Grandfather's Ride in Space

The Day the Aliens Stopped at Shady Rest

Grandpa was always singing. Mostly the same song, bursting out of total silence in a
cascade of syllables that began and abruptly ended with the rapping of his silver
handled cane and made everyone in the vicinity glance sideways in his direction. He
was not a native hillbilly, having moved to Arkansas in pursuit of his health, which had
been lost as a postal route driver in Kansas during the Dust Bowl. The mail went
through despite the clouds of suffocating dirt and the resulting emphysema drove him
out of the plains into the hills where the air was cleaner. My father followed him later
on, due to my grandfather's excitement about land values in the Ozarks. "The land's
cheap here," he wrote to my father, who was recovering in hospital from D-Day
wounds, "but you have to be careful they don't throw in twice as much as you plan to
buy--trying to get out of paying that property tax, you see . . . ." Things were different
then.

Grandpa always wore a striped long sleeved shirt and pants with suspenders--on
special occasions adding a black swallow tail coat and a beaver top hat. He liked to
spend his afternoons in a rocking chair on the front porch of his house, sitting among
the split white oak baskets and hickory kitchen chairs that were the mainstay of his
souvenir shop, The Shady Rest. My grandmother, always busy cleaning and cooking,
set aside her chores and handled the customers herself, quietly hoping they would
actually buy something instead of browsing for a moment and asking to use the
bathroom--which they would discover, to their usual horror, was a rough lumber
outhouse a hundred yards out back. My Grandpa counted the money, bought from the
traders who drifted by, and was apt to spit tobacco on any car which parked too close
to the railing. His favorite pastime was counting the cars that passed the shop. An
exciting day was sixty cars, I remember. It was the busiest highway in the area.

One afternoon when my grandmother had walked the quarter mile to our house to
visit, my grandfather had the chance to count something unusual. As he related to my
father later that day--while my father twisted his cap nervously in his hands and
wondered whether grandpa had completely gone mad--he was sitting in his chair on
the porch when out of nowhere a silver saucer ship settled down onto the dirt parking
lot between the house and the highway. A hatch opened and three small people in odd
tight clothing stepped out. While he sat too stunned to move, they gathered around him
and lifted him out of his chair, carrying him to the ship and aboard.

Much of what happened aboard ship is lost to history since grandpa soon realized that
my father didn't believe a word of his account of the day, beyond sitting in the rocker
on the porch, and thenceforth angrily refused to say anything more about his
adventure--but before he quit talking he told us that from his seat up front in the ship,
with the crew to either side of him, he could see that they lifted way way up in the sky,
so high that he could see the whole country, "the whole damn country, Jim!" Some time
later, after certain things happened that were never disclosed, the same crew brought
him back but returned him to the garden lot atop the hill across the road from the
house, leaving him alone and astonished among my grandmother's tomatos and string
beans, so that he had to struggle down a steep embankment covered with kudzu vines
to get back to the porch.

For quite some time everyone in the family thought my grandfather was crazy and
was especially nice to him, which he saw through instantly and to which he reacted
with fuming silence. His reputation was somewhat restored when a few days later while
hanging the family laundry out to dry, my grandmother and my mother saw three
silver saucer ships hanging motionless over our house. My father was the only skeptic,
probably because he didn't get to see anything.

It was for the rest of us, myself and my two sisters, a season of delicious fear, the
summer my grandfather was our first man in space, and the aliens came to give me a
vision.