Boys Life

wouldn’t know a one of them.”
    Granddaddy Jaybird despised sleep. Maybe it had something to do with his knowing that his days on this earth were numbered. Come five o’clock, rain or shine, he’d rip the covers off me like a whirlwind passing through and his voice would roar in my ear: “Get up, boy! Think you’re gonna live forever?”
    I would invariably mumble, “No, sir,” and sit up, and the Jaybird would go on to rouse my grandmother into cooking a breakfast that might have served Sgt. Rock and most of Easy Company.
    The days I spent with my grandparents followed no pattern once breakfast was down the hatch. I could just as well be handed a garden hoe and told to get to work as I could be informed that I might enjoy a trip to the pond in the woods behind the house. Granddaddy Jaybird kept a few dozen chickens, three goats-all of whom closely resembled him-and for some strange reason he kept a snapping turtle named Wisdom in a big metal tub full of slimy water in the backyard. When one of those goats stuck his nose into Wisdom’s territory, and Wisdom took hold, there was hell to pay. Things were commonly in an uproar at the Jaybird’s place: “All snakes and dingleberries” was his phrase to describe a chaotic moment, as when Wisdom bit a thirsty goat and the goat in turn careened into the clean laundry my grandmother was hanging on the line, ending up running around festooned in sheets and dragging them through the garden I’d just been hoeing. The Jaybird was proud of his collection of the skeletons of small animals which he’d painstakingly wired together. You never knew where those skeletons might appear; the Jaybird had a nasty knack for putting them in places you might reach into before looking, like beneath a pillow or in your shoe. Then he’d laugh like a demon when he heard you squall. His sense of humor was, to say it kindly, warped. On Wednesday afternoon he told me he’d found a nest of rattlesnakes near the house last week and killed them all with a shovel. As I was about to drift off to sleep that night, already dreading five o’clock, he opened my door and peered into the dark and said in a quiet, ominous voice, “Cory? Be careful if you get up to pee tonight. Your grandmomma found a fresh-shed snakeskin under your bed this mornin’. Good-sized rattle on it, too. ’Night, now.”
    He’d closed the door. I was still awake at five.
    What I realized, long after the fact, was that Granddaddy Jaybird was honing me like one might sharpen a blade on a grinding edge. I don’t think he knew he was doing this, but that’s how it came out. Take the snake story. As I lay awake in the dark, my bladder steadily expanding within me, my imagination was at work. I could see that rattler, coiled somewhere in the room, waiting for the squeak of a bare foot pressing on a board. I could see the colors of the forest in its scaly hide, its terrible flat head resting on a ledge of air, its fangs slightly adrip. I could see the muscles ripple slowly along its sides as it tasted my scent. I could see it grin in the dark, same to say, “You’re mine, bub.”
    If there could be a school for the imagination, the Jaybird would be its headmaster. The lesson I learned that night, in what you can make yourself describe in your mind as true, I couldn’t have bought at the finest college. There was also the subsidiary lesson of gritting your teeth and bearing pain, hour upon hour, and damning yourself for drinking an extra glass of milk at supper.
    You see, the Jaybird was teaching me well, though he didn’t have a clue.
    There were other lessons, all of them valuable. And tests, too. On Friday afternoon Grandmomma Sarah asked him to drive into town to pick up a box of ice cream salt at the grocery store. Normally the Jaybird didn’t like to run errands, but today he was agreeable. He asked me to go with him, and Grandmomma Sarah said the sooner we got back the sooner the ice cream would be made.
    It was a day right for ice cream. Ninety degrees in the shade, and so hot in the full sun that if a dog went running, its shadow dropped down to rest. We got the ice cream salt, but on the way back, in the Jaybird’s bulky old Ford, another test began.
    “Jerome Claypool lives just down the road,” he said. “He’s a good ole fella. Want to drop by and say howdy?”
    “We’d better get the ice cream salt to-”
    “Yeah, Jerome’s a good ole fella,” the Jaybird said as he turned the Ford toward his