Death of a great American -- and a great America

Jeremy Beer's extraordinary remembrance of an anonymous elderly farmer -- his grandfather -- and the kind of America he represented. Excerpt:

He traveled the three miles to the mill 63 times during the 87th harvest of his life, his old International pulling the wagon my uncle filled with beans or corn. I don't know why he counted the trips; perhaps it helped pass the time and focus his wavering mind on something other than the pain. He said to my father that he wanted to bring in one last crop. He almost did, clearing the beans but only getting halfway through the corn before he swallowed hard and told my uncle that they had better hire another man. The agony was too much, his back too hunched, his vision too cloudy and constricted. He asked my father to check him into the nursing home. A few days later, he died.

The house he lived in for more than 60 years had been his father-in-law's--whom he often recalled as a lazy farmer, with an air of gentle reproof. His wife, the last of 14 children, had been born in that house. Her oldest brothers had even gone to school in the neighboring one-room red-brick schoolhouse, which later became an outbuilding to house a tractor and a few implements. The old blackboards are still affixed to the walls, but only longtime local residents know what the building once was.

A few years after my grandmother Betty died, he decided to record for all of his descendants the story of how she had contracted polio. She was pregnant with their fourth child. For five months, he recalled, she lay immobile in the hospital, consigned to an iron lung. The doctors called him in to say goodbye on several occasions, but against all odds she had survived. After he had been alone for a few years, he could not remember that long-ago crisis without emotion.

He told of this so frequently that, frankly, we wished he would move on. It was not that we tired of hearing his stories. It was just that he had so many others to tell, some of them uproariously funny, and we wanted to be regaled, not depressed. Once he got going, he would string memories together in a peculiar staccato style and rural idiom filled with colorful turns of phrase not often heard anymore. It was wildly entertaining.

But he kept coming back to the polio story, probably because he was trying to come to terms with his gratitude. He was overwhelmed by the grace of a God who had allowed his wife and the mother of his small children--including the one with whom she was pregnant--to live. She was gone, but all those children lived close by, even those who had once made their homes far away. Three lived within walking distance, not that anyone often walked out here in the flat, windswept Indiana countryside. So, too, in the area were innumerable cousins, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and folks of no blood relation who nevertheless could not resist calling him Grandpa Beer. God had been good.

Do, do, do read the whole thing.