This is a character who will be in my senior project. This is a climactic scene from his section, where the character Eddie "Grandpappy" Stampers is confronting his present and his past, through landscape and actions that he has gone through in the past, and is being forced to confront again, 50 years later. This is three drafts in, and will probably be run through at least 3 or 4 more drafts before it is finished. Enjoy!

Grandpappy shifts the truck into 4th into 3rd, then from 3rd into 2nd. The beast rumbles as its pistons begin to slow their pumping; trees begin crowding over the road at the line where pavement turns to dirt. He remembers coming here when he was in the passenger seat of his dad’s truck, when he was so small he couldn’t yet see over the dashboard. His dad would always talk — neither quite to himself, nor quite to little Eddie — while he was driving: Gotta slow down through here. Rough going. Some people with their new trucks beat the shit out of those things. Like they never expect em to break. Grandpappy would sit quietly in the seat, and listen to his father tell him about the world. Now, it’s the same road, the same style truck, the same Grandpappy, but nobody else is talking: Grandpappy is in a music-less car, alone, driving with an unopened can of worms and a folded up fishing pole with the tags still attached.

His parents tried their hardest, and did a pretty goddamn good with what they had to work with. Grandpappy knew that the ball-drop was all on him, and him alone. He had to start working at 16, on a farm at first, and then later a textile mill and a mechanic’s shop, just so that his family could make their house payments on time while also avoiding starvation. They had always wanted Grandpappy to go on to do something more — his father had been in the army, and always said it was the last thing he wanted for little Eddie. You gotta promise me you’ll get out of where we are son — I want better for you, he would always say. I want better for you. Grandpappy always thought he knew what his dad meant by that.

The road narrows now — the ditches begin bending towards one another, boulders crowd in from the short banks on either side of his truck, rocks stick out of the ground like dulled down spikestrips. Once he gets to the little roundabout, he sees the single row of rocks lined up to keep vehicles from driving on the trail. He sings the truck around so that it faces the way he came, and slugs the shifter into first gear, pulling up the parking brake.

Grandpappy had just gotten up on a muggy summer morning, Sunday, aged 15 at this point, or thereabouts, when his father called him into the den. He had looked at Grandpappy and stared at him with his lightning blue eyes, and asked if Lil Ed-boy wanted to make a little money this fine, warm morning.

Grandpappy gets his worms, his tiny knob of a fold-up fishing pole, and gets out of the truck. He begins walking towards the gorge, but realizes he almost forgot the grill lighter again, and turns around to get it. Boy, he’d have been pissed if he fucked up again like that first time. Approaching the path at the end of this old road is like staring down an olympic bobsled track from the starting point: only, steeper. Grandpappy’s knees are killing him — generally, he doesn’t do this much walking in a day. He’s used to sitting behind those joy sticks, focused on stripping the bark off of lumber. He has gone to the top of a forested promontory already, and now he will be climbing down into the pits of a stony ravine. There are some freakin’ monsters in the little pools down there, surrounded by walls of untouched granite. Grandpappy has his worn out steel-toe boots on, and tries to make sure his feet are firmly planted before beginning to move further down on the loose, cocoa-powder earth.

The two drove down in his dad’s rusted blue Ford pickup to the old hen houses, laid out in long, even lines of straight, blue, metal walls. They parked at the entrance and Grandpappy remembers looking at his little arm swinging by his little side, and sees his little crummy black shoe below, and then sees the big hen house before him: and his dad with his head down, walking quickly, at first, but then looking up at the big blue hen house before him as if he had done it a thousand times before. It made little Grandpappy feel like his dad really knew the place, like he had the ability to control whatever unforeseeable chaos that may be laying in wait, inside. Grandpappy, or Ed-boy as his dad called him, followed his poppa through the unlocked doors, and they were instantly hit with the gases of piled up fowl excrement trapped in a closed-off space. It was dark; the pungent smell hit Ed-boy all over his body, making his arms and neck shiver. It was a warm smell; it felt like he was standing inside a canyon sized version of the place where shit exited a body: it felt like the building was breathing. It went inside his body, down his esophagus, and it wreaked in there. Just before he was about to wretch, his dad said, Don’t go puking on me now there kiddo, and Ed-boy had no choice but to hold those chunks inside. The other choice was to face the wrath of the passive aggressive my-poor-son schtick, which he knew could only be considered ‘caring’ in a real narrow sense of the term. Ed-boy could always tell exactly what his dad was feeling. He could see it in the small skin movements around his mouth and eyes, hear it in the way-back area of his deep, rumble-strip voice.

The ground levels out again at the bottom of the path. A person unfamiliar with the secrets of Augusta’s landscape would see, at the bottom, nothing more than thicket of pines dense enough to block out all light — it is truly dark down here. What Grandpappy knows, from his father, is that behind this thicket, if you keep walking for long enough in the right direction, you will come to a small pool of fresh water surrounded by towering walls of glossy, obsidian granite, stuffed with patches of quartz. Inside of this water, there are rainbow trout that have been untouched for all of their life; grown to unheard-of proportions, and always ready to put up a fight for their lives.

They grabbed masks, and gloves, and shovels and baskets — all the supplies they would need in order to take care of the animals creating this unbearable atmosphere. They walked through the piano-like slices of light angling in from tall, evenly spaced windows. It was more than warm in here — approaching blistering — and Ed-boy could feel the sweat starting to sting the tops of his eyelids. But collecting those eggs out from under the hens — seeing the baskets collect the eggs, knowing that he was starting with a single egg and stacking them up patiently, one, by one, by one — was something he could see himself learning to love. He found it amazing how the weight really didn’t add up noticeably at all; he would start without any eggs in the basket and it was real easy to carry; pretty soon, he would be holding a basket with so many eggs in it that his arm was beginning to ache under the strain, but it was as if he could not notice the middle ground in between. He never found the exact point where the basket went from being what he considered “light,” to being “heavy”: he always wondered which egg was the one that pushed the basket over its limit. The 10th? The 15th? The 40th? Even when he tried to figure it out — trying to listen to the messages of his own body, with open ears — he could never pay attention long enough to tell. He would get to 10 or 15, and start thinking about school, or basketball, or girls, or space ships — then the basket would be heavy, and he would have 32 eggs inside, and still no idea which was the one that pushed the weight past bearing.

Grandpappy Stampers sits on the rock he sat on as a kid. The time is 1:55. He takes his fishing pole, and sets it between his legs to start tying on the hook. He sets the can of worms on his aching knee, and pops off the top. Taking one worm from the bunch, Grandpappy begins to loop the hook through the little critter, wriggling lively in response between his old fingers. It always makes Grandpappy wonder if maybe the worms know what is going to happen to them: the way they begin struggling as soon as your hand gets close to the opening of the can, trying to bury themselves into the earth, to get away. Or maybe it was just because they were being picked up, and held aloft in the bright light of day, against their will, that they struggled so much.

After tying on the hook, and before trigger-casting a chubby nightcrawler into the amber brook below, Grandpappy takes the unfiltered cigarette out of his ear, takes the grille lighter out of his pocket, and sets them on the crotch of his pants. His dad used to smoke cigarettes, almost as much as Nora did. He smoked Lucky Strikes, though, whereas she smoked Marb Reds. The only difference was that his dad never quit — Nora did. It was actually his dad who gave Grandpappy his first and only cigarette until now, after they had left the hen house.

Grandpappy picks up and sticks the cigarette in between his un-licked lips, feels the filter hook dryly onto the un-moist skin. After they had finished up collecting eggs and shovelling shit, his dad asked Ed-boy if he wanted to go fishing since they got everything done so fast. Of course he did — that spritely boy — and so Grandpappy and his dad got back into the truck after working for maybe 6 or 7 hours — it was around 2pm at this point — and headed over to the great stone gorge. They sat down on the rocks just like Grandpappy is, now; facing the cut in the mountains caused by endless years of soft water wearing down hard rock. He casts his night crawler into the same corner of the small pool that he cast into with his dad, hoping to entice a rainbow trout into becoming supper for him and Nora. The cigarette bobs around loosely, dangling from his mouth.