by David Cameron
“I’m tired,” Lester said as he pulled his old heap to the grassy verge of the flat, two-lane country road. “You drive.” He slipped the manual gearshift on the steering column into neutral, left the car running, opened his door, and slowly unfolded to stand outside the car. He walked around to the passenger side, jerked open my door, and stood there as I looked up at him like a ‘possum caught in the headlights. I was twelve and had never driven anything but my Dad’s old tractor and a homemade go-cart. You’d think I’d be thrilled that my grandfather had just offered me the holy grail of adolescence. I was terrified.
Granddaddy was my mother’s father. He’d been in the battle of the Argonne Forest, part of the Meuse-Argonne offensive in World War I, the largest and deadliest military action in U.S. history lasting from mid-September to Armistice Day on November 11, 1918. Forty-seven days. Three hundred fifty thousand total casualties. It turned the tide for the allies, but I never heard Granddaddy speak of it.
By the time I was twelve, Granddaddy lived about seven miles outside Cleveland, Georgia, in a shack down by the river. Though my uncle and his family lived just up a private dirt road from him, my mother was the one who would drive three hours each month to Cleveland from our home in Gastonia, North Carolina, to spend the weekend cleaning and making sure the old man had groceries. I would sometimes go along to keep her company. I was careful around the wood-burning, potbellied stove he used to warm soup and heat his home. We slept at night under piles of musty-smelling quilts.
It was paradise to be by a river, where my cousins and I could fish and swim, but I was scared of Granddaddy. He rarely spoke except to grumble about something. He had been a school principal after the war, and he and my grandmother divorced in the early 1940s—almost unheard of back then. My grandmother made a good life for herself after the divorce, working as an executive secretary and attending the First Baptist Church in Athens, Georgia. My grandfather? He lived in a shack down by the river.
Had I been older I might have relished the time with the crusty old guy and tapped into his stories. I might have sat with him by the river and gently tried to decipher the runes etched in his psyche by the hell he must have witnessed in the Argonne Forest. I look back at that twelve-year-old boy and want to say, “Buck up, son, the old man is reaching out to you in the only way he knows how.”
On that day, however, on the side of the road, looking up at him as he commanded me to drive, I was mute. Obediently, I exited the car, walked around, got behind the steering wheel, and shut the door. He lowered himself with a groan into the passenger seat and stared straight ahead. In a timid voice, I said, “How do I put it in gear?” He said, “Just feel around, you’ll find it.”
I’m not sure the clutch in that old rattletrap even worked, but I did manage to get it in gear and rolling down that straight country road. I even got the speed up to maybe twenty miles per hour and was doing fine until I spotted a car in the far distance coming from the other direction. As it approached, I white-knuckled that steering wheel, sure I would involuntarily swerve into the other car’s path and kill us all. But we passed without incident, and, after about two miles, I finally turned into his long, dirt driveway.
At that point, he instructed me to stop the car. I let go of the breath I had been holding and slipped the gear into neutral. He got out, and we switched places again. As he started down the driveway, he continued to look straight ahead but said out of the corner of his mouth, “Let’s not tell your mother about this.” The Argonne Forest was one thing. My mother was something else altogether.
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David Cameron married into a double military family and had relatives who served honorably. He was a Presbyterian pastor for many years and ended his career directing a Meals on Wheels program in western North Carolina where he lives with his spouse and son. He is on loan now to the waterfalls and mountain trails.
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