Grandma wasn’t dead and buried six weeks when Grandpa
started looking for a new wife.
“It’s too soon,” said Tory’s mother. ‘‘I don’t know what’s
wrong with my dad.”
Grandma’s death had been unexpected. She had been in good
health, still teaching school at the age of 69, when without warning she died
in the middle of the night with a mild case of the flu. Mama and Tory’s aunts agreed that it looked
like Grandpa hadn’t loved Grandma very much, starting up so soon with ideas of
marrying again. Tory didn’t know what to
think. She was 12 when Grandma died. She was still 12 when Grandpa started his
campaigns to find a new wife.
Grandpa, always logical, was methodical in his search. He
called to mind a number of women he had known in years past, or whom he had met
and knew to be without a husband. Then he wrote to two or three women at a
time. The whole thing just didn’t seem
respectful to Grandma’s memory, nor to the women he canvassed like a salesman. The aunts said he was getting senile, and it was
true that, of late, there was a tremor in his handshake and a shuffling to his
once-confident stride.
But Tory’s mother remembered, “He always approached romance
in a strange way. When he proposed to Mother, he had proposed to another woman,
also. We were lucky Mother could make a decision very quickly — she said yes
first.” Tory listened to the
conversation between her mother and her mother’s sisters and thought, If
Grandma hadn’t been so quick to make up her mind, none of us would have been
born. It made her queasy to think by how narrow a chance the whole lot of them
had managed to exist.
Grandma had been a 32-year-old schoolteacher when she married
Grandpa. It had all happened in the northern woods of Minnesota, where the
trees were still thick in Tory’s time (she had seen them once, on a trip when
she was 10). Houses and people, and perhaps eligible women, were few and far
apart. Later Grandpa and Grandma moved
their fledgling family south to a land that was just as thick with trees, and
almost as lonely. There they built a school and taught the gospel.
Tory remembered Grandpa when he wasn’t as old as he was now,
still strong and independent. She remembered when he ruled his classes of
seventh and eighth graders. He was stern and exacting, yet able to tell a good
story. Even now, with his steps turning to shuffles and holding a cane he
didn’t know quite what to do with, he had a way of catching a person off guard
with that keen look Tory remembered from better years. He just doesn't think like we do, she
thought. He’s the last pioneer, thrust
into a world of television and freeways and keeping up appearances.
In her fifteenth year Tory saw the last passenger trains
come to Chattanooga. The newspeople said that tractor-trailer rigs were running
trains out of the business of hauling freight, and that the family car and the
airplane had replaced the passenger train.
But when Grandpa traveled across the United States to visit a lady on
the West Coast, he went by train. He returned by way of Chattanooga, where Tory
and her parents now lived. Tory and her
mother went to the depot to meet him. The old train station’s grand lines were
obscured by dust and litter. Derelicts slept in the shade of the platform. Like
the broken men that took refuge under the roof, the depot was a derelict, a
thing of the past. When the train came
in, Grandpa was the only passenger to disembark. He paused on the step, one
hand on the rail, sun on his white hair.
“Daddy!” called Tory’s mother. ‘‘We’re over here.” She
started forward to take his suitcase, but Tory hesitated, struck by a sense of
history. That proud old man with the handsome, haggard face, standing so erect
on the stoop of that train, and the train itself, were of an age . The
passenger train had just about had its time. And Grandpa, with that gleam in
his eye from having just blazed a trail across the country, had about had his
time. Already his ways of thinking, his ways of finding a wife, were obsolete. Don’t go, thought Tory to the train and to
her grandfather. Don’t go.
‘‘Tory!” called her mother. ‘‘Don’t just stand there. Come
take his other suitcase.” Tory obeyed,
while Mama took Grandpa’s arm and helped him off the train. Tory followed them,
feeling bewildered. She recognized that he must feel the same bewilderment. How
can things change before you know it? How can this be the last train?
The West Coast courtship had not been successful. The lady
had been kind, but the outcome was clear. Grandpa had returned alone, and there
were no plans for future visits. But
Grandpa was undaunted. ‘‘While I was there, I succeeded in obtaining the
address of Nora Brady. You remember Nora, don’t you, Lisa’?”
Tory’s mother nodded . ‘‘ I remember Mrs. Brady. She taught
school with you and Mother for several years.”
‘‘Well, you’d never guess where she is now. She’s gone back
to the northern woods, and is still teaching school !”
‘‘ She must be almost 70.”
‘‘Seventy-one,’‘ said Grandpa. ‘‘She never remarried after
Mr. Brady died. She was a good Christian woman. A good woman.” Grandpa had already sent a letter to her,
mailed from the West Coast.
Tory’s mother suddenly looked exhausted. She had expected
him to arrive discouraged, perhaps a little wiser, ready to calm down and
accept the fact that he was old. His health was failing, and on top of that, he
was a pauper. What other woman would be willing to live like Grandma had lived?
Grandma, sharing his zeal to spread the gospel, to teach, to serve, had spent
as little time keeping the home as he had. All they had was a tiny, dilapidated
travel trailer and an unfinished two-room cabin in the woods.
“Mrs. Brady probably won’t answer the letter,” said Mother
quietly to Tory. “He’s watching the mail, and he’s going to be disappointed
again.”
But the 71-year-old schoolteacher in the northern woods did
answer Grandpa’s letter. The letters of Nora Brady followed Grandpa from house
to house as he became more dependent upon his children and they shared the task
of caring for him. He became confined to a wheelchair, and still Nora Brady
wrote.
“She can’t have any idea how feeble he is,” said Mother.
“She thinks he’s still the way he was 25 years ago.”
Grandpa’s handwriting grew shaky, and then he could hardly
write at all. His mind sometimes wandered to places in the past, and to other
places no one could recognize. But the part of him that was Grandpa watched for
the mail, and Nora Brady kept writing. Soon
his replies were returned to Mrs. Brady in Tory’s best script. She knelt by his
wheelchair, scrupulously taking down every word, each unique turn of phrase, so
that the letters she wrote were entirely his own. Grandpa’s letters were scholarly. The
historian came out in him as he described the founding of schools and the
progress of townships. He chronicled his own life. At the end of his letters,
as at the end of Mrs. Brady’s, was always the same text: Romans 8:28.
As Tory sat on the floor by Grandpa’s chair, she looked into
the past with him. Grandpa was a time machine, his words transporting her
backward. Her eyes became dazzled by the northern lights, she thrilled to wolf
calls as sharp and clear as the winter snow that buried the northern woods. She
trekked with him on snowshoes across the frozen land, where not a light could
be seen beneath the stars. Every day she
was with him she urged him to tell her more. He might soon disappear with the
passenger trains, but she, Tory, would save everything. She felt herself aging—aging backward.
Sixteen now, she felt her memories stretch further back than she was old. She
breathed in the chill air of lost Minnesota nights, and shivered in the
Southern heat of her own time.
“Grandpa,” said Tory as they finished a chronicle to Nora
Brady, “your letter is missing something. A woman you are courting wants to
hear, well, something about how you feel for her.” So “with love” was added to
Grandpa’s letters.
As soon as school was out, Nora Brady wrote that she was
coming south to see him. Grandpa was delighted. For a few days he seemed to
regain some of his vigor. But time was running out, and Grandpa’s will and
Tory’s will put together couldn’t stop its progression. As school drew to a close in the north,
Grandpa declined. He was staying with Aunt Cecily now, more at ease in her
Smoky Mountain home than in Chattanooga’s smog and traffic. Too weak to get out
of bed, he held tight to his notion that Nora Brady would come. Mrs. Brady
would come, they would get married, and live in his cabin in the woods.
Nora Brady did come. The family told her how badly Grandpa’s
condition had turned, and she still came.
The first time Tory saw Nora Brady, she was applying
medication to Grandpa’s bedsores. Though his emaciated body was beyond repair,
the woman from the north sat calmly on the bed beside him, ministering to him
with tender, gnarled hands. This was
something no one had expected. Even Tory, who understood Grandpa’s need to keep
loving, had not dreamed it would be returned in this measure.
And Grandpa, always the hunter, the logical seeker, now had
to stay in one place while something illogical like love came to him. Nora Brady became his nurse, his companion,
his comforter, his sweetheart. Behind her serene gaze, Tory sensed a story, one
that had never been told, that perhaps never would be told. Had Nora Brady, all
those years ago, loved him in the privacy of her heart? She did not say. She
did not speak of her feelings. Her ministering hands, her constancy, spoke them
for her. Tory remembered Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together
for good to them that love God.”
A few months later, Grandpa died—peacefully, gently, in the
arms of Nora Brady.
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