In the Castle of the Flynns. Michael Raleigh
“Oh, now what does it look like?” he would mutter, looking at the television.
“You’ve been drinking this poison again.”
“No,” he would say. “That’s an old one.”
“I reversed the cushion on this chair last week, and this filthy thing wasn’t there then.”
“Well, I don’t remember when I drank it. I’m not even sure it’s mine,” he would say with a shrug.
“And whose is it, then? Mine?”
And my grandfather would turn to me and give me a long, slow squint, and this would set her off.
“Oh, for the love of God, you know very well it’s not his,” she would say, and march off to the kitchen, and then it was her turn to mutter, a couple of people who had learned to communicate both directly and indirectly after thirty years of unarmed conflict. “A moron I’ve chosen to live my life with,” she would say, “an amadan I’ve got for a husband, without the sense to come in out of the rain, pouring poison down his throat and dragging a tiny boy along with him.”
There would follow the sound of the bottle being tossed violently into the garbage can.
“A brainless idiot I’m joined to for life,” she’d say loudly.
Still facing the television screen he would mutter something like, “A little drink never hurt anybody I know,” and she would hear it, as she was intended to, the softness of his voice notwithstanding, and this would launch her like a missile into a short but violent burst of anger and general name-calling, a performance that would in Shakespeare’s day have earned her the title of Village Scold.
And then she would be all right. A few minutes would pass, marked by the sounds and smells of Grandma putting dinner together, and after allowing her a short while to calm down, my grandfather would call out, “What’s for dinner?”
“God knows you don’t deserve one.”
“Probably not, but I’d like to know anyway.”
“Pork chops and boiled potatoes.”
He would nod, pleased with the answer, and I would nod along with him. She was making good things, and that meant she wasn’t holding a grudge.
Good things they were, always, she could cook anything and make it taste like food on a picnic, but it was not necessarily the menu a doctor would have put together. The salient characteristic of my grandmother’s cooking was lard. “Shortening” she called it, but it was lard, lard from a can the size of a man’s head, thick and white with the consistency of new-poured cement, and when it had melted into a pool an inch thick in the big black skillet, she would drop in the pork chops, or the chicken, or the hamburgers. If necessary, she cooked eggs in it, though she clearly felt that the ideal medium for the cooking of eggs was the grease from a half-pound of bacon.
She wasn’t trying to kill him: she was just a farm girl from the simplest part of the old country, where a breakfast or dinner that “stuck to your ribs” was more than a colorful expression. Once I saw her drop my grandfather’s toast in the bacon grease. At first, I thought this was a mistake, but she left it there and when it was soaked through, she slapped it on his plate.
“A little grease makes your insides work,” she once told me, thus giving me the notion that lard was the culinary equivalent of a good thick motor oil and suggesting to me that Grandpa was probably healthier than he looked. For his part, however, the old man frequently claimed that after one of her breakfasts he often lost the feeling in his lower legs.
A typical dinner was chicken or pork chops, potatoes, sometimes soup, a vegetable. And jello. In the years we were together she served me jello perhaps two thousand times, and it was always lemon: perhaps she found the color soothing, or had heard lemon jello had magical properties, so that was what we had. With dinner they split a quart of Meister Bräu, and indulged in the fantasy that this small quantity of beer was my grandfather’s “ration,” ignoring the fact that he’d put away a half-pint of Jim Beam earlier in the afternoon.
She made me drink milk, except on Saturdays when she gave me Pepsi-Cola. Fried pork chops, boiled potatoes, green beans, lemon jello, Pepsi. To this day, if I’m served pork chops I expect it to be followed by lemon jello, and I can’t think of any of these things, can’t taste them, without thinking of my grandmother.
Each morning when I awoke she was already up and dressed for work and tending to the needs of “the two simple-minded children that live in my poor house.” She made us sandwiches for lunch, wrapping them in a thick waxed paper, and fixed “eggnog” for him in a tall glass. It appeared to be sugar and a raw egg in a glass of milk, and after it had set a while, the contents separated into layers. Grandpa would hold it up to the light and peer at it, then shake his head.
“Oh, look at that, would you? Something in there’s moving.”
Then he would stir it and drink half of it down at a swallow, gasping afterward.
“Is it like the eggnog we have at Christmas?” I asked him once.
“Good God, no.” He stared at his eggnog and spoke in a stage whisper, “She tries to poison me.” Then he pretended to have a brilliant idea. “Here, Danny-boy, do you want it?”
I told him I had cereal, and I did, multi-colored balls of cereal that went soggy in milk and dyed it the colors of spumoni ice cream. In any case, I had no need for this glass of milk with disgusting elements of raw egg floating around in it. For his part, he seemed to find my little soggy bits of cereal repellent, and frequently I’d find him grimacing as I fished for the last shapeless bits swimming in the now-colored milk.
After she went to work, I’d play or read and he would smoke Camels at the kitchen table—a practice that seemed to be a male responsibility in most households: my uncles all did it and I remembered seeing my father sitting at our kitchen table smoking and staring out the window.
In the afternoons we went on our trips, and when we came back, he would settle in under the glow of a couple of snorts and take a short nap. As he slept, I would explore the house, unfettered by an adult hand. I went through my grandparents’ drawers and studied old photographs, read old mail, explored the dark recesses of Uncle Tom’s closet and the dresser where Uncle Mike kept magazines with pictures of girls without clothes. I understood that these magazines had something to do with sex and that I mustn’t look at them, and so I rooted them out like a termite on old wood. I went through my uncles’ pockets in search of scandal and found loose change, scraps of paper, work-related notes, receipts. I crept into the pantry and drank Log Cabin syrup straight from the little tin chimney atop the painted cabin, I spooned honey straight from the jar, I tried wine, which I found acridly repulsive, purloined hard candy from a hidden jar, stuck a greedy finger into the raspberry reserves and, finally, I sank my exploratory fangs into the wax fruit on grandma’s living room table. It was, like most wax, tasteless, and I was surprised that anything so colorful as her wax peach could be so bland. I tried to smooth out the toothmarks and set the peach back in the bowl, then bit into the wax grapes, in case the peach had been set out as a decoy.
Eventually, she was to find the tooth marks, and it happened when I was in the next room, in the dining room, where I had covered the entire dinner table with my toy soldiers. From the corner of my eye I saw her bend over the glass bowl and freeze and I shot her a quick glance. She was holding the wax peach and staring at it open-mouthed. Then she glanced from it to me with the look that she’d probably have used if I’d told her I’d gone dancing naked down Clybourn. In the end, she replaced the peach, bite marks down, and said nothing. As she walked into the kitchen, she was shaking her head.
And on another lazy afternoon in my company, my grandfather set fire to the couch.
He had nodded off with a Camel between his tobacco-stained fingers and I was playing a few feet away on the living room floor with my soldiers. I had noticed the cigarette but was still convinced at that stage of life that adults normally knew what they were doing. A while later,