I visited The Brim Hollow recently in hopes that I might see him. I stepped up on the big footstone and entered the old house where no one has lived for 60 years. Inside the workroom I looked for his faded denim jumper which always hung on a big nail. It being winter, his weathered, felt Stetson should have been hanging on that nail, too.
Next, I stepped into the kitchen where the boom of his laughter used to echo among the walls. In the bedroom I once sat beside him as we popped popcorn over the flames of an open fireplace.
Peering out a window, the windowpanes dimmed by the passing of many years, I hoped to see his hulking figure coming from the sheep barn and crossing the rock-bottomed creek.
I tried another window, my gaze lifted towards the feed barn where I often saw him sauntering down the hill with a pail of warm milk in the late afternoon. Just beyond the little, dry branch lay the rocks where he once salted his goats. He could “called them down” with ease. In a rich baritone, he would call, “Diddy, diddy, diddy…come on diddy!” (His pronunciation of “billy.”) I could almost hear him calling.
I made my way to the back porch and looked up the hollow where he once parked his truck in a little shed covered by a shake shingle roof. It had crumbled long ago under the weight of time.
As I left the hollow that day, I walked down a shady lane with which I am too familiar, and caught myself listening for the “chug, chug, chugging” sound of his 1952 GMC half-ton. Only silence met me.
I decided to give it one last try. Driving up main street in the little town of Riddleton, I looked where he once sat in a straight-back chair in a ditch formed by a low, rock wall and the edge of the pavement just across the road from Leonard Carter’s General Store. By late afternoon he would have been knee-deep in cedar shaving he had whittled all day long. He was not to be found.
Long ago my grandmother gave me some of his personal effects. She said he would have wanted me to have them. One is particularly dear to me. He called it his billfold. Actually, it was a little coin purse he carried in the bib of his overalls. I’ve kept it in a lock box at the bank over the years just the way I received it. It contains his drivers license, a few tarnished coins, a “Lincoln” folded up the size of a postage stamp, and a few odd receipts.
Not too long ago, I visited the bank to “get into” my lockbox. As I thumbed through several documents, I came upon the “billfold.” I opened it, removed its contents, and traveled back in time. Before I returned it to the lockbox, I closed my eyes, held it to my chest, and I thought of him.
As I breathed in deeply, I suddenly I felt a whiskered old face up against mine! My eyes flew open as I thought someone had gotten in the back vault with me! No one was there. Just a memory.
In the late fall of ’63, my brothers and I arrived home from school to be met by our Aunt Rebecca McCall. That seemed very odd. She let us know that our grandfather Brim had taken ill, and our father and mother had gone to the hospital with him. He had been placed in a straight-back chair and rode out of The Brim Hollow in the back of a pickup truck to meet the ambulance. He was then rushed to McFarland Hospital. He had dealt with a bad heart for years. This was his third “spell.”
That afternoon he was resting comfortably in his hospital bed with my mother, his only child, at his side. She was holding his hand. My mother would later say he thought he was going to pull through again.
Suddenly, he opened his eyes as if he were surprised.
“Honey, I’m dying!” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she answered.
“Don’t you hear that death rattle!” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she answered, again.
She whispered a silent prayer. “Lord, please don’t let him suffer.”
He closed his eyes, breathed an easy breath, and he was gone.
Gone, but not forgotten.
Copyright 2024 by Jack McCall
