His father Tom could recall only vaguely. He had always thought of him as having been lost, for that was the story he'd been told when he was old enough to understand. It seemed, however, that no one had actually known what had happened to him. One spring morning, according to the story, he had set out for the river with a fish spear in hand and a bag slung across his shoulder. It was time for the carp to spawn, coming into the shoals of the river valley's sloughs and lakes to lay and fertilize their eggs. In the frenzy of the season they had no fear in them and were easy prey. Each year, as that year, Tom's father had gone to the river when the carp were running, perhaps making several trips, coming home each time bowed down by the bulging sack full of carp slung across his shoulder, using the reversed spear as a walking stick to help himself along. Brought home, the carp were scaled and cleaned, cut into fillets and smoked to provide food throughout a good part of the summer months.
But this time he did not return. By late afternoon, Tom's mother and the old grandfather set out to search for him, Tom riding on his grandfather's shoulder. They came back late at night, having found nothing. The next day the grandfather \vent out again and this time found the spear, abandoned beside a shallow lake in which the carp still rolled, and a short distance off, the sack, but nothing else. There was no sign of Tom's father no indication of what bad happened to him. He bad vanished and there was no trace of him and since that time there had been no word of him.
Life went on much as it had before, a little harder now since there were fewer to grub a living from the land. However, they did not do too badly. There was always food to eat and wood to burn and hides to tan for clothing and for footwear. One horse died—of old age, more than likely—and the old man went away and was gone for ten days or more, then returned with two horses. He never said how he had got them and no one ever asked. They knew he must have stolen them, for he had taken nothing with him that would have served to buy them. They were young and strong and it was a good thing that he'd got the two of them, for a short time later, the other old horse died as well and two horses were needed to plow the field and gardens, haul the wood and get in the hay. By this time, Tom was old enough to help—ten years or so—and one of the things he remembered vividly was helping his grandfather skin the two dead horses. He had blubbered while he did it, trying to hide the blubbers from his grandfather and later, alone, had wept bitterly, for he had loved those horses. But it would have been a waste not to take their hides, and in their kind of life there was nothing ever wasted.
When Tom was fourteen, his mother sickened in a hard and terrible winter when snow lay deep and blizzard after blizzard came hammering down across the hills. She had taken to her bed, gasping for breath, wheezing as she breathed. The two of them had taken care of her, the mean, irascible old man transformed into a soul of tenderness. They rubbed her throat with warm goose grease, kept in a bottle in a cabinet for just such an emergency, and wrapped her throat in a cherished piece of flannel cloth to help the goose grease do its work. They put hot bricks at her feet to keep her warm and the grandfather cooked a syrup of onions on the stove, keeping it at the back of the stove so it would stay warm, and fed the syrup to her to alleviate the soreness of her throat. One night, tired with watching Tom had fallen asleep. He was wakened by the old man "Boy," he'd said, your mother's gone." And having said that, the old man turned away so that Tom could not see his tears.
In the first gray of morning light they went Out and shoveled away the snow beneath an ancient oak where Tom's mother had loved to sit, looking down the coulee, then built a fire to thaw the ground so they could dig a grave. In the spring, with much labor, they had hauled three huge boulders, one by one, on a stone boat, and had placed them on the grave—to mark it and to keep it safe against the wolves that, now the frost was gone, might try to dig it up.
Life went on again, although it seemed to Tom that something had gone out of the old grandfather. He still did a moderate amount of cussing, but some of the eloquent fire had gone out of it. He spent more time in the rocking chair on the porch than he ever had before. Tom did most of the work now, the old man dawdling about. The grandfather seemed to want to talk, as if talk might fill the emptiness that had fallen on him. Hour after hour, he and Tom would talk, sitting on the porch, or when the nights grew chill and winter came, sitting in front of the blazing fire. It was the grandfather who did most of the talking, dredging from his almost eighty years of life tales of events that had taken place many years before, not all of them, perhaps, entirely true, but each incident more than likely based on an actual happening that could have been interesting in itself without all the extra trappings. The story about the time when he had gone traipsing to the west and had killed an arrow-wounded grizzly with a knife (a story that Tom, even at his tender years accepted with a grain of salt); the story of a Classic horse-trading deal in which (as change of pace) the old man got handsomely swindled; the story' about the monstrous catfish that it took three hours to land; the story about the time, on one of his fabulous trips, he became entangled in a short-lived war fought by two tribes for no reason whatsoever that could he adequately explained, fighting most likely just for the hell of it; and the story about a university (whatever a university might be) far to the north, surrounded by a wall and inhabited by a curious breed that was termed, with some contempt ‘egghead," although the old man was quite content to admit that he had no idea what an egghead was, hazarding a guess that those who used the term had no idea of its meaning either, hut were simply using a term of contempt that had come out of the dim and ancient past. Listening to his grandfather through the long afternoons and evenings, the boy began to see a different man, a younger man, shining through the meanness of the older man. Seeing, perhaps, that the shifty-eyed meanness was little more than a mask that he had put on as a defense against old age, which he apparently considered the final great indignity that a man was forced to undergo.
But not for a great deal longer. In the summer that Tom was sixteen became home at noon from plowing corn to find the old man fallen from his rocking chair, sprawling on the porch, no longer suffering any indignity other than the indignity of death, if death can he thought of as an indignity. Tom dug the grave and hurled him beneath the same oak tree where the mother had been buried, and hauled boulders, smaller boulders this time, for he was the only one left to handle them, to be piled upon the grave.
"You grew up fast," said Monty'.
"Yes," said Cushing, "I suppose I did."
"And then you took to the woods."