A Night Heir

     My mother's father walked into our lives from the steps of a Greyhound bus.  Mom had hired a private detective to find him. He'd been riding the rails for years. I was sent to bed before I could picture mom as a young girl and him as a young man. 
    I've few memories of him. His visits were short and few. 
    One day Dad loaded us into the 53 Chevy and drove us through the cow pastures to a pond. My first fishing trip. Worms wiggled wildly on my frightened hand. Grandpa put the worm on my hook, gave the line a solid jerk, and said, "There! You can catch a whale with that line."  Then he told me that long, long ago all this land was under a large sea. 
    I could see a whale older than the hills in that pond. And I knew that I alone could catch him. I caught a perch, then another. They were quick to bite. "What... what would the whale want?" I asked myself. What could he be hungering for all these years? Dad was catching carp on dough balls. Ground up Wheaties and cinnamon and water. My brother was eating as much bait as he could steal. My little fish were far from a whale. Then the hot sun gave me an idea. I opened the cooler and pulled out a grape popsicle.  I put some on my hook and tossed in my bobber.
    The whale sighed and licked my grape popsicle. While no one 
looked I pulled the whale in and silently took him to the trunk of the car. We sat in the open trunk, the front wheels coming off the ground. 
    He was so big that all I could see of him was one soft, old eye, a curl of a wise lip and color of a pale night sky. He was glad to be out of the pond. It had been a very long time since he'd roamed his old home grounds. I petted him; he purred. Soon I could hear my family walking back to the car. I knew I was in a lot of trouble, but the whale promised that no one would see him, no one had seen him for thousands of years. Not only could they not see him, they couldn't even imagine him. He was right. Grandpa held up the two perch that I caught, he winked, and said, "I told you that you could catch a whale." 
    Dad drove us home and he cleaned the fish. I kept the whale under my bed. We had no bath tub in those days. (Just a wash tub like a big bucket.) At night he would tell me stories. Stories rich enough that we could both swim in them. Together we swam in oceans before the ideas, or the efforts, or the  rules of men were born. We swam in talk. I told stories of love, and friendship and we swam like the breeze. 
    One morning, Grandpa stood before us with his one satchel in hand and Mom would say, give him a hug good-bye. My brother and I 
would cry and beg him to stay.  Mom, and even Dad, would side with us. But he always said, he'd been in one place too long and he'd walk down the road and stop a Greyhound bus and leave our lives once again. 
    On this particular morning he rubbed my head, knelt down  and said, "I could never catch a whale, but I knew you could." My eyes got big and when he stood up I saw the whale tucked under his arm. He blew me a kiss as big as a lifetime, flipped a fin, and said, "I'm off to see the rest of this land sea." 
    My Grandfather passed away that winter. He had been picking oranges somewhere in Florida. I've grown now and I've moved away, next to the sea. Sometimes, in the pale night sky, I hear them, and I swim like the breeze about my  empty house. I keep a grape  popsicle in the window.