Hailey is six when her grandpa first tells her the story of Jacob Hamblin, the Mormon-cowboy-saint. She watches the cement and steel of downtown Los Angeles blur past the car window behind her grandpa as he speaks, weaving tales like baskets, sprinkling stars across a dark, desert night. He tells her about the faithful frontiersman, how miraculous healings seemed to follow him as he traveled west, falling from his anointed fingers like apple seeds. He always refers to Jacob Hamblin by his full name, and says that he was an “apostle to the Indians,” a man with a foot in two worlds, who, by God’s power, could understand even the long cries of the coyote. Hailey trembles when he tells about Jacob Hamblin’s encounters with his nemesis, a wily old Indian called “Big Foot,” and her grandpa throws back his head and laughs, his mouth open so wide that she can see the dark fillings glinting in his very back molars.
When the car stops, Hailey can see just the halo of the setting sun peaking over the top of their tall apartment building. Her mom and dad climb out of the front seats, while her grandpa releases her seatbelt and lifts her from the back of the car. Her grandpa pulls her in close and nuzzles his bumpy pink nose into the side of her neck until she giggles. “I’m gonna miss you, Chickadee,” he says, then points to his cheek. “How about one for the road?” Hailey holds her grandpa’s face in her hands and presses her juicy, scrunched-up lips to his face. Then he squeezes her one more time before getting into his own car.
Hailey holds her mom’s hand, and she and her parents wave as he drives away. When the red lights on the back of his car melt into all the others on the busy road, Hailey and her parents turn and walk into their apartment building, past the big moving truck filled with all of their furniture and clothing and toys. The one they will leave in, first thing in the morning.
Hailey’s footsteps echo on the bare linoleum like tap shoes, but it’s just her pink jelly sandals. Her dad helps her brush her teeth and her mom tells her that she should wear her clothes to sleep, since they’ll be leaving so early. Then Hailey’s mom tucks her into a bed made out of blankets on the floor, kisses her forehead, and turns out the light.
She snuggles down in the nest of blankets as the last rays of the sun poke through the broken slats of her window blinds. She blinks her eyes slowly, and when she opens them again, there is a man in her room.
“Howdy, Chickadee,” he says, tipping the broad brim of his large, white cowboy hat. “I’m Jacob Hamblin.”
Hailey looks him up and down. Indeed, the name “JACOB” is spelled out on the brim of his hat in shiny rhinestones that glint in the orange light. He wears cowhide chaps on his legs and an elaborately embroidered vest over a light-orange shirt with fringed sleeves. A long, thick mustache hangs from his nose like upside-down bull horns.
“Hello, Jacob Hamblin,” Hailey says, holding out her hand. The mustachioed missionary takes her small fingers in his larger, calloused ones, giving them a small shake. Then Hailey turns over, pulls the blanket up over her shoulder, and drifts off to sleep.
— — —
The next day, Jacob Hamblin rides in the back seat of the car, next to Hailey. As they pull away from their home, Hailey touches the cool window with her index finger and tells Jacob Hamblin, “There’s my school,” “That’s my park,” “That’s the donut store.” But soon they are on the freeway, and the buildings grow shorter and sparser. And then the decorated walls on either side of the road fall away, and all Hailey can see is yellow desert, stretching out to the edge of the earth. She presses her forehead against the window and slowly counts the stubby trees lining the barbed-wire fencing.
Jacob Hamblin clears his throat. “You know, that right there is where my horse done threw a shoe.”
Hailey peels her forehead from the window. “Really?” she asks, wide-eyed and wondering.
“Honest!” Jacob Hamblin says, chewing on a piece of straw. “Right by that there tree. We were heading to the gold rush when ol’ Cinnamon threw her shoe and I said, ‘What’d you do that for?’ but Cinnamon just made horse sounds on account of horses can’t talk. Anyhoo, I dropped down in the dirt right there and prayed harder than I’d ever prayed in my whole life and when I stood up, Cinnamon had grown wings and she flew me all the way to the gold rush where we got all the gold in California.”
“Is that true?” Hailey asks.
“Darn tootin’!” Jacob Hamblin says, and Hailey smiles.
— — —
Hailey’s new house is so much bigger than the apartment. It has an upstairs with smooth, white tiles in the kitchen and a textured green carpet in the living room. And it has a downstairs with built-in cupboards and a scratchy-looking ceiling. Jacob Hamblin seems at home, too. Hailey often finds him standing in their bricked-in backyard, gazing thoughtfully over the southern Utah desert to the brown mountains in the distance.
Once a week, Hailey’s grandpa calls and asks her about her new school, if she’s made any friends, what her grades are like. And once a month, he sends her a letter. Hailey loves coming home to find a thick envelope with her name scrawled across the front in all capital letters. Every time, she rips the envelope open and frees the story inside. It’s always a story, printed out on his old printer, on computer paper with rough edges where the hole-punched fringe had to be torn away. Scattered throughout the story are bold vocabulary words, like “loyal” and “sentinel,” words that she knows her grandpa will ask her about during their next phone call. When she learns the meaning of one of his new words, he whoops so loud into the phone receiver that Hailey has to hold the phone away from her ear while she giggles at his excitement.
Hailey rubs the edges of the page as she reads her grandpa’s stories out loud to Jacob Hamblin. Sometimes her grandpa writes about his own life, or stories about when she was little. But mostly the letters are about Jacob Hamblin—the time tricky “Old Big Foot” raided a pioneer camp and stole all of their livestock, so Jacob Hamblin tracked him all the way through the forest and across a river. And the time that an Indian tribe took a sick woman out of camp and left her to die, but after Jacob Hamblin gave her a blessing, she leapt to her feet and asked what was for dinner. Jacob Hamblin nods sagely as she reads the stories out loud, squinting towards the sun and every once in a while adding a serious, “Darn tootin’.”
— — —
Hailey grows up in that dry, desert place. She goes to school and learns about algebra and dirty jokes and listening in on adult conversations. One day, she comes home from sixth grade and hears angry, muffled sounds coming from her parents’ bedroom. She sneaks downstairs, to the spare room directly underneath her parents’ room, and sits beneath the open air vent, letting the heated words shower down on her head and shoulders.
“You shouldn’t have loaned him the money!”
“I just can’t believe my dad would do something like this.”
“What are you talking about? This is exactly the kind of thing he’d do.”
“I don’t think he was trying to hurt us.”
“Not trying to. But he did. Because he thinks he’s so smart. He thinks it’s impossible for him to lose at anything.”
Jacob Hamblin sits on the ground next to her, a snappy black hat pulled down over his eyes. His mustache is shorter now, connected to the thick muttonchops that cling to his ears. And his enthusiastic chaps and vest set has long been replaced by a brown poncho and blue jeans. He whistles softly underneath the continuing conversation.
“You know,” he says, “when I was a missionary, we traveled without any money at all, relying on the kindness of strangers for food and shelter. One time, when I hadn’t eaten anything at all for nigh on seven days, I was crawling through Pennsylvania when a kindly old widow found me and dragged me into her house. She gave me water to drink from the stream, then she told me that she would happily give me a dollar, except it was her last one. She was going to spend it on a loaf of bread and some fresh milk, and then she’d just wait to die. But the Spirit of the Lord was upon me, and I promised her that if she gave me her last dollar, she would be blessed a hundredfold. So she gave me her dollar, and as soon as I put it in my pocket, the pony express stopped at her door and delivered an envelope full of one hundred American dollars.”
Hailey laughs.
“And speaking of envelopes,” Jacob Hamblin goes on, “I do believe there is one upstairs with your name on it.”
“Really?” Hailey gasps.
“Darn tootin’!”
And the two run upstairs to release the stories.
— — —
Time gallops on. Hailey’s homework load grows. Between youth activities, piano lessons, and boy-girl birthday parties, the phone calls with her grandpa sometimes go forgotten. But every month, without fail, he still sends her a letter. The handwriting on the outside of Hailey’s envelopes grows shakier, until the letters blend together and stumble over one another. Over time, it becomes difficult for her to read the letter inside, as well, not because of the writing, but because of the content. By the time she starts eighth grade, the descriptions of Jacob Hamblin facing off against the “savage” Indians, or rebuking them for their “barbaric” practices—they start to sour in her stomach.
One day, Hailey comes home from school to find another letter from her grandpa. She drops her backpack on the kitchen floor and carries the envelope into her bedroom.
Jacob Hamblin reclines coolly on the bed, a weathered brown hat worn over his damp, wavy hair. Instead of a mustache, he has a respectable salt-and-pepper scruff all over the bottom half of his face. The flaps of his denim jacket hang open when he leans back on his elbows, revealing a sprinkling of chest hair.
“Well now, Chickadee,” he says. “Let’s hear today’s yarn.”
Hailey watches Jacob Hamblin, her lips pressed together. “I don’t know if I want to.”
Jacob Hamblin pushes back the front brim of his hat. “What on this God-given earth are you talkin’ about? What could be better than hearing more stories about yours truly?”
“I don’t know.” She brushes her fingers over the trembling letters on the front of the envelope. “I’m afraid if I learn any more, I won’t like you anymore.”
Jacob Hamblin nods sagely, then looks out the bedroom window. “You know,” he says, “that mountain right there is where I met Old Big Foot for the first time. Only I didn’t even know it. He was hiding in a tree, and I tracked him to the very spot where he waited, but then the Lord told me to turn around and go back. So I did. It was only later that I learned that Old Big Foot was waiting with his arrow drawn, aimed right at my heart.”
“Okay,” Hailey says, and she drops the unopened envelope into the drawer of her nightstand.
— — —
Her grandpa moves in the summer before Hailey’s junior year. When her dad pulls into the driveway with her grandpa in the passenger seat, Hailey runs outside and throws her arms around her grandpa. He feels thinner than the last time she hugged him—less steady on his feet. But he squeezes her to his chest and sighs a little as he rests his cheek on the top of her head.
Hailey loves having her grandpa there. He putters around the house, a non-fiction book in one hand, a glass of iced Kool-Aid in the other. She likes to sit next to him on the couch and read over his shoulder. On the first day of eleventh grade, she wakes up to find a necklace on her nightstand—a small, tear-drop shaped ruby on a thin, gold chain. Sitting next to it is a typed note. “This belonged to your grandmother.” Hailey wears it every day.
Originally, Hailey’s parents planned for her grandpa to move into the guest room in the basement. The stairs prove to be a challenge to his aged knees, though, so Hailey agrees to move downstairs while he takes her bedroom on the main floor. At night, while she stays up late working on homework, her parents’ conversations float down through the vent and rest on her textbooks like eraser shavings.
“I know he’s never going to pay us back, but it’d be nice if he helped out a little while he stayed with us.”
“He can’t afford to pay any rent.”
“But helping with some of the bills would be the polite thing to do.”
“We used all the house money to pay down his debts.”
“Then where did he get the money to buy that new laptop?”
When she was younger, the air-vent secrets had been part of the grown-up world, and she could experiment by surreptitiously imagining that she was a part of the adult decisions. Whenever the words weighed too heavily on her, she would brush them off her shoulders and hide in her own room with Jacob Hamblin and her teddy bear collection. But now, this is her room. Her teddy bears are stacked neatly on her bed nearby, offering only glassy-eyed smiles. And Jacob Hamblin reclines in his chair, his feet on up Hailey’s desk, his hat pulled down low over his eyes. Hailey turns up the volume on her music to drown out the voices as she works through her chemistry problems. When Johnny Cash starts singing “Big River,” Jacob Hamblin grins under the shadow of his brim, and says quietly, “Darn tootin’.”
— — —
Hailey applies to college early. Her grandpa helps her with her application essays, then, after she hits the “submit” button on the college website, he calls her into his room—the room that used to be hers. Hailey tries not to wrinkle her nose at the stale smell of someone else’s dirty clothes hamper, tries not to compare the stacks of unopened cardboard boxes and the overflowing closet to the bright, clean room she had had before. Her grandpa sits down on the edge of the sloppily-made bed and gives her a secret Riesen from the nightstand. It’s the same nightstand where Hailey had kept the pile of unopened letters from her grandpa. Now they sit in her desk drawer downstairs, the envelopes still crisp.
The thought must have resonated in the room, because, while Hailey’s mouth is full of chocolate and caramel, her grandpa asks, “Do you remember all those stories I used to tell you about Jacob Hamblin?”
Hailey nods and swallows the lump of caramel. Her grandpa smiles. “You’ve grown up so fast, Chickadee.”
That night, Hailey fights sleep as she scratches down her thoughts about Nineteen Eighty-four on lined paper. She yawns and writes, and Jacob Hamblin paces the room, restless.
“You know,” he says, interrupting Hailey’s homework, “that bright moon reminds me of the first time I crossed the great Mississippi River. We were headed west—“
“I’m working,” Hailey says, not looking up from her paper.
“—and the boat tipped clear over, dumping me and all the other passengers out in the raging torrent.”
Hailey glares at Jacob Hamblin, but he continues with his story. So she pulls a set of headphones down over her ears and presses play on her iPod.
After around fifteen minutes of passionate storytelling, Jacob Hamblin wears himself out. He lies down on Hailey’s bed, propping his boots on the footboard and pulling his worn leather hat down over his face. Hailey turns off her music and opens her history textbook. Just as she’s starting to answer the “Questions for Consideration” at the end of the chapter, she hears her dad’s voice float down through the air vent.
“I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“We’re not doing that.”
Hailey yawns and reaches for her iPod. But just as she’s about to press play, she hears her grandpa’s voice.
“It’s not a gamble. This is a sure thing. I know the guy.”
Hailey pulls off her headphones and tilts her ear towards the vent in the ceiling.
“Absolutely not,” her mother says.
“Fine. But you’re gonna feel like a real jackass when you miss out on this opportunity.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dad, please don’t call names.” Her dad sighs so loudly she can hear it bouncing in the vent. “Look, it’s not even our money. It’s Hailey’s college fund—“
“You’re right,” her grandpa says. “I’ll go ask her.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Hailey’s mother says.
“It’s her money,” her grandpa says. “She’s a smart girl. She’ll make the right decision.”
Hailey hears the door slam shut, and for a minute, she thinks her grandpa must be coming to her room. But then she hears her mom’s voice again. “Don’t you dare approach my daughter with any of your get-rich-quick schemes. You’ve already taken money from everybody else, but she is a child. She trusts you.”
“It’s not a good idea, Dad. Think about your relationship with her.”
There’s a moment of quiet, then footsteps away from her parents room. Hailey worries that they might be headed down the stairs, but then she hears the muffled sound of the other bedroom door shutting.
Hailey stares at her history book, and the edges of her vision start to wobble as she processes the conversation she overheard.
“Boy, howdy!”
Hailey jumps at Jacob Hamblin’s inappropriately loud greeting.
“I sure could go for some grub. How’s about heading up stairs to make us a big plate of those na-choes. Darn tootin’!”
“I don’t want nachos. Leave me alone,” Hailey says blotting her eyes with her palms.
Jacob Hamblin puts his tasseled arm around Hailey’s shoulder. “There’s no need to be glum on this lovely night. You’ve got a roof over your head to protect you from Indian raids. There are na-choes upstairs. And, hey, you’ve got me!” He turns in a circle slowly, then taps Hailey’s nose with his index finger. “Say, have I ever told you about the time I saved an entire pioneer company from cholera? I rebuked the disease in the name of the Lord and it walked right out of camp at that very moment. Every bodily issue halted instantly and nobody pooped again until they got to Utah.”
As Jacob Hamblin speaks, anger rumbles in Hailey’s body, down low at first, then rising up until she can’t sit still any longer. She leaps to her feet. “That never happened!” she shouts.
Jacob Hamblin blinks, surprised. “Well, of course it did!”
“It’s not even possible. You’re a liar. And I think you might be a…a racist.” She feels the heat grow behind her eyes and she takes a step towards Jacob Hamblin. “You tell all these miraculous stories that make you look perfect, but you’re not. You’re not perfect. I don’t know if you’re even good.” She looks at Jacob Hamblin’s rust-colored leather jacket, his embroidered boots and his jangling spurs, and suddenly, nothing looks right about him. “I want you to go.”
Jacob Hamblin looks surprised at first, then his face softens. He rubs his scruffy chin, like he’s considering Hailey’s words. Then he nods. “Farewell, Chickadee,” he says, and he walks out the bedroom door, closing it carefully behind him.
For a minute, everything goes quiet. Not even Hailey’s breath makes a sound. She watches the door, waiting for Jacob Hamblin to come back and tell some outrageous story about himself.
Then she hears a loud thumping sound on the ground above her. A thumping, and then her dad’s panicked voice. “Dad?” he shouts, his words careening down the air vent. “Dad! Dad!”
Hailey runs upstairs.
— — —
The doctor says it was some kind of seizure, which happened after some kind of stroke. Hailey’s grandpa lingers in the hospital for about a week, tubes and wires dangling from his body like appendages, until the doctor finally pulls the family aside and tells them that there’s no brain activity. Hailey kisses her grandpa on the cheek, one more time for the road, then squeezes his hand as he takes his last breath.
After the funeral, no one wants to go into her grandpa’s room. Hailey tries to not even look at it, like if she pretends it’s not there, she can imagine she hasn’t lost anything. A week goes by. Then three. One day, a full month after the funeral, she comes home from school and finds the bedroom door open, just a crack. She tiptoes down the hall and pushes on the door. Her mother is sitting on the floor with a half-full kitchen garbage sack.
Hailey tries not to panic. “What are you doing?”
“Oh,” Hailey’s mom checks her watch. “I didn’t realize I’d been in here so long. I’m just starting to go through your grandpa’s things.”
“But what’s that?” Hailey feels her eyes well up. “Why are you throwing away his things?”
Her mom holds up the garbage sack. “This? You can look at it if you want, but it’s nothing worth keeping.”
Hailey frees the bag from her mom and starts digging through the mess of papers inside—mostly emails, printed off and stapled together. Chain letters, with pleasant little poems that ended in promises of blessings or vague threats. A couple of recipes. More than a few emails that accuse one political candidate or another of supporting communism. Hailey buries those quickly in a pile of discarded Mapquest directions. Finally, she hands the sack back to her mom, and turns to leave the room.
“Wait,” her mom says. “Stay. Help me go through all of this stuff.”
Hailey looks around the cluttered room. “What about Dad?”
“Dad’s having a hard time. I could use the help.”
So Hailey puts her backpack down on the bed and opens the nightstand. She pulls out two Riesens, one for herself and one for her mother.
Her mom rolls her eyes. “Of course he kept candy in here. It’s a wonder this room wasn’t crawling with ants.” But she takes the candy and tosses the empty wrapper into the garbage sack.
— — —
It takes Hailey and her mom two weeks to go through all of her grandpa’s things. By the end of the first week, her dad helps, too. They clear the bedroom of his shoes and his tie collection, the six half-empty aftershave bottles that sat on the windowsill and the desk drawer full of misprinted ballpoint pens that he bought from an office supply overstock store. They open boxes that have been sealed shut since he moved away from his house in California. Hailey admires each item she finds in the boxes. A collection of fat, porcelain baby statues that had belonged to her grandmother. A heavy pencil case full of centavos from Mexico and pence coins from England. She sees her dad’s eyes glow as he opens a box full of dusty-smelling Scouting uniforms, feeling each embroidered letter on the stack of loose patches. She hears her mother’s impatient sigh when she opens a dresser drawer, only to find it overflowing with receipts and tax forms and an accordion folder labeled, “Business Deals.”
Slowly the room clears, divided into boxes and bags, keep piles and donation bins. And once the room is cleaned, they bring in the tubs from the garage, the things that were important enough for her grandpa to bring with him, but not so precious that they had to be kept in his room. Medical records from the years her grandmother spent in and out of the hospital, before Hailey was even born. The older, ill-fitting clothes that didn’t fit in his closet. Hailey and her parents giggle when they leaf through her grandpa’s high school yearbook and discover that he was voted “most likely to run a circus.” Her dad tells her about how his dad taught him to shave with a straight razor. Her mom talks about the first time she met him, how he spilled ice water all over his lap at the restaurant and yelled at the waiter, but then felt so bad about it that he left everything in his wallet as a tip—$36 and a gift card to Sears.
Until one day, it feels like they might be done. Hailey looks under the bed, while her mom checks behind the dresser—both clean. Then, because he is the tallest of the three, her dad steps into the closet and checks the top shelf. He emerges with a timeworn, orange cloth-covered book in his hand. He opens it to the title page, then he smiles and hands it to Hailey.
Good luck at school, Chickadee it reads, in her Grandpa’s shaky handwriting. Don’t study too hard. Love you forever.
Below her grandpa’s inscription is a black and white photograph of large-foreheaded man with an A-line haircut and a beard that looks like a pile of moss glued to the underside of his chin. At the top of the page is the title of the book. “Jacob Hamblin, A Narrative of his personal experience, as a frontiersman, missionary to the Indians and explorer.”
Hailey closes the book and hugs it to her chest, sitting down on the bed. Then she looks up at her parents. “Was Grandpa a good person?”
Hailey’s dad frowns, and her mom purses her lips. “Sure, he was a good person.” Hailey’s mom looks at her dad as she speaks. “He took care of his family. He went to church.”
“I know about the money,” Hailey said before her mom could continue. “I know he took money from people.” She looks down. “I know he wanted to take money from me.”
Hailey’s dad turns away and brings his fingers to his face. Her mom sits down on the bed next to her and holds her firmly by the shoulders. “Hailey, that man loved you more than life itself. But he made some stupid mistakes—”
“He was a dreamer.” Hailey’s dad says, still facing the wall. “He never tried to hurt anyone.”
“He didn’t try to,” her mom agrees, “but he did. Sometimes.”
“He wasn’t perfect.” Her dad is almost whispering.
“He was complicated. We all are.”
The family sits together quietly for a few minutes, letting the grief settle to the floor before wiping their eyes and drying their wet hands on their pants. Hailey’s mom heads to the kitchen to make dinner. Her dad steps into the bathroom and blows his nose at a comical volume. And Hailey walks downstairs to her bedroom with her book. She sits down on her bed and opens to the title page again, tracing her grandpa’s handwriting with her finger. Then she looks at the picture of Jacob Hamblin. He looks so different from the Jacob Hamblin she’d known.
She hovers over that picture, not sure if she’s going to turn the page or not.
“Hello there, Chickadee.”
Jacob Hamblin sits perched on the edge of her bed, his hands folded politely in his lap, his knees angled toward her.
“Will we be enjoying some stories this evening, then?” he asks, gesturing toward the open book on Hailey’s lap.
Hailey thumbs through the pages, feeling the dust of old paper coat her fingers. She thinks about all the stories inside. All the ways the Jacob Hamblin in this book might be the one she loved. All the ways he might be the one she feared.
She looks up at the man sitting next to her, and it’s like she’s seeing him for the first time. She examines the cowboy curiously, all of his new strangeness. The crooked nose and receding hairline, and the heavy black coat that makes him look like he’s hunched over. The black, mossy beard that hangs down from his chin. He smiles, and his thin lips look strained, then he nods gently, touching the edge of his white hat. And that’s when Hailey notices the familiar glint of rhinestones spelling out his name, “JACOB,” along the brim.
“I like your hat.”
“I know,” Jacob Hamblin says. “That’s why I wear it.”
Hailey grins. Then she drops the book in Jacob Hamblin’s lap and pulls open her desk drawer. She lifts the pile of crisp, unopened envelopes from the bottom of the drawer and sits back on her bed, flipping the pile over to find the one on the very bottom, the first letter she ignored all those years ago. She holds it up, examining the wobbly letters of her name on the front, the crooked stamp in the corner, but she can’t quite bring herself to open it yet. She closes her eyes and holds the envelope on her lap, knowing that she’s teetering on the edge of something, not sure if she’s ready for whatever that something is.
When she opens her eyes, the last orange rays of the setting sun are shining in through Hailey’s bedroom window and bouncing off of Jacob Hamblin’s rhinestones, showering radiant specks all over her walls and ceiling and arms. All over the envelope still in her hands. And in that spray of light, Hailey tears the flap open like a Band-Aid, pulls out the letter, and starts to read.
“Darn tooting,” Jacob Hamblin says, nodding as he reclines on the pile of teddy bears and opens his book to the first chapter.
Jeanine Eyre Bee (jeaninebee.com) is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and the current fiction editor for Wayfare magazine. Her writing has been featured in such publications as Dialogue, Exponent II, and The Mormon Lit Blitz. She lives in Utah with her husband, their four kids, and their blind dog, Penny.