Quarry

I come from a long line of cowards. The exception is my grandfather, who to my knowledge has never had to rely on anyone. When he approached me after the funeral and asked for a ride to the vet, it pretty much drop-kicked me into orbit.

I wasn’t shocked that he hadn’t arranged a post-ceremony ceremony. People standing around fingering canapes wasn’t his idea of respect. I’d pictured him leaving his wife’s service early to see a man about a tractor for the back paddock. That was why I leapt at the opportunity to be alone with him on a long country road. To glimpse the sphere he inhabited. The solved world.

I drove a borrowed car to the house I’d feared as a kid. It had always felt empty and silent, a big white thing on a treeless plain in the high country, kissing distance from heaven. He’d built it from the ground up, hauling slabs of redwood from the forest a few hours drive west, the trees sometimes bought legit from fellers, sometimes purchased off the books. He had a lot to say about redwoods – they could live for thousands of years – and I came to imagine my grandparents’ home had towered there forever on that unsealed road, which led in one direction to the tallest trees in the world and in the other to a flooded slate quarry.

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