Joseph, My Grandfather

I flashed on my mother bringing meat home from the Winn Dixie where she worked.
Mr. Harry would allow Mom to slip out with some fine cuts of beef that "weren't quite right"....or "on the verge".
She would open the packages in the sink and smell the darkened meat...sometimes smelling it more than once...and then out would come the salt.
Mom would put the meat under the tap to wet it, rub salt into the steaks or chops...sometimes repeating the process several times until it seemed cleansed and fit to eat.
Then would come the explanations of why the meat was ok...how rich people paid out good money for aged beef...how the general public didn't realize that the meat that was dark and old looking was really the best....how lucky we were.
Mom was like that.
I wondered how much of this she actually believed...or was it all a collection of the lies that the poor tell themselves to make it all ok...all acceptable...and palatable.
I don't know.
But I still have a styrofoam plaque of John 3:16 that we got from Top Value trading stamps. Mr. Harry also gave Mom rolls of these stamps. How all that went down, I don't know, but at least they didn't need to be rubbed down with salt.
The taste of glue is what I remember from filling book after book with the gold stamps....and the catalogue that spurred me on, all filled with dreams that could bought with those stamps. We never managed to get the really big stuff...just a lamp here, a set of Lilly glasses there....a coffee maker, a toaster.
The Top Value Redemption Center was the only place I heard the word redemption used outside of church. "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so....?
I was busy pasting stamps in our project apartment when we got the news that my grandfather, Joseph had died from his run-in with a big white Cadillac right off of North Broad. They had him hooked up for days on all sorts of machinery at Charity Hospital....but now that was over.
Joseph had paid for years for a burial policy that entitled him to a grand throw - down at the House of Boltman on Napoleon and St. Charles...complete with huge limos...a silver metal casket...and a plot at the Garden of Memories on Airline Highway.
Quite a show!
When I saw him in the casket, I thought about meat. It wasn't Joseph with the wad of Brown Mule in his mouth...the Joseph with the penetrating black eyes and jet black hair he dyed...the Joseph who sang crazy songs and cursed bitterly at all he hated...the Joseph who drew moustaches on the only portrait that my grandmother ever had made because he loved to piss her off.
Joseph lived to piss people off....which is why he praised Hitler and Stalin loudly.
He paid for that funeral bash the same way we would lay aside trading stamps.
And I suppose they preserved him for much the same reasons that my mother would rub down the
partially spoiled meat with salt.... He wasn't completely bad, but a lot of people were convinced, from all appearances, that he was too rotten to save.
His wife, my grandmother, thought so. When she was in the last stages of a hideous battle with intestinal and stomach cancer, she made the family promise not to bury her near him.
Like the meat from Winn Dixie, Mom explained away Joseph's life.... even the parts that had destroyed her childhood and her first marriage. He was ok....
Emma knew better.