Grandpa was a magician, although I’m not sure he knew any spells. When I was young, he talked to whitetail deer while I watched from the low branches of a maple tree. This was the deep woods of North Arkansas, not a place of metaphor or fairytale. That meant that at the same time Grandpa was convening with deer, other men were walking into the woods with .308 rifles, outfitted in camouflage jackets and desert hunting boots. Grandpa wore a hundred-year-old bone knife on his belt loop and only put on shoes if a pretentious sign stuck to a restaurant door demanded it.
In those days, a Cherokee Indian in Arkansas stuck out. It wasn’t more than a couple hundred years before—a blink as far as Grandpa was concerned—when a man of his reputation and line would have walked anywhere and done anything he pleased in that country. As it were, Grandpa wasn’t even allowed to hunt on the land that’d been his for centuries. He couldn’t hunt because he didn’t have a license. He didn’t have a hunting license because when he was a boy, the school bus didn’t come to his reservation. His daddy didn’t own a car. It’s hard to pass a written test if you can’t read and can only write your name. He lived on a reservation, near as I can tell, because in 1778, an Indian called Dragging Canoe trusted a white man called—
But that’s another story. What I’m getting at is this: Not being able to hunt the way he’d done as a boy—not being able to travel in the woods with the hickory bow that was older than the men who wrote the laws that made it illegal for him to practice his religion on land that was stolen from him—that wasn’t easy for Grandpa. It’s not till now that I realize the damage that did. Not to his health, but to his soul.
But he didn’t break the law, even though he didn’t believe in it. He couldn’t take the test because he couldn’t read. And he couldn’t read because a long time ago, people that look a lot like me did some awful things to people that look a lot like him. It’s not that simple. Not really. But that’s a certain kind of truth, the kind of truth that you can tell in a story without getting things all confused.
When we got hungry, Grandpa would simply talk to the deer. We’d wander for a while through the woods. Sometimes we walked on faint trails and other times we made our own way through the brush. Grandpa always seemed to know where he was going, and that was good enough for me. He called it magic. Not just talking to the deer, but knowing where to go and how to get there, being able to look up into the stars and point precisely where home was, whispering to the wind and being able to hear its reply.
When it was time to do magic, Grandpa would point to a maple tree. Never a pine or an oak, never a hickory or a hawthorn. He’d point to a maple, and sometimes he’d lift me up to the lowest branch, and I’d pull myself into it like a squirrel. Other times he’d watch me struggle at the trunk and wait until I could scramble up the bark like a raccoon.
Then he’d walk a bit away. Never so far that I couldn’t see him. He’d wipe his forehead with the back of his leathery hand, blink the sweat from his eyes, and maybe even take a swig of river water from the canteen he always carried across his chest.
Then he’d talk. He’d tell the deer about our family, speaking low and calm even before they came to the sound of his voice. Grandma was home, baking German apple pie. He told them about my father who died with my mother in a car accident. The first time I saw him at it—barely any time at all since the embers had died in the old Honda that was their casket—he cried while he spoke. He told them about his father, who was a Cherokee man like him, who taught him how to talk to deer and walk through the woods without following a path and most of all…
He’d wait.
And I’d watch. The first time, I was certain the deer weren’t listening, certain that they wouldn’t come. I had a quarter of his blood, and that little bit didn’t count for much when it came to performing miracles. The Cherokee culture that was so much a part of his life and his identity was a dreamlike thing to me. He held onto it like a drowning man holding on to a life vest. But the thing about drowning men is that they’re dangerous; if you get too close to them, they might pull you under and kill you in their panic.
That first time, it was a pair of twin does that walked out of the infinite brush and answered him. I didn’t hear them coming. I never did, not even years later, toward the end. They were the ghosts of the woods, who moved like they didn’t have feet and lived like they weren’t really a part of the world. They just appeared, russet hides gleaming with dew, big eyes watchful but not alarmed.
Grandpa discussed things with them. If it’d been me standing there, talking in my voice, they’d have bolted. But it was him, so they listened instead.
The ones that left weren’t done with the woods yet. That’s what Grandpa said. The ones that stayed would let him take the knife he wore on his belt right up to their throats. They’d blink at him. It’s hard to say just how their eyes looked when they did that. I guess you’d call it solemn, but I think there was something else there, too. The same thing I saw in grandpa’s eyes at the end. It was like a kind of exhaustion.
It’s tiring being a wild thing.
After, Grandpa would beckon me down from the tree. We’d kneel next to the deer. The first time, he asked me to touch it and thank it. I’d never seen a thing die. I’d never seen that much blood either. I put my hand on the deer’s shoulder, looked into its empty, black eyes, and thought about how I was supposed to do that. It was dead. What could I say?
“Smell it,” he suggested.
I leaned in and inhaled. Acorn husk, pine pitch, animal perfume, river soil. It made my head light. It occurred to me that this deer might have slept near a pine tree, might have napped next to the river, and possibly ate acorns for dinner. What else might it have done?
“See?”
We’d hang the deer from the same maple I climbed down from. Grandpa would clean it and skin it. Only the guts and blood were left behind. Those were for the tree and the things that lived in the tree.
#
Grandma held me while I cried, but Grandpa made me feel better. I was ten when my folks died, ten when I learned they’d burned alive after a drunk trucker ran them off the road and sped off without even stopping to see if he could help. Ten when I made the trip by plane from California all the way to Arkansas to live with a pair of people I loved but barely knew.
The first few weeks, while I was still learning to feel the shock and the hurt, I cried a lot and Grandma held me a lot and Grandpa just watched on, waiting till I was ready. I guess he knew I was ready in the way that he knew all sorts of stuff. By the time I wondered about that, I knew better than to ask.
He didn’t ask me questions that the counsellor at my new school did like how does that make you feel and are you holding up all right? Holding up what? I’d asked the lady the first time she’d posed the question, and that put an end to that.
No, he didn’t ask me questions. He showed me things instead—like how to make a fishing line from a bear’s intestine, or how to clean the carburetor in an old Honda motorcycle. Although he wasn’t very keen on technology, Grandpa loved to do what he called tinker. It’s been nearly a decade since I turned a wrench with him in the shop, but I still use his tools, and when I rest my palm into the worn grips of his crescent wrenches, it’s almost like holding his hand.
About a year after I got to Arkansas, after six months of begging, I convinced Grandpa I was old enough to pull back a bow and we spent the whole weekend searching for an Osage Orange Tree with a straight enough branch to make a little hunting bow. Grandma made donuts and cakes and sugar cookies while we scoured the woods. She told stories about growing up in postwar Germany—and about leaving to go to school in America when she turned eighteen—every night when we got back home, covered in fat ticks and bramble scratches and rich, black dirt.
When we found a good one, Grandpa showed me how to cut it and we laid it up in the rafters back at home to dry together.
I think it was around then that the bloody hole where Mom and Dad used to live got sewn up tight by all the things he shared with me. It still hurt when I stretched or moved the wrong way, I still woke up at night and felt the ache, but I was mostly done crying about it, and that was just as well because Arkansas didn’t like the taste of my tears.
#
I was shy in school and preferred to be left to my own, but I made a friend by my second year. His name was Alex, and his father was a pilot. On career day, Alex’s dad came to school in a green uniform which he proudly told us was called a flight suit and talked about what being an Officer in the United States Air force meant. He traveled the world and got paid to defend America. He had bright blue eyes and slicked back blonde hair. I felt envious of Alex, not just for having a father, but for having a father that had fun and traveled the whole world while flying in an airplane. While flying an airplane.
After his father was done talking to the class, Alex asked me what my dad did. It seemed to occur to him for the first time, then, as he gazed admiringly at his triumphant father, that I might have a dad as well.
I told him my dad died in a car crash. I’d held that information back like a bad secret, but there didn’t seem to be a way to conceal it without lying, then. “But my grandpa takes care of me,” I’d added, to show that I wasn’t some charity case taken in by the state.
Alex blinked at me, as unperturbed at learning my father was dead as any eleven-year-old would be. “Well what does he do?”
I didn’t know exactly what to say. Grandpa was a well known bowyer, a fletcher of goose fletched arrows, a shade tree mechanic, a small scale farmer, a fisherman and hunter, a hiking guide on occasion, and a hundred other things beside. But he didn’t exactly have a job. I thought about how to explain that, what kind of title to give him, and when I tried, what came out instead was a strange but true statement. “He talks to deer.”
When everyone started laughing, I looked around for the joke. What I really remember isn’t that Alex joined them—it’s that his father, the pilot, was laughing loudest of all. It wasn’t for a while that I realized they weren’t laughing at me. They were laughing at Grandpa, who really did talk to deer, who really did live on the same land his father and his father’s father lived on, who really did talk to deer.
#
Sometimes he’d go out with no other task than to listen. More than once when I was getting ready to climb into bed and Grandma was tucking me in, we’d hear the front door swing closed and she’d sigh knowingly, saying that he was going for one of his nighttime strolls. On those occasions, Grandpa would share some news in the morning about what he’d learned. “It’s going to rain this evening,” he said once. “Gonna break the dam—it’ll be a near record flood.” Or “there’ll be a meteor shower tonight. Want to stay up and watch it with me?
The woods were always right. They never lied, and Grandpa never misunderstood. Which is more than can be said for men that speak to other men, even, and that’s how I know that not only did Grandpa speak the wind’s tongue and understand the river’s whispers—he was fluent.
#
A couple months after Alex and the class had laughed at me, just as I’d really settled into my new life in Arkansas, Grandpa took me fishing. He had a canoe made out of a single piece of birch and it slipped through the water like a shard of marble. He laid the fishing spear, which was older, he said, than the canoe itself, straight across the rails and paddled us a way into the lake.
Grandpa leaned back and stretched out his legs. “They haven’t made it illegal for me to fish in my own lake yet.”
I looked up at him darkly. “Do you think they’re gonna?”
He had all his teeth, which wasn’t the norm for old men in Arkansas, and smiled at me to prove it. “Don’t see why they wouldn’t try.”
I considered it in silence. We ate fish for dinner just about every other night. What would we do without it? It was already illegal to net, already illegal to set up a fishing wheel, already illegal to make an indigenous fishing trap. Looking back now, with eyes that are more than a decade older, I realize the fact that the state would regulate something as arcane and rare as spear fishing (here was one law Grandpa broke with abandon, and unapologetically) was an overt, unambiguous aggression toward the native practices that once ruled the land they’d stolen. I didn’t understand it so plain back then, but I knew enough to see that Grandpa had been given the short end of the stick for most of his life.
But he didn’t bitch about it. And he wouldn’t have wanted me to, either. Still, that doesn’t stop me from seeing them—seeing what they’ve done, and still do—and reflecting on it.
“This land will take care of you if you let it.” His voice was deeper than a sequoia’s roots, and when he talked smart like that, it seemed to grow even more resolute. “Think about the fish. Our family has been here for centuries. Since before white men were here to write things down.”
I looked over the side and tried to see into the water, but it was too dark.
“You gotta ask em to come.”
I didn’t know what he meant. All this time later, I still don’t.
He wiped his mouth and sat up straight. “Can’t just drop a line into the water in these parts and hope a fish will take a bite. Not here, no sir, no.” He shook his head. “People think this lake is full of minnows and turtles. Fishing line doesn’t catch much, here.”
I knew it was true because we were the only people that ever fished there.
“The funny thing is, all they’d have to do is ask me and I’d tell em.” He leaned over the side of the canoe and it tilted. The water came right up to the edge. He kept leaning, like he meant to just slip right out and take a swim, but he held on and stuck his head down into the lake instead. I thought he looked like a kid bobbing for apples.
The fish came a few moments after he lifted his dripping, grinning face out of the dark lake. He speared them without preamble, and we went back home to eat dinner with went to bed with full bellies that night.
#
The Wardens didn’t like Grandpa, but he never said a bad word about them. We had a few encounters with them over the years, but the one I remember the most is about three years after my folks died. I was thirteen, and if I’m honest, I can’t recall exactly what was said that day or why the guy—a great tall blonde haired man that looked a bit like a Viking—was giving us such a hard time.
But eventually he left and Grandpa and I went back to fishing, which we spent at least 10 or 15 hours a week doing in those days. As was typical, Grandpa surprised me by speaking in the warden’s favor when I complained about the way he’d talked to and looked at us, as if we weren’t supposed to be outside. “He’s just doing his job.”
I raised my eyes at that. “What’s his job?”
He chewed on a sprig of grass for a while, not answering. “Keeping an eye on the mountains and the woods.”
That brought me up short. “Isn’t that what you do?”
His brown eyes shimmered like dark gems. “You wanna know the truth?”
I told him I did.
“The truth is, you’re right. They don’t like me much. I guess that’s not their fault.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew they didn’t like him much. I wanted to know why. Why did everyone laugh when I told them about the deer? Why did people look at him darkly when we went into town for groceries? Why did he want me to mark down White on the questionnaires that came from school instead of Native American?
Why did Dad run away from here and never look back? Why didn’t he teach me about the deer? Why didn’t he tell me about the way the stars moved but also stayed the same all year long, about the way you could look off the end of the Big Dipper and find North and know how to get home, about how to bend a longbow and fletch an arrow and tan a deer hide, why didn’t—
“I’m the last Cherokee in these parts,” he said at last. “I don’t write things down. No one would want to read the things I had to say, even if I did.”
“I would.” I meant it.
He shook his head. “Can’t trust some things to paper. Anyone can get ahold of a book.”
That made a certain kind of sense. I nodded, to show I understood.
“But not anyone can sit in a maple tree and keep watch for hours while the woods breathe and think around them.” He looked at me seriously. “Not anyone can rest in the middle of the lake for half the day while I try to remember the songs my folks used to sing.”
We’d been out on the water for a few hours at that point, and Grandpa hadn’t dipped his head into the lake to call the fish to the surface. But not so long after the warden left, he did, and as was usual, he speared dinner and we paddled back to shore. He pulled the canoe onto dry land and I helped the best I could. That night, we ate dinner on the back porch. Grandma made cornbread and we had fresh butter to make it moist. Grandpa fried the fish in lard and I shelled purple peas. I thought of Alex and his father laughing at me while I fell asleep. The memory was practically ancient by then, and Alex was forgiven and still my friend.
I didn’t feel sad anymore. I felt proud and lucky to be witnessing the things Grandpa felt were too important to be written down.
#
Sometimes when I came home from school, I’d find Grandpa standing under a great cedar tree in the front yard, chirping at the birds. They’d flutter around him, hop on the branches over his head, rustle their wings and blink their beady eyes. He’d shake and jig, yip and yap. If I went inside, read through my textbooks, did my homework, lazed about on the couch, and then came back out, he’d normally almost be done.
The smells I most strongly associate with Grandma is bread and powdered sugar. I could smell her coming back then because she spent so much time baking and cooking, and so I knew when she’d come up behind me while I was watching Grandpa do one of his dances under the cedar tree.
I didn’t know it then, but that was actually the last time we’d ever stand there together and watch him at it.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.
She rarely sounded so serious. I raised my eyes. “Something bad?”
She grunted. “He’s sick.”
I peered at her suspiciously, and then looked back into the yard. Is that what he was talking to the birds about? “He looks fine.”
“That’s how it is with cancer. You look fine until you aren’t. And then you die.”
Cancer was a dirty word. I quailed. Had I heard her right? Grandpa didn’t smoke or drink, he didn’t work in a dirty factory. He didn’t eat bad things. He didn’t even drink soda. “That’s not right.”
She took a deep breath. “It never has been, for him.”
#
Grandpa only went to the doctor once. Later I learned that they told him it was stage four, which meant that it’d spread to just about all of his body, and would kill him right fast. He didn’t tell me that, then, but he did tell me he wouldn’t be around for much longer, and that he wanted to show me something before he was gone. “It’s important.” He grasped his hands tight and wrenched them nervously. “You’ll be the only one who knows. That’s a responsibility.”
I was thirteen, turning fourteen in just a few months, and I felt like a very mature and responsible person. In some ways, I was. But I also knew that I had very little knowledge when it came to important things. I thought of bills, I thought of legal wills, and I thought of Grandma. Did he want me to take care of her? Of course I was going to. He didn’t have to ask.
My grandparents had engendered a kind of fierce devotion in me. Although my father had left—and died—there was never any question to them when it came to me. I would stay.
“It’ll fall to you to do the things that need getting done,” he said.
We were out near the river, leaned back in the grass, taking cover from the heavy sun in the shade of a swarm of young pine and oak. Grandpa’s face was thin as a babies. His glittery gem eyes were set back into his skull. His lips were dry—always dry no matter how much he drank—and he couldn’t walk for long without needing to stop and rest. But he was still Grandpa. His mind was the same. His voice was mostly the same.
I just looked at him. I’d have done anything he asked. I wanted him to know that. I thought he did know that.
“You don’t know about the graveyard. I didn’t want to burden you with that.”
The statement was so odd I couldn’t find my voice. I wondered if I’d misunderstood.
“Suppose it’s more accurate to call it the burial mound.”
That brought up peculiar connotations. “You mean like an Indian Burial Mound?” I said it like that, with capital letters.
“Guess I’d better show you. Once I’m gone—” he coughed and seemed to think better of what he was going to say. “It’s best to just let you see. Can you do that for me, son?”
“Course, Grandpa.” I helped him up. Offering him my hand and lifting his frame was like lifting a little kid. I realized, suddenly, that he was thin as a broomstick. When was the last time I saw him eat?
It took a long time to get where we were going. The woods were mostly untouched. There weren’t paths or trails, there weren’t even accurate maps. Still, he knew the way. He led us into the mountains. The trees stood over us like planets, orbits frozen in a kind of antigravity. We were nothing more than drifting dust.
Finally, he stopped. Not for rest.
I looked around. A grove of hawthorns had somehow muscled the bigger trees out of way. It was like they’d been planted by intelligent design, but it’d be impossible for such a large swath of trees to have been cleared all the way out here. You couldn’t get trucks and machines this deep into the woods without a big, wide road.
Nonetheless, the earth rose in the midst of the trees. It was too slight a rise to be a hill, and too uniform to be an accident. It had the same look of the trees themselves. Man made.
“Two hundred Cherokee starved in the winter of 1829,” he said. “And here they were laid to rest.”
It seemed like an awful lot of people to die in a single winter. We walked through the trees and got closer to the mound. It was larger and more alive now that he’d given it context. There were two hundred bodies just before us. The mound seemed to pulse with the immensity of it. Two hundred Cherokee Indians laid to rest way out here in the woods, and no one knew or cared in all the world but Grandpa.
No one but Grandpa and you, a voice corrected. And that seemed like a terrible truth, that seemed like the death of a whole nation and no one around to witness, no one around to know but me.
“That many dead folks change a place.” He looked up through the branches and smiled as the sun lit up his sallow face. “Can’t talk to the birds and the bees in every wood in the world.”
“When you’re gone—”
He cut me off. “I’ll be here, too. I’ll be laid to rest right here in these trees. Not far from here. Close enough so I can visit when I’m bored. But not so close that I’ll be a bother.”
Grandpa had discussed these kinds of things before. He said he could see Cherokee men in the eyes of the trout, in the gaze of an old owl, in the gait of a young fawn. He said, once, that an eagle gliding overhead reminded him of my father, and he had tears in his eyes.
He sighed. “You’ll have to take care of them.”
I wouldn’t have said no, not if he’d asked me to spend the rest of my life erecting a statue to commemorate him. Not if he’d asked me to run a thousand miles, or pull a thousand splinters out of my aching foot, or beat on a drum for a thousand nights and a thousand days. “How?”
He waved his hand. “Just how I do.”
“But I can’t talk to them.” No matter how much I wished I was, I wasn’t a Cherokee Indian. I was my father’s son—my father who went away to college and got a degree and broke Grandpa’s heart like an old sheet of stained glass on a concrete floor. My father who was dead and was denied a burial on account of there being no body to bury. When the fire was finally put out, all that was left were ashes.
“Then you’ll just have to listen.”
“How will they know?” I looked around helplessly. The woods felt larger than ever. It seemed like if I were to lie down, they’d swallow me up and never let me go.
Were the trees really full of Indians? Were the animals here different than other places? Did the souls of those forgotten men really live among us?
“It’s bigger than you’re thinking.” He grasped my arm and his fingers dug into my flesh desperately. “It’s on the breeze. It’s in the soil. Smell it in the bark of these hawthorns.”
#
He died the next day and the sky wept.
The storm kept me inside. I sat with Grandma at the front window and we watched the rain come down and listened to the thunder rumbling through the mountains. The trees ate up the wind and the lightning, but the mountains made it echo and scream. The woods and rocks seemed to work against one another a lot that way. Unyielding hard stone isn’t a friend to earnest, reaching roots. Still, that’s how it was. They lived right on top of each other.
Grandma told stories. When they first met, their first date, when she knew she loved him, when they built the house—the very room—we were sitting in. It was precious information to me. I listened carefully and internalized it, catalogued it, and committed it to the place in my mind that some of my peers were storing test answers and math equations. The only exam I’d ever have would be in my heart. Grandpa cried about the songs he’d forgotten, about the stories he couldn’t tell. He was anguished by it all, and I didn’t want to feel that, and although I knew he wasn’t a fan of writing things down, I began to record my memories in earnest that very night.
The morning after he died, I hiked to the grove. It was muddy and cold and the sky was overcast. It took me twice as long to find it on my own, and when I did, it felt different than before. Like perhaps I was at a place I didn’t belong. Were the trees watching me with contempt? Did they know I was a white man? I’d never been there alone.
I stood at the edge of the mound, not knowing what to do and wishing more than anything that Grandpa was there to show me the way. Be there for them, he’d said. That meant being there for him. If the souls of two hundred Cherokee were out here, then Grandpa’s soul was here, too.
I listened to the way the wind rustled the branches and shook the leaves. What language did the wind speak? What did the trees say in response? And what of the dust it drew up from the ground, what of the pollen it shook out of the flowers, what of the seeds it ripped from the pinecones? Did they speak, too? Could I taste it on the wind? Hear it in the bubbling of the brook? See it in the way the waves fell against the shore?
I was surprised to feel tears on my cheeks. I had a sharp, childish urge to call out for Grandpa. I quelled it for an instant and then shrugged. No one to witness me. I threw my voice into the wind and called for him. Once, twice, thrice—Grandpa, Grandpa echoed around the still trees like a rubber ball on hardwood floor.
A sparrow came down from one of the ancient hawthorns and lighted on a low branch. The breeze came again and it swept a million bits of tree off the ground. It brought all that dead stuff back to life and made noise with it. It shook raindrops from the highest branches. One landed on my nose.
The sparrow twisted its head and blinked at me.
–
Tyler Hauth teaches writing at Emerson College, is the chief editor at Muddy Paw Press, publishes short stories all over the place at magazines most of the world has never heard of, and is opening up a bookstore in the small town where he lives, Orange, MA.
© 2023, Tyler Hauth
Halfway Down the Stairs 