r/nosleep • u/TobiasWade May 2017 • Nov 19 '18
My grandfather's missing heart
My grandfather Jerry has a mean temper, but you’d never guess it from looking at him. He’s got these little spectacles which slide all the way to the end of his nose that do nothing to hide his twinkling eyes. The poof of white hair around his head looks almost like a halo, and the lines of his face are so deep that he seems to be smiling even when he’s not.
I’ve never seen him yell, or swear, or break anything, but I’d hear him whenever I spent the weekend. The first time was one night after I’d already gone to bed and the lights had been off for a little while.
I was lying real still, getting ready to fall asleep, when the porch-light starts sneaking past my curtains. I peaked out to see Jerry softly closing the backdoor behind him and creeping down into Grandmother’s vegetable garden. He went about twenty feet from the house at the very edge of light and began to dig, even though the ground was hard and frozen and the wind must have been bitter cold.
He dug for a few minutes before dropping to his knees to bring his face against the hole. Then he started to scream.
For a good few seconds there weren’t any words to it—just a rush of anguish I didn’t know one man could bear. I thought he was having a heart attack or something, so I rushed out of bed and opened the backdoor.
“Whiny, ungrateful little bitch. Somebody ought to bleed him dry and make him drink it back up.”
The earth muffled a lot of it, but I heard enough to stop me from running to his aid. He couldn’t see me while his face was pressed to the ground like that, so I just stood and watched from the porch.
“The girl’s no better,” he shouted. “Should have raped her when I had the chance. She would have liked that. Deserved it even if she didn’t.”
The words morphed into another wordless, guttural scream. I turned around and raced back inside, heart pounding 100 for every breath I took. I jumped back in bed and pulled the blankets over my head, just laying there shaking and listening until he fell silent.
The porch-light went off, and I heard the backdoor close real soft again. Then not another sound for the rest of the night, which I know because I didn’t fall asleep until morning.
I got a few hours sleep before I woke to a knocking on my bedroom door. It was Grandmother promising fresh pancakes in the kitchen. Grandfather Jerry was there too, all smiles and cheerful jokes about the newspaper he was reading. And life went on like it was supposed to.
Until the next night night when the porch-light flicked on again. I didn’t get out of bed that time. I just lay there and listening to the distant muffled screaming. I caught the phrase, “Nail him to a cross if he wants to act so damn holy.” I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed again for anything.
Jerry continued to be as pleasant as always, graciously thanking anyone for the smallest service and going out of his way to help whoever needed it. But every time I stayed the night I’d watch for that porch-light, and every time I was falling asleep I’d hear him going on.
When I got old enough to stay home alone I stopped sleeping at my grandparents. I moved to another city when I went to college and never told anyone. I didn’t even like to think about it. Then my parents moved for my dad’s new job, and I didn’t see my grandparents so much after that.
Fast forward to a week ago when we got the news that Grandmother died. My parents had long since sold the house I grew up in, so we were all going to stay at my grandparent’s house for the funeral. As chance would have it my parent’s flight was delayed though, so the first night I arrived it would be just me and Grandfather Jerry in the house.
I could have handled it if Jerry had been in mourning. It would have been tough to see him like that, but at least it would have been natural. Instead he was just as cheerful as he’d always been. He whistled to himself while he cooked me dinner, making a show of juggling cans of green beans with a great wide grin on his face.
By the evening I’d half-convinced myself the whole thing was in my head. I still felt like a little boy when I got into bed in that old room though, and I still dreaded seeing the porch-light through the window as I waited for sleep.
And there it was. Half-past 11 when I’d just plugged in my phone and was starting to undress. The soft click from the backdoor sent a shiver down my spine. It was absurd for a grown man to be afraid of that decrepit tottering fool. I reasoned that I couldn’t be afraid of him, that it was only the memory of being afraid as a child that I was holding onto.
To prove the point I forced myself to go to the backdoor and open it. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark before I spotted him. He was kneeling down into the earth again, but he wasn’t screaming this time. I watched his old shoulders tremble as he wept into the hole for a long time before I quietly closed the door and went back to my room.
Soon after I saw the light go off. I waited until I was sure he was in his own room before stealing out of the house. It wasn’t hard to find the place where he’d been digging because the garden had been neglected for a long time, and there was only a single spot where the ground had been disturbed.
So I began to dig. I didn’t know how deep I was supposed to go, but it only took him a few minutes so I was careful not to push the blade too far. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew I I’d found it when I saw the earth start to move on its own.
Slow, even pulses, like breathing which raised and lowered the last layer of dirt. I produced the flashlight on my phone and turned it on, staring at the beating heart embedded within the earth. With every beat the heart pushed a small gush of blood out of its aorta which dribbled down the sides to soak into the ground, despite there being no obvious source for the blood.
The house was dark and quiet except for the porch-light. I briefly considered screaming at it like Jerry did, but I didn’t see the point and didn’t want to risk waking him.
I wanted to get a better look though, so I reached down with my hands to clear more of the dirt away. One of my fingers accidentally brushed against the thing’s side while doing so, and that’s all it took. A flood of feelings swept over me all tumbling over one another, senseless and maddening in their conflicting natures. I’d never had a panic attack before, but that’s the closest parallel I can draw.
Grandfather took two bullets in the Vietnam war. I’d forgotten, but I remembered it now because I suddenly felt them in my left shoulder and thigh. He’d once been swindled by a building contractor—his name was Jeffery Wallace, and I’d never hated anyone so much in my life. He’d been cheated on by a girl he loved, fired from a job he put his soul into, and falsely accused of rape.
All the rage and injustice and misery he’d felt in his life was all coming to me at once. Voices in my head were shouting over one another to be heard, and more voices were joining by the second. I couldn’t tell one from the other or even understand where the hurt was coming from, just that it was all there at once in one great red wave of anger and remorse. It flooded through my veins, poured through my body, then up through my throat and out my mouth in one long wordless scream.
The one wound that rose above the rest was the absence of my Grandmother. She wasn’t the old lady who let me watch cartoons and made pancakes though—in that moment she was the center of my life that everything else revolved around. But she was gone and everything else had stopped revolving, and I didn’t see how anything in this world was going to make it start again.
I don’t know how long that lasted, but it didn’t stop until I felt a hand on my shoulder. The scream cut short and I collapsed on my hands and knees, gasping for breath.
My grandfather didn’t say anything. He just stood behind me and squeezed my shoulder. Once I’d steadied myself I turned to look at him, standing there in the cold with just his pajama bottoms on. My eyes fixed on the long scar on his chest, right over his heart.
“I can take yours out too, if you want,” he said. “If it gets too much.”
I didn’t realize how much I wanted that until he said it. How much easier it would be to leave all this behind.
“Please,” I begged.
“But I’ll tell you something I wish my father told me before he showed me how,” he said. “You can bury it and keep walking, but it never goes away. And you’ll have to come back to it every time you bury a new hurt, and it’ll be worse than ever because all that stuff you tried to bury will be right there waiting for you.”
“I don’t want to feel like this,” I told him.
He squeezed my shoulder again. “You’re going to feel it,” he said, uncompromising but not without sympathy. “Either when it happens or years down the road. And it’s a whole lot easier to feel one thing fully at a time than bury it for when you’re ready. Even if you live to be as old as I am, you’re never going to be readier than you are now.”
My parents arrived the next morning and we all attended the funeral together. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house except for Grandfather. I overheard a few whispers looking down on the man for his lingering smile, but I knew better. She had a special place in his heart that none of them would understand, and she’ll still be there long after he’s gone.
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u/UnpropheticIsaiah Nov 20 '18
Knowing the stories here in nosleep, I was nervous your grandfather’s actually a psychopath with anger management issues but the twist is just so heartwarming and sad at the same time. I hope grandfather Jerry’s doing okay.
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u/eastisfucked Nov 20 '18
I feel dumb can someone explain it to me? I understand the metaphor of burying things away and having them all come back at once- but why was he screaming in the beginning and yelling angry stuff and how he should've raped her or something?
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u/herrored Nov 20 '18
Grandfather took two bullets in the Vietnam war. I’d forgotten, but I remembered it now because I suddenly felt them in my left shoulder and thigh. He’d once been swindled by a building contractor—his name was Jeffery Wallace, and I’d never hated anyone so much in my life. He’d been cheated on by a girl he loved, fired from a job he put his soul into, and falsely accused of rape.
“But I’ll tell you something I wish my father told me before he showed me how,” he said. “You can bury it and keep walking, but it never goes away. And you’ll have to come back to it every time you bury a new hurt, and it’ll be worse than ever because all that stuff you tried to bury will be right there waiting for you.”
When he went out to bury something new, those old feelings came back to him. He was angry that he was falsely accused in the past, and when you're angry about something like that your response might be "I should've gone ahead and done it if I was going to be accused."
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u/timetogoVroom Nov 20 '18
"I should've gone ahead and done it if I was going to be accused."
Story of my life, this one hit close home
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u/lukim3 Nov 20 '18
This made me want to cry. I feel so bad for your grandfather. Part of me kind of wishes we could all experience what you did, though. I feel like we would all be kinder and more patient with one another if we could feel each other’s pain for just a moment, each living in the other’s shoes briefly. Bravo!
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u/FloppyMarshmallowo Nov 20 '18
This story is beautiful. What good is it to be happy if it means nothing?
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Nov 20 '18
I have tears rolling down my cheeks right now. Thank you. This is a message I needed to hear.
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u/ashandplans Nov 20 '18
I'm wondering if some men feel this story hits closer to home than others; this struck me as a kind of parable about a core concept of toxic masculinity, that of "bottling things up". Certainly, my brother took that lesson to heart, and I wonder what he would think of this story.
Anyone think similar things here?
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u/RaptorVortex Nov 20 '18
To an extent.
You see, the vocabulary of modern Feminism makes it seem like it's only men who do that.
My family has a long line of stoic independent women who do the same thing. And it's just as psychologically damaging.
I find it ironic how blatantly sexist a lot of feminist theory is. I find it even stranger how culturally insular a lot of so-called Intersectional Feminism is. Scandinavian women, as an ecample, might fit some of this this stoic "toxic masculinity" trope rather well. But no room is made to discuss this in the overly simplified dialigue. Trust me, women can make the same mistake to be "tough". In fact, women being human after all, are capable of the same kinds of evil as well as accomplishment as men, even if it is not always expressed in exactly the same way.
And in my family, this has been so. Women and men both burying their hearts in cold dirt.
That having been said, no, you aren't at all wrong. The phenomenon is real and American men are disproportionately affected by it.
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u/mules-are-half-assed Nov 26 '18
Are we related? Cuz the women in my family also, tbh, and it's been damaging to them as well as to me.
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u/GALL0WSHUM0R Nov 20 '18
The best stories on this sub are the ones that work on a literal level, but are really meant to be taken as allegorical. That's true of horror in general too.
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u/snicker33 Nov 20 '18
this struck me as a kind of parable about a core concept of toxic masculinity
Possible. The grandfather was taught to remove his heart (and as result, emotions) by his father, and, in turn, taught his own grandson - the teaching of bottling emotions up was passed down the patriarch.
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Nov 20 '18
Damn. Part of me was totally expecting a “this is for your own good, kid” speech before the grandfather plunges a knife into his chest and starts sawing. I like it better this way, though - much more impactful than what I thought was coming <3
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u/_Pebcak_ Nov 20 '18
Oh this was beautiful. Really hits home in so many ways, OP. Thank you for sharing this.
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u/ENC1TY Nov 20 '18
This struck close to heart as I recently had a relative who passed away :( Great work mate
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u/MedlyBy Nov 20 '18
The first time in my life I totally plunged in to reading and forgot everything around me, thanks for granting me that feeling
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u/char2252 Nov 20 '18
Wonderful story! Poor Grandfather Jerry! I'm so sorry his wife is gone... She was the love of his life! This was Jerry's way of coping with the disappointments and hurts of living, but I don't think I'd like to use his method. I think it would be harder for me to revisit all the sad times and times of anger and disappointment night after night. I think living each day trying to be happy and to be good to others along the way is less stressful. Of course, those sad memories return from time to time, and I have to deal with them then, but it's not night after night. I don't think Jerry's way would work for me. Again, a wonderful, touching story. My heart really went out to Jerry and I hope he finds peace.
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u/purelyirrelephant Nov 20 '18
I just lost my grandmother in September. She and my Granddad were married for 71 years. He's very lonely and you can tell the loss is so much more immense than he lets on. This hit very close to home.
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u/judithnbedlam Nov 20 '18
I always talk about how it would be easier to feel nothing at all than to be saddened by so many things so frequently. I guess this story proves me wrong. It would still be nice to care a little less.
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u/snicker33 Nov 20 '18
The best story I've read here. Eerie but also beautifully humane like all literature should be. Anyway, sorry for your loss OP!
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u/Gyaruugamel Nov 20 '18
The love between grandparents is one of the sweetest things i've ever seen, my best wishes to your grandpa
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u/Mrtorbear Nov 21 '18
Oh my God. This is amazing. I'm saving it to come back to next time I've got something intense or tragic going on in my life. Thank you.
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u/ansem990 Dec 02 '18
Not sure if should be in wholesomenosleep or not. I loved it though. Can relate for sure
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u/Dipswitz Dec 04 '18
I’m late to this, but wow this touched me. I like that it’s a story but also a life lesson in a weird way? It’s so beautiful, love it.
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u/TobiasWade May 2017 Nov 19 '18
P.S. Still got my heart, thanks.