I think Grandpa Stewart developed a stutter
from years of being interrupted.
I've never heard him get out a whole sentence
on his own, without Grandma cutting him off
before tonight. He hobbles over to the kitchen
where I'm doing dishes after dinner.
Expectantly, I look up into the ***** windowpanes
of his old, gray eyes,
his hands are shaking and lips quivering.
When he talks, it's like a secret, and he
tells me, struggling over sequence and syllables,
stories of being a volunteer firefighter. Days
he was the strongest man anyone knew.
He stopped a flaming tractor trailer, once, from
running away all ablaze when its brakeline blew up.
Set his jaw, leaned into the smoke, another time,
and pushed onward in steady strides, putting out
a fire in a nickel and dime store, even when
the hose pressure was pushing his line of
sweaty men backward into the street.
Where the hell is that fighting man? I look
at the hunched, wrinkled one before me and remember
the panic that crippled him when
his second son killed himself 12 years ago.
Knelt down as if in prayer, begging
for forgiveness maybe, put a shotgun under his chin,
and blew his brains out, a different type of fire,
with carbon and sulfur exploding just as deadly.
They said the bullet came out his eye socket.
I don't know how they could tell.
It was a stranger in the casket they pieced together
from chunks of skull found across the basement floor.
Haunted by fires, Grandpa doesn't sleep now,
answers the phone on the first ring, paralyzed
in perpetual anxiety, yelling,
"Y-Y-YES?! He-Hello?!"
His stutters are a endless seziure convulsing
on his tongue. He's slower, he's somewhere else, he 's
interrupted and doesn't try. He's medicated
and sedated and
smothered into this empty shell of
a man, sleeping, existing on a living room recliner,
****** with colorless eyes,
desensitized to fear and family, broken
in the wake of fire's senseless destruction;
all the charred ashes left in its place.