'Dody'

ALTHOUGH I was only a youngster when my grandfather was with us, a few of the pictures and experiences that we enjoyed together stand out in my mind with distinctness above a misty haze of forgotten ones. I clearly recall a man in a gray fur overcoat who took my brother and me cutter-riding behind a brown-and-white spotted horse. I remember the hours just before bedtime when ‘Dody’ — our childish name for Grandfather — held us on his knees before a red, snapping fire and with his jackknife cut. round and round apples without once breaking the curling red-and-white peeling. I often think of the times when he picked us up from a fall, telling us to say ‘ Jehoshaphat’ like a man instead of crying. I recall, too, how we searched through his bulging pockets for boxes of animal crackers. But with greatest pleasure I remember how Grandfather and Grandmother took Paul and me to the cottage to spend the long summer days. These bits of our associations with my grandfather still remain in my memory, much as the gold dust clings to one’s fingers long after the butterfly has slipped through. The times I remember best are the days at the cottage — probably because there we did the same things again and again until they were indelibly engraved on our minds.

The cottage was a low square hut tucked under old oaks, walnuts, and elms, on a cliff above the cedar. It was built so close to the edge that it seemed to us only the heavy branches of the old trees that bent, low against the roof or scraped the green-painted sides prevented the summer winds from shoving it from its foundation of four stone blocks and tumbling it into the water below. The tall grass, too, grew closely about the cottage, so thick and rank that it almost concealed the white stone step in front. Grandma always declared it ‘looked a sight’ when we unloaded our things, so we all helped to clean house. After the scrubbing was done and the tackle repaired, we left Grandma on the roofless but shady porch and climbed down the steep path to the river on our way fishing.

Most often we fished for ‘croppies’ on the point, a stony strip of land jutting out into the river. With Dody between us we sat on a wide flat rock in the shade of overhanging shoots of willow and white birch. When the line whirred far out into the water, we settled back quietly like good fishermen to await results. Everything about us was quiet and hushed excepting the steady lap of water against the rocks, the muffled gurgle of the spring on one side of us, and once a far-off train whistle, so faint that it emphasized its own remoteness. We watched the sun playing on the water, tracing gold lines on the crest of every soft, swirling eddy. The ‘ shiners ’ sparkled as they swished about in the minnow trap. Blue-and-bronze dragon flies, their delicate wings aflutter, poised over the fish poles. Wasps trailing long legs toppled drunkenly above the water spiders, scudding and darting on the smooth surface of a quiet strip of backwater. Birds with pointed, stiff-beating wings dipped the water or made slow shadows across it as they sailed over. Longest we watched the red bobber as it danced and dipped far out in the current, finally disappearing, a signal for Grandpa to jerk his line and slowly wind his reel until a glistening silvery croppie flopped at our feet.

When Grandfather said the bass would be getting jealous if we did n’t visit them, we took the dim narrow trail along the bank of the river to the old bass hole. We followed through the clean-growing maples, the shadowy-patterned birches, and the dark pines, redly blanketed with needles, until we rounded the bend and came to the bass hole, black and quiet in the dusky twilight of the pines. After Grandpa had plunked the sinker into the deep black water, Paul and I ran off to the woods to play, leaving Dody leaning against the broad trunk of an old pine. We climbed to the crest of the hill, through the pines, over logs and boulders, and, as the trees thinned, through the hot sun until we came to a huge walnut tree on the top of the hill. In its shade we rested a few minutes, watching over the woods — the glistening cottonwoods, the black pines, and the pale birches. They always looked the same to us as they had the day before, and we told each other they were like Dody, for we always found him just as we had left him, a never-failing wonder to us then.

Soon we started down the hill, following a miniature brook that tumbled sleepily from tiny pool to pool down through a steep-sided cut in the hill. Tall pines bent over the gap, dimming the light to duskiness. Locust trees chafed their feathery leaves together in winds that faltered between motion and rest. Birds concealed in the shadowy branches lilted and caroled in hurried runs of melody while we jumped from one mossy rock to another. We slipped through the trees wondering if Dody had moved, but we always found him leaning quietly against the old pine trunk. Often we asked him what made him sit so still. Invariably he smiled slowly and told us, ‘Perhaps it’s the magic in this tree trunk; you try it and see.’ So, because we wanted to be like Dody, we sat beside him and leaned close against the tree, but before we could test its magic power the slow, penetrating quiet of the woods put us to sleep.

Many evenings after supper at the cottage we rowed up the river to set the trout lines. Before we pushed off the point, the sun had slipped behind the pines, leaving the western sky brilliantly washed in red, the hills and trees outlined with fire, and the whole scene glowingly mirrored in the water. We rowed by the sand bar where a long-legged heron stood on one foot in a shallow pool, through the pond where the water lilies grew, their pale petals flushed from the sunset and their big leaves swaying with a sudden motion, to Catfish Channel, where the fish flopped above the surface, rippling the flaming water. We strung the long line across the river. Grandpa baited the hooks with shining minnows (we called them ‘minnies’ then), which darted and flopped on the end of their line. Then we floated downstream in the slowly changing light. The brilliancy of the sky softened to limpid gold and faded away. The long pointed shadows of the pines leaned farther into the river, pushing the red and gold still lingering on the water deep into its black depths. The birds hushed their songs to twitters, except the thrushes, who began their antiphonal evening chants as the woods lapsed into darkness. The sound of our oars dipping and dripping rhythmically and the faint purling sound of the spring rose liquid in the evening quiet. When our boat struck the rocks on the point Grandmother spoke from the shadows where she awaited us. ’Is that you, John?’ With her we sat on the rocks as the night mist fumed on the river and watched as the water brimmed with wavering, twinkling stars and the fireflies wheeled in the woods about us. Then Grandmother slapped at a mosquito and declared that it was bedtime.

Of the furnishings of the cottage I remember little, except that Dody had chosen them and that Grandmother termed them ‘outlandish.’ The poinsettia-covered sofa where we napped on rainy days, the two brightly painted green and red cupboards, and the brilliant yellow curtains strung on a wire to divide the room, Grandmother called ‘heathenish’ and often laughingly told Grandpa that he must have acquired his taste for color in the South during the War of Emancipation. Although Grandmother did not share Dody’s fondness for the bizarre, it pleased Paul and me, as did the old freak chair that glided smoothly back and forth instead of rocking.

The dishes, too, were unusual. Paul and I drank our milk from two huge beer mugs, presents from one of Grandfather’s patients. Dody often teased Grandmother about bringing up children to drink out of beer mugs. So, to prevent any future evil effects, she conscientiously warned us never to drink anything except milk from the mugs. At that, Grandfather usually looked up from his fish, his eyes twinkling, and asked, ‘ Why, Louisy, what’s your objection to good water?’ Then he chuckled, a signal for Paul and me to smile tolerantly. We had no idea why Grandpa’s cup irritated Grandmother, too. It was an oldfashioned moustache cup, decorated with a skull and crossbones. She sniffed every time she set it beside his plate, declaring her intention to throw the horrible thing in the river some day. Each year Grandmother threatened to replace the sinister dishes and refurnish the cottage; yet, as Grandfather’s chuckle indicated, we drank from our beer mugs and napped on a poinsettia-covered sofa as long as we passed the summers there.

All this happened long ago, as I was reminded last summer when I visited the cottage again. The rains and snows had erased all signs of green paint and had washed the earth away from a foundation block, causing one corner of the cottage to warp and dip. The old stone step had crumbled and cracked, and weeds were growing through the crevices. The platform-like porch had rotted until one board had broken through and the corners had decayed. I peered through a broken window, but turned away when I saw that the cupboard doors had been broken off and the shelves emptied, that the mice had scissored the poinsettia-covered sofa and scattered the excelsior over the floor.

I climbed down the old path, almost indistinct now, to the point to watch the sunset, but the river had changed its course and now raced over the point, even lapping the old stone where Grandfather, Paul, and I had squatted while we fished for croppies. As I watched, the water caught the brilliancy of the western sky and rippled in spreading waves where fish flopped above the surface. In the gold light I leaned over the old rock and read my Grandfather’s name carved on the stone: —

DR. BAIN STONY POINT — 1912

Probably the work of some camper who had known Dody.

The gold in the west softened and the flame on the river slowdy disappeared in the deep, black water until the timber across from me was only a bank of shadow. The thrushes began their evening chants and the river filled slowly with stars. As I slapped at a mosquito the distant horns of my friends’ cars honked blatantly through the woods.