Patience is a Virtue

Patience Is A Virtue

By Damon Nomad

          It was oddly quiet as I trudged up the long gravel driveway to my grandparent's home. I usually could hear the television far away from the front porch. My heart filled with dread as I got closer to the old farmhouse.
          My mother told me never to say that I hated anyone, but there was an understood exception for Grandpa Rufus. He called my mom a stupid bitch the first time she stepped foot into this house. Because she refused to fetch a beer from the refrigerator while he watched a baseball game on television. I heard the story, when I was ten or eleven, while my parents were arguing. My mother threw it in my dad's face, saying he didn't stand up to the ornery old man.
          Rude, mean, and stubborn were the three most common adjectives my parents used to describe him. I cussed under my breath as I plodded up the stairs of the front porch. Banished to this backwoods place, for two months, to help with chores. Not how I wanted to spend my last summer before heading to college.
          Grandma Anne came onto the front porch as the screen door slammed shut behind her. "Sorry, you had to walk from the bus station." She was afraid to drive alone and I figured Grandpa refused to help. She looked much the same; a bone-thin woman with a sad face. She never said much and rarely spoke in the presence of Grandpa Rufus. I had no memory of her smiling or laughing.
          "I don't hear the TV. Is it broken?" I gave her a half-hearted hug as she pecked me on the cheek.
          "He gave up trying to hear it. Still won't admit he's deaf." He'd been in denial about his progressive hearing loss for years.
          She was more of a mystery to me than him. Why did she marry the jerk and stay with him for going on fifty years? It was never said, but I was sure he hit her and my father when he was a child. Not wild beatings, but a hard smack on the face or punch to the back of the head for an insolent word or act. They only had one child, thank God.
          I found Grandpa parked in his cherished recliner. A few days of stubble covered his face and he sported a buzz cut he gave himself once a week with electric clippers. Bib overalls and a dingy once-white tee shirt underneath covered his slightly overweight frame. Not a huge man, but certainly not small especially next to Grandma. His stocking feet were kicked up on the footrest and a hand-rolled cigarette hung from his lips. A collection of empty beer bottles sat next to him on an end table. He was proof that heavy drinking and smoking don't necessarily kill you before your time.
          He kept his gaze on the television as I came into the room. I picked up the remote and clicked through until I found the subtitles for the hearing impaired. I turned them on without expecting or wanting a thank you. I smirked knowing that he didn't know how to do it himself.
          I heard him as I shuffled toward the stairs with my backpack. "Smartass, just like your father. I don't need words to understand a ball game."
          ***
          A few days later, I took a break from trimming weeds around the walkway leading to the front porch. I sat on a porch step gazing out at the rolling farmland across the narrow country road that ran in front of the house. A few hundred acres of prime tobacco-growing land for four generations of my father's family. The land and tobacco barns were sold off after my father left home. A corporate farming operation still grew tobacco in the fields. I lazily watched as the mailman made his daily stop.
          I heard the sound of the screen door slamming shut and footsteps coming towards me. "Get out of my way." He talked way too loud ever since he started going deaf.
          I followed him as he headed for the old sedan on the carport. Surely, they took his driver's license away. Then I realized he wouldn't care. There was no arguing with him, especially now that he physically couldn't hear. I jumped in the front passenger's seat; I couldn't let him kill himself, could I? I thought about it for a moment and decided it was the right thing to do.
          Grandpa didn't complain about me coming along as he slammed the car into gear. "I need beer and rolling paper. Stupid old woman said wait till tomorrow."
          The car careened down the driveway and then left onto the country road without him ever checking for traffic. I heard honking coming from the right and pulled on the steering wheel just in time to avoid a crash with a white church bus. The bus barreled down the road; the back covered with red numbers for citations to Bible verses.
          Grandpa mashed down the accelerator and didn't look at me as I let go of the wheel. "He was speedin'; not my mistake."
          The nearest town, more of a village, was only five miles away. It seemed a lot further when you had to walk from the bus stop. We screeched to a stop in the gravel parking lot of the general store. The man behind the counter was wearing a police uniform; he was the town's sheriff as well as the store owner. He walked over, tapped Grandpa in the chest, and held up a sheet of paper. You got no drivers license. Have the boy drive home.
          My grandfather handed me the car keys and headed down the aisle. "Fine!"
          A pickup truck flew past just as I was ready to pull out onto the country road after Grandpa paid for the beer, cigarette papers, and nine-volt batteries I retrieved from the shelves. I exclaimed with a joke of sorts, "Why don't they slow down and enjoy life." I went quiet, realizing that Grandpa Rufus couldn't hear me. Even if he did, he didn't have a sense of humor.
          ***
          A few days later, I changed out the batteries in the smoke alarms in the house. They were all dead. My father had installed them years ago because they gave Grandma peace of mind. Especially because Grandpa smoked in bed, but now he slept downstairs on the sofa in the parlor next to the den. I tested the last one, in the upstairs corridor. I could hear Grandma cooking dinner as I carried the ladder downstairs. I put it back in the shed, headed to the kitchen, and grabbed a root beer from the refrigerator. "Smells good." I knew she was cooking my favorite; fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy.
          "A reward for taking care of those smoke detectors." She used tongs to put the last piece of chicken onto a platter next to the stove.
          Grandpa came into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge. He popped the top off and moved closer to the stove. "I said sausage and baked sweet potatoes, woman."
          Grandma kept her attention on the stovetop as she stirred the gravy.
          He kicked a kitchen chair across the floor. "Don't ignore me." He went over to the sink and threw the cutting board with potato peels to the floor. "You understand me now!"
          Grandma moved the pots with gravy and mashed potatoes onto hot pads on the countertop. She got down on her knees to pick up the potato peels. I got down and helped her, half expecting him to kick one of us. He muttered something under his breath and shuffled back into the den.
          After dinner, he got up from the table after stuffing himself with the meal he supposedly didn't want. "Better be sausage and sweet potatoes, tomorrow." He headed back to the den for his ball game, beer, and cigarettes.
          ***
          The high-pitched scream of a smoke detector woke me up late that night. I knew it was from downstairs. There was one in the kitchen, the corridor, and the den. I was sleeping in a T-shirt and sweatpants. I put on sneakers and raced out of the room.
          I saw Grandma's door come open. "Did I leave the stove burner on? Cooking oil."
          I headed down the stairs. "I don't think so." I was thinking of how I would fight a fire; they didn't have a fire extinguisher. The screeching sound was coming from the kitchen, so I cracked the door open and flipped on the light. Smoke was puffing out of the wastebasket but there were no flames. I grabbed a flashlight from the shelf near the back door and carried the waste can outside. I put it on the ground and shined the light inside, some old rags were smoldering with a pile of cigarette butts on top. Grandpa must have dumped his coffee can full of butts into the trash before collapsing on the couch. A couple had just enough life to spark the rags. I unrolled the garden hose and doused the smokey mess as the alarm inside went quiet.
          Grandma was waiting for me as I came back into the kitchen. "What was it?"
          "Cigarettes in the trash."
          She turned off the light in the kitchen and we headed towards the stairs. There was just enough light from the upstairs corridor to see the outline of Grandpa on the sofa. Wheezing, snoring, and oblivious to the danger he had put us all in.
          I lay in bed as my nerves settled from the excitement. What about next time? What if the alarms are dead?
          ***
          There was nothing said the next morning about the smoke alarm. I painted the porch railing that day as Grandma sat nearby on a rocking chair. She had a pitcher of homemade lemonade on the table beside her. I heard the squeaky brakes of the rural route postman making his daily stop at their mailbox across the road. Grandma observed, "You can set a watch by that mailman." She tapped on the chair next to her. "Take a rest and have a glass of lemonade."
          The screen door slammed shut just as I sat down in a chair next to her. Grandpa meandered down the stairs and headed down the driveway. Grandma poured me a glass. "Been waiting for that sports magazine of his, comes the last week of the month."
          Minutes later, the quiet was shattered by the blast of a horn and the squeal of brakes. I bolted out of my seat as time slowed down, like a slow-motion scene from a movie. I watched as the white church bus hit Grandpa Rufus and violently slammed his body to the pavement. The back wheels slowly rolled over him as the bus coasted to a stop.
          I was slack-jawed as I turned to look at Grandma. Still slowly rocking in her chair with no apparent reaction. Just for a moment, it looked like she started to smile. Just a bit. She seemed strangely calm as she spoke, "Bus is regular every day for that Bible study."
          Then she read aloud one of the Bible citations painted on the back of the bus, "Romans Six, Twenty-Three." I knew she read the Bible, but didn't expect her to know the verse by memory. She paused a moment and added, "The wages of sin is death."
          She took a sip of lemonade. "Fetch my phone; I'll call the sheriff." She muttered another citation from the back of the bus, "Galatians Five, Twenty-Two."
          She didn't reveal the meaning but I looked it up later. Patience is a virtue.