By Cheryl Calvert, with David Anderson.
The Adventures of Nee-Pie and Che-Pie, Chapter Three
In maybe every family there’s always that one. Different than the rest. Like a dandelion in a field of daisies. Like a square peg in a round hole. Like a fish out of water.
In fact, it was a fish out of water, literally, who Brother Grumbles (as I would call him, though never to his face), helped me and Nee-Pie (my nickname for my friend Annette, while she called me Che-Pie) rescue from the receding flood waters of the stream that ran through our property.
Helplessly struggling to find its way back to join its finned friends, the fish was shooed along by Grumbles as we two fourteen-year-olds girls splashed alongside, eventually standing at stream’s edge congratulating one another for another critter rescue.
Well, not Grumbles. “Damn fish outta know better than to get himself stuck like that!”
Grumbles was family. Not a blood relative though. Iin fact, Grumbles was not a relative at all, but rather a quirksome, irascible crusty old curmudgeon who our family adopted to take care of our chickens and roosters.
When we lived in the city, the nice police officer who came to our door had said he was responding to a neighbor’s noise complaint; that our roosters “were crowing at ungodly hours.” Though dad asked how roosters greeting the sunrise was any different than birds singing throughout the day, the nice police officer was not sympathetic saying the roosters must roost elsewhere.
Enter Grumbles who, like the roosters, needed a place to relocate. Outside of town in the mountains, we had a place upon which stood a kind of storeroom that had survived the fire that had destroyed the adjoining house but which house we had rebuilt.
Grumbles wanted to get away, as he grumbled, from “the rest of the world which is all going to hell,” and yes, the laundry room with the canned goods built over underground water that kept things cool, might cool his cantankerousness.
But we doubted it.
And so it was that Grumbles joined the roosters, and while feathers occasionally flew, Grumbles never did fly the coop but instead stayed right there and never left.
On occasion he’d join us for dinner. In his beard were the remains of yesterday’s dinner. Maybe the day before that too. His beard would enter the room minutes before the rest of him did, followed by a pair of eyes that looked to be perched above some sort of big fluffy animal.
I learned early on never to ask him how he was doing. My mother, on the other hand, who was all honey and sugar combined, didn’t seem to mind. Grumbles would grumble on about his favorite “the-world-is-going-to-hell” subject, and mom would even go to sleep but Grumbles didn’t seem to notice, his brimstone, fire and lightening monologue getting him increasingly riled up the longer he held forth.
My mother and I used to laugh at one of Grumbles’ sayings.
It came about when the washing machine overflowed. We didn’t have water attached to the laundry room that doubled as a roof over Grumbles’ head. It was necessary to drag the garden hose from the back of the house to fill the washer. But the five minutes it took to fill the machine with a hose was just too long for me to stand there and watch the water trickle out so I just left the hose running and went on about doing something or other. I forget now these many years later what otherwise had occupied my so-important teenage girl time and it may have been a half hour or more later that we heard quite loud grumbling outside our door.
The laundry-slash-bedroom had flooded with maybe two inches of water, so much water in fact that the water was flowing out the door and waterfalling over the steps where Grumbles was sitting at the time while watching the roosters.
Well, evidently, Grumbles kept watching the roosters, and kept watching the water fall over the steps, until finally, getting wetter and wetter the longer he watched and not really seeing much of any end in sight, he splashed his way over to our house and without knocking just hollered to no one in particular:
“IS THERE SOMETHING ABOUT THIS WASHING MACHINE I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?”
That’s what my mom and I over the years never ceased to laugh at when some crises or another occurred, something went wrong, didn’t work, or couldn’t be found.
“Is there something about this hairbrush (missing stocking, etc., etc.) I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?”
Years later, at the end of his life, as Grumbles lay dying in the hospital, he looked at me with those tragic but loving eyes.
The same eyes perched above his beard that had so enjoyed watching me as a two-year old scoot about the basement on the spring horse, my pigtails all the way down my back bouncing about, whereupon I earned his nickname for me, “My little Dutch hippy” – those eyes were fluttering closed.
And then, the fish-rescuing, rooster-watching, laundry-questioning Grumbles was gone.
Definitely one of a kind, a most honorable and Memorable Man.
