William, it was really nothing

Grandpa died last week, and now he’s buried in the rock

Well, that’s not technically true.

Grandpa died this morning, and we won’t bury him until Sunday.

He would have been 96 years old in October, and he’d been trying to go for two weeks. He stopped eating or drinking. He hadn’t left his bed. He was just hoping for a merciful end.

He finally got it.

He died in the house he built largely with his own two hands in a south Georgia backwater. He died laying next to my grandmother. They’d been married more than 70 years. “I’m only still here for Annie Mae,” he said a couple of years ago when his health began to fail him in earnest. I don’t think they had a perfect marriage — or, for a period of time, even a very good one.

But he was loyal. And protective. He felt like she needed him. He was probably right. For her, this may be impossible.

My grandfather was a farmer. He raised hogs. He ran the maintenance department for the county school system. Mostly, though, he was a child of the Depression. You didn’t see a lot of emotion. He kept it to himself.

Like many men of his era, he seemed almost afraid to give name to something he loved lest it be deemed license for the universe to take it from him. Cards, close to the vest. A heads-up poker game against God.

He once dug a hole for a 550-gallon septic tank — by himself, by hand — because he could. He could fix anything. He could grow anything. His Camellias, many of the flowers his own grafted creations, won awards.

He taught me how to fish. Slowly, at first, with a short cane pole and a bobber. His pond, a small body of water more often than not covered with duckweed and filled with as many turtles as fish, was lined with Catawba trees, and he showed me how to pluck a caterpillar off the leaves, thread it on a hook — just so — and toss it to the bream.

His world was small, though. And everything filtered through that lens. Things that happened outside of his little parcel of land (or at the Methodist church they attended) didn’t interest him much. We grew up just an hour away, and it seemed to him to be separated by a mountain range. They didn’t visit often and didn’t stay long when they did. He preferred, as I suppose is the patriarch’s right, to have things orbit around him. And they did.

He took to writing late in life. He had so many stories to tell. And he was a rough, but passable raconteur. His writing often belied his simple exterior. His notes, written longhand in an unrefined 1920s-era cursive script, let on more than the small man in the rocking chair ever did.

I go back to Georgia on Saturday to say goodbye to my grandfather.

Kind if not effusive. Uneducated but intelligent. Strong and proud.

Pleasant William Roberts: 1914 - 2010.