Pap’s Blue Ribbon

Modine

I can’t really remember how I found out my grandfather shot my grandmother, but I do remember how I found out that I probably shouldn’t tell people about it in polite conversation. I was in college and I somehow mentioned the incident, in the more or less joking way that my family always talks about it, only to get a roomful of blank stares and then to be barraged with a lot of loud, very incredulous questions (“Why?” “What happened?” “Are you serious?” “Is she still alive?” “Is he in prison?” “What the FUCK?”).

This was how I learned  that what was considered “normal” or even “funny” in my family, was usually considered bat shit crazy (or just downright sad) by the rest of the world and that, apparently, it’s not OK to bring up your family’s history of relative on relative violence in mixed company. Good to know. 

My grandparents lived in what used to be a small, rural farming community just outside of Nashville, TN, called Lebanon (pronounced LEBnun, and not to be confused with the place in the desert). I still remember it the way it was when I was a child: sparsely populated with a rundown Piggly Wiggly, dilapidated trailer parks and lots of falling down farm houses with rutted gravel driveways like the one my grandparents lived in. In other words, it was a pretty depressing place, especially to a girl who was born and raised in the happy shiny suburbs of a nice, big city like Nashville.

My family didn’t spend a lot of time there, probably because my mother had gotten the hell out of Lebanon and didn’t really care to go back. When we did go, it was to visit that rundown farmhouse, and later, an almost immediately rundown feeling brand new house that was built next to the old farmhouse when it was more falling down then rundown. The new house was always dirty and always smelled bad and only ever had one toy: a small water ring toss thing where you pushed the button at the bottom to send the tiny hoops up through the water and hopefully, eventually (oh my god is it time to go home yet?) on to the little posts glued on to the back wall of the puzzle. Needless to say, my grandparents’ house was never my favorite place to be. 

I'm guessing that when most people think of the word "grandma," they tend to think of plump, little old ladies who bake cookies and bring you presents when it's not your birthday or Christmas and generally more or less spoil you rotten. My paternal grandmother, Myrtle Dye, was a lot like that stereotype. However, when I think of my maternal grandmother, Modine, I think of a rail thin, almost bony woman, who made tuna fish sandwiches by taking tuna straight from the can and putting it directly onto store brand white bread (no mayo, no pickle, no nothing) and who, if you were lucky, would give you a set of poly/cotton blend sheets from K-mart for Christmas: not in a box, just haphazardly wrapped up in a lumpy mess in any old wrapping paper that happened to be cheap at the dollar store. To call the woman no-nonsense would be putting it mildly. This was a woman who worked in a shirt factory for 40 years and who loved to work outside in her yard so much that it's fair to say that her riding lawn mower was her single most prized possession. 

According to my mother, Modine had also never exactly qualified for any Mother of the Year awards. She was a working mother and had little time or energy for her children when she came home after long days at the factory. But she wasn’t all work and thriftiness and bad tuna sandwiches. She was, or tried her best to be, a good Christian woman who went to church every Sunday without fail and who once called my mother almost in tears (maybe one of the only times she ever cried) to tell her that, after years of temptation, she had finally broken down and gone to the Bag-a-Bargain sale at the local Catholic church, for which she was convinced she would surely go to hell, because she had given money to "pagan idolaters." Bless her heart. 

In addition to raising three girls of her own, she also took in two of her grandchildren when they were very young and more or less raised them as her own. Without her, I’m not sure what would have happened to my cousins. I’m sure they didn’t have the coziest life, but they certainly lived to see adulthood (even if one of them would later sell her prized riding lawn mower for a crack rock). 

So she wasn’t cuddly, she wasn’t anyone’s ideal mother or grandmother, and she didn’t give good hugs or good presents, but it’s safe to say that she was one tough cookie, especially considering how much she put up with from my grandfather. 

From watching too much TV as a child (most notably numerous episodes of The Waltons & Little House on the Prairie), I’m pretty sure that most people, when they think of the word "grandpa" probably think of old nubby cardigans, candy warm from being in the pockets of those cardigans, being bounced on creaky old knees and getting cards with clowns on them with checks inside. When I think of the word "grandpa," I think of tallboys, Pall Malls, spittoons, shotguns, and whiskey breath. That is to say, I think of Pap. 

Pap (given name Grover, as in Cleveland) was Modine’s husband and the only grandfather I ever knew, as my paternal grandfather died when my father was himself just a child. Pap had a stroke when I was fairly young and I only have brief, hazy memories of him when he had the use of both sides of his body. All of those memories include him wearing overalls, spitting, shooting guns and/or drinking beer. Such was Pap's affinity for a certain brand of beer, that I was embarrassingly far into my teens before I realized it was not, in fact, called "Pap's Blue Ribbon" but rather "Pabst Blue Ribbon." 

The majority of my clearer memories of Pap are post-stroke memories. These are of a man who spent his life in a recliner, dependent on my grandmother, Modine, to feed him, bathe him and clothe him. Since he lost the use of most of one side of his body after the stroke, Pap couldn't talk clearly and although my mother and grandmother could understand him, he mostly just frightened me. He looked odd, he talked funny, and he smelled bad -- none of which are traits that usually endear adults to small children. 

For a school project, I once asked my mother where her family came from and without hesitation, she replied, “railroad trash.” Not exactly the “England” or “Ireland” answer I was hoping for, nor one I could take back to my 6th grade teacher, but it was more or less the truth: Pap worked as an engineer on the railroad, at least when he wasn’t farming tobacco, killing pigs or driving up to Detroit to make some extra money in the car plants during the winter months. The “trash” part, however, was more difficult for me to understand.

Even though he was slightly scary and I certainly didn't like to sit in his lap, it was nearly impossible for me to reconcile that almost incapacitated Pap with the stories that my brothers and mother would later tell me about him. Those stories were of a young, handsome, womanizing devil who somehow swept an innocent, God-fearing Church of Christ girl right off her feet, married her and then promptly proceeded to spend the next 40 years abusing her and their children and whoring around on her in a drunken stupor. To hear my family tell it, that “bad” Pap made my grandmother's life a living hell until the day he had his stroke. Even if I reached back to the old "Pap's Blue Ribbon" memories, and added those to a picture of Pap taken when he was in his mid-twenties that proved he was, indeed, quite a handsome, if not necessarily an evil, devil, I still couldn't quite imagine that what they were telling me was true. 

According to my family, the day that Pap had his stroke, the tables suddenly turned in his relationship with my grandmother. No more would she sit at the kitchen table wondering where he was and when he would come home. No more sneaking around in his pockets trying to figure out where he had been the night before. Modine -- maybe for the first time in their 40+ years of marriage -- now had Pap right where she had always wanted him: at home and incapable of leaving her. No more drinking, because Modine wouldn't drive to the store to buy him the booze. No more women because he could barely walk by himself, much less, well, you know. No more violence, because now he was just a feeble, helpless old man who couldn't even feed himself. No more name calling because anything he said came out half mangled and at half volume. For all intents and purposes, Pap's life as he knew it ended the day he had the stroke. He was no longer a force to be reckoned with. Now he was just a sad, old man who was lucky if he got to watch what he wanted on TV. 

Day in and day out Pap would get up and be helped to his recliner by my grandmother, where he would sit and wile away the day with nothing to do but eat Modine’s terrible tuna sandwiches and watch The 700 Club. As much as he no doubt must have resented it, other than visits from his daughters and grandchildren, the extent of Pap's life was pretty much limited to whatever Modine allowed it to be. 

I don’t know if Modine took pleasure in any of this, or if she honestly just thought she was taking care of Pap the best she knew how. I do know that this pathetic tale probably would have eventually ended in Pap dying of old age or another stroke in his recliner if it hadn't been for my Aunt Amy. 

Amy was my mother’s sister. The funny thing is that I remember a lot about her son, my cousin (his cocky smile, his curly hair, the time I smacked him for trying to steal my Doritos (yes, I’m serious about my snack food) and her husband, my uncle (nice but dim-witted, with maybe the worst set of teeth I've ever seen outside of a Monty Python sketch) than I do about her. Whenever I think of Amy I don't see her as she was in real life. Instead I immediately envision her high school graduation photo that hung on my grandparents’ living room wall. It's a picture of an almost pretty girl who leaned toward being a little too plain, with stick straight hair parted right down the middle and slightly pasty skin. Now that I think of it, she may be the only one of the three daughters who favored Pap rather than my grandmother. Or maybe that's just hindsight playing tricks on me. 

Unlike her oldest sister (my mother) and her middle sister (who by all counts has been married 10 times, twice to the same man), Amy had only been married once, and of all of the sisters, seemed to have led the calmest and least scandalous life. But the lesson we all learned with Amy was that it's the quiet ones you have to watch.  

Amy lived in the same little town as my grandparents and not too far up the road from them, and she was also, according to my mother and oldest brother, Pap’s favorite child. So, it only made sense that she would stop by and check on Pap from time to time and sometimes even stay to watch and visit with him while my grandmother went to church or to the grocery store. Only Pap and Amy will ever know for sure what went on during those times when Modine was away. Seeing as how Pap could hardly talk, I think it's fair to assume that the conversations they had were pretty one sided, and, judging by what happened later, possibly very calculated. 

My guess is the conversations went something like this:

“Poor Daddy. Momma sure is being mean to you isn’t she?”

“Jjjjeeeerrrrrsss!”

“I don’t understand why she treats you that way. You’re a grown man, you should be able to do whatever you want, shouldn’t you?”

“Ssssspphhhhhsfffff!”

“I sure wouldn’t treat you like that if Momma wasn’t here anymore.”

“Bbbbbllllaaaaghght!

Or something like that. I have no evidence at all of what happened during that time, but whatever conversations they did have finally culminated one day in Amy allegedly buying alcohol for Pap, Pap drinking said alcohol and Pap somehow dragging himself outside on basically one leg to prop himself up on one arm to wait for my grandmother. With a shotgun. 

Let me just stop here to say that I can’t imagine how bad you have to hate someone, or how knee-walking drunk you have to be, to get yourself propped up outside your house with a shotgun when you really only have the use of one side of your body. Let me also just say that I can’t imagine what kind of a badass marksman you’d have to be to actually hit your target in that situation, but that’s exactly what Pap did that day. 

That day, when my grandmother came home, pulled into the driveway and put the car in park, Pap fired that shotgun and hit her somewhere around her right shoulder. And here’s where my grandfather’s badass shooting met my grandmother’s ninja like reflexes: after the first shot, Modine immediately ducked down just before the next shot hit the back of the headrest, and still crouching down in the front seat, slammed the car in reverse, backed down the driveway and drove herself several miles to the emergency room entrance, where she opened the door of her car and promptly collapsed on the pavement. The doctors later could not believe she had actually made the drive, given the amount of blood she lost. Tough cookies can apparently do things like that. 

And that was the story, that in my family, was just that: a story. My grandmother got a lot of buckshot in her back, but she was ultimately OK and I don’t think was ever in any real danger of dying. No big whoop.

After the shooting, Amy pretty much immediately left town with her husband and my cousin without leaving a forwarding address. Shortly after she left, it was allegedly discovered that sometime before the shooting, Pap had added her as a signatory on the joint account he had with Modine and that the bank account had been cleared out by Amy before she left town. No charges were ever filed against her and to this day, I have no idea if she ever really did anything wrong, but to my mind, nothing tends not to say “I’m totally innocent” like skipping town in the middle of the night and leaving your parents virtually penniless. 

Pap, being too old and infirm to go to regular jail or prison, was instead sent to some Nursing Home for Mean Old, Sick Cusses. I know this because my mother made me go with her one time to visit him there. There were no cells or locked doors on the inside, probably because pretty much everyone I saw there was in a wheelchair or completely bedridden. This was the place where bad, old men came to die and it looked like it and boy, oh boy did it smell like it. I barely remember speaking to Pap, but I do remember walking down the hall, being yelled at by feeble, crazy, old men. I guess old cusses never really give up their cussin’ til the bitter end. 

Modine lived a relatively happy life after all of this happened. Sure, she stayed in the hospital for a while and lived the rest of her life with some buckshot in her back, but she was finally, really and truly free for the first time in her life. Free to pick up sticks in her yard every day. Free to grow the yummiest tomatoes I’ve ever eaten. Free, even, to risk eternal damnation by going to the Catholic Bag-a-Bargain sale every single year (They had purses for $1! And matching shoes for 50 cents!). Free to take in a more or less completely feral cat named Cat, who would walk right up to you and then squat and piss on the shag carpet at your feet, as if daring you to do something about it. Also free, apparently, to rent out the bottom floor of her house, cause her tenants non-stop grief, and only by luck not get herself killed by spying on them at all hours and going through their things when they weren’t home. I never said tough cookies were always smart cookies. 

This new, freer Modine was the woman I finally came to love and accept as my grandmother. In fact, she quickly became the only living grandmother I had left, as my maternal grandmother died a few years after Modine was shot.. My mother and I would pick her up and take her to Captain D’s, which it turned out, was the equivalent of taking most people to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. Even though she would complain the whole way there about how she wasn’t going to waste anyone’s money by eating in a restaurant, I have never seen anyone enjoy a single piece of fried cod more in my life. It would take her an hour to eat it, and she would watch other diners with an eagle eye, chastising them in her tight, fast middle Tennessee twang  when they threw food away uneaten (So wasteful! This was Captain D’s! A great little seafood place, for God’s sake!). She had somehow become a cantankerously sweet old woman after all. Or maybe she always was underneath all of that suffering. 

I was living in Germany doing a graduate school exchange when Pap died. He had apparently been released from the Nursing Home for Mean, Old Cusses into the custody of some distant relations (for good behavior? For being old as dirt?) who also thought he had money worth stealing (having money in my family, as you can guess, can be a dangerous thing). They had moved him out of state to live in their trailer somewhere, and that is where he died, I can only hope from natural causes. I didn’t fly home to go to the funeral, and my grandmother didn’t go either. She told my mother that she had gotten rid of him a long time ago and she didn’t need to say goodbye again. 

Modine lived to a ripe, old age and was mobile and mentally acute up until just a month or so before she died. The first time she landed in the hospital, after falling and breaking a hip, I rushed to Lebanon to see her, after my mother told me she was worried about her making it through the night. I walked in her hospital room to find her sitting up in bed, drinking a carton of buttermilk and eating a bar-be-que sandwich. Instead of being happy to see me, she just said, “I’m fine. Why’d you waste your gas money just to come see me?” Tough cookie. 

One of the last times I took Modine to Captain D’s was with the man who would become my husband.  Modine liked Ray, I could tell, but toward the end of her piece of fish, she looked at us sideways and said, “Y'all ain’t never gonna git married are ya?” 

I was  embarrassed, as Ray and I were still just dating, and hadn’t even discussed marriage yet. I did know that I was very much in love with him and wanted to marry him, but sitting in Captain D’s with my grandmother didn’t seem like a good time to talk about it. As I was beginning to panic, I looked at Ray and realized that he hadn’t understood a word she was saying, so tight was her Wilson County Twang. The relief was real and allowed me to respond, “Well, I don’t know Grandma. Why?”

My grandmother looked at me briefly and said, “Don’t never get married. What good does a husband do you anyway?” and then looked back down and finished the last of her fish.