When an Iron Horse is Put to Pasture

My maternal grandfather is a member of the generation that helped put this country on a path to prosperity. A child of the depression, he served his country and raised his family on a modest middle-class income, and without a high school education. He was a man of enormous strength, and to see him slip into the feeble grip of the wretchedly unforgiving plague we call Alzheimer’s is a fate that no individual should suffer and no family should have to endure. My thoughts are with him on this Father's Day.

William J. Mitchell, or Mitch as he would come to be known, was born into the particularly desperate circumstances of life in 1927 East Mines, Pennsylvania. It was the year of Lindbergh's conquest of New York to Paris; Babe Ruth and Murderers' Row in four over the Pirates; The Jazz Singer, the Long Count, and Hills Like White Elephants. But the roar of the twenties registered only a whisper in East Mines, where the work whistle always rang louder than laughter and cheer. A coal patch, enveloped by black hills and the curvy roads that cut through them, is best described as the smallest and most forgotten village in an area containing little but.

My grandfather would distinguish himself very early as an athlete of exceptional repute, and years later men of his age would tell me stories of Billy "Hot Foot" Mitchell, the first freshman halfback to ever start on the St. Clair Saints varsity football squad. Unfortunately, that would be the last year he could afford the indulgence of high school, forced to drop out and find work to help his struggling family survive.

He drove a beer truck and operated some heavy equipment until he fudged his age to join the Army at the tail end of World War II, serving with the Corps of Engineers in the Pacific and sending his paychecks back home to East Mines. Once he was discharged from the service, he married my grandmother, Helen, whom he affectionately called Haitch, an early coal region pronunciation of her first initial. After the war, there was some club baseball and even a brief professional career when a scout from the Philadelphia Athletics’ organization (now the Oakland A's) spotted him and offered a chance to play for their minor league affiliate in Savannah, GA. A broken hand eventually sent the young catcher home, where a family was soon to follow.

My grandmother was from nearby Duncott, which you won't find on a map, a sickly girl who never expected to survive a series of chronic childhood ailments. He liked to say that he had raised her from a pup, and to this day the only time I've seen him cry was when he confronted the unimaginable thought of her passing as she lay in a hospital bed suffering from complications after a heart valve replacement. Never once have I heard him so much as compliment another woman's beauty, or seen him sneak a peek at a youthful figure as it passed. She was, and remains, the love of his life.

Pappy was a gifted and prolific storyteller, but tales of his own exploits came just a little at a time over the years. Despite having been more worldly than anyone would have imagined, there was rarely a word about having been a professional athlete or traveling the globe as a soldier. He liked to talk about that which he felt he did best—driving an 18-wheeler. He was a proud teamster who drove long hauls for a now-defunct outfit called Branch Trucking. His call sign on the CB was the Slowpoke and legend has it that everyone from dock foremen to terminal bosses would wander out to catch a glimpse of his skill at backing a rig into its loading dock at speed, no matter how many obstacles had to be traversed. He never got rich, but he raised three kids and always had a few bucks socked away, should any of his grown children, and later grandchildren, stumble upon hard times.

In my childhood, he loomed large. Still a muscular specimen well into his 50s, he'd pull up at our house and honk the air horn on his green rig whenever a route would bring him nearby. Rippled arms bulging from his white t-shirt, Pappy would pull the cord with a smile, and then let me do the same when I dashed out to greet him. He and Nana would pick up my sister and me on Fridays after school. I recall endless weekends at their house, long rides in his treasured '78 Cutlass Supreme Brougham while listening to Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, lazy Sunday afternoons watching a baseball game, as he pontificated on the superiority of Brooks Robinson and Willie "Puddin' Head" Jones to Mike Schmidt and Graig Nettles, my two favorite third basemen of the day.

He was a newspaperman who insisted on silence during the evening newscasts, local followed by national. His temper would flare, and there would be an occasional outburst of political disagreement directed toward the set, though his mood would soften into hearty laughs during the M.A.S.H. and All in the Family reruns that would immediately follow. Back to the newspaper, the occasional tabloid, and a 10 o'clock hand-off of an early model, brick-sized remote control that was, without exception, ceremoniously accompanied by a wag of his finger and the stern warning, not all night—far from an easy promise to keep for a young kid commanding a 21-channel cable-ready television, in a time and place where such things were a rare luxury indeed.

My grandfather possessed a restless anxiety that I've found common in those who cut their teeth in depression-era America. No matter how far he'd driven that week or what time he finally got back on Friday night, if someone were changing out a busted oil pan on their car, or hanging a sheet of drywall for a makeshift room in the basement Saturday morning, Pappy was there with his toolbox, unsatisfied until he had managed to muscle his way into the center of the job and hammer the last nail, or pull the final turn of the wrench, wiping well-earned sweat from his thickly-wrinkled brow. It took three separate retirements to finally pin him down and in sad irony, it was almost as if that restless resistance, that fear of ever slowing his body, was validated by what happened once he did.

He had watched nearly his entire family suffer through horrid bouts of the disease; held his sister's hand in the nursing home when she didn't know his name, indulged his little brother when he would tell him that a deceased sibling had just moved into a room down the hall in the same nursing home—all the while asking only that he never suffer the indignity of leaving life in the same fashion. "It's a shame," he'd say, with a pursed-lip scowl and determined shake of the head, his standard expression when assessing an injustice.

Distance has spared me the constant, up-close experience of seeing him fade into a shell the way his wife and children must; my grandmother having to endure the repeated agony of being forgotten by the only man she ever loved, whose whispered mumblings are now totally inaudible to her impaired hearing; my mother constantly having to re-break bad news to him and introduce forgotten grandchildren; daughters-in-law trying desperately to offer comfort; his sons having to see that iron horse lying on its side.

I made the 18-hour drive with my son last summer, hoping for one last chance to see him lucid; to catch his ear for just a moment and tell him all of the things I needed him to know; for my son to get one last look at his Pop Pop, whose white hairline still traces his own like a genetic map on the identical foreheads they share. My grandfather had just gotten out of the hospital with pneumonia and was somewhat spry after a good rest and plenty of B-12. He fumbled with a few details and introduced me to neighborhood children as his son, but then recalled times from my youth that I myself had forgotten. I told him that I loved him, that I owe more to him in this life than he'd ever know, and in tears, told him that I would miss him for the rest of my days, never forgetting how much he had done for me.

Somewhat confused, he laughed in the innocent and uncertain way of a child. "Why are you crying?" he asked me, turning his head to my son playing on the sidewalk out front as if to escape the awkwardness of eye contact. "You were a good boy," he said, still looking away. "We were buddies. Come on, I'll get you an ice cream out of the freezer. They want me to go back to work, but I told 'em I'm done." And that was it. He declined quickly after that visit. Night terrors, insomnia, paranoia; dressing and leaving the house because they need him at work, as if his fading self was struggling to retreat to his labors, which had for so long managed to keep him in front of what had happened to too many people in his life once they'd stopped moving. Dammit man–just get back to the terminal. Get in that rig and work! All of these jumbled thoughts and out-of-sync rhythms will sort themselves out if you just keep moving!

My mother's middle-of-the-night rescues and the nervous calls that came to her work grew constant. Fear that he would manage to get the keys to the car again, that in his confusion he could be a danger to himself and others finally prevailed. He needed full-time care that my grandmother could not provide. He could no longer be safe at the homes of his children in the hours they were away. He was put in a nursing home that winter, the very same one, just blocks from my family home, where several of his siblings had finished out their lives under hauntingly similar circumstances. After only a week, he suffered a steeper decline. It was insisted that he be moved to a better-resourced facility a little further away, where he could receive closer care around the clock. He remains there today, faithfully visited each afternoon by family members who hope their attention provides some modicum of comfort, however undetectable it may be.

1,300 miles away, and not without guilt for it, I am left with more pleasant memories—spared having to add infinitely less romantic ones that fill too many of these final days. When I remember my grandfather, I remember my favorite idiosyncrasy: the way he rubbed his palms together quick enough to start a fire, while snickering through a closed mouth–a trait that signaled anything from sitting down to a favorite meal to someone about to get caught in a tight spot on a television program he was watching.

I remember the huckleberry pancakes he would fry up after we had picked the wild berries from a nearby field, his endless wars with the hornets forever nesting near his garage; the sight of him quenching his thirst with a cold glass of beer after mowing the lawn on a sweltering summer day. I think about the way he would grind his teeth and mumble a threat to "deck" someone, or "puck them in the mouth," when his kettle was hot. I recall how he'd light up around young children, or the way he looked in the Santa Claus suit he would wear to the youth wards at area hospitals once his own kids and grandkids were grown. I think of a great man and how lucky I am to have him in my life, how he deserves better and how helpless we can feel in this world, as those closest to us suffer such cruel and unjust fates.

 

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is a featured columnist for The Bradenton Times. His column appears each Thursday and Sunday. His debut novel, A Long Road Home, was released in July, 2015. Click here to order your copy.