Johnny and The Exodus Album
My brother was in first grade when our grandmother died in the house fire next door. Our father tried to save her, breaking the glass of her bedroom window that was protected with burglar bars. The burglar bars prevented anyone from getting in to save her.
They found her body on the bathroom floor of her bedroom, a wet terry cloth wash rag held to her mouth. They said the fireman that carried her out passed out from the thick smoke that billowed out every window and doorway, right after he walked out the kitchen door with her body in his arms.
I stood at the upstairs window with sister, Nancy, that night. We saw smoke, fire, the top of the ambulance, lots of people running back and forth.
Someone walked us into the house after the fire. I don’t know who. We stood at the bathroom door, gasping in shock at the outline of her body on the white tiled floor, made visible by the black soot that surrounded it. She had lain in fetal position when she lay down to die. The shiny white tiles where she had lain told her final story.
It was her seventh fire, started from a cigarette. She was addicted to prescription drugs which knocked her out at night. They sued the country doctor, Doctor Nichols, after that. He had dozens of widows addicted to drugs it turns out. She’d only just moved next to us a few months earlier. I hadn’t gotten to know her very well yet, but she was always nice and kind. A quiet woman, afraid of my mother. They’d had a fight the night before.
The movie, Exodus, came out the same year that my grandmother’s house went up in flames. We had the album to the movie’s soundtrack. There were flames licking up the cover of the album. My brother, Johnny, would play the album and run around the living room with the fireplace poker in his hand, jumping up and down on the furniture, the couch and the coffee table, pretending to save our grandmother. We all thought it was cute and also very sad. He went deep into his fantasy with the very dramatic soundtrack of the Exodus movie playing in the background. He saved his grandmother many, many times.
Not long after the fire, before the charred and damaged remains of the house had been touched, my mother insisted that I go into her mother’s house and retrieve an encyclopedia that would help me on a geography report. My heart froze. I begged her, “No”. She told me, “Don’t be silly.”
The walls of my grandmother’s home were blackened with smoke. She had always kept a pristine house, with tiny crystal bowls on doilies filled with mint candy all around. There was nothing left. Everything was burnt, broken, blackened.
The air stank of the smell of old, wet, smoke, an olfactory memory I will never be able to shake. I walked in alone to my grandmother’s empty, dark home through the same door they’d carried her out of just a few days earlier.
Blackened shards of broken glass covered the floor in every room, and crunched beneath my feet, mixed with thick ashes and soot, as I walked through the house from the kitchen to the living room, trying not to breath, trying not to look down the hall toward her bedroom.
The silence in the house was deafening and my heart pounded in my ears as I searched through the sooty book collection.
She was a sweet old lady, protecting me and my siblings a number of times from our mother when Mom was having a fit.
I recall a time I rode my bike to the country store out on the highway. It was a newly given freedom and I was elated to go and buy candy on my own, riding my bike to the highway on my own.
When I returned to the garage, my mother and grandmother were standing there. I gave my mother the change and she looked at it and then told me that I was a quarter short.
She insisted that I ride my bike back to the store until I found the quarter. That was a very long ride of about 10 blocks. I was crying so hard that I was snot faced. My grandmother suddenly cried out, “Oh, look! I think I found it.” and she bent over and picked up a quarter, holding it out to the two of us.
My mother exploded and accused her of planting the quarter. I was sobbing deeply and watched them argue. My grandmother was my hero in that moment. I never realized, till this moment, how much I needed her in this life. My whole life might have been different had she not passed away.
She had a special affection for, and worked to protect, our oldest sister, Nancy, because, like Nancy, our maternal grandmother was a half-sibling and treated as a second class citizen throughout her life.
apologies for the rambling …
Oikos 