Last
Summer
By Elva Avara
It was my best
summer at Grandma’s, until we found the bones.
Grandma lives on tile Gulf of Mexico —
in little house right on the beach. All her friends are pretty old, and
they move slowly, but they like to talk to me.
They say things like: “Hey, boy, you’re
nearly as big as yore daddy!” or “Son, I remember when yore grandpa and
me fished over there on that mud lump. Wanta go with me sometime, huh?”
These men chewed tobacco and carried buckets around on the docks — they
had ropes, and cleats for their boots, and so many things that I wanted
to see.
But back to the bones. Grandma and I
had come down to the beachside, (not the riverside), and I was swimming
in the water, and Grandma was scooping up dry sand on the beach to help
me build a sand castle. The bones showed up in the shallow water, two of
them, as white and smooth as if they were made of plastic. They were not
connected, and the smaller one was half buried in the rocks and sand.
That looks like a femur,” Grandma said,
after I held them up and called to her. She had been a nurse in the old
days, so I reckoned she knew.
“What’s a femur?” I asked her, looking
straight into her blue eyes with the hot July sun looking on.
“Oh, a femur is just a bone...” and I
realized that she had gone into that adult voice which says "Don’t tell
the children any more - not good for them.”
“Tell me, Grandma, what is a femur?”
I leaned into her heavy arm and over against her breast. I was half
teasing and half whining.
“It’s a leg bone, son, probably from
some animal or other that got lost in one of the hurricanes, a long time
ago. We’ll take it and have somebody check it out, but nothing for you
to worry about, okay?”
But Grandma was never the same the rest
of that day, nor that night. She made phone calls, and she kept giving
me chores and games and stuff to keep me busy. But I knew it was about
the bones. And I knew that it was not an animal who had lost his skin
and flesh in the salty water. It was a human. I knew that.
All that night I kept touching the
bones. They were dry now, and had little tiny holes here and there.
Finally, Grandma wrapped them in a towel and told me to leave them alone
and it was time for bed.
I dreamed all night about the bones. I
saw a man with one leg missing, standing menacingly over my bed. What
have you done with my leg bone?” He was angry and I understood why. I
kept telling him I had nothing to do with it.
Then I dreamed that there were lots of
people walking on the sandy beach, and none of them had any flesh or
skin, just femurs connected together, and skeleton heads wobbling on
them. Finally, I left my bed on the screened porch, and climbed in with
Grandma. She seemed to be expecting me.
Next morning, we took the towel-wrapped
bones to the sheriff. I watched as carefully as I could — I had vowed
last night that nobody would keep me out - I had to know the truth about
my find. The sheriff looked over his glasses at Grandma, and then at me.
“Harold’s boy, huh?”
Then he said, “Gladys, this looks like
a human femur.”
Grandma must have frowned at him,
because he looked like he had done something wrong, and took the
bones to the back of the office, laying them down, where they clanked
like drumsticks on the metal cabinet.
His voice was hushed. "I'll get them to Jackson,
we can do DNA now, and there can be tests made.
They knew something that I did not. I
hated that.
Later I asked her, “What did the
sheriff mean, about DNA and about tests?”
Grandma sighed, and she pulled me close
to her on the sofa. “Sonny, there are some things that you don’t need to
think about...”
I interrupted her: “Grandma, you always
treat me so good, like I was your son, or your friend. Please tell me,
I want to know, I really do. Please.”
“Well, okay, I’ll tell you. DNA is the
way we are made up, and each of us is just like his own family. That is,
if you had my bones, you could test them, and test you or your dad, and
find out that we were the same family. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah! So these bones could belong to
somebody who has a mother or a father or a son or somebody living here.
Is that right?”
She nodded and stroked my hair. But she
was staring ahead now, lost to me for a few minutes. “Let’s eat,” she
said, and we did.
I slept in Grandma’s bed after that,
the big iron one in the back of the house, where you could hear the
crickets and the thunder when a squall came up. The sheets were white
and smelled like the sea, and she changed them for blue ones sometimes.
A few days later I was allowed to go
fishing with Walter Jones in his batty — and I stopped thinking about
the bones when we were catching fish and eating the lunch he had brought
us.
Then our vegetable garden began to come
in. The tomatoes were amazing, red and so many of them — we ate them in
the garden, just wiping off the sand — and the squash and eggplant and
the okra burst out too. After a rain, the next day, we would be swamped
with beans and new peppers.
I suppose the days were so busy that I
forgot all about the bones — and then so suddenly, my dad and my mother
were at the screen door. The day was hot and hazy, and I knew that
summer was not over—why were they here? They only hugged me a little,
and they seemed to clutch my grandmother and I thought I heard her
crying. Something was terribly wrong here, and I hated it.
I asked my Dad: “What is wrong? Please
tell me,” I wanted to cry, too. My grandma seemed to nod, wiping her
eyes. We all went out and sat on the porch. A breeze began to blow up
from the beach. It was almost as if this was a perfect day, a perfect
place, if it were not for their solemn faces. My dad sat in the swing
beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders. My mom was in the chair
beside us, looking at me, too.
“A long time ago, son, when I was about
your age, my Dad went off in his boat and disappeared.” Dad hesitated.
He took a deep breath. “He just disappeared from us, and we didn’t know
what had happened to him. We never found his boat. We thought that he
might have left us…”
“No, no, he didn’t!” I heard myself
screaming. “He wouldn’t do that!”
Dad took me up into his lap, and my mom
sat in the swing with us. “No, baby. He did not leave us.” My dad was
crying tears, down his face now. “You know the bones that you
found...” he could hardly say it. “Son, we tested them…”
“He is our family. He is your dad!” I
interrupted. “I knew it was him. I knew it!”
“But you didn’t know that I had lost my
dad, did you?”
“No, but I just know he wanted me to
find him. And I did,” I was crying hard now, feeling like I had just
fallen in the deep water or something.
“You
sure did, boy. Now we can know that he
is at rest, and I will tell you all about him.’
We sat for a long time there together.
Sometimes my dad would shudder, and cry some tears and he would pat me,
sitting in his lap. I think they began to feel better when the sun went
down. And I did too.
The next morning we went to the
cemetery beside the Methodist church, just us and the preacher, and
there, in a fine cedar box, they let me carry the bones. The preacher
prayed and my grandmother prayed. We placed the box in the ground, left
some flowers there and turned to go away.
In the side of the cemetery I saw
people standing back, as though they were waiting for it to be over, and
then they came and took our hands as we went out of the gate.