... My grandmother loved him dearly. After WWII, he became a mean drunk. My grandmother divorced him twice and would have remarried him again if he had become sober.
During one winter when my dad did not want him in an SRO or on the street, he came to live with us.
We had a mule named Hannibal. Hannibal tolerated adults barely, but that mule love my grandfather. We think he shared drinks with the old man. He had no car and he would walk miles to fetch a bottle way up the road. We'd find the bottles in the barn and especially in Hannibal's feed.
He loved a good fire but he missed often opening the damper and one night a few months after my sister was born (she and I have the same b-day, eight years difference). And my step mom (one of the nicest and toughest women I know) put her foot down. My dad talked to him as he drove granpa back to the city. "What's going to happen if you don't stop this drinking?"
"I'll die."
"Then what?"
"You stick a ham-bone up my ass and let the dogs drag me into the woods!"
He died about four years later. He was living in an SRO. My grandmother had my Uncle Fred go to the "hotel" to bring him over for Christmas EVe (she did this every year) so she could give him some new clothes and personal items. Where we parked in the lot and his window was first floor right in front of the car. Fred went in because he knew how he was on occasion. I could see them through the window shade. Fred came back. And for the first time ever he missed Christmas Eve.
That was the last time I saw him, through a window shade. He died in that room in March. He had a heart attack and knocked his nitro pills onto the floor. He died in his chair and sat for four days.
Without the ham-bone, we had him buried in the cemetery right next to woods. I hope he and the dogs and Hannibal are walking them still.
I still have his slide rule. A country boy who figured out higher math on his own.
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