Family Secrets by Ruth Barrett

 
    When I was just a little kid, I knew that my grandfather hated me to death. The feeling was mutual.
    Thankfully, I didn’t have to see him too often: only at major holidays and the odd summer weekend up at the shared family cottage. Whenever occasions forced me into close proximity, I did my best to avoid him by hanging around with my cousins or disappearing into my room to read. Sometimes I had no choice in the matter--like over the July long weekend in the mid-1970s when I was ten, and Mom gave the dreaded order “Jill, why don’t you go outside and spend some time with your Grandpa?”
                I knew better than to protest. As his only daughter, Mom doted on her Dad and seemed oblivious to what an old brute he was to my cousins and me. He was disruptive, demanding and apparently immortal. I repressed a sigh and went out the kitchen door of the cottage, leaving my mother and Aunt Carol to the dinner preparations. Pausing at the top of the porch steps, I scanned the sloping yard and spotted Grandpa sitting in a Muskoka chair under the shade of a massive old willow tree.     
    I was in no hurry to join him. I started across the lawn, kicking at fallen twigs in the grass and racking my brain for something we could talk about. It was hopeless. I don’t think Grandpa had ever liked women all that much and he seemed even less fond of little girls. For as long as I had memory, every attempt at conversation between us had ended in stalemate. His icy glare, and his milky, blind left eye made me so nervous that I’d barely manage a low mumble, and then the half-deaf old fart would shout:
    “What? Speak up, lass!”
    Impatiently banging his cane, he’d bark in a raspy voice with a thick Glaswegian accent he’d never lost over the decades, even though he’d emigrated in his teens just after World War One. I could barely understand him half the time and that just got him even more agitated with me. He’d curse and mutter to himself, and we’d end up sitting in an awkward silence. I didn’t like being near him--he had a sour, musty odour that made me queasy. I'd avoid eye contact and stare in morbid fascination at his ugly hands clutching his cane or the arm of his chair. The arthritic knuckles bulged and gave his fingers the appearance of claws tipped with hard yellow nails, usually ragged and in need of cutting. I lived in horror of him touching me. Luckily for me, he rarely did.
                But there was something more malevolent that went beyond all of the childish physical repulsion: something irrational that I couldn’t find the words to articulate at ten-years-old. Even now in my forties looking back, putting a name to the exact sentiment is deeply elusive. I’d felt that way as long as I could remember--ages before that pivotal July cottage visit. Maybe it was because my dog Benny would slink away cowering whenever Grandpa tried to pet him: the old man was the only person alive who Benny wouldn’t rush to greet with sloppy kisses. It was as if he’d sensed the same malignancy in him that I could feel. But--as my parents would endlessly remind me--poor Grandpa was just an old man made weak by a series of strokes. He was lonely, having been a widower for twenty-five years. And he was my Grandfather. His blood flowed in my veins. One day, my mother would scold, I would be old and lonely too… and how would I like it if my own grandchildren avoided me whenever I came to visit? Yet the primeval guilt her words provoked in me did nothing to lessen my feelings of unspeakable dislike.
                I was halfway to the tree when I heard the screen door bang shut. I turned to see my older cousin Robert thumping down the porch steps, obviously delegated to the same pre-dinner duty as I had been. I gladly waited for him, and we silently walked together underneath the canopy of the willow. At least I wouldn’t be stuck all alone with the miserable creep.