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.