I look in the mirror and smile as broadly as possible. I think that if teeth are all it takes, I will be quite successful. I part my hair in the middle and see that I look old-fashioned like Uncle Matthew. I pull it forward and smile rakishly; now I am my father all over.
The silver belt buckle I am wearing belonged to my grandfather, my mother’s father; and for many years my mother thought that it lay buried with my grandfather’s remains. She thought that Uncle Matthew, who lived with Grandfather and made all the funeral arrangements, had not wanted me to have the silver belt buckle, that he had been resentful that I, not he, shared these engraved initials. See how beautifully they are cut into the silver; a Mr. Farrier, a great friend of Grandfather, gave it to him. He was a jeweler and did the engraving himself. Grandfather, an open, warm-hearted person, had lots of friends but Mr. Farrier was his best friend. No one has ever understood why Uncle Matthew, his only song, could grow up to be solitary, never marry, and be interested only in rocks.
Nothing however has ever seemed strange about Uncle Matthew to me. I have always loved and admired him and I was watching when he walked up to the front of the church for his last look at Grandfather. I saw him reach inside the coffin and slip this buckle into his palm. I saw him execute that sleight of hand because I was seated to the side of the front pew, while my mother’s weeping face was turned into my father’s shoulder and his gaze was directed to the tip of his shoe.
When we visited on the anniversary of Grandfather’s death and drove out to the cemetery to lay flowers on his grave and on Grandmother’s grave next to him, she must have thought bitterly of the buckle deep in the ground. Yet she never asked Uncle Matthew or me if what she thought to be true was true; and while Uncle Matthew may have known what she was thinking (may indeed for all I know have rejoiced in her bitterness) I had not a glimmer. Some secrets are kept out of ignorance. That was why I never spoke of what I knew. The belt buckle would be mine when I had grown big enough to wear long pants and need a belt. I understood that condition just as I understood my mother’s fear that I would not grow up to be “normal”, that I would choose a strange profession such as geology, never marry, and give her no grandchildren. Yet her concern for my future life assured me that there would be a future life, that nothing could stop me from growing up. It was as if her thoughts of me as an adult, odd and reclusive as I possibly might be, staved off disease and pestilence, prevented the Angel of Death from discovering my whereabouts. I have always felt lucky. This buckle is lucky because it is a gift of love.
Before I was born, my parents had elected to live in San Francisco and even after I was born, they found that an apartment was quite large enough for their needs. It was because they could always drive down the Peninsula any weekend to visit Grandfather that they felt no need for a house and land. I was sent to visit every summer while they went to other large cities around the world for their vacations of more operas and museums and fine restaurants. They were relieved that because of these annual exposures I would grow up with a proper understanding of the natural world. Although they had chosen to be city dwellers, they said, it did not mean that they scorned the life Grandfather and Uncle Matthew led; but they regarded it as an existence more suitable for children than for adults such as themselves.
“They’ve sent you to rusticate,” Uncle Matthew always said when I arrived for one of my annual visits. “Let’s go out to see the sheep.”
We would lean on the fence and Uncle Matthew would give the sheep a report on the evening news, announce some earthquake in China or an eclipse of the moon we could expect to see next week if the clouds weren’t took thick. I knew that it was myself he was educating, but it was a good joke that the sheep had an interest in world events.
They were Blackface which Grandfather had bought from his friend Mr. Farrier and their startling black masks against the white fleece put me in mind of Halloween, false teeth, and the old saying about “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
Yet like all sheep they lay low and spent their whole efforts cropping the meadow, their strong, occlusive teeth never still until every blade of grass was nipped clean to the ground.
“You can’t fool a Ewe,” Uncle Matthew told me. “You can’t make a Ewe take another Ewe’s lamb. If the mother dies, the lamb will die. It’s the damnest thing about sheep. You can’t teach them a thing.”
It was this passion for teaching me everything he knew that endeared Uncle Matthew to me, that the affection we shared for Grandfather.
“He’s been looking for you all day,” Uncle Matthew would say, having given my parents a chance to greet Grandfather privately and tell him anything they wished before I was brought back to the house. Or was it that Uncle Matthew loved me and my company so much that he wanted to be with me first. So glorious wooed—how could I have been happier.
Turning away from the pasture, we visited the chicken house to collect the warm eggs, both of us laughing at the squawking, offended chickens as they half-jumped, half-flew from their boxes. Better yet, I was allowed to place the thin glass eggs Uncle Matthew kept in the china closet into the nesting boxes. “Can the hens possibly believe those dead-white eggs are the results of their own efforts?” Grandfather asked me. “No,” he answered, “It is instinct that makes them start to set when the nest is full. They can’t think a single thing through,” he said sadly, as if he wished dumb animals had been dealt a better hand. But together we tricked the hens. [Note: the original version of this paragraph had Uncle Matthew saying that, not Grandfather.]
“It’s a blessing Mother can’t see how Matt’s let everything run down,” my mother always teases after one of our visits to Grandfather; and I thought she disliked Uncle Matthew because he did not take care of the house well enough, refusing to have a regular cleaning arrangement, letting spider webs accumulate in all the bedrooms, doing nothing at all with my grandmother’s rose garden. Did she wish that she could get rid of my father and myself so she could come back and look after Grandfather as her mother would have. I thought not. I know how she loved the city and how she neglected her own housework to read one historical novel after another. I did not mourn the way this unknown grandmother’s taste and habits of cleanliness were ignored.
I had eyes only for Grandfather who always as soon as our car had stopped was in the front yard holding out his arms for me to come running. As he lifted me up, his immense stomach pressed against me. How wonderful his stomach was, reaching out for me, never shrinking back. When he sat, it spilled forward against his legs and left little room for me to sit, but enough. I could never fall, secure in the crook of his arm. Such strength infused my limbs after one of these visits that a week or two would pass before my mother was saying “nervous little thing” about me again.
I was always an acute child, I have been told, startled by noises, offended by odors, distraught if a pianist hit a wrong note. When I began to take piano lessons myself, the poor piano had to endure kicks and scuffs from my nervous, impatient feet wanting to pay it back for those infelicities of my fingers. In spite of these difficulties which stemmed from my sensory acuteness, Grandfather accepted me with his whole being; I was secure in my favored position of namesake, secure in the knowledge that I would one day wear his silver belt buckle, engraved with our shared initials.
My mother and father would sit talking to Grandfather while he held me, telling some event from our life in the city or recalling the time when my mother and Uncle Matthew were the children of the family and vied for my place on his lap. My parents basked in the pleasure they were bringing him while Uncle Matthew, thin as a rail, glided like a ghost through the rooms; and I saw that he was very like the photograph of my dead grandmother which my mother carried in a locket around her neck, his features blurred by his quick movements: that is how I see the resemblance. It does not occur to me until many years later that he too is “nervous” or that he might be jealous of Grandfather’s love for me. Even then, I think it is hardly worth thinking about.
But I am not at all sure what Uncle Matthew’s position is. My parents always speak of the visit we make to Grandfather’s house and although they embrace and shake hands with Uncle Matthew, they never swerve from their attention to Grandfather. But they do stay up late after Grandfather and I have gone to bed talking over affairs with Uncle Matthew as I have known them to do at home when we have had visits from their old friends who lavish questions and looks on me until it is my bedtime and then when I am out of the way laugh and talk into the wee hours. I do not think so. Uncle Matthew excuses himself soon after dinner. He must get up early and drive to the geological station where he works. [The contradiction in this paragraph is a mystery.]
When Uncle Matthew calls and tells my mother that Grandfather has died in his sleep and she comes to tell my father and myself, weeping and hardly able to talk, I refuse to believe that he has died. I force myself to think of our last moments together, feeling his strong arms around my body as he carries me from the barn, not wanting my city shoes to get muddy and ruined. My short pants slide up and his belt buckle rubs against my thigh. I cry out at the coldness and he stops, looking down at my skinny legs. “What is it, little one? Oh, that, my buckle. When I die, you’ll have it to wear. I’ve told Matt you’re to have it.”
I pull a long face and squinch up my eyes, stamping my feet like a colt, wishing I could run into the pasture and be one.
“Oh, come now,” he says, always knowing exactly what I am thinking. “I’m not going to die anytime soon.” He shows me how easily the buckle unsnaps from the belt and puts it into my hand. I rub my nose across the initials (our initials) and ask why the metal is so cold.
“Because it has no life,” he says and swings me up into his arms again. “My boy, my own boy.”
When we arrive for the funeral I refuse to speak to all the Aunts and Uncles and Cousins who are filling Grandfather’s house.
“Where is he?” I demand, running from room to room, until Uncle Matthew tells my parents that he will see what he can do. He carries me to peer in the coffin; but I refuse to recognize the bodily remains, shaking my head wildly and thrashing about in his arms until he says to my parents that he will take me out to see the Blackface sheep.
I feel better away from the house full of strangers who claim to know who I am.
“You remember Mr. Farrier, my telling you about Grandfather’s friend Mr. Farrier who sold him the sheep and made the belt buckle for him?”
I nod yes. “Has he died too?”
“All of Grandfather’s friends have died; he was ready to go. We’ll miss him, you and me, but he was ready to go. He was getting very tired.”
“I don’t like it,” I say but I feel better.
“The sheep don’t like it either,” he says before we come back into the kitchen. I see pushed in a corner the great, black galoshes that Grandfather always wore flopping about his ankles when he went to feed the stock. He would carry me to the fence and set me there to watch him do his chores. “These sheep are better than a lawnmower,” he would say.
Friends and neighbors have brought in enough food to feed threshers, but someone must solve the problem of bedding down all these far-flung relatives. No one is callous enough to suggest a motel. Cots are found and dragged from the attic. Doubling-up is the order of the day.
My mother comes to me from the kitchen drying her hands as she walks through the room towards the sofa where I have burrowed into the familiar cushions, the wonderful smell of tobacco and male sweat overcoming the deadly odor of flowers which has filled the house. She gives her hands a brisk rub because she knows how I shy away from cold hands. “You are going to sleep in Uncle Matthew’s room,” she says, “And keep him company.” I am already half-asleep on the on the sofa. If only they would leave me there, cover me over with a coat or blanket or even pile the cushions over me, cover my head, let me wake up to find them all gone and only Grandfather and Uncle Matthew in the kitchen starting a fire in the wood stove. But my father must be summoned from his conversation with all these strange Aunts and Uncles to carry me up the stairs. Someone else has been assigned to the sofa.
He puts me down on a cot which has been set up at the foot of Uncle Matthew’s big double bed and leans over to kiss me goodnight. “We’re right down the hall,” he says. “I’ll look in on you before we go to bed.” They do not believe that a child should sleep in the same room as his parents or ever share their bed.
Perhaps he and my mother do look in on me, but I am fast asleep. I do not awaken until first light is entering the bedroom. Uncle Matthew is sitting on his bed in his shorts. He has taken his teeth out and his cheeks have fallen in. “Good morning,” he says and goes into the bathroom, his thin legs hairy and spindly. I remember Grandfather is dead and pull the covers over my face. I think, “If Uncle Matthew dies, so will I.” I sit bolt upright and begin to scream.
My mother and father come running into the room, barefoot and shivering. “What has happened?” my father asks.
“Nothing,” I sob.
“A nightmare,” my mother says. “Poor boy.”
My father lifts me up and carries me down the hall to their bed. My sobs are smothered in his shoulder. I fall asleep between them thinking that I have deserted Uncle Matthew. But I know that they can care for me, that the Angel of Death will not dare to visit our apartment in the city.
After the funeral when we are on our way home and they think that I am asleep in the back seat, my father says, “Old Matt hasn’t changed a bit, has he.”
“No,” my mother says and sighs. In a while she sighs again as if the years of knowing that Old Matt has not changed a bit stretched as endlessly in both directions as the road which we follow.
“Papa wanted” (she turns to see if I am still asleep and does not speak my name) “to have his silver belt buckle.”
“Matt didn’t know that, I suppose,” my father says.
“Oh yes, he did; but he knew I wouldn’t make a row about it.”
I think of Grandfather lying in his coffin with his girth circled and sealed with our initials and of Uncle Matthew going to lean over the coffin to touch Grandfather one last time and of the silver buckle in his palm, and the expression on his face as he returns to sit next to me, saying that I am not to tell and who would believe me anyway?
My mother who has cried steadily throughout the church service and at the graveside is still crying softly as she says, “It’s like everything else about funerals. As if he would ever stand again and hold us all in his arms.”
“I know, I know,” my father says. I can hear the bubbly noise that always comes before he blows his nose.
The next summer they decide that I am old enough to go to camp and I do not go alone again to Grandfather’s house. After our visit on the first anniversary of his death, we are never free again to drive down although my mother calls often just at 6 p.m. to see if Uncle Matthew is getting along all right. He always says that he is watching the evening news. She invites him to come visit us and tells him that I will share my bedroom with him, but he finds a million excuses for not making the trip.
On my twelfth birthday they decide that we will spend it with Uncle Matthew. As soon as we arrive and while my parents are walking about the yard (my grandmother’s roses are resurrected and full of blooms) to see how well Uncle Matthew has managed by himself, he invited me to his room and rummages in his bureau drawer until he finds a small grey jeweler’s box with the name J. Farrier printed on the satin lining of the lid. Imprisoned by a hidden catch, the silver belt buckle is difficult to lift out.
“Your grandfather wanted you to have this,” he says simply, putting the buckle into my hand. He shows what a snap the box makes when he closes it. “Like a snapping turtle.” He is trying to help me forget the coffin lid coming down so silently, closing Grandfather away from us forever and he keeps talking fast while I take off my belt and punch a new hole with the pocket knife my father has bought me for my birthday. I want to put on the buckle immediately.
“Do you remember Mr. Farrier who was Grandfather’s friend?” Uncle Matthew says.
“Yes,” I say, impatiently, as if it is the answer to an examination question. “He sold Grandfather the sheep. Right?”
When we come back downstairs and I push out my stomach so that my parents will notice the buckle immediately, my mother is dumbfounded. “All these years, I thought…” She kisses Uncle Matthew on the cheek. My father too is smiling. Uncle Matthew says it must be time for the evening news.
In some strange way, I feel that he has been defeated.
Several years later I am invited to a Halloween party given by one of the girls in my class at school. At the Novelty Shop where I have gone to select a costume, I linger over the wax teeth. Finally I pay for the pair which looks least ghoulish.
“There look almost as good as the real thing,” the clerk says and I want to say something funny in reply, but nothing comes to mind. I wish I had bought a rubber nose instead. I cannot bear the thought that someone (another boy at the party) will suggest the similarity of thin rubber, flesh-colored object. [That last was handwritten on the typed manuscript.]
At the party we begin by bobbing for apples, and I forget that the teeth are a part of my costume. As soon as the apple-bobbing is over we are served popcorn and candy corn and take turns telling ghost stories. All the lights are turned out for the ghost stories I am terrified of and following suit (like all fifteen-year-olds) I kiss the girls on either side of me. When the lights are turned on again the girls get out their lipsticks and giggle at the smears the boys have on their handkerchiefs.
At home undressing for bed, I forget about the teeth altogether and when the laundry is sorted they are overlooked and melted in the dryer, making unsightly grease spots all over my father’s best shirts. My mother is very distraught because she cannot understand what has happened, but I cannot bring myself to tell her. I put my hand to my throat and feel the great lump of Adam’s Apple and I fear that if I speak my voice will crack.
I long to see Uncle Matthew and reassure him of my love and friendship. I wonder if he still keeps the Blackface sheep and if he goes out to see them after the evening news and tells them what is happening in the world. “I was just watching the evening news,” he still says to my mother when she calls to see if he is getting along all right.
I roll around in my mouth the taste of love and the pleasure of love withheld. It is a taste both sweet and sour.
[Undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]
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