Page 63

By Jack Joseph Smith

remember being taken into his errie and old wooden room. There were old relatives with wrecked faces standing at the doorway and they parted from me as I passed through with my mother. He was lying in a large and heavy laced wooden carved bed. The bed had a high back that through shadows across the other peoples faces standing around him, but his face was so white with his hair that I could see his features shadow themselves before I was near him. It was like a starless night when you are looking at an early moon the second night after it is full without a complete circle of distinction and pale with gray lines moving in the center of the coming dark. Once he had chased me because of my mischief on a bright winter day down a trail that led into the woods that surrounded his home. I wasn't afraid of him then, because everything that was going on was so real for him and for me. And I just ran and ran never really thinking about him catching me and only knowing that I was running and feeling the excitement that I wanted so strongly within me that he was so much a part of. And now I was not afraid looking down at his whithering eyes and drawn chin and wrinkled ears that looked so big on the outside of his boned and blue vained head. His dying was only strange to me because he had already gone and his acceptance became the distance that all were so fearful of in the last moments when before their eyes they were watching something they were unsure of leave. I was led away after he had told me that Michael was also his name and the great Michael had been the one who had conquered the devil and I should always remember that and look for the good in my life. In the front room under the dim red lit chandelier after a thousand people and moments had passed under and within the many shaped grandfather clock above me, I heard in whispers

Original Scan

Page 63

AI Interpretation

GPT

Brought into the dying grandfather's room, the child sees a body already half gone and receives from him a final naming, linking Michael to the conqueror of the devil and to the search for good in life.

The scene is intimate and eerie rather than sentimental, with wood, lace, wrecked faces, and whitening flesh making death feel visible long before it is announced. Memory of being chased by the same grandfather on a bright day keeps the dying body tied to earlier vigor and mischief.

Claude

The narrator is taken past old relatives 'with wrecked faces' to Grandfather Faolain's carved deathbed, where the old man's white face looks like a waning moon; he remembers being chased down a winter trail by him, and hears him say that Michael was also his name, the great Michael who 'conquered the devil'.

The child meets death without fear, seeing in his grandfather's acceptance 'the distance that all were so fearful of'. The memory of the joyful chase and the Michael blessing turn the deathbed into a handing-on of identity, while the page ends suspended on whispers under the red chandelier and grandfather clock.