Billy Goat Gruff and Chinese Sally
Eric Davis
One of the earliest memories I have of my grandfather is visiting him at the coal mine he worked at for over forty years. It was late in the afternoon on a cloudless day, the sun beating down on the open, dry landscape, and the tar-like scent from the coal almost stinging the nose. He was nearing retirement and worked mostly in a small one-room office building with blueprints, tiny yellow notepads, and legal papers piled on the desk and tables. The one window, overlooking the entire coal mine, was covered in a thin layer of silt. Seeing an office space for the first time was one thing, but I was most impressed by the deep pit that had been dug out of the earth below, creating this vast ravine of dirt and rock where tiny, unfamiliar men scurried about like ants across a great ocean. Meanwhile, the motors of the Caterpillar machinery were churning and spurting, drowning out voices in conversation as they dug at the ground, dry mud caked against their frames and wheels.
Some of the workers climbed their way up towards the office, and I got a better look at them. When not in the pits, they’d tie their long-sleeved flannel shirts around their waists and bake in the sun. Their forearms and faces were almost bronzed, the same marks my grandfather had carried for years. His skin had a quality like a dank leather pouch left out too long in the sun. When I was young, he’d rub his cheeks and their five o’clock shadow against my face, just so I could feel the rough sandpaper-like quality of his whiskers. The sweat from the workday mixed in with his musky cologne, making the experience even more unpleasant and foreign for a five year old.
That day, he railed against some of the younger men who’d taken off their hardhats while working underground. He’d been there long enough to know of the dangers.
“Dumb suckers don’t have any sense,” he guffawed.
His father had immigrated to the country from France in the early 1900s, and like so many European migrants from that era, he’d settled down into mining work. It was only later in my life after I had read novels like Germinal and studied labor issues in the 19th and 20th-century, that I realized just how dangerous and damaging the job could be to the mind and spirit. As the oldest child in the family, my grandfather was pressured into supporting a relatively young and still unproven American family. Although labor reforms and improvements in work and health safety would eventually come, the daily routine, harsh atmosphere and long hours must have been debilitating.
My mother described the nights when he returned home, dazed by brutal repetition and ailing from aches and muscle cramps. He’d immediately set down at the table and soberly pick at the noodles and mashed potatoes that had been set out for dinner. It was a time for the whole family to be quiet, a way for them to show their respect at the sacrifice being made each day. Then he’d get up, retreat to his favorite chair, and bury himself in the newspaper or nightly news. Often, he’d have someone rub his callused feet with lotion, or massage his back, tightened by not only the weight of his workload but also its stress. The thought of him one day not returning, being buried under rock or earth in a cave-in, always entered his children’s minds. My grandmother, in her quiet and reserved dignity, may have also had these fears, but never admitted to them. Instead, she placed the matter in God’s hands and paid silent respect to her husband for undertaking the risk. It was part of the reality of their lifestyle, and it never occurred to her that it could be helped or changed.
“That’s just what we did in those days,” was a common response from her.
He must have brought me there that day to show me what he did most of his life. He was always showing me things—in his gardens, in his cellar, in the Des Moines Register and in magazines—but also to blow the big horn on top of the excavation site, signaling to everyone in the pit that it was lunch time or the end of the workday. The shock to my ears was thrilling, and from my perspective, gave my grandfather a sense of authority and power. I immediately associated this experience with the animated series The Flintstones where the rock quarry foreman blows the noisy pterodactyl and all the workers leave for home. My young mind didn’t make this analogy perfect, however. I began thinking of my grandfather as a kind of Fred Flintstone rather than the grumpy, humorless foreman. After all, Fred Flintstone was a character you could grow to like, even root for, not someone soured and angry all the time.
My grandfather also served in the army during World War II, becoming a veteran of the European battlefield theater. He provided my family and I flashes of his experiences in combat, but there was always a hesitancy to go too far into it. Questions about killing, being shot at, seeing friends die and hearing the conversations of the enemy over battle lines would surface, but they were always briefly and vaguely answered, quickly forgotten in a discussion on how bad the Chicago Cubs were playing or how the pinecones in the yard were piling up again. Once, when I interviewed him for my American history class in high school, I asked specifically about any memorable experiences he had in his unit. He replied that there were quite a few but wouldn’t go beyond that. Once, he admitted that while settling down for the night in a building, his unit discovered a dead German soldier. Fearing that his unit would come back for the body, they spent the entire night awake, anxious, and understandably shaken. He’d never talk about the leg injury he suffered at The Battle of the Bulge, an experience that was surely both horrible and relieving, since it kept him out of the war until Victory Day.
Experiences away from the battlefield were much easier for him to recount. He preferred to talk about his time at the military base in California before being sent over, or the sergeants he encountered in boot camp, or being the Golden Gloves boxing champion of his unit. He had no trouble in detailing the rehabilitation he did afterwards, or the time he spent training to become an Air Force pilot at the end of the war. They were experiences he could look back on more fondly, with emotionally neutral or even inspiring memories, away from the chaos and bad memories of the field.
* * *
With all of these unspoken memories and daily challenges, both physically and mentally, he had to find ways to release the tension. One of them came in the care of his gardens and fruit trees. While this also took plenty of physical effort, pulling up the never-ending weeds and clipping off green beans to load into countless bushels, it gave him the opportunity to show off the benefits and joy of his work. I remember reading of a steel mill worker who said his job would be much more tolerable if he could just point to a beam he’d made in a skyscraper. Writers and painters could point at their works with pride, and so everyone should have something like that. Not only that, it held a practical significance. The surplus of food was a reminder that if something drastic happened in the economy, as it did when he was a child during The Great Depression, his family would have something to fall back on.
He’d always show me his fruit trees and vegetable plots when I’d visit. He’d take pride in plucking smooth, recently ripe baby pears, almost a golden green, from the branches and inviting me to take a bite. He was pleased that I questioned why the pears and apples and peaches from his trees tasted better than the ones from the supermarket. The pesticides and chemicals used on the latter I now know is the easy answer. But the comparison was particularly rewarding for him, as he’d routinely complain about the prices of grapes or cherries at the market, equating them to crimes like robbery or assault.
“Those suckers ‘ill cheat you,” he’d shake his head. “They will! Ever notice that?”
He’d always bring a tiny three-legged stool out from the corner of the garage, which was neatly packed and organized with reed fishing poles, lures, spades and shovels hung on the walls, and large buckets of radishes, beets, and potatoes stored against the freezer door. Then, taking a small pocketknife from his jeans, he’d peel away at some fruit, tossing the skin to his obese rat terrier and offering me a bite, always curious as to how it tasted. Did it taste too ripe, too hard still or was it just right? Nearly every time I’d nod to confirm the latter.
“You won’t get that from the store,” he’d say, a smile creeping onto his lips.
* * *
There was also a creative release my grandfather used, going beyond physical work and into the mind. I remember him taking me to his bedroom for nap time as a child. It was a small room, the bed taking up nearly the whole space, and the blinds always drawn, letting in as little light as possible. We’d lie on the hard mattress, tuck ourselves tightly under the covers and he’d tell me the story of Billy Goat Gruff and the bridge troll.
“C’mon, feel my face,” he’d say and rub his whiskers against my cheeks so I’d know the tough texture of the goat’s beard. Then he’d wrinkle his face and push his nose upward to imitate a pig’s, so I’d have some idea of what the hideous troll looked like. The story involved Billy Goat Gruff’s son running away from home and wandering out to the troll’s bridge. The troll, preying on the innocence and naivety of the young goat, tricked him underneath with the promise of vegetable soup and apple pie, or whatever dish I wanted it to be.
“What do you like?” he’d ask me.
“Watermelon?”
“No, not that, something else, something sweeter.”
“Cranberry sauce?”
“Okay, that’ll do. The troll offered him cranberry sauce, just like the kind grandma puts out at Thanksgiving, and he gobbled it all up.”
Eventually, the young goat was captured and bound, and the troll’s sinister plan was revealed—the vegetable soup would have goat meat in it. But before his son could be skinned and eaten, Billy Goat Gruff would come to the rescue.
“Clip-clop, clip-clop,” my grandfather tried to imitate the sound of hooves against wooden bridge boards. Unable to fool or overcome the grizzled veteran, the troll was soon defeated in a great battle. Most of the time he ended up dead or unconscious, rammed into the hollowed-out oak tree he called home.
I was told both the troll and the bridge were real, and not only that, they were nearby. To reinforce my belief, he took me out on a country road past his house and pointed to a hollowed-out oak tree shooting up the side of a dusty bridge—the same dusty bridge that was described in our stories. Soon other elements of this setting were incorporated into the story, including the hen house at the farm next door, which my grandfather actually visited and bought eggs from.
I was not the only one who was the focus of these creative energies. When my sister was a child, she fell in love with a homely porcelain doll owned by my grandmother. The infatuation became so strong that it was eventually promised to her as an heirloom. But my grandfather, rarely missing an opportunity to tease the princess of the family, insisted he’d already pledged the doll to a young girl my sister’s age he called Chinese Sally. They’d met while the young girl was visiting her emigrated grandparents in his home town. He crafted an elaborate backstory for her, including a proper Chinese name and detailing her daring escape from Communist China to Hong Kong. She’d communicate to my sister and the rest of the family through letters where she avowed her love of the doll with the black freckles and red string yarn for hair. In subsequent years she became a nun and took a vow of silence, but later somehow became engaged to a Hong Kong business man and obviously had to leave the convent. These letters would usually arrive on Christmas and Thanksgiving when our relatives could share in the fun, but they also came at other times of the year just for my sister, my parents and I to enjoy.
When we asked if he’d heard from Chinese Sally recently, the answer was almost always yes. And in the rare instances it wasn’t, I’d see him sneak back to his bedroom for a few minutes. On the next visit a letter about her working in a shoe factory or studying in Paris was read aloud. He’d draw a crude sketch of a shoe or the Eiffel Tower in the corner of the letter. He was a terrible visual artist. On my mother’s birthday, she’d get a homemade card, written on a yellow Post-it note and featuring a self-effacing portrait of him, wishing her a happy birthday. It was charming, in a tacky sort of way.
A recurring event around Thanksgiving was to have all of his young nieces, nephews and grandchildren gather in his closet to be introduced to the infamous ghost in the attic. His accomplice in the illusion, my Uncle Dave, would sneak into the adjacent room and cause a big racket in the closet with a broom and theatrical moaning. The kids would then shriek and stomp through the house, and my grandfather would immediately regret playing the prank.
“Look at those suckers getting wound up,” he’d say, and yet the tradition continued each year.
* * *
At my grandfather’s funeral many of these experiences were recounted. I have always been struck by the difficulties in his life, from all those years in the coal mine to the horrible experiences he faced in the war, but I had never put into context all of the exceptionally creative things he did for the children in his family, or thought about him spending his free moments writing letters in the voice of a 13-year old Chinese immigrant and world traveler. It was a wonderful escape into a world that brought all kinds of ideas and excitement into my head—from danger to suspense to silliness and good-natured humor—the kind of things that will not be forgotten easily over time, no matter how hard life may seem.