Kinfolks Read Online Free PDF

driveway when I get home. I tromp into the living room in my muddy uniform to find her perched on the sofa in a suit of raw silk. Her permed hair encases her head like a helmet of silver feathers. Her face contorts as she struggles to convey her displeasure without frowning, since she’s trying to starve her frown lines. I’m hurt. I’ve endured broom straws under my fingernails for her. But clearly she’s a Two Hearts, not a Tonto.
    I’m standing on the rose-and-aqua Persian carpet in my grandparents’ living room, surrounded by adults I don’t know. I’ve figured out that the tall, lanky men who look uncomfortable in their suits and ties are my grandfather’s cousins from Virginia — Reeds and Artrips. Others are doctors or patients, plant executives, Virginia Clubbers, all come to pay their respects to my grandmother.
    My father looks as though he might start crying. He adored his father, who took him on house calls once he was old enough to help. My father administered ether during operations on kitchen tables in remote hollows.
    He credits this with helping him through World War II. While assigned to a troop ship in the north Atlantic, he had to perform an appendectomy during a German submarine attack. After strapping himself to the operating table to prevent his being hurled across the room by the depth charges, he discovered that the ship hadn’t been supplied with medical instruments. Using a trick he’d picked up from his father during those house calls, he transformed dinner forks into retractors.
    In France, my father had to climb down a ladder into a deep pit full of German prisoners to treat the ill and injured. But he says it was no different from confronting a houseful of mountaineers, who might bury you in an unmarked forest grave if you botched an operation on one of their kin. Once he was operating on a German prisoner when German paratroopers landed outside the tent. They burst in, waving their rifles. But thanks to the sangfroid he’d learned from his father, he just kept operating. Realizing that the patient was one of their own, the paratroopers thanked my father in perfect English and left.
    There’s a fresh snowfall, so my mother sends my bored brothers and me outside to play. As we careen down the icy hill on our sleds and saucers, I try to figure out what it means that my grandfather is dead. He’d had a heart attack and then cancer, so he’d been even quieter than usual lately. But I’d thought that since I’d gotten better after my nosebleeds, he would, too. I feel indignant at the notion of never seeing him again.
    My mother says that when my father departed for boot camp right after my birth, my grandfather insisted on holding me whenever he was home. And he was sad when my mother, John, and I hit the road in an old Ford, following my father to army bases in Wyoming and Texas. When my father was shipped to Europe, we drove back to Tennessee and then to New York to stay with my mother’s family. Upon my father’s return for a stint at Walter Reed Army Hospital, we drove to Washington, D.C., to join him.
    We moved seven times in my first two years. (As an adult I will suffer from chronic wanderlust.) My car seat was an orange crate on the floor of the backseat. My mother says that when she removed me from it at day’s end, I’d just sit motionless in my playpen like a baby Buddha. Chipmunks would climb through the bars and eat my teething biscuits as I watched in silence. Although this sounds to me like someone who needed medication, it may be when I learned to prize solitude — and kind people like my grandfather, with sad smiles and sky-blue eyes.
    Our parents didn’t let us attend the funeral at the Baptist church because my grandfather’s casket was going to be open. They said they wanted us to remember him as alive and active, not as a waxy corpse wearing bad makeup. Without seeing his inert