WHEN I LAID MY BURDEN DOWN [TWO OF TWO]

By the time August came along, it seemed Uncle Ben would live to be the last man on Earth. I was pretty sure of it. He would be the one man alive after a nuclear war, wandering about the great wasteland of Earth with a beard and rosy cheeks like some romantic farmer from a dust bowl movie. He’d find the last woman alive and they’d breed a whole new race into existence.
They’d be the future Adam and Eve.
“Why do you hate me, son?” he asked one day, as we sat out on the porch together, eating Margie’s fresh-made peanut clusters.
I admit, I was startled. His directness cut me in half and my entrails were suddenly hanging out in broad daylight. I was caught red-handed, thinking derisive things about Uncle Ben’s beer belly-- and he read my mind without so much as a flinch. I was disturbed.
“I don’t hate you!” I finally protested with a warm, eerie smile. “I love you to bits, Uncle Ben. You know that.”
“Like hell you do,” he said, spreading open the newspaper on his knee.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I cried offended.
“It means that you’re only waiting for me to die so that you can get your hands on my money.”
I laughed heartily. Suddenly it seemed like I could no longer lie or be embarrassed or delicate about his illness and ever-approaching death. He showed such a sweet, honest, calm disgust of me that I couldn’t help but feel entirely cozy in his environment. I wondered why I had never felt like this around him before. It seemed I was always treating him like some glass vase-- and now I felt very comfortable about banging him around like a basketball. It was a great, mutual feeling.
“I might be waiting for you to die, grandpa,” I said, “but I’m not after your three dollars. You can rest assured about that.”
He turned the page of the newspaper and answered in a rhythmic, dull voice. “Well, you just wait and see. I’ll donate those three dollars to the Church of the Reconciler down the street. And then what’ll you do?”
“The first thing I’m going to do after the funeral is turn on the TV and watch Cops for three hours straight in peace and quiet.”
Uncle Ben seemed disgusted, but I have to admit, he was disgusted with style. He smiled a wonderfully crooked, cynical smile that revealed depths of greatness.
“So,” I said, after we had watched a group of squirrels tackle each other and do a few other routines that were beginning to make me feel consciously embarrassed with Uncle Ben there beside me, “are you ready to meet your maker?”
“Yep.”
“Rinsed off all those sins?”
“Yep.”
“Well, aren’t you special,” I said.
He chose another peanut cluster and smiled as he popped it in his mouth in one awful whole.
“You’re going to end up choking if you eat like that-- and then you’ll never be able to die of cancer.”
Intense joy streamed from the little slits that were his smiling eyes. I smiled, too.
“I killed a man in my day,” he said through the peanut cluster. “Trust me, the priest who saved my soul didn’t have it easy.”
“Yeah right.”
He nodded like a weather-beaten man. The rosy image of the universal grandpa with his friendly gut hanging out and the smiling innocence melted into a weird little gnome. His skin seemed green to me, wrinkled and sick-- his eyes tired and his hands trembled. This was no longer the man who watched nature shows and marvelled at polar bears.
“Yep, I’ve done just about everything that a man’s not supposed to do,” he said. “I put my fingers everywhere, did it all, had it all, and finally developed cancer for the good of mankind I guess.”
I no longer felt like talking. I focused back on the squirrels.
“The days were dark, son,” he continued. “You don’t know what it’s like to hate yourself. I couldn’t eat or sleep.”
I was horrified like a little kid who stands looking up at a tall, greasy stranger with a glittering piece of candy in his hand.
“But glory hallelujah when I laid my burden down,” he said, like the sweet man that he never was. “The priest slaved hard over me, like a decent servant of god ought to. It wasn’t easy... but he saved my soul and washed away my many sins. He told me so-- told me I could go home and live the last few days of my life like a newborn baby. I’ve been redeemed.”
I patted him on the back-- and I meant it from the bottom of my heart.
“Good for you, Uncle Ben.”
“Yep,” he said, squinting at the fading sun and reaching for another peanut cluster. “If I believed in religion, I’d sure have it made.”

When Uncle Ben finally died, I broke down and cried like a two-year-old whose toy truck had been taken away. I kissed the old man’s ceramic cross and the other religious souvenirs that symbolized his petty attempts to save his soul, and felt miserable and cruel and helpless-- it was horrible.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ervin!” my wife said, “First you act like an asshole because he won’t die, and now that he’s dead, you’re acting like a whole gang of assholes. Can’t you just be normal?”
I looked at her with a quivering lip. “Margie, he was a decent man. A good old dog.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Stop acting like you lost your leg in the war. Go take out the trash, will you?”
So I took out the trash and stopped acting like I lost my leg in the war.
But still, to this very day, I can’t eat one of my wife’s peanut clusters without a sharp pain in my heart. And when I see squirrels doing the naughty thing, I always break down and cry.