, but never letting go.

We always reached the crest together and as we crossed the flagstones leading to the front porch my grandfather let go of my hand to put his coat back on and wipe the sweatband of his hat for the last time. I’d dash across the yard and up the steps, crash through the screen door and shout out my announcement of our return, “Mamaw, we’re home!”