I reluctantly moved to the bed. I knew Grandpa wouldn’t want to have Mom undress him, but I
didn’t want to, either. He was so skinny and frail that his coat slipped off easily. When I
loosened his tie and opened his shirt collar, I felt a small leather pouch that hung from a thong
around his neck. I left it alone and moved to remove his boots. The scuffed old cowboy boots
were tight and he moaned as I put pressure on his legs to jerk them off. I put the boots on the
floor and saw why they fit so tight. Each one was stuffed with money. I looked at the bills that
lined the boots and started to ask about them, but Grandpa’s eyes were closed again.
Mom came back with a basin of water. “The doctor thinks Grandpa is suffering from heat
exhaustion,” she explained as she bathed Grandpa’s face. Mom gave a big sigh, “Oh hinh,
Martin. How do you suppose he got here?”
We found out after the doctor’s visit. Grandpa was angrily sitting up in bed while Mom tried to
feed him some soup.
“Tonight you let Marie feed you, Grandpa,” spoke my dad, who had gotten home from work just
as the doctor was leaving.
“You’re not really sick,” he said as he gently pushed Grandpa back against the pillows. “The
doctor said you just got too tired and hot after your long trip.”
Grandpa relaxed, and between sips of soup he told us of his journey. Soon after our visit to him
Grandpa decided that he would like to see where his only living descendants lived and what our
home was like. Besides, he admitted sheepishly, he was lonesome after we left.
I knew everybody felt as guilty as I did—especially Mom. Mom was all Grandpa had left. So
even after she married my dad, who’s a white man and teaches in the college in our city, and
after Cheryl and I were born, Mom made sure that every summer we spent a week with
Grandpa.
I never thought that Grandpa would be lonely after our visits, and none of us noticed how old
and weak he had become. But Grandpa knew and so he came to us. He had ridden on buses for
two and a half days. When he arrived in the city, tired and stiff from sitting for so long, he set
out, walking, to find us.
He had stopped to rest on the steps of some building downtown and a policeman found him. The
cop, according to Grandpa, was a good man who took him to the bus stop and waited until the
bus came and told the driver to let Grandpa out at Bell View Drive. After Grandpa got off the
bus, he started walking again. But he couldn’t see the house numbers on the other side when he
walked on the sidewalk, so he walked in the middle of the street. That’s when all the little kids
and dogs followed him.
I knew everybody felt as bad as I did. Yet I was proud of this eighty-six-year-old man, who had
never been away from the reservation, having the courage to travel so far alone.
“You found the money in my boots?” he asked Mom.