U.P. Reader -- Volume #6 (eBook)

Up In Michigan

by Edd Tury

“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

—Ernest Hemingway

When my grandfather put a bullet in his head it stayed there. Not like Hemingway, who Grandpa greatly admired. No big mess for some poor soul to clean up. Cranial vault intact, but just as dead. He always liked precision. Grandpa, not Hemingway. Well, Hemingway too, at least in his prose. So, when Grandpa decided it was time to check out, he simply put his special cartridge in his deer rifle, sucked the barrel, and pushed the trigger. Clean and dead.

Grandpa sometimes talked about a special cartridge, but I never knew what he meant. Whenever I asked, he’d just say—you know, like I load for deer. A special round for a special job—and I’d say what job and he’d say—you’ll find out one day. It’s not important now. Remember what I told you about the right tool for the job? A bullet is just a tool. You wouldn’t shoot a deer with an elephant gun, now, would you? And I’d just scratch my head and say the deer would sure be dead and Grandpa would say—yeah, but you’d ruin half the meat.

Ever since I was a kid, I had been fascinated by the things my grandpa did and the way he did them. Early on, I knew Grandpa loved deer hunting, deer camp, guns, and some writer named Ernest Hemingway. When I got older, and actually read some Hemingway, I wasn’t too impressed; Grandpa and I had some heated discussions about what was good writing and what wasn’t.

Grandpa asked, “What was your English teacher’s name?”

“What teacher?”

“The one that read the first line of some Hemingway story and made fun of it, telling you what a bunch of dull, macho crap it was.” He had me there. It was my eleventh-grade Advanced Lit teacher.

“Mr. Hall. How’d you know?”

“I just know. I had a high school English teacher who called Carl Sandburg Carl Sandhog and made fun of every one of his famous poems. He’d read ‘the fog comes on little cat feet’ in the most smarmy voice and the whole class would laugh. As if we knew what we were laughing at. I hated Sandburg for years until I decided to reread him. For a laugh you know. I found I liked a lot of it. Had I gotten stupider? Or maybe just a little more open minded, a little more willing to trust my instincts and not care what someone else thinks.”

So, of course, I went back and reread Hemingway, trying hard to keep an open mind. Except now I had my grandfather’s bias to contend with. I guess my old prejudices and the new influence sort of canceled because I found myself reading the stories with the feeling that I was reading them for the first time. I liked much of it; some I loved; some I thought missed the mark. All seemed extremely well crafted and the short, declarative sentences, so maligned by my eleventh-grade teacher, revealed their clarity to my newly unblinded eyes. Grandpa never even said ‘I told you so’ when we had our first Hemingway discussion after my rereads. He was cool.

I remember one of the first discussions we had was about “The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber.” I think it was Grandpa’s favorite Hemingway short story, though he never said it. I told him that it was a good story, but I found it a little depressing.

“Depressing?” he asked. “Why is that?”

“Well,” I said, “Here’s this spineless wimp finally finds his balls and his wife offs him.”

“Well, that’s true but ol’ Frankie doesn’t get depressed about it—he’s dead. His last moments were his happiest ever. Besides, life’s like that. Few happy endings. A good story leaves you thinking. That’s what I think.”

I knew he was right. I didn’t care for stories that were too ‘easy’, too ready to make you forget them once you were done with them. We discussed a lot of Hemingway’s work, but not to the exclusion of other writers. We had lively discussions about Steinbeck’s humor and Faulkner’s density. Most often we agreed, but not always. I’ve never known anyone who enjoyed arguing more than Grandpa. He didn’t consider them arguments. Debates, he called them. And they were oftentimes heated, with raised voices and table thumping. Occasionally, Mom or Dad would come down to the basement where these debates took place, to make sure everything was all right. It always was—our faces were just redder than usual.

The best times, though, were at deer camp. Grandpa loved to hunt and loved to camp. He always seemed younger there. Even later, when the fire in his debates grew smaller and his voice slowed, he would seem to step back in time a decade or so when the tent was pitched, the fire started, and all that was left to do was to shoot the bull and wait for opening day.

I started hunting when I was fourteen and Grandpa was sixty. For the first ten years we hunted together, I never thought of him as old. He moved through the woods with grace and pleasure—fast if need be; slow as a stalking cat if the situation called for that. He taught me all I know about hunting whitetails. For the most part it was by observation—but if I screwed up, he’d tell me about it that night. In front of the wood stove, when dinner was over and the dishes cleaned up, it would be, “Jesus Christ, what the hell were you thinking out there today? Just because you’re bored you don’t get up and stroll around. I know I pushed a buck past your blind. But were you in your blind? No, you were screwing around at the swamp edge.” My dad would just laugh. He’d been through it all before.

The lessons happened early in my hunting career. I learned fast. Partly because I didn’t like Grandpa yelling at me and partly because I really enjoyed deer hunting and studied it. My dad enjoyed it; the hunt and the camp, but it never became a passion for him. It did for me, just as it was for Grandpa. We had twenty good years.

Up until Grandpa was seventy-five years old, he held the camp record for the biggest buck our camp had ever taken. That year I shot a bigger one and Grandpa couldn’t stop grinning. It was a huge deer, both body and antlers and, to tell the truth, I really did outsmart the son of a gun.

I had to tell the story a dozen times that night around the wood stove. Dad was happy for me because he understood what it meant. Grandpa rocked back and forth on his camp chair sipping scotch and, when he wasn’t asking questions, grinning from ear to ear.

“Fell in his tracks?”, he asked.

“Yes sir,” I said. “Hit him in the shoulder where you showed me.”

“Didn’t move?”

“His leg twitched, but that was it,” I answered. “Those handloads are the right tool.”

Grandpa rocked and grinned some more. Later, when Grandpa crawled into his sleeping bag, he said he was going to sleep in and not to wake him in the morning. In sixteen years, this was the first time he ever did this.

Well, no one in camp got up the next morning; too much celebrating. It was okay, we had a great buck on the buck pole. I think we had breakfast around noon.

We were poking around camp, cleaning up and having a little hair of the dog, when Grandpa asked me if I ever read Baker’s biography of Hemingway. I said I had, and he asked if I read all the notes in the back of the book. I said no.

“Well, when old Ernie decided it was time to go, he loaded a shotgun, a twelve-gauge double barrel, stood in the porch of his home, put the barrels in his mouth, and pushed down the triggers. Now, that’s a sure way to go and I doubt he suffered much, although he was suffering plenty beforehand. Enough to make it not worth the trouble to go on. Anyway, it explains in Baker’s footnotes that he blew out his rear cranial vault which is just fancy talk for splattering your brains all over the wall, taking the back half of your head with it. Pretty disgusting picture don’t you think?”

Well, no kidding. I knew he had killed himself that way, but Grandpa made it too vivid, and the image stayed with me awhile. I did think of the people who had to clean up the mess.

“If someone’s going to do themselves in, they should have a little respect for those left behind. It doesn’t have to be messy. Even if a bullet to the brain is the method of choice.”

I let that stand.

After Grandpa turned seventy-six, he seemed to deteriorate. No, deteriorate isn’t the right word. Slow down doesn’t cut it either. He just flat out got old in a hurry. It was hard to watch, and I tried to deny it, but it was there. Deer camp was still fun, though Grandpa didn’t go in the woods near as much. Our ‘debates’ were still lively but lacked a lot of the table thumping I used to look forward to. Dad helped. When we discussed Grandpa and his ‘slowing down’ he reminded me that it’s a natural thing. No one gets out alive. Just hope he’s happy to the end and doesn’t suffer. I was depressed for a week.

Grandpa turned eighty in the spring and buried Grandma. Sixty years of marriage gone in a failed heartbeat. Grandpa started trembling that summer, fingers shaking...