Throughout my childhood, I’d heard so many of my grandmother’s stories about 'Old Billy Hessong' that I was convinced I knew him. He died a decade before I was born, but I knew in my little-boy heart that I had been by his side for dozens of adventures.      

My grandmother sometimes had trouble remembering what happened an hour before, but she could tell stories with vivid detail about events that took place before our old farmhouse had indoor plumbing. Her favorite story subject was a character named Old Billy Hessong. He was a friend of the family many years before when Grandma was a young wife and mother. He rented the old long cabin on the border of our small farm and helped my grandfather take in crops, tend a small herd of cows, and cut trees for lumber and firewood.     

The Old Billy Hessong I got to know from her stories was both larger that life and completely human. He was a war hero many times over, a great prankster and master storyteller himself, a crafty woodsman who could live off berries and shrubs for as long as he liked, a legendary hunter who bagged more deer and bear than anyone in local history. But Grandma’s tales also revealed a man like every man. Once he disappeared for a year and didn’t tell anyone where he went, leaving one day without a word, then returning as if he’d never been gone. She even once told us that he slipped tiny slivers of lead into the ginseng roots that he sold to city slickers--more lead, more weight, more money.     

As a child, I thought my grandmother was the oldest person in the world. She had lived on our farm for more years than I could comprehend and had been a widow longer than my own parents had been married. Her stories seemed to be from another age of the earth, and I usually pictured them in grainy black and white. I once asked Grandma if she knew Lincoln, a question that did not go over well with her. Her grumpiness was legendary, and my sisters and I knew not to cross her. She scoffed at our first experiences with girlfriends and boyfriends, calling our early romances "silliness." She refused to carry a cane but walked around our farm leaning on a garden hoe, occasionally chopping at the ground to prove to anyone who might be watching that she could still work as hard as she had all of her life.      

But she also had a soft side, which, unfortunately, her grandchildren didn’t really appreciate. She would often walk through the door connecting our kitchen to hers and run her fingers through our hair while we ate our breakfast. We flinched and wolfed down our cereal before running to catch the school bus that wasn’t even due for half an hour. She made us pick bushels of vegetables for any visiting relative--even though they had overflowing gardens of their own at home. With the railing in one hand and her garden hoe in the other, she climbed to the tub in our upstairs bathroom to take a bath every week. When she kissed us each night before she went to bed, and we said, "Goodnight Grandma, see you in the morning," she walked away saying, "Oh if I live that long. It’s a horrible thing when a body gets old ..." her voice trailing off as she shuffled away to her bedroom.     

What I remember most about Grandma was her stories. One night while sitting at the kitchen table, she told me the story of how Old Billy Hessong had a stroke and spent the last twenty years of his life unable to walk or talk, confined to my little upstairs bedroom--in the very same bed where I slept every night.     

Of course, Grandma chose to tell me this particular story right before my bedtime when I was nine years old, an age where the borders between fantasy and reality are blurred, to say the least. As I lay awake in bed that night, I was unsure of only one fact: whether or not the ghost of Old Billy Hessong could or could not actually read my thoughts. That his ghost existed, I was certain. That his ghost was there in my bedroom, I was certain. That his ghost could see and hear me, I was certain. That his ghost had been present in my room every night of my life up to that point, I was all too certain.     

"Hello ghost of Old Billy Hessong," I thought in my terrified brain that night as I stared at the ceiling, taking care not to look around the room for fear of actually seeing his ghost--or to close my eyes, giving his ghost the opportunity for a sneak attack. "I’ve heard lots of stories about you from my grandma, Mr. Ghost, and I feel like I know you. I’m very sorry you had a stroke and had to stay shut up in my room in this bed for twenty years until you died. I wish you could have gotten outside to hunt bear and collect ginseng roots. I like you very much ghost of Old Billy Hessong. I hope you like me too. I’ll try not to close my eyes and fall asleep tonight, but if I do, please, sir, please don’t kill me in my sleep."

Just in case his ghost couldn’t actually read my thoughts, I repeated the whole speech in a strangled whisper, loud enough for any ghost to hear, but soft enough that my sisters, parents, and grandmother asleep in various rooms of the house couldn’t hear me.     

Eventually, I did drift off to sleep that night, and, to my amazement, the ghost of Old Billy Hessong didn’t kill me. I survived the next night as well, and the night after that, and every night I slept in that little bed in that little room until I packed up and went to college at age eighteen. Over the years, I came to a truce with the ghost of Old Billy Hessong. In exchange for him not killing me every night in my sleep, I would occasionally mull over his stories in my mind as I lay in bed, reflecting on his life and keeping him alive in my memory and my dreams. Not long after I left home, my twin sister (who apparently either never heard Billy’s story or didn’t believe in ghosts) dropped out of college and took over my room, replacing Billy’s stroke-bed with her own.

On my trips home after that, I actually slept in the guest room of the only home I had known for eighteen years.     

As I have grown into adulthood and early middle age, the stories of Old Billy Hessong have faded from my memory. I no longer feel the same sense of having known him that I felt as a child. When I think about him now, I mostly think about how childhood imaginations can be strange and amazing things. Sometimes I tell the story of Billy’s ghost to my Children’s Literature classes as an example of how family stories can inspire historical fiction. I’ve even considered writing a ghost story children’s book about a young boy who hears an innocent story from his grandmother, then lies awake all night hoping the ghost in his room can’t hear his thoughts.

But Old Billy Hessong’s story has never completely left my thoughts, and recently I’ve been able to think of him. I’ve realized that no one takes a casual friend into her home for twenty years. Such an act requires an immense commitment of time and resources, to say nothing of the psychological dedication of giving your life over to the long-term care of another human being. He must have had some kind of family to care for him after his stroke. There must have been some kind of hospital or institution that could have taken him in. But instead, my grandmother, a young, recently widowed woman with a house full of kids, brought this bed-ridden man into her home.     

It has taken me more than thirty years to understand something that I couldn’t fathom when I was nine. The only kind of non-family member who would take in someone and provide twenty years of care is a lover. After decades of Grandma’s Old Billy Hessong stories bouncing around on the edges of my consciousness, it has finally dawned on me that my grumpy, prim, prudish grandmother and Old Billy Hessong must have been lovers.     

No one in my family, least of all Grandma herself, would ever have even hinted that they were lovers. My family’s gossip was usually one of two types: rumors about people outside our family that could possibly be true, or rumors about people within the family were extremely unlikely. Something that might be true about someone in the family just wasn’t proper gossip material for us. The fact that Grandma’s relationship with Billy was never mentioned around our house serves only to give it more credence. Looking back on it now, the whole situation was probably something that all of the adults knew about but simply had no inclination to talk about when they gathered around the Thanksgiving dinner table while I sat eavesdropping on the grown-ups from the table with the other kids in Grandma’s adjoining kitchen.     

Now that I’m an adult too, the whole situation makes me understand my grandmother more and see her in a different light. She’s no longer just the grumpy family matriarch holding court at mid-summer family reunions--"Grandma Sheirer" as she was known to nearly everyone in the area. But I now also see her as "Annie," a young woman who had fallen in love, married, bore half a dozen children and outlived half of them, been widowed at a tragically early age, built bombs and bullets in a World War I munitions factory, founded and operated her own one-room schoolhouse, discovered love again, then lived a different kind of tragedy when her new love soon fell victim to a debilitating long-term illness.     

Not long after my father died, my mother told me the story of moving into our home with my grandmother. Dad was Mom’s second husband. Her first was killed in a motorcycle accident while she was a pregnant teen-aged bride. Dad married her and adopted her son, bringing them to live in his childhood home down the hall from my bedroom where Old Billy Hessong lay slowly dying. For the first few months they were there, Grandma wouldn’t even speak to my mother. Mom assumed it was because, in those days, my father marrying a young widow with a child was considered a minor scandal. But now I know the real reason Grandma was cold to her. Mom got a second chance at a full life and true love after her first husband died--Grandma’s second chance turned into a lifetime as noble widow and two decades as nursemaid to a broken man.     

If I could go back to my childhood knowing what I know now, I would be less inclined to pull away from her touch and sneak to the other room when she repeated her stories for the fifth time. I would have tried to connect with this woman and her mysterious past, to let her know that I knew about her pain and that I knew she was so much more than the shriveled old woman she had become. I would have let her know that she could tell me all about it, that I would keep my mouth shut. I would have let her know that I loved her more for the secret we could have shared.     

When grandma was nearly ninety, she broke her hip--a death sentence at her age. She had been descending the stairs after her weekly bath. Near the bottom, she lost her grip on the railing and tumbled just a few feet, but that was enough. The doctors did what they could, but Grandma needed full-time care, much more than my twice-widowed mother could provide now that she was nearly seventy herself. So Grandma spent the last year of her life in the "rest home" operated by one of our distant cousins. Her mind and memory, so sharp for so long, quickly faded during that painful final year. Her stories were replaced by crying and begging to go home.     

Shortly before her death, I came to see her. By then I was nearly thirty, a full-grown man. When I told my confused Grandma who I was, she had trouble believing I wasn’t the little nine-year-old boy who listened to so many of her stories. She seemed upset by her confusion, going from tears to slurred curses and back again in her frustration and pain as she writhed around the bed. I was about to leave so she could calm down and rest, but just for a moment her eyes cleared, and she was herself again.     

"Billy," she said in a clear voice, sitting up and reaching for my hands. "It’s so good to see you again Billy. Oh, I love you Billy."     

I assumed she thought I was my father, her son William, Jr., dead for nearly a decade then, or her own husband William, Sr., gone for more than sixty years. We held hands for a moment, and I said, "It’s good to see you too. I love you, too." Then she sighed and lay back on her pillows and drifted off to sleep.     

A month later, she was dead. And I’m not sure now which Billy she thought I was that day. I get the most comfort thinking she had one last chance to say good-by to a young and healthy "Old Billy Hessong."

Author's Biography

John Sheirer teaches public speaking, writing, and literature at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut. 

Some of his most recent personal essays can be found in these e-zines: Ethical Oasis, Naked Humorists, Faculty Shack, Laughter Loaf, The Writer’s Life, The Irascible Professor, and Nights and Weekends (where he is a regular contributor).

E-mail John at JMSheirer@aol.com

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