Grandma Came Home to Pine Fork

How She Got There

It started in March, the way these things always start, with one bad step.

Grandma was carrying a dishpan of scraps out to the chickens on a cold morning. The back steps were wet with frost. Her heel slid off the second step and she went down on her left arm.

I was on shift in the emergency room that morning. I work at the little hospital in Sparta, twelve-hour shifts, three or four a week. I have been a nurse there for fourteen years.

I came around the curtain with a chart in my hand and there sat my grandmother on the bed, holding her wrist in her lap like a hurt bird, and the first thing she said was, “Now don’t you fuss.”

It was a clean break of the wrist. The doctor set it and put her in a splint, and later a cast. For 91, she had come out of it well.

But I knew what was coming the minute I called Lowell. I heard his breath catch on the phone. I heard him go somewhere in his head that he had been once before and never really come back from.

My granddaddy fell in the barn lot in the fall of 1998. He was 71. He was moving round bales with the tractor and climbed down to fix a chain, and something gave way, and he went down hard on the frozen ground.

He lay there four hours before anybody found him. Grandma was at a quilting at the church. Lowell was at work in Charlotte, where he ran a crew for a heating and air outfit.

Granddaddy lived two days in the hospital in Winston-Salem. Lowell drove up and sat by his bed for both of them. He has told the story maybe twice in my hearing, and both times he stopped in the same place.

“If I’d been there,” he said. That was as far as he ever got.

My daddy was the younger son. Daddy died six years ago, his heart, at 58. After that, Lowell was the only son Grandma had left.

So I understood him. I want that to be plain. When I called Lowell from the emergency room that March morning, I knew exactly which old fear was waking up in him.

He drove up that same afternoon. He stood in the hallway outside her room with his cap in both hands and said, “That’s it. She’s not staying up there by herself anymore.”

“She’s not by herself,” I said. “I’m twenty minutes away. Her neighbors check on her every day. Dovie calls her every morning.”

“Twenty minutes,” he said. “Daddy was a hundred feet from the house.”

There was no arguing with that, not in a hospital hallway, not with his face looking like that. I let it go. I thought he would calm down in a week.

He did not calm down. By the first of April he had packed her clothes in boxes, loaded her rocking chair, and moved her into his spare room in a subdivision outside Charlotte.