By Elizabeth Hoppel

“I am tired—that’s the trouble, yes…just tired,” she thought, sighing deeply as she washed the dirt from beneath her fingernails in a large ceramic sink, filled to the quarter mark with soapy water. In the window’s reflection she saw wrinkles drooping down her face, every line etched like a tally mark, won in thankless labor. She began counting her wrinkles with her worries before looking away. It was a sick game, and she didn’t care to keep score. 

Her grandson, Paul Robert, ran by, shooing a chicken out through the screen door, neglecting the woman’s reminder that she’s “about ready to go down to the church—And you’ll be cleaned up if you know what’s good for you!—Five minutes,” she yelled, shaking her head with anticipated disappointment in his tardiness and growing indignation for the boy’s slovenly appearance. “He just doesn’t know what’s important—or he just don’t care. No matter what I tell him, nothing seems to sink through that skull of his,” she reflected as she replaced her work apron with a long, corded cross which rested above the purplish rash on her neck. 

But Paul did know a few important things that he had picked up while living with his grandmother. He knew that the chickens should be in a chicken coop, not a house, and if he did find one pecking around beneath the kitchen table, he’d better shoo it out. He also knew that if he failed to dress for Mass, his grandmother would force him to wash his face and ears and put on a white shirt and clean pants—and it would necessarily follow that they would be a good five minutes late for church—if he was lucky, that is.

His grandmother was certain that he didn’t have enough to fill his time with—that he’d either wind up playing with the neighborhood boys or in Hell—most likely both—if he didn’t spend his hours praying them litanies and walking to church and sittin’ through Father Andrew’s whole homily as his voice lisps on about something or other. But Paul Robert Wallace thought he’d rather like Hell—or at least he’d like Hell more than an eternity of getting pinched by his grandmother as he falls asleep during the Bea—tif—ic vision. Grandmother taught him that word yesterday and he liked it very much. She had a special talent for mixing long and ornate words in with simple ones like he knew. 

He whispered it to himself as he walked past the battered picket fence and back into the house, leaving the white hen safely in her coop. Grandmother told him the bea-tif-ic vision is “what you look at for all of eternity if you was real good and loved God and says your prayers.” Paul was pretty sure that some people a long time ago found the eta—mol—ogy (another new word his grandmother taught him) for beatific by smushing together “beautiful” and “terrific”—at least if Paul Robert Wallace created etymologies, that’s what he’d do. Regardless, he thought that sounded pretty nice for Heaven to be beautiful and terrific, so maybe he’d like it after all. He just hoped it wasn’t beautiful in the way his grandmother meant the word. She thought the old shaggy carpet covered in little swirly designs was so beautiful that you could hardly walk on it without her screeching out your name and telling you to “take them shoes off” or “get over here right now.” She also thought that big old glass vase above her little bookshelf was so beautiful that when it was out on the kitchen table, you’d best tiptoe around it and get out of there before it breaks—all that beauty sounded a little too fragile to him, and Paul thought it could never last an eternity if he was around. She also must’ve thought she had a beautiful voice with the way she hollered out them songs, but Paul Robert Wallace was fairly convinced of the contrary and—

“I hope yous ready!” Grandmother’s call broke through his brief contemplation of Heavenly mysteries and all at once he remembered that he was supposed to be procrastinating his preparations for Mass. The surest way he found to successfully waste time was to forget that he was wasting time at all. “Oh, yes ma’am!” he responded “I’ll be ready in a moment if you just let me change my shirt and wash my face and—” 

“I gave you five minutes. You’ll get in the car as you is if you knows what’s good for you!” 

While Paul Robert did not know what was good for him, he knew exactly what was bad for him, including his grandmother’s wrath, so he hastened through the screen door and into the car, hoping she wouldn’t notice the grass stain sliding down his right elbow or the mud spattered on his boots all the way up to his knees. Grandmother was always interested in his clothes matching real nice—no blues on blues and what-not—and looking clean, so Paul Robert developed a plan: if she asked, he would tell her that he thought his whole outfit looked just like himself, which was matching in a certain sense. After all, his mud-spattered blue jeans looked remarkably similar to his sunburnt face, which scattered a thousand freckles from his nose, cheeks, and forehead, and circled them around his eyes. The green also matched the stain on his flannel, but he wouldn’t mention that unless his grandmother noticed first.

His grandmother did not notice. And how could she be expected to? She felt dizzy as she pulled the car into drive, thinking, “at seventy-seven—or however old I am—how could I raise a child—a boy no less—without a soul to help or tell me what to do. Hell, I could die tomorrow, and Little Paul would be left once more with nothing but his three names and two hens.”

“—What sort of daughter dies just like that? And what sort of husband—father—” She blinked hard, trying to cut off her thoughts before they dissolved into the wrathful sorrow that she knew too well. A severe pain in her neck drew her back to the present as she clenched her teeth and gripped the steering wheel hard. Her pain subsided and the woman’s thoughts drifted mindlessly to her past. She had raised two daughters, the first of whom, Charolotte, left West Virginia at eighteen and never came back and nearly never calls. The other, Regina, married at twenty, divorced, and died at thirty-six, leaving behind little Paul Robert Wallace, who bears his father’s name and his grandfather’s resemblance. In his little erect gait and protruding lower lip, the woman saw her late husband. His shining, curious eyes brought back every love and disappointment that she had known too well—and trembled to know again. Looking at him, she saw only the two men who ruined her daughter’s life. To her, his youth signified only fear, despair, and poignant regret, refreshed with every one of his childish laughs and wandering, persistent questions—

“Grandmother! Look—look!” Upon this interruption to her thoughts the woman slammed on her brakes, hardly out of the driveway. Sprawled on a tuft of scorched grass beside the old ash tree lay a hundred filaments of dead leaves and dried grass. Looking closer, she saw two shivering and misshapen sparrow nestlings, freshly fallen from the roof of the shed. Stepping out of the car, his grandmother seethed through gritted teeth, “what have I told you about them damned birds?” 

Paul Wallace had two chores: the first was to ensure that the chicken coop was clean and secure and that the chickens were fed, and their eggs were gathered. The other was to weed the garden and to ensure that robins and sparrows did not build their nests within its gated parameter. Paul, however, disliked his second chore and took pains to ensure that it was nearly never completed—disguising their exposed nests and feeding the birds with worms he found among the weeds. He thought the mama bird might not like him too much, but he got along with the babies just fine.

 His grandmother scratched her neck absent mindedly as she reflected on Paul’s persistent laziness. Beneath her fingernails the swollen and oozing skin found no relief from her poison ivy infection, which had spread from her toes to her ankles and legs and now was strangely manifested on her neck. She supposed she got it gardening. She had labored hard in sowing and reaping their vegetables, feeding her family. “If you don’t work you don’t eat,” she had always said to her husband before he traded his job for whiskey and his life for death, proving her motto to be more prophetic than she imagined. A bitter scoff rose to her throat, but she swallowed it back. Looking at her grandchild, anger and defiance swelled within her and oozed out through her scowling lips, intensifying the wrinkles around her mouth. It was all out of her control now. She did not choose this. 

“It’s all about nature,” she concluded, “Maybe the boy’s just got a bad nature. He can’t do a damned thing because his grandfather couldn’t and wouldn’t. Nothing besides a good dose of religion can fix a nature like his,” she thought, as she turned around, remembering her intention to arrive to church on time. “If we don’t leave now, we’ll be late” she said, grabbing Paul by a tuft of his overgrown hair, pushing him onto the bench seat, and swinging the car door closed. Pulling harder than she knew, she tore a tuft of hair from his head. He winced but climbed back onto the bench seat with uncharacteristic silence and he prayed ardently that God would come and feed his little birds. 

Paul Robert Wallace, consumed by his ardent plea and reverent indignation, let time pass unnoticed as they drove through the hill country and past a papermill, stumbling out of the car and finding his place in a pew. Amidst his reflections he neglected to notice that sweat dripped from his grandmother’s forehead and fell from the tip of her nose as she toddled into the chapel and sat down in the pew before genuflecting. No—Paul’s attention was now totally immersed in a stained-glass window depicting a white bird. He observed intently as the larger of the birds bled out while her young sucked away her blood, pouring from her side. One tore the feathers away from her skin and another lacerated her flesh with its beak. He winced, his thoughts returning to his little nestlings.

Suddenly, he was jolted out of his reflections and instinctively bolted upright after noticing that the rest of the congregation had already risen for the gospel. Resolving to ask his grandmother about the stained-glass window later, he glanced back at her and noticed something rather odd. She was sitting down with her neck hunched over as though she was carrying a great burden, her glassy eyes peered downward, her face washed in tears. Now, Paul Robert knew that this was highly unusual behavior from the woman who typically spent her prayer time pinching and nudging Paul into stillness and glaring him into reverence. For the first time in his life, he nudged his grandmother in church and asked her why she wasn’t “following along like she ought to.” With this reminder, she labored to lift her eyes and sharply whispered, “No. I dun’t understand—I—I…” and she began to weep, quietly at first and then loudly until Paul thought that the whole church must’ve heard.

But Fr. Andrew, now halfway through his homily, continued as though deaf to the woman’s cries: “and what does this mean? How might we humble ourthelves and ‘become as little children?’ Mustn’t we labor like adulths, talk like adults, reason like adults—”

Father’s eyes nervously glanced to the woman who typically sat in reverent silence but now wailed and anxiously tapped the pew beside her. 

“But,” he continued with some hesitation, “the Lord reverences childhood as a thing to be athpired to, not grown out of—” regathering his confidence, Fr. Andrew’s voice lisped on. But Paul only faintly heard Fr. Andrew pound upon the pulpit occasionally as he rambled on about the “meel-stones” while his grandmother grew erratic, pounding on the pew with one hand as she squeezed Paul’s fingers with the other and rasped on. “I did not need…I never even wanted—Never!” Fr. Andrew’s eyes snapped anxiously, and his voice dropped immediately as he signaled to a large man in the front row, who in turn approached this strange woman and felt for her pulse while reaching for his phone. 

Paul counted the next moments as some of the strangest in his life as his grandmother was cradled in Father Andrew’s arms and wheeled off into an ambulance and he was left watching the flashing lights disappear, holding the hand of a large woman who smelled of cigarettes. That night, he walked into a chilly hospital room where his grandmother lay sleeping beside a large beeping machine. Although he heard the words “gangrenous legs” and “sepsis” her legs did not look particularly green and they did not use a septic tank anymore, so he let the words pass by without another thought. “She’s just sleepy. Even grandmothers get tired every once in a while,” he thought, approaching her slowly and placing his small, soft hand on her callused and wrinkled one, watching her breast rise and fall unrhythmically, her wheezing sighs breaking the chilly silence. He thought that the wrinkles beside her eyes that she called “crow’s feet” looked more like angels guarding her sleep, but he couldn’t be sure. They reminded him of tree rings, so he began counting them, gently touching each wrinkle with his little index finger, seeing if he could find out how old his shrunken grandmother was.

He barely counted to two before her eyes suddenly flashed open, and she saw her little Paul before her, staring at her with an expression of curiosity mingled with fear. Looking into his face, she noticed for the first time that freckles spattered across his nose like mud and large bug bites rose above his brow, one of which bled as though he had been pierced. His hands retracted and he began playing awkwardly with the white hospital sheet, but his curious eyes remained steady, looking into her own. It seemed that for the first time in her life, she saw him. In his piercing gaze she found some implicit accusation, some failure in her love staring back at her. Her eyes darted across the room and as she whispered the name of her own mother, and then proceeded to repeat her old chant: “No…oh…no.” Grasping his hand, she stared into her grandson’s eyes and pleaded, “help, dear Lord, help me.” A tear dribbled down Paul’s cheek and fell upon her hand, causing her to flinch, but, crossing herself slowly, her face softened, and she fell asleep.

Fr. Andrew and the large woman who smelled of cigarettes whispered outside the door, “Well, I can’t say I ain’t worried, Father… but we can give him a place to stay at least for the night—if it’d be any help, I mean. I know he’s got an aunt somewhere. I don’t know much beyond that.” Paul heard a muffled response, a brief pause, and then her trill reply, “It ain’t ordinary, you know. The way that whole lot suffers…you best pray long and hard that she gets it all over with and dies tonight…Perhaps that’s harsh but she’s suffered enough, you know. She ain’t had the easiest time of it, you know.” A long pause ensued before Father Andrew muttered an inaudible reply.

Paul thought for a moment and then decided that the woman must be right. The boy prayed ardently that she’d die that night as he muttered fragments of words he barely understood. Eyes blinking slowly, his head finally drooped, resting upon his grandmother’s arm as he fell asleep. She died just before dawn, holding her grandson’s hand between her clammy, cold fingers.

Elizabeth Hoppel received the 2025 Carlotta & Alvin Ewing English Award for this short story.