Up the road from the campo sancto. In the unpainted concrete basement of my great-grandfather's house. I've dropped a small, red-glazed ceramic pipe, and it bounces down an unfamiliar stair, off the landing and into a sandpit below. Going to collect it I encounter the recent, marvelous tables my grandfather has been crafting. The top of the largest is a cross-section of pine, at least five feet across and three-quarters of a foot thick; the round still has the bark on, shiny beneath the saplike coat of finish.
Retrieving the pipe from the sandpit beneath the stair I go back up to the top landing and find granddad knelt there, woodworking, shirtless & panting as he planes the surface of the table level. His sister and wife watching with skepticism. Keeling forward, his fingers dig into his chest, and I experience a shock of recognition. How much like my father he looks, his hair not yet gone completely gray. A.E. straightens up and lurches off for a nitroglycerin pill, dismissively irritable with everyone for carrying on and making a meal of things. "Been this way ever since the operation," his voice a bass murmur. I feel ashamed-- not for my concern, but for what he would call my effeminacy.
I descend to the basement again, going from vacant storeroom to vacant storeroom. No electricity. The rooms faintly cold, accruing damp. The dark resists my eyes, the details of blank concrete the blurry forest green of retinal afterburn. Remembering that my aunt is dead. The house did not long survive her.
* * * * *
After an hour of dicking around with every search engine I could find, asked Siegfried to help me check on my grandparents.
A.E. died in 2022. Mary died shortly thereafter.
Guess now I know.
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