A Man’s Life An ongoing conversation about what it means to be a man in the 21st century
about the world and its operations but also could stand up to fight—and if not beat, then put a serious hurt on—anyone who might challenge him. And yet, he was not a brute. Sure, he had a healthy streak of lasciviousness, appreciated with gusto a voluptuous female form, but he was also a gentleman, a man who knew how to deliver a compliment, work hard, clean up, and look sharp. He had a knack for making people he liked feel special, and not only because he might treat you to Krispy Kreme doughnuts if the “Hot Now” sign was lit up, or take you to Sunday brunch at the Hyatt downtown. He was the kind of man who could light up a room, and when that light was directed your way, it was hard not to feel like a million bucks.
in his leatherbound Time/Life series of Cowboy books— was lowered into a hole in the ground. The first time I saw these stones, I thought, They’re trying to keep him from coming back up.
I’ve known no one more willful in all my life; the stubbornness that inspired him to refuse to remove his hand from a chopping block solidified in him and helped to make him what—and who—he was. If anyone I’d ever known could rise from the dead, it’d be him. It’d be good to see him again. To ask him what it was like on the other side. And to let him know, too, that I had some questions, some things I wanted to get straightened out. It’s nice to believe that I could talk to him with such frankness, but when I imagine him sitting
I like to console myself with the idea that my grandfather—as one of the most generous people I’ve ever known—would help anybody who needed it, regardless of their skin color. EVEN SO, I GRIMACED —as
I’m sure all my cousins did—when he used the N-word, often drawing out the first syllable with what seemed to me like gleeful disdain. I found this contempt to be puzzling, confounding, disturbing. He had employed a black man named Gene—a man who washed his cars—and often bailed the man out of jail when the police arrested him for public drunkenness. My grandfather’s longtime and beloved dental assistant, Ida, often babysat his children. He looked with admiration upon black boxers, especially Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. But if he happened to catch you watching an NBA game on TV, he’d question why in the world you’d want to watch a bunch of (racial epithets) throw a ball around. His racism seemed both comprehensive and indiscriminate, an inexplicable snarl in a mind that seemed, to me anyway, gracious and kind. I like to console myself with the idea that my grandfather—as one of the most generous people I’ve ever known—would help anybody who needed it, regardless of their skin color. I like to tell myself that Pa-pa was merely a product of his generation. But it’s hard to understand and thus forgive him for what seemed like such irrational scorn, and harder to forgive myself for never asking him why he thought the way he did. buried at the end of the field he used to mow. An assortment of stones and chunks of rock has been arranged on the dirt where his casket—a pine box, not unlike the outlaws I gawked at
MY GRANDFATHER NOW LIES
at the kitchen table, his purple cowboy shirt crusted with dirt, drinking coffee from a mug that looks like it’s been carved from sandstone, I imagine myself dumb-struck. He might wonder why I didn’t have the TV turned to FOX News. He’d probably notice that I’d gained weight, though it wouldn’t stop him from asking if I wanted a bowl of ice cream or a Hershey bar, which I’d feel obliged to decline. And if he happened to drop the N-word, or say something disparaging about a black news anchor, I like to think I’d hit him up with a direct question like, “Why don’t you like black people?” But I’d probably recycle the preposterous reasoning I always employed in these situations: I’d tell myself that Pa-pa was from another time and place, that it wouldn’t be fair to question his bigotry, that I wouldn’t want to make him—the grandfather I loved—uncomfortable. So I’d simply pretend, as I always had, that nothing had happened. I’d watch him rub the stumps of his fingers together, and the whispering of those bloodless nubs would underscore the room’s resultant silence, for which I—as much as he— could rightly be blamed. Matthew Vollmer is the author of the short story collection Future Missionaries of America and inscriptions for headstones, a collection of essays. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Virginia Tech University, and worked with Wabash students last spring as a visiting writer.
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