Sarah

Papaw was a sound, a thundering, crackling sound. He’d move into a room and the vibrations he caused from his footsteps, his voice, his aura, always made me tense. Like a rabbit freezing into survival mode at the whiff of a predator. I loved my Papaw in a fierce and frightened way. I was just a kid when he quit smoking, so my nicer Papaw memories didn’t form until later.###He was a real cowboy. And that’s not according to me, that’s according to my Mamaw. She said as soon as she saw him bracing his sheep in the 4-H Sheep Showmanship area at the Montana State Fair in 1959, she was “infected with the love disease.” Not to mention they both had on blue cowboy boots, her’s a rusted copper, his a dark denim.###If Marlboro had held auditions for their ads, there would have been a star in our family. But Papaw wasn’t really the Hollywood type; he preferred a big lot of farm land to a stage. You could catch him hanging around in his shed, a cigarette in his left hand. He’d be bent over a John Deer tractor, fiddling with the engine. Or pruning the various trees and rose bushes my Mamaw loved. Or feeding the sheep, shearing the sheep, tending to the sheep. They didn’t have too many sheep, just enough that they still had something to take care of in their spare time. After their children had grown and left, they bought the sheep. Then my dad had me and they remembered how much they missed the curiosity of a child. So I would spend almost every weekend with them and their sheep.###Every once in awhile, I would run outside to get my Papaw for lunch or dinner, and he would be standing in front of a blaze. He’d be staring into the fire burning away all the dead tree branches and dead grass and old newspapers. Like he could communicate with the fire and the heat was releasing all sorts of secrets about the nature of life to him. He was such a force of nature himself, I really believed that he was listening to what the fire had to say. He was probably just finishing his cigarette and enjoying the destruction.###There was a Marlboro thermos he always carried around with him. He used it as an ashtray and trash can. I shoved sticky candy wrappers into it all the time. Pawpaw took me to get my first adult haircut when I was seven. Mamaw was teary eyed because she knew she was out of a job. It was the same place Papaw went, so I felt like I was getting closer to being Papaw by going too. The barber sheared my hair like I had watched my Papaw do to his sheep, bits of my hair falling like dark fluff to the floor. When it was done, my Papaw looked around and then at his Marlboro thermos. He took the lid off and shook it into the barber’s trash can, banging it to make sure everything had fallen out. Then he collected my hair from the ground, putting it all into the thermos. It’ll smell like ash, but your Mamaw will still get her memento, he said to me with a tobacco stained grin.