The Travelers-Back   by m. l. teague   (page 57)

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Chapter One

House of The Patriarch

Grand Daddy Lester Earl strode with his large coffee table Bible in hand (the one given to him by Blythe, which she did not want because it contained The Books of Maccabees, which Southern Baptists regarded as apocryphal). Her father, whose precise faith may have been Pentecostal, or Assembly of God, was taken with the heft of the book, its impressive gold leaf cover, and its preponderance of colorful reproductions of Renaissance paintings on Biblical themes.

“Now, daughters…” he began, with one hand thrust before an imaginary podium, “it says in the Bible that Man did not go to the moon! It’s falsehood and fakery! It was all staged in a carpet warehouse in Hollywood. I’ve seen those fake moon rocks before, and in more than one John Wayne western! Any man who believeth in fakery cannot know the Way, the Truth, and the Light!” The patriarch paused mid-thought, planting a knotty finger in the spine of his text. “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth…”

Uttering these words, the Bible was shut with a flutter of onion-skinned paper, and returned to the end table. The daughters said nothing, only sharing a look when he turned away. They were not sure what prompted the topic since they were ironing at the time and discussing their mother’s sclerosis of the liver. (Lester and Agnes had divorced years before, though parted on friendly terms.) The mist of spray starch hung in the air, and the father walked through it in a mild snit to his bedroom; the grandchildren snickered when it was safe to do so.

“Those Jehovah’s Witnesses are getting to him,” said Mildred, the youngest of his children. “They come here once a week trying to recruit him, and wind up staying through the dinner hour.”

The middle daughter shushed the laughing children and, after a while, Lester Earl reappeared in the living room, and mostly because the house, being oblong and inconsistently heated, chased him back into milder climate. He paced in his slow deliberate manner, worming his way back into everyone’s good graces. It was not in his temperament to stay in an ill temper.

While his daughters continued to gossip, his gaze settled on his grandchildren, who were always entertained by his antics. He dropped in his vinyl recliner and spit a plug of chewing tobacco into a Folgers coffee can. When enough time had past, he rose to mug his audience with peek-a-boo glances. A mischievous wink signaled the initiation of something untoward.

He gestured first with his shoulders and, with hands tucked inside in his pants pockets, shuffled his feet short of breaking into dance. The choreography was soon apparent: The rodeo clown circled the room on a pretend horse, with a slow exaggerated gallop. The children guffawed, which encouraged him.

His daughters were less amused. The floor planks worked like a trampoline beneath his shuffling shoes, rocking (if not toppling) bric-a-brac in the vicinity. The patriarch was also becoming a nuisance too near the unsorted laundry.

Any sign of annoyance, of course, was an excuse to prolong the agony of sourpusses, until the joy Lester derived from it reduced even him to giggles.

Eventually he relented, and, on cue, reticence returned to his stony face. He stared passed the screen door and dirt yard. His sights bent toward a horizon that was never far enough away, and he stepped out onto the porch quietly, with marked heartache, to begin one of his long walks to the graveyard.

He loved, and was beloved. His daughters and grandchildren sainted him years before his passing at a nursing home following a stroke. The grandfather would stay away for an hour or more on his strolls, until the day he joined his haunted memories and did not return.

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