THE BALLAD OF THE UNSPEAKABLE SON
or
Why Mick Pryor Never Had A Grandad
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Maurice Cordwainer sat alone, eating his lunch under the
rare and stately bluegum that had stood forever at the edge of Sixty Acre Paddock.
The sandwich was small in the mass of his knotty fist, the bread a stark kind
of milk-white against the odd grimness of his grip on it.
As he finished he spread the fingers of both hands wide,
first turned away, then facing him, then turned away again, studying them as if
in mild bewilderment, as Maurice Cordwainer had arrived at the age where he had
trouble recognising his own hands, with their thin muslin skin and scribbly
blue veins, endless spawnings of fresh liver-splotches. Only the callouses and
their hard-earnt bigness seemed to remain from their prime. He mourned, just a
little, for the young bullocky hands they once were.
He brushed away a fly, took out an apple, twist-snapped it
in halves as had always been his way with apples, checked the core, bit down on
one half, chewed slowly. Behind him the tractor's engine block made small
ticking noises, contracting to its natural resting state.
In the distance a crow divined the end-of-the-world with
its dark and hopeless arrk arrk ahhrrrrrr, causing Maurice to stop
chewing, as it brought to his mind troubling images, of abandoned creatures, catastrophic
judgments, the voyages of Noah. The endless cubits of God's wrath.
Maurice Cordwainer surely sensed he was nearing the end of
his given days, and had become morbidly preoccupied of late with the
consideration of the significant waymarkers of his life - the ideals, the realities,
the failures. Recession, depression, rust, liverfluke, flystrike. Profit and
loss. Love and lust. Muriel Lightfoot. The unspeakable son. The distant wife,
the distant daughter, dynasty, patrimony, patri-money, sin, retribution. God. Absolution.
Grace. Heaven and Hell. Death.
As these things clattered around in his head, he wondered —
am I at all ready? Have I accumulated enough ... points?
After a lifetime of being faithful to group dogma, and
taking the safe and soft ride that this afforded, Maurice Cordwainer was now
beset by real doubts, by the fear that he had accepted a pre-packaged way to
God and Salvation without question, and that there might not be enough time
left for him to make ready, to get his own view of The Afterlife clear
in his addled brain.
He had on occasions even caught himself practising for
death, preparing himself for the leaving behind of this uncertain business of
Life and the memory of who he was. He would close his eyes and try to imagine
what wave of sensation might unfold through him at that last moment, and
whether it would be frightening, or filled with light and joy, and What, or Who,
might really be waiting to receive him out there in the endless
firmament.
He had acquired enough wisdom to know he would have much in
the way of blots and stains to explain away, standing before any throne to be
judged, but clung to the notion that at least he had one or two saving graces
with which to bargain for his Redemption. He had worked hard all of his life,
and he had been a close and decent and loving father to his daughters. To most
of his daughters.
His thoughts turned once more — compulsively — to his
youngest.
He wondered again why Dorothy had always seemed to be so — withholding
— as if forever in waiting, waiting for a more pleasing manifestation of ... of
... but his eyes and his grasp failed him one more time, leaving him far too
alone, as he gazed out across his flat and featureless landscape, with those
vaguely unsettling feelings of urgency and inadequacy once more tugging at his
elbow.
But, at that moment, all these clamouring things of life
suddenly became too much of a multitude to be with each other in the one head
at the one time, and he began shovelling them out, until he found that the only
thing he had left to consider was the essence itself, like writing left on the
wall, left by a previous occupier — “You arrive alone, you depart alone,
everything in between is just symbols, sweat, and passing company.”
That was what he was reading-thinking, but now desperately
needing someone, someone closer, to reassure him he had earned more.
His thoughts returned to Dorothy. Then absolution. Dorothy
in one hand, absolution in the other. It was an image that had visited him
often lately, and naggingly so, as if he had unconsciously made his youngest
daughter, the only one to have distanced herself so thoroughly, had made her
the final arbiter of his worth, and he now needed to actually hear Dorothy
testify to his earthly value, believing that only then might he find a measure
of peace, and readiness, and a little grace in the eyes of his God.
He slowly finished eating his apple. His eyes were deeply
sad.
Against all likelihood, Maurice Cordwainer had allowed
himself to become a terribly vulnerable man.
< >
There’s bitter irony in the story of the Unspeakable Son.
Maurice Cordwainer was a broad-acre farmer, the only son of
that unbroken but tenuous line of redheaded, broad-acre farming Cordwainer only
sons, the current bastion against the constant threat of Cordwainer name
oblivion that God seemed to have visited on the colonial Cordwainers. As
always, there had been any amount of daughters to take their ancient Dorset
gene-line out into the cities and farmlands of South Australia and Victoria, some
even with ‘Cordwainer’ as a middlename in futile acts of patronymic survival.
But still just that one thin line of males with a true and everlasting
Cordwainer surname, barely hanging on.
Until Maurice.
Maurice sired four daughters, and then Dorothy, who was to
be the last, as a cervical cancer scare ended all conventional possibilities,
and the proverbial writ was finally upon the wall, for all to see. Maurice
reeled at the news. He was an elder of the church, and while some would say he
was a bit of a puffed-up man and a minor bully, he believed he was worthy of
his due son and heir, as he'd been a good practising Anabaptist all his life.
Good until a passing domestic servant named Muriel Lightfoot stepped
provocatively through his senses.
Muriel Lightfoot caught Maurice in a dangerous moment of
middleaged madness and genital starvation. In many moments in fact. But when
the inevitable manure hit the muckspreader Maurice claimed that Muriel was a
debauched temptress, which was actually true, but Pastor Racket still felt
inclined to work long and hard on Muriel and her potent belly until they had
been purchased into some long term security, but elsewhere, out of their
reputation-rattled congregation and hopefully out of their lives. At some expense
to Maurice.
The irony (some would say delicious irony) was that Muriel
had a son. Which meant Maurice had a son. Which meant that the Cordwainers had
a son. As redheaded as ever. Unclaimed and unclaimable. Called Giacomo
Lightfoot.
Right through the whole sordid business, Maurice went into
a rigid state of anguish and denial, while Maurice's wife Mavis went into an
aggrieved slump and a separate bedroom. They both continued to pray and sing
loudly on Sundays, but — like a pair of mismatched bookends — kept their five
daughters (and the invisible and Unspeakable Son) lined up between them to fill
the long and everlasting space.
In an act of defiance, Muriel Lightfoot kept her baby, and
in a two room flat over a chandler's shop in Port Adelaide, raised him on
distant Cordwainer money and the fruits of the occasional Italian merchant
seaman. This was a nationality she much preferred, as Muriel surely believed
her own father had been Italian, based only on the fact that her hair and her
eyes were dark, that her middle name was Maria, and she had a penchant for
vermicelli done with mincemeat, spicy tomato sauce, and a little basil, especially
when consumed from the bare groin of a Neapolitan sailor while holding his
heaving manhood firmly in her right hand.
Muriel named her son Giacomo, after a short but vibrant
stoker from Palermo, whom she loved with a short but vibrant passion from the
very first week of being slim again, but eventually cut the man rather badly
across the left buttock with a bread knife for reasons she could not entirely
remember. But while Muriel Lightfoot may have been a little disturbed in the
head, she well recognised that her own son's penis represented a triumph and a
trophy in the grand scheme of things, especially Cordwainer things, and she
would regularly hold her son close, and caress it, while she rocked him back
and forth, and sang him quaverous lullabies.
It would be far too many years before Giacomo came to
appreciate that this was not a normal state of affairs.
< >
Dorothy Cordwainer was always something of an independent
child, which may have been why she never developed any particular closeness to
her father, although she had at least arrived with a fundamental need for a
man-figure, to be a father-figure. But she could not find this in
Maurice Cordwainer. Her strong personality needed example, where he gave a
tainted ambiguity. It needed enlightenment where he gave tutelage. It needed
friendliness where he gave supervision. It needed affection where he gave
stewardship. She came to think of him as a little — wishy-washy.
It bothered her sometimes, as an adult, that she didn't get
to participate in what society imagines to be the right and proper course of
events, where she would somehow just naturally love and respect — and like
— her father. But she couldn't, and in time Dorothy came to see that their
parent/child relationship had evolved in the vicious circle of not giving so
not expecting so not giving. All love is conditional, and Dorothy had
unwittingly, in the way of all natural loners, simply not accepted the conditions.
She seemed to be forever standing back and waiting.
There was a brief period though, at age sixteen, when
Dorothy tried to properly connect to her father through the re-affirmation of
their shared religion, and had herself re-baptised, imagining that this could
lead her, at that last flowering of her time as a child, to Jesus and
enlightenment, and through this to a re-birth of paternal love. But in truth
the time had already passed, her adult brain already sceptical, her woman's
heart already astute.
In grasping for closeness with her father, what came to the
surface instead was a buried memory of whispers, of words, of secrets, of
somewhere a castoff baby, somewhere a red-headed boy, who officially never
existed. Re-awakenings can be like that. If a strong-minded person fishes
around in the images from early childhood long enough, looking for one lost
thing, they can find something else entirely, from which they make final judgements
and decisions that will last a lifetime.
She may have only been six years old, but she remembered
the background noise, like emotional furniture being moved about, in rooms
behind closed doors, her mother with a deep and devastated look day and night,
her father stiff with remorse and the air thick with deals being done.
Their house wasn't the same after that, as if it had
greenstick fractures in its limbs, in her parents’ limbs, in her sisters’
limbs, in Dorothy's limbs. Fractures that wouldn't mend. It took Dorothy much
of her teenage and early adult years to wheedle the truth out of the reluctant
family woodwork, but then didn't know quite what to do with it. Until Giacomo
confronted her doorstep.
< >
Giacomo Lightfoot had had little experience with real
families.
Before he tracked Dorothy down, ‘Mam’ Lightfoot was the
only thing remotely like family he'd known. And Mam wasn't right in the head,
and probably never had been. It had taken him twenty years to make up his mind
that his mother wasn't right in the head and probably never had been, but once
he recognised this, and admitted it, at least to himself, he left home and
started to find his own way of getting hold of life.
But he still hadn't been exposed to a lot of the funny,
gritty, pushy-shovey, lovey-hatey, electromagnetic energy-stuff that held
proper families together in one sticky cross-laminated mass when by all rules
of science they should've flown off in several different directions at least
twice a week.
It had begun with Dorothy, when he found her and her family
living in a tired old renter in Bacon St, behind the wool-scouring works at
Thebarton.
As though some kind of genetic memory was at work,
recognition passed between them in the very first instant of her opening the
door. And oddly enough she didn't look all that surprised to see him, as if
she’d been waiting.
“Um — Dorothy?”
“Yes...”, but then she didn't react one way or the other,
and he was ready for her to shut the door soundly in his face, as the
Cordwainers had always so pointedly done, or as his mother was inclined to
endlessly tell it. But his resolve was to see this through, regardless. It was
now or never.
“Hullo — I'm your — um — little brother — Giacomo — well,
half-brother I suppose — I don't know if you know — if anyone — I’ve been
meaning to...”, and then his prattle dried up, waiting for the embarrassed, but
firm, rejection.
But there wasn’t one.
The truth was that Dorothy felt an obligation, on behalf of
the Cordwainers, a nagging sense of debt and injustice. Which was why, in the
beginning, she left the door wide open for him in the old place in Bacon
Street, to give him room to manoeuvre, and to glean from them what sense of
family he could. It was then that Giacomo Lightfoot’s uncertain heart began to
beat just a little more evenly.
But, the Pryors struggled a bit with Giacomo, at first,
even Dorothy. It was his name. Actually it was lots more than just his name,
but his name seemed to capture the whole awkward nature of this fine-boned
young man and his need to attach himself to the Pryor household.
He pronounced it ‘Tjuck-o-moe’, rolled it off his tongue
with practised ease. Dorothy had the first try, brought him in and introduced
him around.
“Allan — this is my brother...”, and Giacomo flushed with
intense pleasure, to at last hear the words ‘my brother’, “...the one I told
you about... Jack-Como...”, but managing only to make him sound like a brother
to Perry. Perry-Como.
“Tjuck-o-moe...”, Giacomo gently corrected, and with a
nervous little laugh added, “... it’s ... Italian ... takes a bit of practice.”
Allan put aside his newspaper and stood up, wondering if
anyone could look less Italian than this. Or for that matter, look less of a
Cordwainer than this, as he was slightly built, finely featured, freckled, as
nervous as a cat, while the Cordwainers had tendencies towards chunkiness, lived
by muscle and sinew and were of meat and large potatoes, while he looked more
like he’d grown up with leanings towards fettuccini and bruschetta, Rigoletto,
and just about any of the works of Caravaggio.
Allan shook his hand, long fingers, thin, a little sweaty,
but firm and positive. It was Allan's turn to have a try.
“Juck a mo...”, and he gave the ‘Juck’ a sort of a slur,
like a Hollywood French accent, “...g'day — glad t’ meet ya.”
By the time they’d introduced him around to the kids, and
lurched through afternoon tea, his name had been trimmed down to ‘Juck’, and by
his third visit it had mulled into ‘Jack’, and — red hair and freckles and all
— by about the sixth Sunday afternoon Allan had drifted it off to ‘Jock’ and
the rest of them sort of followed. Because it was easier. And it certainly
fitted better. Considerably.
Giacomo didn't mind. They could've called him anything. It
was the ‘my brother’ part he was really looking for. And besides, ‘Jock’ had a
meaty and masculine ring to it.
< >
To get a rounded start in life, every kid should have a
grandparent, at least one, and for a decent amount of time.
That’s what Mick Pryor believed.
Still does.
He also believed that a boy especially needed a
grand-father, to fulfill that natural order of things which decrees that small
boys and old men should between them continually re-create the link through
which passes the more ancient workings of the mystery. All part of the Big
Engine.
But it needs to be a particular type of grandfather, a
really old one who knows how the Moses stuff works, the stuff that's been
handed down since Time, three parts wisdom and one part fable, the stuff
parents don't have until they’re old and it’s too late. And it needs to be
someone they can easily connect to, who can hook them straight up to those
primeval ideas, give them a different slant from a different age, point them at
other ways of seeing the clutter and clatter of life in the ten minutes that a
kid is given to get everything collected and organised in their head before
it's time to start wearing a particular hat.
Grandfathers like that are not easy to find.
Mick Pryor will always remember the day he lost his one and
only shot at having a proper grandfather. A true Grandad.
It happened on their first proper Sunday lunch after
finishing ‘The Shack’ on the blocks at Greenacres, those artichoked blackdirt
slices of wheat paddock that had been their part in the great Post-War Dream of
homeowner heaven. A shed-with-lean-to was Allan’s version of every 1950 battler’s
temporary Quick Fix.
But it was meant to be a Memorable Occasion.
And it was.
It began with the family scrapping over seating
arrangements, as they seemed to have forgotten their long-used best fit for
lunch on Sundays at Bacon Street. It was like they'd left the floor plan
behind, or more that they now needed one more suited to their downsized “dining
room”, and for a minute or two it looked like only the vagaries of chance and the
rules of Rafferty were at play.
Allan had taken the end by the door, and Dorothy the other
end nearest the stove, but after that the main driver seemed to be the scramble
for the last two real chairs. Claire quickly claimed these for herself and Jock,
put them along the bedroom curtain side of the table, leaving Millicent, Wenno,
and Mick to squabble over Allan's handcrafted bench seat against the back wall.
And squabble they did. Until Allan took hold of Wenno’s and Mick’s
neck-scruffs, plonked Wenno’s backside in the middle, Mick’s beside himself,
with Millicent at her mother's right hand.
And so a peace of sorts settled.
Until...
< >
Dorothy always accepted
that her father didn't care for the city, acting as though it was a dangerous
place, alien and without rules, the simple rules of Maurice Cordwainer's small
world of paddock and shed and church. Not that she had ever discussed this with
him, or would even be given the opportunity, as her father had only visited
them once or twice, in their early days at Bacon Street, and even then he never
came on his own, on each occasion bringing one of her sisters, like his shield
against surprise attacks of intimacy.
And not that Dorothy
could visualise her father and her mother spending travelling time together,
just the two of them crammed into an impossible space the size of a truck cab.
For all the home life that Dorothy remembered, they could only seem to exist as
a couple with several other people placed between them, to soak up the awful
sense of void they generated.
And besides, her father
always wrote to her of arrangements as they developed, in letters that began
‘My Dear Dorothy’, even though he never actually used that degree of endearment
in real life. Not that she cared. About his arrangements or his endearments. Or
so she would say to Allan, and too often.
It was not surprising
then that Dorothy was totally unprepared for her father's face to appear,
unannounced and unaccompanied, at their wirescreen door that Sunday.
It was just as they
were finishing and they hadn't even cleared away, and the seven of them were
pressed in around the table, talking about Truman's dismissal of General
MacArthur.
Millicent was in the
middle of asserting her opinion that this had surely averted World War Three,
when there was a tentative two-knuckle rap on the three-ply, startling all of
them.
“Hullo there, anyone ...
home?”
Allan froze, half out
of his chair.
“G'day — we didn't know
you were...”, and before he could do anything about it, Maurice had the door
open and was standing inside.
Dorothy looked at Jock,
Millicent and Claire as well, each with the same expression of apprehension,
even a little panic, as both girls knew well the subtleties of the family saga.
For a moment or two
Jock seemed no more than puzzled, at their odd reaction to a passing visitor,
but then his complexion went redder than normal, and tense with it, eyes big.
Wenno and Mick simply looked pleased, that one of their distant grandparents was
visiting.
Maurice glanced about
the room, eyes adjusting to the light, nodding and giving a part of a smile to
each of them in turn, a neutral kind of smile, a smile that implied nothing one
way or the other, to Jock as well.
“I've been in town — fixing
up a bit of business...”, was all he offered in explanation, but mainly to
disrupt the strained little silence that was hanging in the air, picking up on
the odd discomfort, but clearly not appreciating the cause.
Dorothy could feel it
beginning to rise rising in her throat, like suffocation, with altogether too
many people and too much heavy breathing around her, crowding into her space,
taking all the air.
“...thought I'd drop in,
cadge a cuppa tea...”, he went on, “...maybe have a ... chat...”, and for a
fleeting moment something just a tiny bit anguished and regretful moved in
Dorothy's heart, at the sight of this apologetic and time-weathered old man,
who once had aspirations to be her father, standing there, turning his best hat
around and around in his hands. Too late wrong place too few acts of fidelity
an old anger whispered, which only added to her inner conflicts.
Suddenly everyone
seemed to want to undertake various pointless small actions at once. Everyone
but Jock, who seemed to have gone completely rigid — shoulders, jaw, demeanour,
everything, even his trembly fingers had become still, every part of him, as
still as a statue, except for the blinking of his eyes, now fixed on Maurice.
Allan stood up all the
way, and awkwardly, knocking his chair over sideways, then he bumped the table
heavily with his backside as he quickly bent to retrieve the chair. Millicent
grabbed at sloshing cups of tea, Claire put her hand on Jock's shoulder, and
Wenno pushed past Mick and her father and gave Maurice a hug, which caught the
old man off-guard somewhat because it'd been about nineteen twenty seven when
he'd had his last truly enthusiastic and spontaneous hug, and now obviously
couldn't remember Wenno's name. Mick waved to his grandfather like he was a
hundred yards away and called out, loudly -
“G'day Grandad...”,
even though none of the kids ever referred to him as Grandad in his absence,
but Grandfather Cordwainer.
“G'day young
Maurice...”, he said, as Wenno finally let go and tried to manoeuvre him to her
own seat.
“Sit down here
Grand...”, she began, but Allan had already shifted his chair out of the way
beside Claire and was trying to steer the old fella to his place at the
head of the table and for a second it looked like father and daughter were
fighting over him and Maurice didn't know where to go. He shuffled with
some uncertainty as Allan disconnected Wenno's hand and pointed her back to her
seat, then sat down himself, bumping the table solidly once more, with
Millicent again grabbing at cups with saucers now completely awash. Millicent
couldn't stand it.
“Da-ad!! — will
y’ watch what you're ... !”
“Hell — sorry — sit
y'self down Maurice...”, and then realised the old man didn't have a chair,
standing with his hat clenched by the brim and looking at a totally empty
space. And there wasn't another chair anyway.
Allan jumped up again
and put his own there for him, and Maurice Cordwainer finally sat down, a
little tentatively, as if he half expected the chair to de-materialise and leave
him sitting on the floor like a damn fool and everyone laughing. Dorothy
couldn't stand it. She just wanted to be somewhere else. She gestured
impatiently at Allan.
“I'm sorry Dad, we're a
bit — you didn't — Allan! — get Dad a cup f'petesake”, and all this time she
could feel Jock's stony gaze on their father's face, and she just had to turn
away from the whole thing, on the pretext of getting the kettle and topping up
the teapot that was sitting on the side of the stove.
“So, Maurice — you've
got a — um — bitta business ... ?”, she could hear Allan waffling, to the clink
of cup and saucer and teaspoon coming together. She took a deep breath, and
turned in time to catch her father now casting about the table with some care,
as if checking off each person present against his memory-bank, and seemed to
at last notice Jock, not fitting. Dorothy could feel her stomach knotting up,
and looked to Allan, now standing by the china-cabinet with arms folded,
clearly recognising that all comfortable options had been lost. His eyes caught
hers and begged the question –
‘What the hell
d'we do now?!'
If the walls had been
anything less than corrugated iron at that moment Dorothy would've done a
Superman and gone straight through them. Anything to escape this heaving press
of impossible circumstance. Then she noticed that Claire was glaring at her
grandfather with eyes so filled with animosity that Dorothy was taken aback.
And her hand was still on Jock's shoulder, in fierce protection, and in that
instant Dorothy was at a loss, as if being forced to re-see her second
daughter. And Millicent wouldn't stop fidgeting around with table settings. And
Mick was babbling on about crystal radio sets and endless bike parts and Wenno
was talking over the top of him about her cat that died three years ago not
that Maurice was listening and Allan had his arms folded so tightly it looked
like he was feeling a chill. Still Jock didn't move. Dorothy thought she might just
give one almighty scream and throw herself at the walls anyway.
Maurice Cordwainer's
gaze had finally come to rest on Jock, as if waiting for someone to introduce
him, maybe to Claire's boyfriend, maybe to a neighbour. The whole place went
silent at precisely the same moment, the same precise moment that Maurice looked
at Jock's red hair and the comely features of a certain wayward young woman — and
the penny dropped.
Maurice went pale.
Dorothy went pale. Several large stone walls could've been constructed from the
silence alone. Jock suddenly leaned across the table, and everyone over
thirteen years of age flinched as if expecting a dagger thrust. He reached out
with one long-fingered hand.
“Bastard son and heir
... father dear ...”, he introduced himself quietly, and there was a
quaver in his voice, but the inflection sounded distinctly like ‘... you old prick!’.
Mick was goggle-eyed.
Wenno stopped looking happy. Millicent stopped re-arranging. Claire continued
to glare. Allan raised his eyes to the heavens as if praying for a miracle of
deliverance. Dorothy's chin slumped onto her chest, and she sighed, and deeply,
exhaling twenty-odd years of a private grief.
Maurice was caught, and
unprepared, and actually took Jock's hand, and sort of shook it, maybe because
he wanted to, but maybe because he simply didn't know how not to.
“I'm — sorry about that
...”, was all he mumbled, as there was no space to say more, nowhere near
enough space, to unload a lifetime of explanations and apologies and a little
self-defence. And there was genuine regret in his voice, so Dorothy thought, or
needed to think. And for an instant the old man’s eyes found hers, and went as
sad and as sallow as cold broth. But Jock was having none of it. He'd nursed
this apparition for far too long.
“I'm sure you are...”,
and took back his hand and symbolically wiped it on his jumper with a good deal
of unbecoming malice. Even Claire flinched at that.
Dorothy made a strange
noise in her throat, that came from somewhere in her ribcage, maybe near her
heart, and she scrambled for the door with the wild-eyed panic of a cornered
animal fighting for survival, shoving past bodies, furniture, husbands, fathers,
whamming the wirescreen door wide and stumbling out into the open air, to stand
between the oregano and the parsley to pump her lungs full and empty and full
and empty and full again till her head went dizzy and only Allan grabbing her
by the arms stopped her from falling down. She steadied herself, shrugging him
off, and set about expelling words at him, words from the wrong side of her
personality, words about failure and unfairness and unbearable suffocation,
primal words she would soon enough regret, then set off for a very long walk,
her apron still on and her inside-the-shack scuffs slapping at her heels.
< >
The old man shuffled up
the driveway, to where his truck was parked on the side of the road.
Mick followed behind.
It had a square of
gates on the back, and in the gates were two rams and a thick scatter of straw.
He was hunched over, like he was walking into a strong wind, with his head
bowed and his eyes blinking, and he caught his shin on the rear bumper of
Jock’s car in passing, and stumbled forward in a shuffly little run, his hands
grabbing ahead as though something to hold onto might be found from thin air.
Mick made a concerned
noise, reached out and grabbed his coat as if to steady him, but intent on
re-collecting his feet, the old man missed in his grandson's small voice his
deep concern for him, which came from a true and unconditional love, the one
that Maurice Cordwainer had actually made this journey to find. Now totally
lost to his ears.
“Seeya Grandad — seeya
when y'come down next...”, but his grandfather didn't seem to hear this either,
and climbed into the cab, closing the door carefully, the way people do late at
night, not wanting to disturb the neighbours.
He leaned over the
steering wheel for a moment or two, staring through the dashboard. Mick thought
he looked really sad, really really sad, thought he might even be crying. Mick
could feel the Big Engine’s making-energy-and-breaking-energy, swirling and
churning all around him, and it made him painfully sad too, but he didn't know
quite why, there was just too much grownup stuff flying past, full of mystery
and out of his reach.
The truck started, and
Mick waved, hard, and yelled out, one more time –
“Seeya Grandad...”
– but his grandfather didn't look back.
© T. R. Edmonds 2026