For one thing, his skin was falling off. At every exposed place on him, I saw flappy folds of yellow-pink. What was underneath was uglier still, not red or bleeding, just not skin. Too dry. Too colorless. He looked like a cornhusk. An empty one.
Next to him, propped on a rusty blue dolly, was a cylindrical silver oxygen tank. A clear tube ran from the nozzle at the top of the tank to the blue mask over my grandfather’s nose and mouth. Above the mask, my grandfather’s heavy-lidded eyes watched me, though they didn’t seem capable of movement, either. Leave him out here, I thought, and those eyes would simply fill up with sand.
“Come in, Seth,” Lucy told me, without any word to my grandfather or acknowledgement that he was there.
I had my hand on the screen door, was halfway into the house when I realized I’d heard him speak. I stopped. It had to have been him, I thought, and couldn’t have been. I turned around and saw the back of his head tilting toward the top of the chair. Retracing my steps — I’d given him a wide berth — I returned to face him. The eyes stayed still, and the oxygen tank was silent. But the mask fogged, and I heard the whisper again.
“Ruach,” he said. It was what he always called me, when he called me anything.
In spite of the heat, I felt goosebumps spring from my skin, all along my legs and arms. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t answer. I should say hello, I thought. Say something.
I waited instead. A few seconds later, the oxygen mask fogged again. “Trees”, said the whisper-voice. “Screaming. In the trees.” One of my grandfather’s hands raised an inch or so off the arm of the chair and fell back into place.
“Patience,” Lucy said from the doorway. “Come on, Seth.” This time, my grandfather said nothing as I slipped past him into the house.
Lucy slid a bologna sandwich, a bag of Fritos and a plastic glass of apple juice in front of me. I lifted the sandwich, found that I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth, and dropped it on the plate.
“Better eat,” Lucy said. “We have a long day yet.”
I ate a little. Eventually, Lucy sat down across from me, but she didn’t say anything else. She just gnawed a celery stick and watched the sand outside change color as the sun edged west. The house was silent, the countertops and walls bare.
“Can I ask you something?” I finally asked.
Lucy was washing my plate in the sink. She didn’t turn around, but she didn’t say no.
“What are we doing? Out there, I mean.”
No answer. Through the kitchen doorway, I could see my grandfather’s living room, the stained wood floor and the single brown armchair lodged against a wall, across from the TV. My grandfather had spent every waking minute of his life in this place for fifteen years or more, and there was no trace of him in it.
“It’s a Way, isn’t it?” I said, and Lucy shut the water off.
When she turned, her expression was the same as it had been all day: a little mocking, a little angry. She took a step toward the table.
“We learned about them at school,” I said.
“Did you,” she said.
“We’re studying lots of Indian things.”
The smile that spread over Lucy’s face was ugly, cruel. Or maybe just tired. “Good for you,” she said. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”
“Is this to make my grandfather better?”
“Nothing’s going to make your grandfather better.” Without waiting for me, she pushed through the screen door into the heat.
This time, I made myself stop beside my grandfather’s chair. I could just hear the hiss of the oxygen tank, like steam escaping from the boiling ground. When no fog appeared in the blue mask and no words emerged from the hiss, I followed Lucy into the hogan and let the hide curtain fall shut.
All afternoon and into the evening, I played the water drum while Lucy sang. By the time the air began to cool outside, the whole hogan was vibrating, and the ground, too. Whatever we were doing, I could feel the power in it. I was the beating heart of a living thing, and Lucy was its voice. Once, I found myself wondering just what we were setting loose or summoning, and I stopped for a single beat. But the silence was worse. The silence was like being dead. And I thought I could hear the Dancing Man behind me. If I inclined my head, stopped drumming, I almost believed that I’d hear him whispering.
When Lucy finally rocked to her feet and walked out again without speaking to me, it was evening, and the desert was alive. I sat shaking as the rhythm spilled out of me and the sand soaked it up. Then I stood, and that unsteady feeling came over me again, stronger this time, and the air was too thin, as though some of the atmosphere had evaporated. When I emerged from the hogan, I saw black beetles on the wall of my grandfather’s house, and I heard wind and rabbits and the first coyotes yipping somewhere to the west. My grandfather sat slumped in the same position he had been in hours and hours ago, which meant he had been baking out here all afternoon. Lucy was on the patio, watching the sun melt into the horizon’s open mouth. Her skin was slick, and her hair was wet where it touched her ear and neck.
“Your grandfather’s going to tell you a story,” she said, sounding exhausted. “And you’re going to listen.”
My grandfather’s head rolled upright, and I wished we were back in the hogan, doing whatever it was we’d been doing. At least there I was moving, pounding hard enough to drown out Mounds. Sounds that weren’t us, and weren’t supposed to be there. The screen door slapped shut, and my grandfather looked at me. Mis eyes were deep, deep brown, almost black, and horribly familiar. Did my eyes look like that?
“Ruach,” he whispered, and I wasn’t sure, but his whisper seemed stronger than it had before. The oxygen mask fogged and stayed fogged. The whisper kept coming, as though Lucy had spun a spigot and left it open. “You will know… Now… Then the world… won’t be yours… anymore.” My grandfather shifted like some sort of giant, bloated sand-spider in the center of its web, and I heard his ruined skin rustle. Overhead, the whole sky went red.
“At war’s end...” my grandfather hissed. “Do you… understand?” I nodded, transfixed. I could hear his breathing now, the ribs rising, parting, collapsing. The tank machinery had gone strangely silent. Was he breathing on his own, I wondered? Could he, still?
“A few days. Do you understand? Before the Red Army came,..” He coughed. Even his cough sounded stronger. “The Nazis look… me. And the Gypsies. From… our camp. To Chelmno.”
I’d never heard the word before. I’ve almost never heard it since. But as my grandfather said it, another cough roared out of his throat, and when it was gone, the tank was hissing again. Still, my grandfather continued to whisper.
“To die. Do you understand}” Gasp. Hiss. Silence. “To die. But not yet. Not… right away.” Gasp. “We came… by train, but open train. Not cattle car. “Wasteland. Farmland. Nothing. And then trees.” Under the mask, the lips twitched, and above it, the eyes closed completely. “That first time. Ruach. All those… giant… green… trees. Unimaginable. To think anything… on the Earth we knew … could live that long.”
His voice continued to fade, faster than the daylight. A few minutes more, I thought, and he’d be silent again, just machine and breath, and I could sit here in the yard and let the evening wind roll over me.