Last Summer

Word Count: 1469

Last Summer
It was my best summer at Grandma's, until we found the bones.
Grandma lives on the Gulf of Mexico - in a 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 boats, and so many things that I wanted to see.
But back to the bones. Grandma and I had come down to the beach side,
(not the river side), 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.
"Its 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, uh?"
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 voiced 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.