I Remember

I Remember

I remember my grandfather had a plate in his head and an artificial eye. He used both when he played with his grandchildren.

“Watch this,” Gampy said. He tapped on his head with the artificial left eye he held. We could hear the tap tapping, and of course, we squealed.

“Gampy, that’s gross,” my eight-year-old self said. “Do it again.”

Gampy tapped some more, then reached down beside his wheelchair and rolled his eye across the floor, the rolling sound loud on the old wood floor until it popped against the baseboard of the far wall.

“Go on now, get it and bring it to me.”

Neither my six-year-old brother Ray nor I wanted to touch that mysterious glass orb with its deep blue iris. Gampy would chide us, telling us it was just a large marble, no different than the ones my brother and I kept in an old coffee can in our room. I remember being the first of us to pick up the fearsome piece of glass, approaching it as if it were a rattler in a cowboy story, coiled and ready to strike. It did not strike, and I learned that most fearsome things only lived in the power of the story we gave to it, but only most things, some things be righteously feared.

Sometimes, Gampy would even get down on the floor to play with us at an eye-to-glass eye level. Gampy was a double above-knee amputee, courtesy of a German artillery shell at the battle of Vimy Ridge in the Great War. He referred to himself as having been snailed by the Hun. He had a German officer helmet, the Pickelhaube, atop his WW1 rifle and bayonet hanging on the wall.

“Tell us about the great war, Gampy.” It had been I who first called him Gampy, my two-year-old tongue lacking the skill to form an R. So, Gampy it was, then and forever, even on his tombstone

“George, I don’t like to talk about it.”

That was true, as it was for my uncle Norman, who had stormed the beaches on D-day, being in the first wave, his feet racing through the surf to touch that sandy, soon-to-be bloody land. He did not talk about it, but my aunt Buelah had shown me a Vitoria Cross medal that he kept in a drawer with socks and underwear. Years later, my mother, while traveling, met a fellow who said that her brother had saved him on the beach on D-Day.

“George, come back later this afternoon without your brother. I reckon you might be old enough to hear a story. I remember lots of stories."

I burst with anticipation for the rest of the hours until I went to his room alone, as instructed. I found him on the floor, positioning my little green plastic soldiers around my mother's plastic food containers and a pillow representing the hill at Vimy Ridge.

“George, come in and sit; the battle is set to begin.”

I sat as instructed, eager for the battle to start.

“OK, George, look at the distribution of our soldiers and the German soldiers on the pillow, I mean the ridge. What orders were given next?”

“I will send my troops up both sides of the ridge to weaken the defenses.

“Sounds like a reasonable plan. Now watch, move your troops onto the hill.”

I did as he asked, positioning my men halfway up the slope. Then, as I got ready to claim victory, Gampi started to make a machine gun sound and reached out to knock my men over so that my troops lay dead on the rise.

“That’s not fair. You had machine guns, and I only had rifles.”

“A fact which you should have planned for. For days, we men of the Canadian side, accompanied by brave US boys, threw men up that hill, charge after charge, and weakening the Germans with artillery fire until we finally broke through to the top of the mountain, shooting at every retreating Hun we could see. It was probably not our best moment, but one less Kraut alive was one less that could regroup and attack us. “

“When did you get hit Gampi”

“I was wounded on the second wave up that stinking, bloody hill. I had to pull myself down that night until I got close enough to our base to be seen.” After that, I lost consciousness for four days, waking up in a military field hospital. After many more losses, they told me how the men had finally captured that hill. I wish I could say I was happy to be alive, but I never thought so then. That’s not something I think a young boy like you should ever hear, but It's done, so unless you want your mother to skin what's left of me, you will keep this a secret between us.”

I shook my head yes.” I sure will, Gampi.”

“I am tired, George. Let's call it a day; more stories tomorrow.”

I went and played with my brother for the rest of the afternoon. We had enough kids in the house for almost any game we thought up, plus the old staples, tag, hide and seek, and even some baseball. Four children had come to Norman and Buelah, and my mother had four, one older sister and two younger than me. My father was in the Air Force, a mechanic on the base. He had died not in combat but in a fall down our basement steps, crushing his skull and fracturing his neck. He lingered in a coma for a week, then went to heaven.

My mother was left with four children under eight, no job, no house as we had lived in the base housing, and no way to support us. We had moved in with Uncle Norman.

We stayed there for two years when my mother got a job. Truth be told, it had taken her those two years to get over the grief and depression after my father's death. Our stories and games with Gampi continued.

One morning, I went to see Gampi early before school. Something was different in his room, a sad emptiness squeezing in from all sides. I called out Good Morning but got no response. I went to his bedside. He had a smile on his face; I touched his now cold cheek. I did not see him breathing. Another loved one was taken out of my life.  Gampi had joined his long-dead companions who had gone to heaven on those bloody days on Vimy Ridge. I started to cry. I knew that I must get my mother and Norman, but just for a while, I stayed there at his bedside, Just Gampi and myself, and my tears.