Forgiveness
Grandpa’s haints are stirred up like a yellowjackets’ nest poked with a stick.
Camped on that hill waiting for that wretched creek to go down, he tells me, “After that Boy Scout brung me back, and you got all riled with me, I went to the Reunion after all. Reckoned I’d face the haints of my brother and Stonewall and all them men we lost. But they wasn’t there. Just old men what used ta be soldiers. Now they got lives and families. I couldn’t look ‘em in the eye without seein’ what Fred never got to be or thinkin’ what Fred never got to have. I couldn’t stay there.”
I try to settle his haints, but the more I try, the more he won’t let them sit.
“Mr. Redmond fought at Chancellorsville,” I say. “If you’d been shooting to kill, might be you’d have killed him. I reckon Chance and his mama are right glad you didn’t.”
“You can’t put might be’s on ever’thin’,” Grandpa says.
“But you do. You say might be Fred wouldn’t have died. And might be your mama and sisters wouldn’t have been sent away. How come you can say, ‘might be,’ but I can’t?”
“Ya don’t understand, Ginnie Lee. It should’a been me what died, not Fred.”
My words come out plain. “If you had died, I wouldn’t be here.”
Grandpa hugs me, but his breath slips out in a sigh.
“You’ve toted Fred’s burden for fifty years,” I say. “Isn’t that long enough? He’d want you to set it down.”
“How do you know what Fred would want?”
“You wouldn’t hold it against him if things were the other way around. You and Fred had different thinking, just like you and me, just like Southerners and Yankees. Who’s to say which is right? You said something past is something past. Leave it past.”
Grandpa grunts, not agreeing or disagreeing, but he becomes more like his old self. Almost. I miss the way his eyes used to glimmer like they had candles inside them. I haven’t seen those eye candles in weeks. No matter I forgave him for what he did to me, he can’t seem to forgive himself for what happened fifty years ago.
After three days, we finally waded across the stream. Still a dab high, the water rose clean to my knees. Its current sucked at my ankles and tried to pull me down. Grandpa and I clung to each other and reached the other side safely.
The pull I feel now is Mama. She needs me.
I’ve wished I could undo the past month and be home, but I admit it was exciting to see telephones, electric lights, and automobiles. I rode on a train and stayed in hotels. I went to an ice cream parlor and tasted root beer. I saw the Great Camp, visited the soldiers’ cemetery, and was inspired by veterans’ faces. I met Corporal Westy, Florence. And Chance. I reckon good memories and bad must live hand in hand.
Virginia Lee Kent
