Grandpa needs a name now. He has needed one for a long time, but I have been hesitant to give him one. The man confuses me. I knew and know him as two people. Stories told to me, images locked in my mind. As I look down at the compass I use to try to find my way through the story of my grandpa and me, the needle spins. I have decided to call him Stone. Grandpa Stone. Let’s go with that. In order to learn about Grandpa Stone, you need to understand that he was raised by the Devil.
My great grandpa was a gambler and a drunk. He hated God and he hated women. He hated the kids he had and he hated their wives. He ignored Rose, Aunt, and I am pretty sure when he died, Uncle Ball was far too young to ever have known him. Let me tell you a little bit about the Devil of the Mocking family.
The Devil lived in a tiny town in West Virginia. If he ever held a job other than cards, I have never heard of it. He had no wife but he had sons. Now it is possible that he agreed to raise the sons he did have. I am going to agree to tell you that story because the alternative is that the Devil of the Mocking family sexed a woman, watched for a while. If she got pregnant he waited to see if she had a boy, and if she did, he went and took it. I have tried to work out a different reality and I just can’t. I have never seen a picture of the Devil.
We will start with his boys.
Mission was the oldest. Legend says he fell in love with my grandma and wanted to marry her, so he went into the army to find a way to support her and ended up in the Korean War. One day he got a letter that said Grandma was going to marry Grandpa Stone, and no one has ever heard from Mission again. The official story is that he got the letter and went into combat. That he somehow was killed and they could never recover the body.
Mission went MIA, or Missing in Action, the day he received the letter that the woman he loved was marrying his brother. Mission is gone.
Then Stone. I believe that was the order. I believe Stone came next. He was not big, but he was mean and he was tough. The Devil would walk into Stone’s room at random, look around, and grab one of Stone’s objects. A bike, a toy, any kind of treasure that Stone had, the Devil would snatch up. He would slap it down on the pot during a poker game and that was that.
Stone and his brothers ate very little. I do not have accurate information on that. All I know for sure is that Stone went into the army. He ended up in Korea. And after Basic, he weighed himself and had gained 20 pounds. Everyone who knows military knows that when a recruit goes into Basic, they trim up. They become lean and hard. No one I have ever heard of has gained weight in Basic training, except Grandpa Stone. Because he was getting three meals a day, and he had never had that before.
In there somewhere came Child. Child was fine until, at the age of six, he got a fever. The Devil was on a tear. In a different town maybe. In a cell somewhere, or just on a lucky streak, and he dismissed Child’s fever. The brothers watched as Child burned for over a week. They said his fever was set at over 108 for over a week. When it broke, the boy’s brain had been fried. Child would remain at the maturity of six for the rest of his life.
Hard is what I will call the next brother. Hard wore a wife beater every day I ever saw him. He rarely held his cigarette or set it in an ashtray, but it hung from his lip as he talked, bobbing and weeping smoke into his squinted eye. He had a big mole on his face and he was funny. He looked, acted, and laughed like a hard man. He loved me. And when everyone else called me Butterball, Uncle Hard called me Tater.
Then there was Cousin Grin. I was told every time the boys came to town that Cousin Grin was not one of the brothers, but they had grown up together. He was family. He was to be honored. Grandpa Stone told everyone that when his daughters got married, he would not walk them down the aisle. He was not going to give his daughters to any man. At all the weddings, except the wedding of Rose and Honed, Cousin Grin had the honor of walking the two sisters down the aisle.
Then there was Uncle Jesse. I only met this man one time. I will try to paint a picture of what I saw in him, but I will have trouble. Uncle Jesse is shrouded, and he only came out of the mist once.
Those were the Sons of the Devil. Those were Stone’s crew. Uncle Jesse had long ago walked away. But Stone, Hard, and Cousin Grin got together a lot.
Poker and drinking was what they did. A few times a year, they would all gather at Grandpa Stone’s house and the party would start. Days of drinking, smoking, cussing, and gambling. Once it got going, it never stopped, and always my mother and me would go to Grandma and Grandpa’s house to watch as the Sons of the Devil held court.
At first, they bet records. Albums would be kept on the floor right next to their chair and they would throw a record in the pot. Back then, albums were pretty cheap. You could walk through a store and they would have a huge bin with a sign saying:
Album sale, one for 2 cents
Stone watched for them, and then just filled a cart, grabbing at random. Now, Christian albums were worth almost nothing in the pot of the Sons of the Devil. Rock and roll, R&B, maybe five cents. But if you had a big hand, or you wanted to make the Sons around the table think you did, you dropped a blues album. The blues was worth God only knows what, but Leadbelly was legend. The Sons loved Leadbelly, and when a Leadbelly album was thrown in the pot, the world stopped.
The Devil had no house, and he had no job. He lived close to the Sons, and he lived with them. Every wife hated him, his morning egg, and his mug of half coffee, half whiskey. They hated the way the Sons of the Devil obeyed their father, and always, after a few weeks to a month, the Devil was thrown out of a Son’s house by his daughter-in-law. He would walk up the street to the next Son, and the cycle would start again.
Knowledge about the Devil is scarce. He loved Uncle Wrath. That is all I know. They bonded over baseball cards and baseball in general. I have no further information. The Devil would sit at the kitchen table with his only real possession, which was a small radio wrapped in leather, and he would listen to the game. Now when I say he would listen to the game, I bet you are thinking a baseball game. Well you would be right. However, when I say he would listen to the game, I bet you are thinking his favorite team. In this assumption, you would be very wrong. The Devil would flip his dial from one station to the next and listen to up to three games at the same time. A few at bats here, a few strikes there. My mother swears the Devil would breathe fire when he flipped a station and he had missed a score, especially when he had missed a home run.
That was when it was hard to live with the Devil.
One time, one of the brothers took Child to Milwaukee. It was a huge affair. He was confused the entire time, wanted to go home the entire time, and through the entire visit I screamed at him. All through the visit, he would call me Taterbug.
I was five. I would scream that I was not a Taterbug. I was Tater. The Sons of the Devil would howl with laughter. And when I was taken home, I was furious.
I would see Uncle Child one more time.
Uncle Jesse dressed well. He obviously had money, where the other Sons were working class. Uncle Jesse wore a golden watch with a face that held a golden President Kennedy on it. The face was the same as the half dollar that all coin collectors are looking for now, the Kennedy coin no longer in circulation. The watch boldly displayed Kennedy’s face, and as far as I can tell, all the other Sons of the Devil were Republicans.
By the time Uncle Jesse came to visit, the Sons were no longer betting albums, but had begun playing Penny Poker. As far as I can remember, Uncle Jesse cleaned them out. He was never around. And no one in the family could read him, except me.
I stayed with him through the entire visit. The other Sons grumbled and Uncle Jesse laughed. The outbursts were not arguments, but the Sons snapped at him and he batted it all aside with a laugh. I had never seen anything like him. A bold man, set apart from the rest of the family, and unafraid.
When he laid back in Grandpa’s recliner to go to sleep, I was at his side. He had me look at his watch and he spoke.
“This is yours. When I die and they read my will, it will say Tater gets my golden watch.”
I never got that watch. At this point, it would be nearly impossible to find Tater. But I did inherit something from Uncle Jesse. And I wear it proudly.
One more thing about the Devil. His number was 168. It was the highest any Mocking had ever gotten at the time. The number we were all taught to beat. It was the one goal, and it was whispered on his death bed. The Devil had slept with 168 women.
Uncle Ball and Mumble were in a bowling league together for a few years. They won first place every year. It was a Saturday afternoon thing, I am pretty sure, probably not Saturday night, and the place they bowled was awesome.
We were too young to watch ourselves, so Less and I were always brought along. Outside it was bright and cold, but inside, the place was dark. They had a full bar with a bartender who loved me and would sneak me Shirley Temples. They had a jukebox that had Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” Believed then, and I still believe might be, the perfect song, and they had a few arcade games.
One Saturday, I saw her.
She was small, obviously young. Blonde, not unpretty, and I remember her dressed in blue. She came in asking for Uncle Ball. He met with her in a corner, peeled a smile across his face while he talked to her. He shook his head. She reached out to touch him and he pulled his arm back and laughed.
When she left, he found me. “That was her. That was the girl I fucked. She is not much to look at, and she was worse in bed, but that does not matter. You work your number. Your number is all that matters.”
Stone asked for me. One night, Grandpa Stone called my mother and asked if she could come over and bring me. When I got there, Stone sent me straight to Uncle Ball’s room. The place was dim. I remember a light, but whether it was a night light or a candle, I cannot say.
I’m going with candle.
He called me into the bed where he sat against the headboard in a t-shirt, jeans, and no socks. I crawled beside him and he wrapped an arm around me. He laid my cheek on his budding peck and ran fingers through my hair.
“Are you okay, Uncle Ball?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.” But I could tell he wasn’t. “She is dead.”
“Who?”
“The girl who took my virginity is dead.”
“Huh?” I had no idea what virginity was.
“The girl you saw at the bowling alley. The girl I had sex with. She killed herself.”
I asked how she did it and he wouldn’t tell me. I cried and he was silent.
“Everybody has to start somewhere,” he said with a cough.
I didn’t understand what this scene in my life meant that day, but I know now. Now I remember. Now I can tell you that I figured it out.
Somewhere in there, I stopped being just a nephew, and I became something else.
I became his Sin Eater. He would tell me of the things he did, and I would carry them around, accepting his guilt so he could work his number.
Until yesterday, when he reached out and attacked me, I still was his Sin Eater, feeling guilty for every secret I held for him.
Now I repent for him. Now I ask God’s forgiveness for keeping my mouth shut all these years.
Tonight the Sin Eater begs forgiveness.
Jesse Teller 
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