Dewey was peculiar.

He was short. Not at all thin. A no-heller of the Baptist variety who wore a small face on a big head.

Fond of drinking songs and scripture, he carried a poke of tobacco in his left pocket, and an Oldtimer in his right – just in case he needed to stab something.

He handed out wisdom and insight like chicken wings at a southern reunion.

“Children,” he once addressed my brother and me, “just remember two things when you move back on that mountain. Grizzly bears kill. And polecat stink will stick to you for a month.”

Dewey was nine …. and our cousin.

**Read more excerpts…here and here.

I was 19 when it happened. My mother and sister were held hostage by a junkie with a bad haircut.

That was the worst of it. But it wasn’t the first of it.

It was all very Cape Fear. A family affair that lasted several years. Between Rich – That’s what I’ll call him – and ourselves.

T tells me not to talk about it. Definitely don’t blog about it. “He might read it. And I don’t want to get that started, darling.”

He wont read it. Other people might. And they might not like it. But it’s out there. It’s been in the public domain for years.

So, like I said, it was all very Cape Fear. Except The Old Man didn’t scare. Not even when he had a gun leveled at his head. He never gave an inch in his whole, hard life. Not even to the people he cared for. When the sometimes-vagrant pointed the pistol at him, he wrestled it away and whipped him with it.

We all watched through the living room window. I still remember the look on my mother’s face. A little shock. A whole lot of disbelief. But The Old Man could care less. When he got over being mad, he was over it.

Rich wasn’t. He came back. More than once.

More Later…..

“I don’t recollect a lot of birthdays. Didn’t really celebrate ‘em when I was a boy.” Pa turned 70 today. “I’d get a year older and not even know it ’til a month later when one of my uncles’d come around.”

I heard my grandmother in the background. Reminding him of the birthday he does remember.

“Well, I don’t know if it was my birthday,” he told her, “But it was there abouts. My Uncle Newt gave me a brand new silver dollar. If I had to pick one best birthday, and one best present, it’d be that one.” Pa cleared his throat. It was 6am and he was watching Walker Texas Ranger. “That was alot of money back in them days. Even for a grown man. And I was just a boy.”

I flipped through the family photo album in my head. Trying to recall the face of a man named Newt.

“He was my favourite uncle. Uncle Roy was the fiddle man. Uncle Newt was the money man. So he was kinda special.” Pa laughed and I could hear his lungs.

“You know, the Lord just promises us 70 years,” he said.

“That may be,” I told him. “But I reckon if anyone’s got any extra graces saved up, it’s my Pa.”

The summer was shorts and sandals. Trying to fish an alligator out of Lake Norman – Jo swore she saw it on the boat slip. Billy swore he’d catch it.

A Cape Cod with a white picket fence. A lawn, mowed before we rolled out of bed.

Speed boats. Jet skis and clear blue. That little strip of motorway that cuts it all in half. The man who drove his boat clear across it – the Urban myth.

We spent hours not playing golf. In wide-open warm.

Bone idle relaxation. A party at a Lineman’s house.

Muddy water coves where drunks got drunker and tried not to drown. We went there too. When they weren’t around. When we looked awful from exercise sweat and couldn’t be bothered. But drunks are clever at finding places where you go to not be bothered.

Dissertations left undone. A trunk full of wet towels and sand. Two girls I haven’t seen since. One I’ve seen only twice.

It wasn’t a yacht on the Mediterranean. But it was good.

She forgets.

It use to be little things. The name of her neighbour’s husband. The iron in the wash room.

Then it was the kitchen. She left the fry pan on and caught the wall afire. She told no one and thought about her grandfather.

She was five when he forgot her name. Six, when he remembered it. She tells a story of that day. Of how he couldn’t be calmed. How he knew no one and no thing. Except her. “She’s the prettiest girl I ever seen,” he said. “She’s my Anna.”

She doesn’t tell how he forgot again. How she cried and grew sick and didn’t understand.

For sixty years she’s pled with God. “Not me. I can’t forget.”

But sometimes…she does.

She smiles at her family. Sits quiet and anxious and hopes, “Maybe they won’t notice. Maybe they won’t know”. That it takes her a little longer than it should. To say their name.

I’m watching ‘Three Sisters’. Morning syndication at its best. The middle blonde is reminiscing. Ooohing and aahhing about the day she fell in love. The absolute moment she just knew. She fell the second she lay eyes on him. He fell three months later, as he watched her eat a pepper off the floor.

My absolute moment came while packing for the redeye. In the middle of socks, suitcases and filthy timberland boots. The smell of clean laundry and the scent that’s just him. In a mad rush it hit me. Wham! Just like that. I knew.

But when did it hit him? I ask, because I never have before: “Love. The exact moment you fell. When was it?”

He doesn’t lift his eyes from the paper. He doesn’t put down his coffee cup. “Well I didn’t really fall,” he says “It was more like a gradual downward slide.”

(And he wonders why I sometimes call him Simon Cowell.)

“What I mean darling,” He looks at me and smiles. “Is I’m still falling. Every day.”

Two years ago Pa decided to hike with us into the wood at the head of Grapevine – to see what was left of the school he went to in 1942. The mountain had swallowed it up years before I was born. None of us were sure he could find it. But he did. (More on this later.) Here he stops to rest his leg.

Ok. Here’s a picture of my dad, The Old Man. Smiling. Seriously.

I use to peddle pharmaceuticals. I sold a boat load of haloperidol to a psychiatric hospital my first week on the job. The lady sounded fat and annoyed when I asked her if she needed to restock. Hoping to woo her I skipped the Freudian / Jungian trivia and went straight to the crazy cousin. She told me how to sort him out and then bought five thousand doses of anti-psychotic.

(Later that same cousin, who really isn’t crazy at all just very clever in the ways of making you think he is, would mock me: “You spent four years in school just to sell drugs? Sheeeeet, I can do that without a degree”.)

My big break came with Pfizer. I was working through lunch when I took the call. A European distributor wanted a quote on Viagra. “One million please.” I crossed my legs as I figured up 5% of one million $7 tablets, gave him the info in a super sexy voice (Momma didn’t raise no fool) and then chatted to him about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how “yes, of course I look EXACTLY like Sarah Michelle Gellar“.

My manager shot me down “No way can we supply that.” So I went straight to the VP – on temporary relocation from San Fran. “Do it,” he said. So I did it. I sold $7 million dollars worth of Viagra to a Swedish dude named Magnus.

Too bad for me, and really awful for Magnus, he was killed in a plane crash a week later. While his office was busy reassigning his accounts I had to catch my own jet plane to London and a postgrad program. I could have hung around and waited on Magnus’s successor. Took the money and danced like Cuba Gooding all the way to the bank. I didn’t. To this day I couldn’t tell you why. Honest to goodness.

I know I made the right decision. No doubt about it. A gorgeous set of brown eyes tells me this every day. But I’d be lying if I said I never think about a Swede named Magnus……….and a whole lotta Viagra.

The air smells late and tiresome. The way it sometimes does when you’re waiting on it to happen.

It’s uncomfortable cold, but I sit with ‘em on the porch. ‘Cause ain’t no bunch ought to be left on their own like this.

Roy shuffles his feet and folds his hands and then lays them straight again. He talks about crops and the weather and about life when he was a boy.

Ebbie stares and is quiet. Every once in a while he turns and looks at me and closes his eyes as if to say ‘You go on. Go on in there and do what you come here to do’.

So I go.

I see the old man, humped up in his bed. Pillows propped and packed behind his head, trying to make him look like he’s more than he is. More alive than not.

He doesn’t move. His eyes are open but he can’t hear me. I know it and the girl who sits beside him knows it, but still I say to him “John, I come to pray with you John”.

I stand over him. Lay my good hand on his head and think again how I forgot the oil. I shouldn’t have forgot the oil. I stretch my other hand to the sky. Say what I know to say about Kingdom Come and Glory and about how one day, death too will end.

I finish up and go quiet. I look at the girl who doesn’t look at me.

“He’s already died,” she says.

I kick a beetle across the floor and say “I knowed it.”

I go back to the porch to tell the boys. Again.