Inheritance of Horses

Taken by Storm

TAKEN BYSTORM MY GRANDFATHER spent the last thirty years of his life in bed, victim of an assortment of chronic maladies. During my childhood, he seemed to suffer one crisis after another—the deliriums of high fever, internal bleeding, and once, a stroke that left him tangled in the sheets at the foot of the bed. These afflictions took him and us by storm. The news would come crackling through the long-distance wire, my mother's face revealing on the phone the danger he was in. I always had trouble accepting it. Since I had never seen him in such extremity, I could not imagine him without the authority of his faculties, and the thought of him caught helpless in the throes of fever confused and frightened me, as though he had been swept out on some dire passage from which he would not return. But return he would. By summer, when we went to visit them, Doc would have recovered, keen and full of wit, readyto resume his discourse on Shakespeare, fishing, baseball, and the Bible. But that was as well as he got. I never saw him out of bed except when he was hobbling to the bathroom supported by my grandmother, and then I was shocked to seehow small and weak his body was. When I was older, I asked my mother what was wrong with him. A lot of things, she said—allergies, digestive problems, migraine headaches; Doc had never been well. I could not understand why any of those conditions would make a complete invalid of a man, but apparently they had. Instead of complaining, Doc laughed at his infirmities, often describing himself by quoting Shakespeare'sJaques: "second 59 60 INHERITANCE OF HORSES childishness and mere oblivion, sansteeth, sans eyes,sans taste, sans everything." An ordained minister,hewrote what hecalled sermonettes for a local paper. People came from all over the state to see him. When Doc was in his mid-seventies,he and my grandmother (whom everyoneknew asBuddie) movedto a house on a hydroelectric lake outside of town, bought a boat, and, to the extent permitted by health and weather, wentfishing.They did it more for his sake than for hers. Among his passions fishing was the one he had continued to insist on, and through the years of his long decline she had cheerfully contrived ways to get him on the water. But they were too old now, their children thought, too old to go out on big water in a boat bythemselves. To a child that boat was a wonder. When we visited them in the summer, we would find it tied to the dock in front of the house, the July sun bouncing water shadows all along its dark green sides. In itself it was unremarkable,a twelve-footskiff no different from a hundred similar craft on the lake. What made it noticeable to the neighbors and irresistiblyenticing to us was the way my grandmother had converted it into a floating bedroom . With energy and resourcefulness,Buddiehad equipped the boat with a folding cot and a blue and yellow beach umbrella that stood in a socket bolted to the floor. The neighbors soon grew accustomed to the sight of the old couple working up and down the shoreline. When the umbrella was open, one said, they looked like the owl and the pussycat. The news of Doc's adventure came long-distance from Buddie one morning inJuly. In itsfirsttellingit was not so much a story as a series of exclamations—self-reproach, exasperation , and relief. Later, as my mother and her sister compared versions, they pieced together a coherent narrative. It began TAKEN BY STORM 6l with my aunt's calling Buddie from her home in Columbia and asking her to drive down for the day. Doc had been free of serious illness the whole spring and into the summer. So Buddie put aside her customary reservations about leaving him and arranged for Liza, a kind and gentle black woman, to stay until she got back that night. Liza had served my grandparents as maid, cook, and nurse off and on for more than thirty years. Almost as old as Doc and no longer in good health herself, she came now only once a week, often on Saturday so she could sit with Doc and listen to the baseball game—they were both Brooklyn Dodger fans. I had...