Nobody's Fool

Will and was astonished to discover that the boy was crying. Sully went to his grandson then and sat down at the bottom of the steps so he’d be eye level. “Hey,” he said. Finally Will looked at him. “What’s up?”
    Will looked away.
    â€œDid Grandpa scare you?” Sully guessed.
    The boy snuffed his nose.
    â€œI didn’t mean to.”
    Will looked at him again, his eyes red.
    â€œWe can go in now,” Sully told him. “Don’t you want to see the house where Grandpa grew up?”
    â€œGrandpa Ralph?”
    â€œNo. Grandpa Me.
    â€œThere’s nothing to be afraid of, you know,” Sully told him.
    Will snuffed his nose, continued to cry softly. It was always Grandpa Sully’s kindness that made him want to cry the worst. It was as if his grandfather truly needed him to be brave, and that made being brave even harder.
    â€œGrandpa wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” he said, and when Will looked at the ground, he added, “Hey … look at me a minute.”
    Will did.
    â€œQuit that,” Sully told him.
    Will stifled a sob.
    â€œGood boy,” his grandfather told him. “Now. You decide. We can go inside for a minute and you can see where Grandpa grew up, or we can go over to the other house and see Dad.”
    â€œOkay,” Will croaked.
    â€œOkay which?”
    â€œGo see Dad,” Will managed, just as certain that this was the wrong answer as he was that it was the only answer he could give.
    â€œChrist,” his grandfather muttered. “Jesus H.”
    When Sully drove up, Rub and Peter were on a break, Rub seated on the steps of Miles Anderson’s front porch, Peter sitting a few feet away, his back up against the front door. Whether they’d been sitting that way for five minutes or an hour was anybody’s guess. Since it was anybody’s, Sully guessed an hour. Also, it had probably been that long since either had spoken to the other. Rub continued to be resentful of Peter’s presence, just as he resented all the other people—Miss Beryl, Wirf, Ruth, Carl Roebuck—who seemed to him competitors for his best friend’s affection. The difference was that these other people didn’t horn in on their workday and subtract from Rub’s quality time. Peter had made a few halfhearted friendly overtures but apparently felt no great urgency about winning over Rub.
    They’d gotten some work done, at least. The bare forsythia had been trimmed back and a huge pile of sticks and branches raked onto the terrace. Sully’s ax stood upright, its blade embedded in the center of the tree trunkon the front lawn. A few wood chips littered the immediate vicinity of the stump, but otherwise there was little evidence they’d made much of an impression on it. Rub was right. Elm tree roots went halfway to China. It was okay with Sully that they hadn’t gotten very far. Getting the elm stump out of the lawn was going to be a ballbuster of a job, but it was one he could do himself, come spring, when the ground softened. He could do it with an ax and a shovel, a chain saw if he felt like borrowing one, and he could do it standing more or less straight up. It was the kind of work he specialized in, that he’d spent his life doing, the kind of work that required no special skills beyond dogged determination and the belief that he’d still be there when the stump was gone. The kind of job it would have probably been better to do another way, with the right equipment, quicker and with less effort. It had always been Ruth’s position that if Sully had put his bullheadedness to some constructive purpose when he was younger he could have been president.
    Will scampered up the walk past Sully and joined his father, who studied the boy’s face knowledgeably. The boy wasn’t crying anymore, but Peter probably had enough of a father’s eye to guess that he had been. Sully himself had always been dumbstruck by grief, even his own, and considered it one of life’s wonders that other people had the ability to see grief coming from a long way off or to detect when it had recently passed. One of the things every woman he’d ever been associated with had held against him was his inability to see when they were grief-stricken. Even his own son seemed to possess this ability so conspicuously lacking in himself.
    â€œI thought you said you was coming by after