Part 2: My Grandparents Have Been Married Fifty-Two Years and Their Pit Bull Is Named Witness. My Niece Asked Why at Thanksgiving. What My Grandfather Said Made the Whole Table Go Quiet.
Part 2
I want to tell you about my grandparents before I tell you what my grandfather said.
My grandfather Earl farmed corn and soybeans on a hundred and ninety acres outside Chillicothe for forty-six years. He got up at five in the morning for most of those years. He has hands that look like they were carved out of something. He does not waste words. He has, my whole life, been a man who communicates love through verbs — through the truck he kept running for me through college, through the firewood he splits and stacks for my grandmother every September, through the fact that he has made my grandmother a cup of coffee every single morning of their marriage and brought it to her before she is fully awake.
My grandmother Ruth taught third grade at an elementary school in Chillicothe for thirty-four years. She is small. She is quick. She has a laugh that comes out of her in a way that surprises people who do not know her, because the rest of her is so contained. She reads two books a week. She has kept a vegetable garden every summer of her adult life. She has, my whole life, been the one who remembers everyone’s birthday and the one who writes the cards and the one who knows, somehow, before anyone tells her, when one of her grandchildren is in trouble.
They have been the kind of married my generation does not entirely know how to be.
My cousins and I used to talk about it, when we were teenagers, at the long summer cookouts on the farm. We used to watch them. We used to watch the way my grandfather’s hand would find my grandmother’s lower back when he passed behind her chair. We used to watch the way she would, without looking, hand him the saltshaker before he asked for it.
We thought it had always been easy for them.
We thought it had always been like that.
I am going to tell you now what my grandfather told a Thanksgiving table of nineteen people last November, after a nine-year-old asked him a question, because I have his permission, and because my grandmother has her permission, and because I think it is the truest thing I have ever heard either of them say.
He said it had not always been like that.
He said there was a winter it had almost not been anything at all.
Part 3
I am going to skip past some of what my grandfather told us, because some of it belongs to my grandparents and not to a Thanksgiving table and certainly not to the internet. My grandfather skipped past some of it too. He is not a man who tells more than is needed.
I will tell you what he told us.
He told us that in the winter of 1980 into 1981, he and my grandmother had been married for seven years. They had two small children — my father Carl was five, my uncle Roy was three. My aunt Lynette had not been born yet.
He told us that the farm had nearly failed that winter.
He told us about interest rates I did not fully understand and a bad harvest the fall before and a loan from the bank in Chillicothe that he had not been able to make the payment on. He told us he had not told my grandmother how bad it was. He told us he had spent the whole fall of 1980 not telling her, getting up at five, going out into the cold, coming back in at dark, and not telling her.
He told us that on a night in February of 1981, my grandmother had found the paperwork from the bank.
He told us they had the worst fight of their marriage that night. The only fight, he said, that he had ever been afraid of. He told us my grandmother had not been angry that the farm was failing. She had been angry — she had been more than angry — that he had carried it alone for five months and had let her believe everything was fine. He told us she had said things that night that were true and that he had deserved and that had still been the hardest things he had ever heard.
He told us he had left the house.
He had not left for good. He had not been leaving the marriage. But he had needed, that night, to not be inside the house, and so he had pulled on his coat and his boots and he had walked out to the barn at eleven o’clock at night in February with no plan and nowhere to go, and he had sat down on a hay bale in the dark in the cold, and he had stayed out there.
He told us my grandmother had let him go.
He told us she had stood at the kitchen window and watched the barn light — he had turned on the one bulb — and she had not come after him, because she had said things she meant and she was not going to take them back just to make the night easier.
They had both, he told us, spent that night certain that something between them had broken in a way that does not get fixed.
They had a dog in 1981.
The dog’s name was Sergeant. He was a Shepherd mix that my grandfather had gotten as a pup from a neighbor in 1976. Sergeant was an outside dog, mostly — a farm dog — and he slept in the barn.
My grandfather told us that when he walked into the barn that night in February of 1981 and sat down on the hay bale, Sergeant had gotten up from wherever he slept, and walked over, and lain down against my grandfather’s leg.
And then — my grandfather told us this part slowly, because this is the part the whole table had gone quiet for — at some point in the middle of that night, the barn door had opened.
It had been my grandmother.
She had not been able to sleep. She had stood at that kitchen window until two in the morning. She had finally pulled on her own coat and walked across the frozen yard to the barn, and she had opened the door, and she had found my grandfather sitting on a hay bale in the dark with the Shepherd mix lying against his leg.
My grandfather told us my grandmother had stood in the barn doorway for a moment.
Then she had walked over.
She had sat down on the hay bale next to him.
She had not said she was sorry, because she had not been wrong. He had not said he was sorry yet either, though he would, many times, in the days after. They had not said anything at all for a long time.
They had just sat there. The two of them. On a hay bale. In a cold barn. In February of 1981. With a farm dog named Sergeant lying across both their feet.
My grandfather told us they had stayed in that barn until the sky started to go gray.
He told us that was the night they decided to stay.
Not with words. He was clear about that. He told us nobody decided anything with words that night. He told us they had simply sat together long enough, in the dark, with the dog, that by the time the sun came up, the staying had already happened.
Part 4
My grandfather told us Sergeant lived another nine years after that.
He told us the farm did not fail. He told us they had refinanced, and the next harvest had been better, and the one after that better still, and that he had paid the bank in Chillicothe every dollar he owed it by 1987. He told us my aunt Lynette had been born in the fall of 1983. He told us the farm that had almost ended in February of 1981 had gone on for another thirty-nine years and had raised three children and eight grandchildren and was the farm we were all sitting on, eating turkey, that very afternoon.
Sergeant had died in 1990.
My grandfather told us my grandmother had cried over that dog in a way that had surprised my father, who was fourteen at the time, because my grandmother was not a woman who cried where her children could see.
He told us he had understood why she was crying.
He told us they had gotten other animals over the years. Barn cats. A Beagle in the nineties named Copper that the kids had loved. Another farm dog in the 2000s named Duke.
But he told us that when my grandmother had driven to the Ross County Humane Society on a Tuesday morning in 2017, without telling him, and had come home with a one-year-old brindle Pit Bull in the back of her Buick — the first dog they had ever had that would live in the house, sleep in the house, be a house dog — she had already known what she was going to name him.
He told us he had walked out onto the porch and looked at the dog and looked at her and asked her what the dog’s name was.
And he told us my grandmother had said, “His name is Witness.”
And he told us he had understood, standing on that porch, exactly what she meant.
He told us he had said only “All right,” because there had been nothing else that needed saying, and because forty-four years of marriage had taught him which moments were the moments to talk and which moments were the moments to simply let your wife name the dog.
Part 5
This is the part where my grandfather looked across the Thanksgiving table at my niece Della, who was nine years old and who had asked the question, and who had been listening to all of this with her roll forgotten on her plate.
He said: “Della. You asked why the dog is named Witness.”
He said: “I’m going to tell you why.”
He said — and the whole table was so quiet by then that I could hear the furnace running in the basement —
He said: “Your great-grandmother and I have been married fifty-two years. That is a long time. In fifty-two years, two people are going to have a lot of nights. Most of the nights are easy. You go to sleep, you wake up, nothing happened. But some of the nights are not easy.”
He said: “Some of the nights, somebody cries. Some of the nights, somebody is angry. Some of the nights, somebody finds something out. Some of the nights, two people sit in a cold barn and don’t talk because there isn’t anything left that talking would fix.”
He said: “And on a lot of those nights — the hard ones — there was nobody else there. We didn’t tell our kids. We didn’t tell the neighbors. We didn’t tell the church. You don’t. You keep the hard nights between the two of you.”
He said: “But the hard nights weren’t only between the two of us.”
He said: “There was always a third one there. There was Sergeant, in the barn, in 1981. There was Copper. There was Duke. And now there is the dog lying on this kitchen floor right now.”
He said: “On the hard nights, and on the good nights too — the night your great-grandmother and I got the news about your great-grandmother’s sister, and the night we found out the farm was going to be all right, and a lot of nights I am not going to tell a nine-year-old about — there was always a dog in the room. A dog who saw it. A dog who was there for the crying and the making up and the sitting quiet. A dog who knew the whole of it. The only one who ever knew the whole of it.”
He said: “So when your great-grandmother brought this one home, she gave him the name he should have. The name all of them should have had.”
He looked down at the brindle Pit Bull on the kitchen floor between his chair and my grandmother’s chair.
He said: “He is the one who sees. He is the witness. That is not a weird name, Della. That is the most honest name there is.”
Part 6
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then my grandmother — who had not spoken once during the entire story, who had sat at the other end of the table with her hands folded and let my grandfather tell it — said one thing.
She said: “Earl. Tell her the last part.”
My grandfather looked at my grandmother. Something passed between them that I have spent a year trying to find the right words for and have not found them.
He looked back at Della.
He said: “The last part is this. The dog is named Witness so that your great-grandmother and I never forget that somebody saw us be married. Not the wedding. Anybody can see a wedding. I mean somebody saw us be married — the hard part, the long part, the part that happens at eleven o’clock at night in a cold barn.”
He said: “When two people have been married a long time, Della, the worry is not that nobody will remember the wedding. The worry is that nobody will know what it actually cost. What you actually did. The nights you stayed when staying was the hard thing.”
He said: “The dog knows. Whatever dog it is, in whatever year — the dog knows.”
He said: “Your great-grandmother named him Witness so the knowing would always have a body in the room.”
I looked down the table at my grandmother.
She was not crying. My grandmother does not cry where her family can see.
But she had her hand down at her side, below the level of the table, where she thought none of us could see it.
And the brindle Pit Bull had gotten up off the kitchen floor.
And he had walked over to her chair.
And he had put his head under her hand.
Part 7
It has been a year since that Thanksgiving.
My grandparents are still on the farm. My grandfather does not farm the hundred and ninety acres anymore — he rents the land to a younger family now — but he still gets up at five, and he still splits the firewood, and he still brings my grandmother a cup of coffee before she is fully awake.
Witness is eight years old now.
He has a routine I did not pay attention to until last Thanksgiving and now cannot stop noticing every time I visit.
Every evening, after dinner, my grandparents sit in the two chairs by the front window. My grandfather reads. My grandmother does the crossword. They do not talk much. They have, I think, said most of what two people say to each other, and what is left is the comfortable kind of quiet that I hope I am lucky enough to earn someday.
Witness lies on the floor between their two chairs.
Not next to my grandfather’s chair. Not next to my grandmother’s chair.
Between them. In the exact middle. With his body turned so that he can see both of them at once.
I asked my grandmother, the last time I was down, whether she had trained him to lie there.
She said: “No.”
She said: “He picked that spot himself. The first week we had him.”
She said: “He has been lying right there every evening for seven years.”
She looked at the dog. She looked at me.
She said: “He knows what his job is, Annie.”
She said: “He always has.”
Part 8
My niece Della is ten now.
She told my brother, a few weeks after that Thanksgiving, that when she grows up and gets married and gets a dog, she is going to name her dog Witness too.
My brother told her that might get confusing, with two dogs in the family named the same thing.
Della told him she did not care.
She told him every marriage should have a witness.
She is ten years old and I think she understood the whole thing better than the rest of us, who had sat at that table for thirty years and never once asked.
My grandparents have been married fifty-two years.
There was a dog in the barn in 1981.
There is a dog on the kitchen floor tonight.
He is lying between their two chairs.
He is watching both of them.
He always has.
He is the witness.
Now you are too.
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