Since that day, I have wanted hands like his.

His hands were as if made of wood, the palms broad and flat, the fingers
wide, square, the surfaces hard and smooth, his grip gentle for all that brutal
size. His were hands that had built things, hands that had been polished
against the wood they shaped, hardened by the iron they bent, massive
hands that moved stone, that could grasp with certainty, could hold and
change the earth.
I dont ever remember seeing him before this day. He had been my
grandfather for thirty years yet on this day I stood before him for the first
time as he lay in this hospital bed near the town on the Mississippi where I
was born, a giant of a man, how could he have been hidden from view for so
long? Like the rest of him, his head too was large, a totem felled upon that
pillow. His face was pale, defeated by the years, spotted with age as if life
had thrown bits of mud his way, his hair had thinned to but the few stands
you might find after draining the tub, his eyes were open, the ice blue irises
struggling a bit in their reddened wounds.
I waved my hand slowly across the front of his face. That was when his hand
shot up to grab mine. Im blind, he said, but that dont mean I cant see.
Grandpa, I said.

His lips quivered as if saying the word back to me, then smiled a surprisingly
wide smile, opened it did as wide as the Mississippi, broadcasting teeth
brown, worn down to their inner rings, as irregular as the pilings of an old
bridge that sunk away from that rivers edge. The smile faded as if clouds
passed overhead.
Whos this? He asked.
Your grandson. Pinkies oldest.
Both of his hands gripped mine in a gentle but firm vise. His arms had risen
from beneath the covers and what remained on his bones hung loosely in
shaking curtains of flesh, bruised I remembered. Blind or seeing, his eyes
danced.
I found him here by accident, by coincident perhaps, so perhaps by fate. My
grandmother had suffered a stroke. She was already quite frail. She had
shrunk to a wisp of a person, the white hair on her head finely coiffed into
the shape of a ripe dandelion. The heat caught us both by surprise during
one of the daily walks we took to help her keep some strength, and she
collapsed alongside the road and descended into one of her spasms, her
dentures escaping from her mouth like a small animal, her arms and legs
drubbing the road as if being fried on the hot asphalt surface.
On this day, I was walking her again, this time safely around the interior of
the hospital when I spotted the name hung next to a door: Sylvester

Callaway. I looked in and saw the mound of a large man quietly laid out on
the bed. I walked her back to her room and on my way out I stopped by the
room again and nurses were turning the man over, changing his sheets. I
left. The next day when we passed his door again, I said to her, Grandma,
who is that in there?
Well, I dont know, she began to say, then with a look that suggested she
smelled him before she saw him, she muttered through her scrunched up
face, Why that despicable son-of-a-!
Jesse! Sylvester shouted as if awoken by an angel.
That man is no good, my grandmother warned me.
Jesse! He shouted as if startled by the tunnel of light.
That man, he is no good. A line, it seemed she had been practicing for
decades now.
Jesse! Sylvester shouted blindly as if aware that his time had come. She
pulled my arm and we left.
Jesse and Sylvester Callaway. Despite how their names seemed naturally
and forever conjoined, I could not bring these two together, not on this day,
not once in the few days they both had remaining.
To her chagrin, I would spend time with Sylvester during the afternoons,
listening to his stories of growing up in this small town, of working in the

railroad yards, of my mother and her black pony, of the joy in working hard
enough to callous those hands which now collapsed in his lap like a pile of
wooden blocks.
Finally he asked me the obvious, the expected question. Does she talk
about me? He asked. Grandma? Yea, Jesse. No. Never said a word until
today, as far as I know.
He quieted, as if relaxing against a realization that had long pillowed him,
was long accepted.
As they say, it is anger thatll blind you even if you got two good eyes, he
said the real thoughts behind those words struggling beneath those milky
eyes. I know I done cut down more trees than I planted in this life, but I
guess a few things I built is still standing, a few at least.
He seemed to all but vanish behind those eyes that flitted from side to side,
following a memory perhaps as it danced this way and that. I felt as if I
should leave, but when I made a movement to go, his hand grabbed my arm
again.
You know, he said, its hard to come to know you are going to leave this life
and never have a chance to say, to tell someone you love them. I sure is
glad to have seen you though.
Sylvester died a few days later. His body was taken from the hospital by his
last wife to Phoenix Arizona. Story has it she put him in the back seat and

drove the 28 hours with him wrapped in a reflective blanket. Buried him out
of sight of all of us.
I asked my Grandma, why wouldnt you talk to Grandpa? He didnt want to
talk to me, she said, he was just creating another story, that is what he done,
spun stories for people to hear, stories that had nothing to do with the truth
really. That is just some man with the same name as him.
Her answer is what I expected, but I thought I saw a tear in her eye, as if she
had squeezed down a little too hard this time on words designed to hide the
truth.
She died soon thereafter.
I have his wedding ring, the one he gave back to my Grandmother. It doesnt
fit any of my fingers, my thumb the best, his hands were that big.