Looking for the Big Man

Mixing personal memoir and fantasy, this story follows a young man on his journey to find the right words.

 Before his end, but after my first tooth, my grandfather would pop me onto his lap and laugh. One hand held a glass of white wine and the other propped on my back. On his enormous knee I bounced for years and giggled, wreathed in the sweet acrid fumes of cheap white wine, the floor miles beneath me, looking into his emerald eyes which reflected back into my own green irises.

--

Yesterday, while he was being cremated, my grandfather’s house echoed with silence. I tiptoed through the house and everyone spoke in hushed whispers, careful not to break the silence of the tomb- All but my step-grandmother, who carried a bottle of sherry she’d take swigs out of every few minutes, and every time she’d try to whisper she’d drunkenly scream.

My mother snuck up next to me while I sat outside and said, “The funeral’s tomorrow.”

“Yup.”

“I have a favor to ask.”

“Mom, I-”

“Hear me out: I want you to say a few words tomorrow,” she said.

“I don’t know what I’d-”

“You were his favorite,” she said.

“In front of the entire family?”

“Of course.”

“I can’t even pronounce their names.”

--

Years after I lost my words, he will sit on the mantle above the fireplace, a big man ringed with the silver of an urn, as my mother goes through miles of paperwork. She’ll find more life insurance policies, printed on a dot matrix printer, in a box at my grandmother’s house. The stack of papers will sit around, move from table to counter and back, for two weeks along with a pad of paper, full names of insurance companies who had bought one another over time.

“I still haven’t actually gotten to talk to any of the insurance companies, yet,” mother will say. She’ll leaf through the yellowed papers then put her hand to her nose. The dust still won’t have settled. “He probably didn’t even finish any of these policies. Damn man never finished a thing in his life.”

--

The first Christmas he was in a wheelchair and the last I’d be there for, the whole family met at my grandfather’s house for a mix of reunion and holiday celebration. A slew of cousins awaited us for a holiday in the Texas heat. We pulled up to his russet-orange brick house, similar to the houses around it that I never could find my way through his subdivision, and we fell out of the car after a seven hour drive, relieved to be out of the cramped car.

A throng of family flew out of the front door with the growing strength of a hurricane and grabbed us tight with hugs and familial names. Embarrassingly, most of the crowd were strangers to me and rough introductions in creole weren’t enough for me to catch their names. English seemed anachronistic in their rough French sentences, and without my grandfather I couldn’t translate. I pushed through them easily enough and made it to the door where he sat waiting for me.

“Boy, you keep getting bigger.” Grandpa’s rough voice brought me inside.

“And you stay the same size.”

His deep laugh came not from his mouth, but as it always had, seemed to come straight out of his chest, like a rumble of thunder. His house was always full of laughter and the smell of wine. His glass was only a few feet away, sitting on the table in front of the TV, as usual.

“I’ve got a surprise for the little ones, tonight,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It should be here any-”

“Santa!” 

The shrieks of the children still in the front yard could be heard inside, and by dogs in a three-block radius. I walked to the front door and peered outside and sure enough Santa had arrived a few days early with a bag of gifts and a steadying arm from Mrs. Claus, as they got out of their huge pickup truck.

Later that night, Santa, who had already had several hot cocoas, and Mrs. Claus, who had drunk several more than her husband, sat on the couch laughing with my grandfather. After walking by family members deep in secret murmurings, Grandpa pulled me over to where he sat.

“Boy, I want you to meet Glenn and Sandra. This is my grandson.” Glenn extended his hand and I took it and shook it twice, the pumping motion causing Glenn’s sweet, amber breath to roll over me. The heavy scent of spice gagged me, but I choked it down. You can’t gag on Santa, it’s a cardinal rule of childhood.

“Ho ho. You’ve got a great grandfather, you know that, kid?” Glenn said. “You wanna sit on my lap?” They all laughed and Mrs. Claus chimed in that she wanted to and they laughed again.

I did not.

“You should wear the beard. It’s too hot anyway.” Santa ripped off his beard and offered it to my grandfather. The fake, white, furry lump dripped with the man’s sweat and reeked worse than his breath. “So what do you want to do when you grow up?”

Before I could answer, my grandfather jumped in, “He wants to be a writer.”

Mrs. Claus said, “You should be a writer, Norbert. Some of the stories you told us- well-” Her eyes travelled to me then back to my grandfather and they all laughed drunkenly.

--

Long before the night of drunken Christmas idols, while he still stood six foot five and I stood three feet tall, my grandfather would pull me up onto his lap and tell me stories of his family and how he grew up. As a small child I couldn’t get past the visions of bayous he’d conjure when he would tell stories of having alligator or raccoon stew, and when French flew from his mouth, I could never keep any of the players in his story straight.

Once, after a few glasses of wine, and one in his hand, he told me a story. One of my ancestors, whose name I never could remember, came to America. She came alone, leaving behind everyone and everything she ever knew. As an adult, I know she probably had to sneak in on a boat, cramped and scared below the decks of a ship on its journey from somewhere to Louisiana, our new ancestral home. As a child, I imagined her jumping off a cliff and flying here.

After a hurricane scattered the family in Louisiana, to the four corners of the country, and destroyed the family inheritance, he mentioned that the same heroine who had brought us here swam the entire way from wherever to here. Swam. I am a terrible swimmer.

Guess I didn’t inherit that.

--

In the now, at the ripe old age of twenty, I sit in a hard backed metal chair. Funeral chairs shouldn’t be comfortable, nothing else about the place is. The smell of formaldehyde and saline fills the whole building and the vases of flowers, mostly fake and faded, do nothing to help. My grandfather’s wife is crying at the front of the cramped, gray room but no one believes her wailing, it sounds far too much like her drunken screams. My wet palms slowly pull a string of purple metallic Mardi Gras beads, my great aunt in front of me seems to be using them for Hail Mary’s. The man handing out the beads, per my grandfather’s request, is young, I wonder if he wanted us to flash him for the beads. Probably. My grandfather certainly wouldn’t have minded. In front of my sobbing step-grandmother a table stands amongst wreaths of flowers. On top sits two silver jars, one larger than the other.

I lean to my mother on my right, “Is that it? Just two jars?”

She nods. “If she tries to take the bigger one, I’ll rip her hair out.”

“Seems a little extreme, mom,” I whisper.

“Nope. We’re not even related to her anymore, remember? I don’t owe that woman anything. Did I tell you that she got everything?” I shook my head. “She got him to sign it all over to her, everything is in her name or has been left to her. Between everyone else we get to share twenty-five hundred damn dollars, and you inherit a one foot section of the family estate. I hope she falls and breaks her neck.”

“This is still Grandpa’s fun-” I never get to finish that sentence, as a recording of the slowest version of “When the Saints Go Marching In” starts playing in the room. We stand, participants in this one last, thoroughly macabre, party. The priest, unsure of how fast to walk down the aisle to get to the front, settles on a slow shuffle while trying to sway and hand out party beads, most of which wind up around his neck by the time he reaches the front of the congregation.

“Norbert- Can you turn off the music? Thanks.” The priest pauses for the music to turn off. “Norbert always did like his parties, didn’t he? I’m Father O’Leare and we’re all here to celebrate life with Norbert one more time, New Orleans-“

“Nawlins!” One of my many cousins pipes up.

“Nah Lins. Of course.” Father O’Leare has already lost me.

--

I wonder why that first ancestor came here, and how we’re now listening to the nervous Father O’Leare. I hope she flew here. I hope she ran to a cliff in the Dominican Republic, a huge bluff, and took a running leap right off the edge. She probably fell for a while, worried she had done something wrong, and then, just as suddenly as the ground had ended under her feet, she started to soar. No one in the family, as far as I’m aware, has wings, so she probably didn’t either.

I wonder who she left behind. I’ve moved around, and whenever you leave, you leave behind everyone else. How many little sisters and brothers stood in amazement at the edge of the land as their big sister shrugged off gravity?

--

After Mrs. Claus offered to sit on Santa’s lap I stumbled through the double swinging doors to find my mother, a glass of wine in her hand, talking to family.

“I’m still surprised that we haven’t found more of us. More brothers and sisters, I mean. Dad was always on business trips and we kept moving around, plus we all know he kept the world’s oldest profession alive.”

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“You’ll know when you’re older.” Apparently thirteen wasn’t old enough.

“Grandpa had sex with w****s?” I asked. My naiveté caused an eruption of laughter.

“Yes. Plenty,” she said, “But don’t tell him that I told you.”

--

Once I was old enough to know, on my last trip to the house while it was still full of the smell of grandfather’s gumbo, I broached the subject with my mother again.

“Why do you always get upset when we talk about Grandpa?”

“It’s- well, it’s difficult. He wasn’t really around much, he was always away on business,” she said.

“Yeah, but-”

“-Your grandfather is a complex man. And quite the ladies’ man,” she continued.

“Oh-“

“He used to take you to the park all the time. He’d take you to the park and sit you on his knee and bounce you, and you’d laugh and laugh, until a woman would come up and talk to him about how cute you were.”

“Were?”

“Are. Sorry, honey.” She made a small smile, “anyway, you’d be back at the house soon and he would be home with the women he’d meet.”

“I guess I-”

“Oh, and don’t go through his drawers in his bedroom. Walked in earlier and saw something I wish I hadn’t.” We laughed. She added, “I do love him, though. Pain my a*s though.” She smiled at me, “What do you think of him?”

“I- I’m not sure. He’s kind of a big man- and I dunno- he seems so different from me.”

“What do you mean?” Her voice full of motherly worry.

“He- well, when the rest of our family comes over, I can’t even understand them. I’ve never seen the family estate, he grew up there, and I’m not even as tall as him.”

“But you have his eyes.” She put her hand on mine and smiled.

Later I wound up in his room to grab his wallet for him and had to open the drawer by his bed. Inside was a bottle of personal lubricant, a rather large sex toy, a medical d****e and an open pack of adult diapers. I never did find the wallet.

--

On the flight to his funeral in Texas, I drank a few little bottles of airplane wine, bitter enough it could’ve been used to fuel the jet, a small book weighing down my carry-on. I pulled it out, flipped through the pages to the dog-eared page to find his name. It was the short story he published about growing up, part of a creole cultural collection I had never read and probably never will again.

I had started to read the first line, when the stewardess had first passed me a bottle of the sharp white wine, and when she had passed me my fifth, I still hadn’t gotten past that sentence. He had sent this to me before to proofread and edit, but I never had. The second sentence started with a French phrase, the letters forming foreign words I had never learned to read.

--

On the night I learned what it means to lose, I stood to the side at a friend’s party, glass of wine in one hand when my phone rang. I picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Your- you- grandfather- he’s-“ My step-grandmother calling, drunk, I was sure, as usual.

“Teresa?”

“We’re- we’re at the hospital-“

“Wait. What?”

“Your grandpa, he’s gonna-” followed by blubbering noises.

“What is he going to do?”

“The doctor says he isn’t- isn’t going to make it through the night.”

Silence.

“Are- are you still there? I was just calling to let you know-“

“Let me talk to him,” I said.

“Well- he can’t really talk right now. I’ll tell him that you love him- but- but he’s gotta rest.”

“No. Put him on. I want to hear him.”

“He- has a- there’s- tube in his throat.”

“I don’t care. Put him on the phone.” She wasn’t used to hearing me speak that way, so I assume she did as I told her. There was only silence. My mouth moved, air came out, but there was no sound. It was as though he had just jumped off a cliff, and I was a twenty-three hour drive away, too far to stop him, to pull him back up. I kept pushing my voice harder, but it was lodged squarely in my throat, refusing to come out until I had the right words. There was too much to say, and none of it would come out.

--

I imagine that the girl who jumped after her sister was the smallest of the family, the most loved, as small children are. She bolted past the hands holding her back, tearing over the ground towards her sister in the air until she hit the edge, there her solid body betrayed her and she fell.

During her descent she could see her older sister soaring, high above and so far she was nothing more than a speck against the sky, practically twenty-three hours away, her sister’s wings spread in the sky like an angel leaving the earthly world behind. Yet she knew the best thing to say as she plummeted, so she gathered her strength, and sent her words through her blood to me; with the voice of a squeaky four-year-old and the mouthpiece of a twenty-six-year old man she whispered, “I love you.”

Silence from the other end of the phone.

--

I stand in front of my family, who are decked out in party beads and drippy mascara, at the podium. I am supposed to speak, to give my grandfather a proper eulogy. I am the writer of the family, the one with the words. I open my mouth, hoping to call back through time to that little four-year-old girl, pull her words here, but nothing comes to me. Not a single thing to connect myself to the family before me, no French comes flowing out of my mouth.

I stand, mouth slightly agape, silent.

I lean forward.

Lick my lips.

Blow on the mic.

Rub my palms against my pants.

I have no inheritance, and no words.