Yellow Pajamas by Derek Lance Furr

The last time I saw my grandfather, about three weeks before cancer finished the remnants of his visceral organs, he was in pajamas—yellow pajamas, cotton, with marigold trim. My grandmother was there, too, in the shadows behind him. It was a Saturday, my grandparents' fifty-first wedding anniversary. Withered and gnarled, my grandfather was hunched over in his recliner, his hands drawn into the cuffs of his sleeves, his knees pulled tight against his chest. Jaundice had stained his sunken cheeks. The blue of his terrified eyes floated, absurd, in the color of daffodils.

I was flummoxed by this encounter for many reasons, but all of them were concentrated in the fact of my grandfather—the brooding and sometimes severe patriarch of our family, whom everyone called “Papa John”—in pajamas. I had spent much of my life under Papa John's roof, and had only seen him in two stages of dress: fully covered in Pointer brand overalls—the kind worn by railroad engineers in children's books—and stark naked. Coming in from the barn at the end of the day, he would strip down on the back porch, shower, and blaze through the living room, a vapor trail of Ivory soap and red clay following him. He was shameless in his strong, hairy body, which filled the recliner as he ate his bowl of mashed potatoes and watched Gunsmoke. That's where he'd often sleep, naked and full, until he woke the next morning and, pulling on his overalls, headed back to work.

When I was little, I had once asked Papa John why he never wore pajamas. He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the bucket by his chair, reached over and turned up Matt Dillon before he chuckled, “They get all twisted and bind me up.” My grandfather was not a man to be shackled. He made his own way among the hills and swamps of our tiny, rural community in North Carolina. He pursued his interests, acted on his whims. He moonshined and fished with dynamite. He raised barns, dug wells, cleared acres of pine for a sawmill he built of spare parts and sheer determination. He could grow any plant in creation, and his acres of vegetable gardens—irrigated by a complex system of pipe, pumps and ponds that he'd devised—overfed the twenty of us in his clan. When he was angry, he destroyed things; when happy, he laughed himself into paroxysms of coughing. We regarded him with the fearful respect that sustains gods and kings.

So finding him in yellow pajamas, his eyes swollen with hapless tears, I wanted to turn away. It was as if I had walked in on something that I shouldn't see, something forbidden. I thought of Lear, in his torn white gown, his countenance frozen in a look of disbelief, blubbering piteously over his daughter's lifeless body. For a moment, Lear doesn't know we're there, and should we be? What can you say or do when you see someone so reduced? Illness and injury often humble us, shaming us into acknowledging our limitations. But Papa John had always scoffed at pain. He rarely went to the doctor and never took medicine. Most aches or ailments could be ignored altogether, he suggested, and even the most grievous conditions could be endured with true grit and, perhaps, a few shots of Wild Turkey. About a decade before I was born, Papa John's right arm was cut off by a silage cutter. “Chewed” would be the more appropriate verb, for as he tried to dislodge a knot of silage from the machine's throat, it sucked him in and ground to a halt at his elbow, not sated but choked again. In the trauma ward for days thereafter, my grandfather refused to be treated for pain. “You get dependent on those drugs,” he declared, and no amount of suffering was going to steal his rugged independence. At least not until the end stages of cancer.

On that Saturday, I nodded to him and awkwardly slipped away to a corner of the room that was partially blocked from view by the wood stove. The rest of our family began to crowd in, all of them from just down the road and bearing dishes of various descriptions for the potluck. Because I had traveled several hundred miles to return home for the first time in months, my presence provided some distraction—welcomed, I imagined, as a momentary ballast to suffering and disillusionment.

For a while my aunts and mother chattered about my weight, or lack of it, and the circles under my eyes, about how I needed to eat more and stop staying up so late reading books and worrying. My wife Caroline had recently assumed the yoke of the good partner—mediating between spouse and family—and steered the conversation away from my health, offering up anecdotes about our drive down with our neurotic dachshund howling in the back seat. Most of us chuckled. Among the women, only my grandmother remained silent, vigilantly on call behind Papa John, the only man who hadn't at least smiled or blushed at Caroline's monologue. Then with sighs and winks, all the women save Grandma retreated to the kitchen, and the men of my family were left to their own, limited conversational devices.

My father and three uncles, each leaning back in a wooden chair dragged from the kitchen, stared awkwardly at their empty hands. My brother pretended to study a seed catalog that he had plucked from the otherwise empty magazine rack. Finally, Uncle Wes inquired, “How's the weather up north?” My home in Charlottesville, Virginia, is “the north” to my family, a peculiar land of harsh winters and impractical ambitions.

“We've had our share of it!” I declared, and my uncle nodded as if he understood. The silence resumed, denser now for having resisted our paltry attempt to fill it. The tocks of the clock on the mantle plopped into it like stones in a lake. Everyone stared holes in his hands. Tucked safely behind the stove, I stole glimpses at my grandfather.

It was now that Papa John had always saved us in the past. He'd get a story started. First he'd toss out an apparently artless observation about farming or hunting or mechanics. “The dry rot's going to eat up half the tomato crop this year.” “Deer's been using the hollow. Got the bark rubbed clean off that big cedar.” “Head gasket on the GMC needs replacing.” Invariably, someone would rise to the bait, giving Papa John a moment to light a cigarette—Camels, filterless, their fine Turkish blend holding the mysteries of the Orient. He would inhale long and deep while, for example, my father described the buck he'd jumped when walking the fence line, and then he'd exhale two billowing streams of aromatic smoke from his nostrils. A haze would gather in the room, soporific, even a bit intoxicating, and Papa John would deftly pick up a thread from my father's disquisition and spin it into a yarn from his past.

Today, however, it was as if that past had been razed and burned by the cancer. Those shanty towns of fops and shrews who populated Papa John's irreverent version of our family history were smoke and ash. He had no stories to tell—intense suffering had pinned him to the present. He stared at the window shades, a flinch and an attenuated cough his only vital signs. Grandma lingered behind him, an apparition, like his broken spirit.

Simply sitting in the presence of pain takes discipline. I squirmed. The temptation to narrative in such circumstances is understandable. Was it up to me, I wondered, to get a story going? Narrative organizes, interprets, distracts. For those very reasons, however, it had no place here. Job's companions should have just kept their mouths shut. I settled into the darkness.

But then a cake was brought in. The piping, the butter cream roses, the cursive wishes for a “Happy Fifty First,” all were yellow. And on a tiny porcelain plate in the center were two gold wedding bands. Caroline ran ahead of the cake like a scout. She crouched by my knees and squeezed my hand, as she does when the plane hits turbulence on its descent.

And that's as much of the day as I can remember. My memory's stage goes dark just as Caroline clutches my hand, and the cake, like the Ark of the Covenant in its uncanny symbolic heft, is borne in. In truth, some time in the years that intervened between that day and my recollection of it, I even lost the rings. The cake I still saw, but the rings—which promise to focus the sad plot of that anniversary gathering, to complicate it and drive it irrevocably forward—were gone. Instead, it was the ruins of my grandfather, tricked up so absurdly in the colors of spring, that filled the day's space in my memory. The wedding bands reappeared in the rubble only after Caroline, reading an earlier version of this essay, pointed them out to me.

My grandparents had been too poor to afford the extravagance of rings when they'd eloped on Papa John's furlough from the army. They'd been too practical to consider buying them later. Love, they believed, inheres in the sacrifices you make for the well-being of your family. Doing without carries more weight than gold.

My mother produced the anniversary gathering and insisted upon wedding bands. She was determined to lay claim to joy despite the omnipresence of sorrow, and she wanted in particular to do something to bolster Grandma. For under the influence of intractable misery during his dying days, Papa John had been relentlessly cruel to Grandma. Pain had whipped his demons into a fury. A man of his era, he unleashed them on his wife, who fussed at his sheets and pillows and freshened his watery Coca-Cola in a futile attempt to comfort him. Grandma had endured, but her daughter, understandably, agonized. “Mama must not feel unloved,” my mother thought, “not now.” Plans were made. A cake was baked and decorated. Rings were bought.

I don't recall the look on Grandma's face, or whether she and Papa John cut the cake. Did they feed it to each other? And the wedding bands—were they worn? Was one on Papa John's hand at his wake a few weeks later? There's a tale filled with irony and pathos in all this, a tale of well-intended gestures, hapless victims, maudlin sentiment. But it's not the tale I remember, or wish to reconstruct, though there are pictures and witnesses at my disposal. For me, the suffering of that day and that period in my family's life is summed up at the vanishing point in my own memory. And what I remember, finally, of that day, are Caroline's grasp—a warning, a reassurance, a commiseration—and how my grandfather's eyes, filled with pain, matched his pajamas and the roses on the cake and the burn of the sunlight through the drawn shades •

Derek Lance Furr is a father, husband, writer and teacher living in Charlottesville, Virginia. He teaches for the Charlottesville City Schools and at the University of Virginia. His essays and poetry have been published in several periodicals, including The New Delta Review, The Washington Post, The Potomac Review, English Language Notes, and The Cumberland Poetry Review.

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