First published in The Grieve Anthology, Volume 7 (2019)
Jane stood looking down the length of the hospital bed at the old, dying man, her grandfather. ‘Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything.’ The mantra echoed in her head. At the same time she wanted to ask ‘How could you? And did you, in the end, believe her?’ But she said nothing, asked none of these questions.
Her grandfather lingered, living for a few more days. During that time Jane resisted her mother’s pleas to visit him in the hospital again. She was afraid she’d not be able to hold her tongue for a second visit.
Now she would never know.
At the funeral Jane was reminded of simpler times when she had been a young child in the care of her loving grandfather. He’d take her out to the backyard to feed Bluey, the pet blue tongue lizard, with tiny bits of chopped meat. Bluey was trapped in a kind of lizard park; a landscape of dirt, rocks, sticks and leaves contained in an old bath with some wire stretched over the top. When Bluey stopped taking meat, indicating he’d had enough, Jane’s grandfather would let her use some of the tools in his workshop. Her favorites were the planes and the hand drill.
At the funeral her uncle talked about her grandfather’s war neuroses and how it wasn’t really acknowledged when he came home in 1945. He was just expected to get on with life by getting to know the children who had been born while he was away and returning to work as a carpenter.
Jane felt herself choked with conflicting emotions and smothered a sob with her handkerchief. She had loved her grandfather and felt sympathy for the young man he had been. But her mother’s revelations about her own sexual abuse at the hands of his father had destroyed the stories she had believed about the family. Her mother had been 12 when she told her parents of the abuse which had been happening to her for years. Her mother’s emerging sense of self had been beaten back by the disbelief of her parents. It would only re-emerge, malformed and fragile, years later, through painstaking therapy. But after the revelations the abuse had stopped. Feeling a warped sense of duty or, perhaps, a determined forgiveness, her mother had served her father as he aged; cooking, washing and cleaning for him as he became increasingly frail.
Could she forgive, Jane wondered, as she sat with the hard pew beneath her. Maybe, if she knew her grandfather had finally believed her mother. If there were any sign he had done anything to protect his daughter. But the only person who could give her the answers she sought was laid out in the coffin before her. And now she would never know.
