Beneath the Surface: Damp Clay

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The old man was losing a sense of himself. Clait simply didn’t know who he was anymore, and that made him angry and confused. He didn’t remember the sequence of events that made him Clait. Sometimes he didn’t remember his own name. He didn’t know what he did for work, if he was married or not, or if he had children or not. There were just snippets that would come and go, and he wasn’t sure if they were memories of his life or simply dreams. The last few days, there had been a young woman that the other people around him insisted wasn’t there, but increasingly, he spent time with her because she could see into his jumbled mind. She didn’t help make sense of things, but at least she understood.

Clait did have a son and two grandsons, and they would come to visit the old man in the nursing facility every day. Clait’s wife had died more than ten years before, and he had just passed his ninety-first birthday, still able to walk without assistance and mostly in control of his motor abilities. The nursing staff had to tell him their names each day, and their faces were always new to him. He really didn’t recognize the man who called him Dad or the young men who called him Gramp Clait, which he had always heard as “damp clay” because of his shotgun-induced hearing loss. Even today, it made him laugh by reflex, but sometimes their faces from different times would be there with a flash of memory that sped past his grasp. The young woman saw all that.

Clait was napping after lunch when the youngest grandson, Clait III, came into his room and quietly sat down. The young man had just turned thirty-three and remembered when his grandfather was hiking him up a trail to a high meadow in the Sierra. Clait III was eleven, and it was one of the first of dozens and dozens of trips he and his brother, and sometimes his dad, would take with Gramp Clait up to some obscure little Sierra stream where the old man had found beaver ponds or meadow water that held trout.

Clait III had brought a little box of flies to the room with him. The old man had given him the box years ago, and it held a prized fly the boy had saved for the past twenty years. Clait III took the box out of his jacket pocket, popped it open, and plucked the fly from a compartment, twisting it in his fingertips and marveling at its intricacy. It was a Royal Coachman the old man had tied on a size 18 hook. That day those twenty years ago, the brook trout had attacked that fly repeatedly, and the youngster, ambivalent up until then on this whole fishing thing, slipped onto the path of becoming a fly-fishing addict like his grandfather. One of the brookies was an honest sixteen inches long, and his grandfather said it was the biggest stream brook trout he’d ever seen. His excitement was contagious. That fly was a symbol for a lot of things to the young man.

The old man was hearing a shuffling sound, the sound of boots on loose soil, but he couldn’t see whose feet were making the noise. Was it his feet? He thought so and tried to see where he was going, but he couldn’t see that, either. There were just colors and amorphous shapes. It was a recurrent dream that frustrated the old man while he slept as much as his waking nightmare aggravated him. He opened his eyes and sat up, rubbing his first knuckle between his eyes, “Goddammit,” he sighed.

“Gramp Clait?” The old man laughed instinctively.

“Hello,” he said.

“I brought something to show you,” the grandson said.

He handed the man a pair of glasses from the table next to the bed, and the old man slipped them on. His mind was distracted and interested in the moment. It was all reflexive and normal. It felt good, because it didn’t require thinking, and the old man went with the easy flow of it, scooting back and sitting up in the bed.

“Do you remember this fly?”

The old man leaned forward and looked into the fingers and the soft blur

of fur and feathers on the tiny hook, and somehow the brain made the right connections without conscious effort blocking the process, and the scene was dancing right there in his mind. A smile formed on his face, big and genuine, as he remembered briefly and spoke reflexively. “ That’s your Royal Coachman, Turd.”

The vivid, moving image of his grandson twisting the fly from the big fish’s mouth and then slipping the brook trout back into the tail of the big pool slid away as the old man looked into the superimposed faces of then and now. He tried to hold onto the memory, but it was gone like the trout back into the pool. The present went with it, and the old man became sullen and angry when he didn’t recognize the face of the young man who was just there, right there, and then gone. “Goddammit,” he said and slouched back into the bed and turned away from his grandson. The young woman understood, and rubbed the old man’s head.

Clait III sat quietly for a minute. The old man was quietly sobbing, lost in the dense marsh his brain had become. There were images of tacos, and driving on freeways, and opening a gun safe, spinning through his brain like a spokes on a turning bicycle wheel. The long-gone writer in him liked that imagery, but then that pleasure was gone, too.

“Gramp Clait?”

The old man laughed, as he always did, mostly muscle reflex to a stimulus, but it broke the whirring nonsense clouding his head. The young woman smiled, too. “Let me tell you the story of that fly,” said Turd. That was his grandfather’s nickname for him since he was born. The third. Claiton the third, shortened to Turd by his grandfather. Hated by his mother and allowed to be used only by his grandfather — that rule was enforced by fists, if necessary, while growing up. Close friends could call him Trey or Tres, but never Turd.

He always thought his brother Jacques had it worse: Gramp called him Strap, which he told the boy’s mother was short for “strapping,” an innocent lie. Pet names were just one of many gifts his grandfather had given him and his brother. He thought about not having been called Turd for a long time until that day, and he knew that all the tumblers had fallen into place for a few seconds and there was memory and recognition for the old man. He had seen the old joy and heard the old voice, and then it was gone again.

The young man’s voice soothed the old man with its unrecognized familiarity, and he listened to the story, not understanding it had been told hundreds of times over the years by both of them. He showed the old man the fly again when he was telling about how difficult it was to tie, and the old man looked and nodded, briefly seeing his own fingers wrapping fine nylon thread around feathers and a hook, and then there was just the voice again and a story he’d never heard. He nodded off to sleep with the young woman rubbing his head and hearing his grandson’s soft voice, slipping back into the dream where he heard shuffling feet, trying to figure out where he was headed, and his mind took him to places unimaginable.


Clait III phoned his father to tell him the old man had remembered briefly and had used his nickname, calling him Turd. They laughed. It was a happy moment in what had been two years of progressively sadder ones, and he wanted to share. When he called his brother and heard him say “Hello,” he asked, “Is this Strap?” They both laughed. Little victories became as big as weekend fishing and hunting trips from years ago.

It was Jacques’s turn to visit the old man that evening, and his brother’s story sent him out into his shop in the garage before heading over to the nursing home. He found a piece of European black walnut, sliced off a finger-sized piece and quickly sanded it into the size of a pack of stick gum.

The old man was sitting in a chair, looking out the window as twilight settled out of the sky. He had always loved the transition times from light to dark and dark to light, and his mind was clear and empty for the moment, content with watching the changing light. The young woman was keeping him company quietly. He was still sitting there fifteen minutes after it was dark when Jacques came into the room.

“Gramp Clait!” The enthusiastic greeting made the old man laugh. This grandson was the high-energy one who didn’t have the patience to be a good fly fisherman, but he loved the long hikes and companionship on fishing trips and bided his time until hunting season, when he could chase quail and chukar with the old man, his father, and his brother.

Jacques pulled the piece of wood out of his pocket and handed it to the old man, who was looking up into his face without recognition.

“What kind of wood is that?” he asked, handing the old man the wood block.

The old man instinctively smelled deeply and smiled. For the second time in one day, a real memory flooded into the old man’s mind. He knew the wood intimately. When he cut small blocks like the one he held in his hand, the aroma would fill his nostrils. The dark European walnut was his favorite. The smell would fill his imagination with visions of the great forests of Eastern Europe and how these ancient trees had pulled up the long human history into their roots and branches, storing them as a loamy aroma told through cutting and sanding. The old man sat there a long time, smiling. Each time he smelled the wood, the pleasant imagery filled his thoughts without struggle.

Jacques was just a face in the room, but the old man clutched the wood and was smiling his old smile when the staff came in to help him to bed for the evening. He was holding the wood when Jacques kissed his forehead goodnight, and the old man smiled at him and smelled deeply of the small wood block.

In his dreams that night, the old man slipped into the shuffling feet dream, but this time, he knew where he was going. With the smell of the wood still in his nostrils, he followed the footsteps into his old garage shop, and he was making quail calls with his grandson Jacques as a young teenager. He was showing the boy the different hardwoods, cutting blocks to the correct size and explaining to the boy the different smells — the nutty, sweet smell of maple and buckeye; the musty, pungent smell of myrtle; and the headache-causing smell of ironwood. Then he showed the boy the aromas of the walnuts — the California walnut, the Eastern black walnut, English walnut. All of them are rich and thick, but he saved the dark, rich European walnut for last because it was the best, the best smelling and the best for calls.

In his dream, the pair went through the whole process of making a call, from selecting the wood, to shaping it on the sander, to splitting and routing in the slot for the rubber-band “reed,” and then the blowing slot. They would drill and rout out a sound chamber, cut lanyard holes, and then spend nearly an hour sanding the finished call from 100-grit down 800-grit smoothness. Then they would hand rub in the oil finish. Finally, they would test the finished call, Jacques being coached to make the perfect imitation of the quail. The whole time, the rich smells of the wood would be filling their nostrils. The old man was dreaming happily for the first time in a long time, clutching the block of wood.


Jacques woke up out of his own dream that same night. In his dream, he was with the old man as they ran uphill after a covey of mountain quail, but suddenly, the hillside was tilting steeper and steeper and had become a cliff where Jacques was clinging while the quail simply continued to get farther away. Then Jacques saw his grandfather soaring like a hawk sailing over the crest of the hill. There was the sound of a shotgun firing, and now Jacques was running to his grandfather and then saw him holding a plump mountain quail and admiring its plumage. They were both smiling, and then there was a whirring of wings behind them, and as Jacques turned around, he was jabbed in the legs by sagebrush, and it jolted him awake.

Jacques lay there a long time thinking about the old man. There was a quail call made by his grandfather on his nightstand, and he blew the melodic “te-qui-la” call perfectly, smiling in the darkness. The Brittany, who had been asleep on the foot on the bed, lifted her head and perked her ears. She probably had been having her own hunting dream, and her twitching and kicking legs probably woke up Jacques. The dog jumped up and started dancing, but Jacques scratched her ears, and she slumped back against him, going back to sleep again.

Clait Jr. had a busy work schedule, but he wanted to go by to see his dad after hearing the boys’ stories from the day before. A man could hope there would be relief from the dementia, and they could be themselves again. He could dream that could happen, couldn’t he?

It was just getting light, and he would frequently find the old man sitting looking out the window, watching the coming light on these early visits. The facility was quiet this early in the morning, and he waved to a familiar nurse at the station and walked down to his father’s room. The old man was in his bed facing the window. Clait Jr. walked around the side of the bed, saw the old man still clutching the block of walnut, and put his hand down on his cool forehead. Holding it there, he fought back tears, and then smiled. The old man was gone.


Three months later, the Clait Jr., Strap, and Turd were standing on the bank of one of the old man’s favorite mountain streams in a high meadow. They all had known where the old man wanted to be when he died. He had told them precisely where to spread his ashes. The old man also liked apricot brandy, so after spreading the ashes, they pulled out a flask, splashed a shot or two into tin cups they carried, and toasted “Gramp Clait.”

Clait Jr. stopped midsip and looked around their feet where they’d spread the ashes. He started smiling.

“Damp clay,” he said, and then he started laughing quietly, looking from his sons to the wet meadow. Then the boys started laughing, too. The old man was back where he’d always been.

They fished through dusk and then sat quietly on some boulders and watched day turn to night, finishing off one flask and getting into a second. They didn’t talk to the young man and young woman who were right there watching the three of them; the couple talking happily, holding hands. Didn’t the three men see them? They seemed like part of the family.

As the three men were hiking back to the truck with just a full moon to guide them, they all leaned into the steep, uphill climb ahead of them, moving up the deer trail steadily. They all knew that once at the top of the ridge, it was a more gradual walk across a broad and open sage-and-pine bench, then a steep drop back down to the truck.

Clait Jr. had followed his dad up this trail many times as a child, as a teenager, and then as a young man with his own two boys in tow. Now he was at the front of the line with his grown boys trailing him. He smiled at the silence as they worked up the slope, surging forward almost as a single unit. He noticed that the hill seemed steeper. There were new pains, but he knew they could be overcome that evening and on future trips here and back up this hill.

When Clait Jr. was just a boy, he remembered the first time he’d heard one of his Dad’s favorite sayings, one they had all heard over the years. The pair had been fishing the meadow in late September. The aspens were golden, and fall colors splashed across the meadow and hillsides like a painter’s palette. The young Clait had just caught a brilliantly colored spawning male brook trout about a foot long. It seemed to have more colors than its small body could hold, radiant, with gold, lavender, and crimson trying to be contained by the rich browns and blacks and framed by the white-lined fins. The old man asked him to hold up the fish so he could see it before releasing it back into the water.

“Claity, where else can you catch sunrises and sunsets like that all day long?” said the old man. Clait Jr. thought of the trout the three of them had caught that day as they leapfrogged each other up the stream’s pools, and then hearing through the willows one of his sons say, “I just released the prettiest sunrise of the morning,” or the other one laughing, “Strap, I just caught that big sunset you missed seeing. Sometimes you just need to be more patient for the colors to develop.” The old man’s expression was now part of their fishing vocabulary. As they climbed the difficult ridge, he knew the two boys were also remembering all the times they had been there and so many other places with their grandfather.

At the crest, Clait Jr. stopped to let his heart and breathing recover. Clait III, the last in the three-man line, looked at his brother and dad in the moonlight, moisture on their brows and cheeks from the difficult climb.

“I felt like Gramp Clait was there with us all day — and grandma, too. Did you sense that?” he asked both of them between deep, recovering breaths.

Strap and Clait Jr. both nodded, smiling in the dark.

“Dad always believed time doesn’t exist in the sense we are forced to live it,” said Clait Jr.

They stood there quietly, thinking about the old man and how much of him they each carried with them.

“Do you suppose this was where he proposed to grandma?” asked Strap.

There was distant flirty laughter from the stream meadow below, and they all looked and strained to hear. It seemed so close, yet so far.