Imperfect Gentle an My grandfather was the kind of man who could light up a room and make you feel like a million bucks. But in his otherwise gracious mind there was an inexplicable snarl. —by Matthew Vollmer MY GRANDFATHER WAS THREE YEARS OLD when his axe-wielding sister severed three fingers on his left hand. But it wasn’t like she hadn’t warned him. He’d been leaning on a chopping block; she’d hoisted an axe above her head. She’d told him to move; he’d refused. I can’t say what Aunt Effie was thinking when she let the axe fall, though she’d likely assumed her brother would come to his senses at the last minute and move out of the way. But her brother, as it turned out, was a decidedly stubborn and single-minded boy, and he refused to budge. Thus, the blade fell and subsequently split three tiny fingers—pinkie, ring, and middle—at the knuckle. They would not be reattached. My grief-stricken greatgrandmother, Pansy, buried them in a matchbox under a sycamore tree. Effie never forgave herself. But my grandfather? He never looked back. If John Thomas Gilbert was self-conscious about his hand, he never said so; in fact, the way he rubbed his finger-stumps together during conversations at the kitchen table made me think he sort of relished the disfigurement. He was surely no less of a man without those distal and medium phalanxes and, if the stories about his youth were to be believed, he’d proved this by beating the ever-loving hell out of anybody who attempted to challenge him. Back in his day, he’d explain, boys didn’t play ball: They fought. With their fists. John T. was no exception. He loved to fight. He claimed to have whipped boys twice his size, once slapping the side of a redhead so hard it sounded, in his words, “like a shotgun going off.” In these stories, those who messed with John T. lived to regret it. The man was light on his feet and lightning-quick, even into his 80s. I sparred with him a time or two in my grandmother’s kitchen. He’d sway from side to side, bite his lip, fake me out with a phan20
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tom left swipe, then slap my face with his right and grin. I’d never see it coming. And it stung. grandfather thought about my inability to defend myself. In general, he had no patience for incompetence. He could not abide the pathetic or the feeble. His jokes were as fast and hard as an uppercut, but he was not—nor ever—silly. He was a man who, at least until the very end, appeared to be utterly in control of his destiny. If he wanted to do something, he did it, and not only did it well, but did it as well as or better than anyone: hitting a golf ball, cutting wood, riding horses. I would brag to other kids that my grandfather was a jack-of-all trades: a dentist, a mechanic, a cowboy, a boxer, an amateur filmmaker, a book collector, and a badge-carrying member of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. (Once, after witnessing somebody run a red light, I saw him flip a switch which activated a siren in his 1976 Chrysler New Yorker as he pulled over the offender.) He was embarrassingly generous, slipping folded 50s into my palm when he said goodbye, encouraging me to have more ice cream because there was another giant tub of Baskin Robbins’ French Vanilla in the basement freezer. He loved coffee and Hershey bars and slabs of cheddar cheese. He was often served—by his sweet and long-suffering wife—a peeled banana on a plate. Unless he was swimming he did not wear shorts: always pants and long sleeves. He often disappeared unexpectedly and without explanation. He called his wife Marg. He delighted in his children and grandchildren. In the stories he told, he was usually the hero, not because he was superhuman, just competent and ingenious in a world inhabited by people who were not. I feared and admired him, longed for his admiration and approval, felt inferior in his presence, sensed that he not only knew more
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