I’m holding a steel nail-setter that my grandfather, a carpenter and welder, beat flat on both ends with uncountable hammer-swings.

It’s a pandemic funeral, most are masked but the preacher sings maskless a few feet from my mother and I swear to myself if he gets her sick I’ll kill him. My grandmother Dorothy and her Moravian family were all Roman Catholic, but my grandfather Milton was some ambiguous flavor of cable TV southern Baptist, and I find myself more uncomfortable around these people than the catholics, even though I am firmly non-religious. Someone in Milton’s side of my family had told them all that they had Cherokee blood. This is a thing you will hear in every southern family. There are well kept records in most tribal nations that could clear this up if an ancestor could ever be named, but they never are. I heard Milton say several times when I was a child that we had “Cherokee blood” (the claim was never a tribe that made sense for Texas, like the Tonkawa people, or the Comanche– those were “Bad Indians”). It was only when I was older and started doing research that these claims fell apart, and I discovered they most likely borne from a white supremacist imaginary- a code for confederate loyalty after the war, a claim on land that professed to be deeper than other whites and which was a lie. – and what to make of Milton’s devotion to freemasonry? It was evidently something his third wife ushered him into as some sort of means of social climbing. He talked about it incessantly. He loved to enumerate all the important people who were masons like him. It’s fun imagining these old white men gathering to play dominoes or shufflepuck in secret architecting some global conspiracy, but how did Milton imagine himself? Did work, war, and a quest for some invented rank distance him from his time as a subsistence farmer on the Navasota, surviving the depression on squirrel and possum?
At his funeral a couple of blocky men solemnly recited some masonic text and included ritual objects like a spruce branch with the coffin. It was fascinating, like some kind of roleplaying game for them. I remember being a goth tween and having him tell me earnestly that I should join the “DeMolays” (some sort of junior Masons club), that they would teach me how to be a man (a thing I had very little interest in learning). [!young_milton] I always thought of Milton as being very masculine, but look at this picture of him as a teenager. He looks almost like I did when I was fifteen. Look how delicate his face seems.

One night after my uncle Rodney returned from Viet Nam, Milton mistakenly shot him, thinking he was a burglar.
My mother said, “Daddy heard rustling out in the garage in the middle of the night and came out with a pistol. Rodney said, Aw man…” I already know where this is going.
“And Daddy said he sounded like a black man…” Rodney fled, shot in the chest, but when police caught up with him, he told them he was shot and he was taken to a hospital. Something changed after that night in Milton’s relationship to Rodney, a hardening. Maybe it was guilt. There were a few occasions where Milton insinuated that maybe Rodney wasn’t even his son, remembering one of Dorothy’s affairs. It was a wound that never healed and a tension that was never resolved in their lifetimes.It’s hard to write these things down with the idea that a college professor in California might read them and think to themselves what racist hicks these people are. It’s hard to argue with the characterization in some places, “I read a book once,” Milton offered after my mother had been chit-chatting about some book she was reading (she is well read, despite her dyslexia). I remember Milton as infinitely kind and patient, though.
[!garden3] The century turned for me with grandpa Milton’s passing. Him, uncomprehending, with a phone held to his ear, 100 years old. My childhood is expansive because of the psychogeography of two places- the deep creek of smashed pavement and street runoff behind my grandma Josephine’s house, and the dirt road to grandpa Milton’s house, canopied with wild grapevines and reverberating with the tinnitus of summer cicadas– the sound of heat, baked into the firmament like the pattern left by a broom in concrete.. He had built the house himself, a cellar full of potatoes from his garden, a riding-mower he let me steer, a fishing boat. Grandpa Milton and I wading into the lake together with a seining net to pull up perch and crawdads and hydrilla and the smell of muck. So many children never get to have these places and I hoard them and visit them often in my mind now and they are sheltering and vast and I will never have fully explored them.
“I remember how strong my daddy was,” my mother said, “in the fog of morning, coming out of the woods with his chest bare and a deer draped over his shoulders.”