A Wide Day
Carl Wooton

Will stuffed his hands in his pockets
and leaned against the wall of the bus station in Conway. He looked angry. I
figured he was pissed because our father had sent him to meet my bus and it was
after midnight. As soon as he saw me he
turned without any sort of greeting and walked to where he had parked our father’s
car. He opened the trunk and I threw the
single gym bag I had packed into it.
Will said, “Is that all you got?”
“It’s enough. I don’t plan to stay long.”
He slammed down the trunk lid.
“Who the hell does?”
When we got in the car, Will added, “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t come home,” then he burned rubber and sent a loud squeal hurtling through the silence of the dark town. He turned onto College Street in front of the Catholic church, hit the accelerator and went nearly airborne over the hump that held the railroad tracks.
I said, “What’s your problem?”
“Nothing.”
He pushed hard on the accelerator and drove through the stop sign at the next corner.
I said, “What the hell?”
Will didn’t look at me. He didn’t turn his head, but I could tell he wasn’t exactly paying attention to the road either. We had almost a mile to go without any more stop signs or any turns to make. I didn’t really get scared. I’d driven the same street the same way late at night. There almost never was anyone else out and about that late at night. We made that nearly a mile in no time and Will slammed on the brakes.
As he turned the corner, he said, “He’s going to move again.”
He meant our father. What he said didn’t surprise me. Will and I both had decided when we were even a lot younger that moving probably was what our father did best.
“When?”
“Just as soon as they get Grandma in the ground.”
“Why do you think so?”
We were only three or four blocks from home, and he turned the corner onto Watkins Street too fast, again sending a high squeal through the clear night air.
He said, “Shit. I don’t think so. I know it. He’s going to move and I’m going to have to go with him. I’ll bet you’re not home ten minutes before you know it, too. You better be careful, ‘cause he’s going to try to talk you into going, too.”
We had gotten to our driveway by then. Our father stood in the backyard, waiting in a square of yellowish light that spread outward from the kitchen window. He glared at Will as we walked toward the house. He clenched and unclenched his fists, a sure sign of anger about to get the best of him. When our father started to say something, Will stopped and turned toward me.
Will said, “Go ahead. I’ll get your bag.”
I shook hands with my father. We didn’t hug. He wasn’t a hugger. He told me how glad he was I had come and how anxious my mother was to see me, and all the time he glared at Will walking back to the car in the driveway.
“How is Mother?”
“Tired, mostly.”
“Grandma?”
“Hanging on. The doctor can’t figure out why she’s still here. Don’t be surprised when she doesn’t know who you are.”
As we climbed the steps to the back door, Will came up behind us.
Our father said, “From the sounds I heard when you turned the corner, you must’ve been in some kind of hurry. Money for tires doesn’t grow on trees.”
Will said, “You’ve been talking all evening about how you wished Mark would hurry up and get here. So, I hurried.”
He walked through the back door I had opened and added to me, “I’ll put your bag in the bedroom. You get the cot.”
Our father put a hand on my shoulder and urged me into the house, as he said, “I swear to Christ I don’t know what to do with him. He acts pissed off at somebody or something all the time.”
Mother came through the door leading into the back bedroom, put her arms out to hug me, and said, “My big boy. I’m glad you’re here. Your grandma will be glad, too.”
When the hug was finished, I said, “Dad said she might not recognize me.”
She turned her head, or did she? Maybe just her eyes moved. I could not have told you even right then exactly how it happened, only I knew her light blue eyes had in an instant stopped my father where he stood with the back door still half open, letting June bugs and moths attracted by the light fly into the kitchen.
Growing up with them I had long since learned to fear my father’s voice, his blood-darkened face and the threat of his wide, thick hand, even though it had hardly ever struck me. Though his hand and his voice threatened, nothing he ever said or did could stop me or him or change the atmosphere of a room the way my mother could with her look.
A glance emphasized by one raised eyebrow used to make me try to crawl inside myself and hide away like a thief looking for the darkest part of the night. My father simply stood still and looked down at his feet as my mother turned me toward the door that led to the other side of the house.
“Come see your grandmother,” she said, and added, “Shut the door, Ernest. You’re letting all the bugs in.”
She ushered me through their bedroom and into the hall that led to the front of the house. “She’ll be happy you came.”
My father was right. My grandmother did not recognize me. She seemed not to recognize anything. Her eyes fluttered open now and then, and she mumbled something unintelligible. My mother held her ear close to my grandmother’s mouth and waited longer than I could comfortably hold my breath before she stood up and wiped moisture from her ear with her sleeve.
She said, “She was trying to say something.”
“I couldn’t hear anything.”
“Maybe if you spoke to her, just to let her know you’re here.”
I did. I heard myself speaking louder and slower, the way I would speak to a small child in order to be understood. I said my name, told her she looked beautiful, and I had come home just to see her. I told my grandmother I couldn’t wait to have a cup of tea with her. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, then came the sound like air being let slowly out of the squeezed opening of a balloon and I jerked backwards from the ammoniac sting of the smell of urine.
My mother turned toward a small chest against the wall. She pulled out a fresh nightgown from one drawer and clean sheets from another. She held the sheets to her face and took a deep breath.
Mother said, “She always liked the way sheets smelled after they’d been hung out in the sun.” She laid them down at the foot of the bed and added, “Go tell your father I need him.”
The house was small and divided down the middle. On one side were the kitchen and the living room that was large enough to include a dining room table. On the other side were a bedroom in the back and another in the front connected by a hall, off of which were the bathroom and another, very small bedroom. The small one was Will’s and mine. Will was in the bed. Somebody had put up a folding canvas cot under the single window in the room for me. It left little space for walking, but I could see well enough to keep from bumping into things. The moon was nearly full and Will had not bothered to pull down the window shade. I tiptoed and squeezed my way to the cot, got undressed, and stretched out.
Will said, “Did you ever see anything like it? She’s like a goddamned breathing skeleton.”
Being home and getting in bed had not softened the anger out of Will’s voice.
I said, “I don’t think she knew I was there.”
“She doesn’t know anything, man. You’re lucky you’re not still living here.”
I looked through the window at the moon and tried to remember all the things my grandmother had told me about it when I was little. The man in the moon. Green cheese. Werewolves and other madnesses inspired by a full moon. She loved to tell scary stories.
Will said, “You ought to come back and stay for a while.”
“I have a job.”
He said, “Someday, I’m out of here,” and pulled the covers up and turned away from me. I was nearly settled into the depression in the center of the cot when he raised his head and added, “And soon, too.”
I had had a long day at work and a four hour ride on a bus. Too tired to respond. I fell asleep, too tired even to dream.
I looked into the bright light of a sun well up when loud voices coming down the hall from another part of the house woke me.
“Goddamnit, Goldie, you’re being unreasonable.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“My daddy died with nobody there, and I’m not going to let that happen to Momma.”
“That was a county hospital. It was because he was a charity case. We’d be paying this time.”
“How? We can’t pay all of the grocery bill this month. I told you not to start buying groceries on credit.”
“We’d pay it, maybe a little bit at a time. It would be different.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I’d make sure.”
“No, Ernest. No!”
Her footsteps on the wood floor in the hall sounded like rocks hitting the wall. His footfall, slower and weighted, followed hers, then the front screen door slammed and I knew he had gone outside onto the porch. In a minute, the porch swing creaked rhythmically, punctuated by the sound of his shoes tapping the floor.
Will was not in his bed. I grabbed my pants, put them on and hurried to the bathroom. I relieved myself, dashed cold water on my face and combed my hair. I looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t need to shave. A light beard was something I inherited from my father and I often went a day or two without a razor. To avoid going through my grandmother’s room, I went through the back bedroom into the kitchen and then to the front and out onto the porch.
My father said, “I was wondering how late you were going to sleep.”
I looked at my watch. It said nearly half-past nine.
“I was tired.”
“I didn’t know selling shoes was that hard on you.”
I said, “It’s not. It was the bus ride,” and walked down the steps into the small front yard and looked at the dogwood tree in full bloom across the street.
He said, “I’m thinking about planting tomatoes along the fence in back this year.”
“That will be nice.”
“It’s early yet. In another month, it should be right. We’ll have them for summer.”
I remembered Will’s anger from last night, and I said, “Are you going to still be here then?”
He stopped the motion of the swing.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Will thinks you’re getting ready to move again.”
He kicked the floor hard and the chains holding up the swing trembled.
“Maybe.”
“So who’ll pick the tomatoes if you’re not here?”
The chains on the swing creaked louder and his foot stomped once on the floor.
“The landlord can have the goddamned things for all I care.”
I don’t know where his small outburst might have gone, but it stopped cold when Mother walked out onto the porch.
She said, “I called Dr. Roblyer. He said he’d come by and see her this afternoon.”
My father said, “Good. I want to talk to him.”
They glared at each other for a long moment until my mother turned to me and said, “Good morning, sleepy head,” then looked again at my father and said, “Ernest. If you want chicken for dinner this afternoon, you need to kill one, maybe two, ” and again to me, “Mark, why don’t you say good morning to your grandmother?”
I knew that was not really a request. I went into the house and into my grandmother’s bedroom. It occurred to me right then that I wished I had been awake earlier and I could have gone with Will, wherever he went.
My mother said, “You can keep her company. I just changed her a few minutes ago. Why don’t you talk to her? I’ll call you when your breakfast is ready.”
Why don’t I talk to her? Simple answer was I was afraid to be alone in the room with my grandmother. What if something happened? What if she died? At eighteen I didn’t know what dying would look like? I had only seen one other corpse in my life, and that was my father’s father. But he had been dead for a couple of days already and was all dressed up and made up lying on a white satin pillow. Three years before this. I was Will’s age then. Would it be different from that? What did a dead body look like, not dressed up and lying in an ordinary bed meant for someone still alive? I would rather have gone in the backyard to watch my father kill a chicken.
I remembered a lot of times I saw my father wring a chicken’s neck in the backyard and watched it run around the yard, its head flopping from one side to the other. He and I sat on the back step and laughed at it.
My father said, “If you ever wondered how dumb a chicken is, the damned thing doesn’t even know it’s dead.”
Suddenly it jumped and flapped and flopped and one time it fell right in front of my feet. It trembled and then was still. I tried to measure the time between the trembling and the stillness, and I couldn’t. It trembled. It lay still. It was alive. It was dead. That’s when I learned there is no time, no anything, between being alive and being dead.
Grandma’s eyes followed me as I walked around the foot of the bed and came up beside her. Did she smile? Her lips moved, and I bent over as my mother had and put my ear close to her face. I heard whisperings—or was it just the struggle of air to move in and out?—and leaned closer, until my ear almost touched her lips. The sounds were like thin water running over pebbles, or like small dry leaves stirred by a breeze. I stood and wiped my ear with my handkerchief.
I told her, “The dogwoods are blooming. The tree across the street is almost finished. The leaves are starting to come out.”
She closed her eyes. I watched her breathe. There was neither motion nor sound between her breaths. There was only time. I felt dizzy and realized I had been holding my breath every time she took in one until she finally let it out. I couldn’t think of anything else to say or do, and I’m certain my mother saw a wide look of relief on my face when she came into the room and told me she had put some breakfast on the table for me.
“After you eat, you can help Daddy in the kitchen? He’s already killed the chickens. I can watch her.”
Her mood had changed. I knew that when she said, “Daddy,” instead of “your father.”
My father didn’t refuse my help. He talked to me while I quartered potatoes, and peeled onions and did whatever else he pointed out for me to do. He was good in the kitchen, better than my mother. He liked to spend late Sunday mornings preparing a huge dinner for mid-afternoon. Often he made it a necessity. It kept him from going to church with Mother.
As I chopped some onions, he started to tell what he and my mother had been arguing about earlier. He wanted to have my grandmother put in the hospital. He said because she could be more comfortable there. People who knew how to take care of someone dying would be there. Mother had decided she would keep my grandmother at home. He had not found a way to turn her mind to another direction. He believed Mother didn’t realize how unreasonable she was being, and how hard it was to do this thing she was asking him to do, and he didn’t know what he would do if Grandma died while he was watching her, and how would he know she was really dead, anyway.
He said Dr. Roblyer told him just to take a small hand mirror and hold it up close to but not touching her mouth and her nose and hold it there for a minute or so—and my father said he wanted to know just how damned long an “or so” would be—hold it there, anyway, and wait and if the glass was clear when he pulled it away, if there was no moisture on the mirror, then my grandmother would be dead. There wouldn’t be any need to call the doctor. Just make a note of what time it was, approximately would be good enough, and call the funeral home, and someone would come and take my grandmother away. The doctor could sign the death certificate later.
As my grandmother nears the end she may have something like convulsions. She might jump or thrash around. Someone ought to tie her down in the bed, just a rolled up sheet stretched across her body and tied to the bed frame would do. We would all be fine and it wouldn’t be long, it wouldn’t be long at all, probably sometime this weekend, and she’ll surely appreciate being at home and having her family around her. My father held a wooden spoon while he talked about holding the mirror close to my grandmother’s face to look for the moisture of breath, and his hand shook so hard he sprayed the stovetop with gravy drippings.
Dinner was tense. Will did not come home. Mother said he spent Sundays at his girlfriend’s house. She and my father both acted as though it wasn’t possible to do enough for the other one.
“Would you like some gravy?”
“No, thank you.”
“Did it get cold?”
“It’s fine. I just don’t…”
“I can heat it up for you.”
“No, that’s all right. You’ve done enough. I appreciate it. Maybe Mark wants his heated.”
I said, “No, it’s okay, really.”
I have recalled that hour many times. It took me a long time to get the understanding I have now about what was happening between them. Tension between them wasn’t anything new. Growing up, I had sat through interminable silent dinners just waiting for some kind of eruption, but this time was different. This time it wasn’t just stubbornness or hurt feelings because he or she couldn’t have his or her way, or because one had flung a real or imagined barb at the other. This time it was fear. They were afraid—I was afraid—that my grandmother would die alone while we were eating dinner. I knew that then. What I didn’t know then was we all feared she wouldn’t die soon, she would take too long to reach those two points between which there is no time. Their fear made the gravy get cold. Even the salt shaker was stopped up. But they, we, pretended.
My mother asked, “How’s your work? Are you selling lots of shoes?”
I said, “I’m selling some. I don’t think it’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
She said, “It’s a good job. Don’t be too quick to give it up.”
“No, ma’am.”
My grandmother used to call a day filled with tension that had everybody wondering when it would be over, wide days. This one promised to be a very wide day.
Dr. Roblyer came in the very late afternoon. He went with my mother into the front bedroom, and my father and I waited on the front porch. He sat in the swing and I sat on the top step. We were out there maybe ten minutes when I spotted Will walking up the street. He was limping. I looked back to the swing and saw my father was watching him, too.
He said, “What the hell did Will do now?”
Will stopped by Dr. Roblyer’s Cadillac parked on the street in front of the house. He put his face against the window to look inside, and when he turned to come up the path to the porch, he limped and carried one shoe in his hand.
My father said, “What the hell happened to you?”
Will said, “We went climbing the bluffs out at Toadsuck Landing. We wanted to see the eagles’ nests. I fell. Ain’t nothing broken, though.”
He hobbled up and sat down beside me before he said, “Is she dead yet?”
My father lunged out of the swing and shouted, “What kind of goddamned question is that?”
He took only a couple of steps toward us, but that was enough to have Will already up and backing away from him. I thought he was going to turn and run, but he stumbled and his face twisted with pain. He sat on the path and looked up at our father.
Will said, “I saw the doctor’s car and I thought that something had happened.”
I moved quickly down the steps, reached out a hand, and said, “Here.”
Will allowed me to pull him to his feet. I helped him hobble to the porch.
My father said, “Sit there. I’ll get the doctor to look at your ankle.”
When our father disappeared into the house, Will said, “Jesus, I didn’t mean anything.”
I said, “He’s scared. He’s never been around anyone dying before.”
“Shit. Who has?”
Dr. Robyler came outside with our mother and father and knelt down to look at Will’s ankle. He laid Will’s foot in one hand and gently probed the swollen flesh with his fingers. Will’s leg jerked. The doctor told Will to come to his office in the morning for x-rays, and in the meantime to stay off of it, keep it elevated, maybe put some ice on it.
My mother said, “I have an ice bag,” and went back into the house.
Will stood, leaned on me and hobbled up the steps and across the porch to the screen door. As we went I heard the doctor tell my father, “I don’t know what’s keeping her going, Mr. Rambler, but it can’t be long now. It just can’t be.”
My father said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this.”
The doctor said, “You’ll do fine, Mr. Rambler.”
He started to go, turned back and added, “Your wife seems awfully tired. Make her sleep tonight. If I haven’t heard anything, I’ll call in the morning.”
Through the screen door I saw my father standing alone in the path as the doctor went to his car and drove away. My father looked smaller, his shoulders slumped, and when he turned to come back to the porch, he moved slowly, like someone measuring the effort it took to lift a leg and put one foot in front of the other. At that moment, whatever else in the world he might believe, he did not believe he would be “just fine.”
Will hobbled to his bed, and mother worried over him and put an icepack on his ankle. Afterwards, she gave me the choice of watching my grandmother or making the sandwiches for our supper. I made the sandwiches. She went into the front bedroom, and my father sat in the porch swing and waited.
Will’s course for the evening and night was clearly set, but the rest of us were trying to find our separate ways to make it until the next morning.
I went several times into my grandmother’s room. Her breathing seemed even slower, but it was also louder, like someone gargling, only from deeper than the throat. We could hear it even on the porch.
My father said, “It’s the rattle.”
“The what?”
“The death rattle. I’ve never heard it before, but I remember people talking about it when one of my uncles died. They said it lasted for days.”
He quickly changed the subject and asked questions about my work and my life in Twin Lake City. I assured him my life was rather dull and my work was neither more nor less than what I expected it to be. Selling shoes at Stricter’s Discount Fashion Shoe Store was my first job combined with living away from home. I lived in a furnished room, ate all my meals in greasy spoon restaurants, and without a car, had little or no social life. Yes, I had met a girl, but no it wasn’t serious. I assumed he knew I wasn’t telling him everything, and that he didn’t really want me to tell him everything. He said, “Stick with it. Something will work out,” and I didn’t know whether he was talking about the job or a girl, or his intention to move.
At another point, he said, “I don’t know what to do with Will.”
I looked at the stars. The sky was clear, the moon shone bright.
He said, “I’m gone all week and your mother has to deal with him and he’s in a new kind of trouble every time I call home.”
“He’s afraid you’re going to move again.”
He pushed the swing harder. Sheet lightning brightened the sky in the distance.
He said, “The Arkansas territory isn’t as good as it used to be. People aren’t buying like they were when I first came here.”
That was a little over a year before.
I said, “Will wants to stay here and graduate.”
He said, “I don’t know,” and after three or four squeaks of the swing, “I’m thinking about going to Chicago. There’s more opportunity there. You could sell a lot more shoes up there.”
I don’t think he took a breath between those last two sentences.
I said, “I don’t think I want to go to some other new place so soon.”
My mother called to him right then, and he got up off the swing.
“Later,” he said. He made sure I knew our conversation wasn’t over.
I stood beside the bed opposite from my mother and father. Will had said she was almost a skeleton. I couldn’t have imagined how anyone could look so gaunt and still be breathing. She was a tall woman, nearly five-ten, and she weighed less than ninety pounds. When I put my hand on one of her arms, I felt skin and bone, with nothing between them. The rattle was louder. Small bubbles were forced to the edges of her lips whenever she let out a breath.
My father looked at me and said, “Let’s check the tie-down sheet.”
We retightened the knots of the rolled up sheet that stretched across her chest.
My father said, “I’ll be back in just a minute.”
I must have looked startled, because he quickly added, “I’ll just be a minute,” and he took hold of my mother’s arm and guided her out the door, into the hall toward the back bedroom. She didn’t want to go, but she didn’t have the strength to resist him. She tried to protest.
“No, Ernest.”
He said, “You need to rest, to sleep.”
“I can’t do that. “
“The doctor said I had to make sure you got to sleep tonight. I’ll call you if anything happens.”
They got quiet, then I heard my father say, “You sleep now. Mark will stay with me.”
When I heard him tell her that I would stay with him I instantly remembered the thought I had when he had called to ask me to come home, and I wished I had told him to call me again when it was over. I wished I was in the shoe store sitting on a stool putting a too tight shoe on a woman’s sweaty foot. I wished I was anywhere else.
Grandma jumped. It was like a reflex action, a sudden, all-body twitch. I put my hand on her shoulder. Her breathing had changed. Fewer bubbles at her lips when she let out a breath. The rattle sounded like a whisper. I pulled up the light blanket that covered her so that I wouldn’t have to touch the cold flesh on her shoulder.
My father returned. He stood across from me and next to a small night stand. He examined the items on the night stand—a comb, a brush, a china bowl half filled with water and a folded wash cloth—and seemed to be looking for something. He opened the shallow drawer in the nightstand and picked up a small, maybe three inches square, piece of mirror glass.
He said, “I’m glad I remembered we had this.”
He wiped the mirror with the washcloth, dried it on his shirt, and laid it on the night stand.
“Just in case,” he said.
He took a pencil and a small piece of paper from his shirt pocket and put them on the table beside the mirror.
He said, “To mark the time.”
The best, the only, way I know how to describe the rest of that night that went on into the earliest hours of the next morning, is that it kept getting wider and wider. The air in the bedroom was still, the light dim, barely bright enough to see all the way across the small room. The skin around my grandmother’s mouth had grown gray and pasty.
My father now and then dampened the washcloth in the china basin, rung it out and carefully wiped my grandmother’s brow. He took the brush and lightly pushed her gray-streaked hair up and back from her face. He fussed with the blanket, rearranged it in the slightest possible ways he thought might make her more comfortable. He spoke to her. “There you are,” and “That’s better,” and “It’s not so bad, is it?”, and “It’s all right, Elizabeth. Everything is all right.” He brushed away a hair or dried a bead of spittle with a gentleness of touch I had never seen from him before.
My mother came into the room some time in the middle of the night. She stood beside me.
“How is she?”
My father said, “She’s resting.”
“She seems quieter.”
“She is.”
“Do you think it’ll happen tonight?”
“Yes. I think so.”
The walls of the room could not stop the spreading out of the minutes that followed minutes that stretched the shadows in the room. Wider and wider.
My father came around the bed and again took my mother’s arm and guided her out of the room.
He said, “Go back to bed. I’ll call you.”
“You’ll be with her? You’ll stay?”
“I’ll stay.”
Shortly after he returned, my father picked up the small piece of mirror and held it out in front of him. He held it delicately, with his thumb and forefinger, the way one might hold the wing of a wounded butterfly, as though he expected the slightest pressure, maybe even the mere thought, of his fingers squeezing the glass any tighter, would shatter the mirror into thousands of tiny fragments. He breathed on it himself and looked at the fog caused by his breath. He wiped it off with an edge of the blanket.
My grandmother let out a breath. He waited. The space between breaths was much longer now. He moved the mirror toward her and held it next to her mouth and nostrils. Wideness covered all. He pulled it away, looked at it, then turned it and showed it to me. I had to lean slightly across the bed to see the light outline of moisture on the bottom part of the mirror. He wiped it off and put it back on the nightstand.
It was not until nearly morning that she finally died. Gray light seeped through the one window in the room. There had been some false alarms, some long spaces waiting for her to breathe, and a few checks with the mirror, before he finally held the mirror to her face and pulled it away only to see in it a clear, unhindered image of himself. He did it twice again—each time his hand trembled a little more, seeming to make light ripples in the air—and he made me look at it, too. I do not know exactly when she died. It happened between the last breath and the time she should have taken another one. Like the chicken that had fallen at my feet, there was no time between she is and she was, no hours or minutes or seconds, even, between was and is trading places. I was there. I waited through the ever widening night for it, and I missed it.
The next few days narrowed into a tight, twisting path like the one that goes up the side of the bluffs where Will had fallen. Only instead of eagles’ nests, there were arrangements, telephone calls, visits from people we had never met, a lot of tension about what the funeral was going to cost, and who, since my grandmother had not seen the inside of a church in more than twenty years, was going to conduct it. There were also Will’s ankle—a hairline fracture that required a cast—and my job. Added to the mix were the mutterings of my father, and I knew Will was right. He was going to move again. When the funeral was scheduled for Tuesday morning, I decided to catch the bus back to Twin Lake City that afternoon.
Two ladies sang “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Life is Like A Mountain Railroad” at the funeral. I kept thinking my grandmother would have preferred someone to play a recording of Red Foley singing, “Peace In The Valley.” The preacher had never met my grandmother and all of what he had to say about her had come from a short talk with Mother. There was no family to come from out of town. My sister, Angie, lived in Texas, but she was pregnant and couldn’t travel. The preacher talked for about ten minutes and didn’t say anything that should have surprised anyone. When the funeral ended, my mother seemed pleased with the way things had been done. She thanked the preacher and the ladies who sang, and she clung to the small bouquet of flowers the funeral home director took off the casket and pressed into her hands.
On the way home, in the backseat of the funeral car, my father said, “He talked too long,” and might have said more, but out of the corner of his eye, he caught that quick turn of my mother’s head and the way she looked at him. He settled back into his seat and remained silent the rest of the way.
When I woke the next morning I intended to catch the first available bus. Will was not in his bed, and the house was silent. My clothes were not where I had left them. I found a clean pair of pants and went looking for my mother. She was in the backyard hanging my freshly washed clothes on the clothesline.
She said, “Good morning.”
I said, “Good morning. I had hoped to catch an early bus.”
She said, “It won’t take long for them to dry. It’s such a warm day.”
It was warm, and a small wind would hurry the drying. I didn’t have much choice.
She added, “Your father wants you to help him with some things when he gets back. He took Will to school. There’s coffee on the stove.”
A big porcelain coffee pot sat in a deep pan almost filled with water over a low flame. I poured a cup and walked through the house to my grandmother’s room. I walked into emptiness, a vast hollowness that sucked my breath out of me. The bed linens were gone. A large brown and yellow stain covered the middle of the old, cotton mattress. I walked around the bed to the nightstand, picked up the small piece of mirror and looked at myself in it. I breathed on it and wiped off the moisture with my sleeve. I breathed on it again, and watched the moisture over my reflection slowly disappear. I was amazed by the fragility of even the sign of life. Maybe I didn’t really think that then, but that’s how I remember it.
My mother’s footsteps sounded from the kitchen, and I went to meet her.
She said, “I was wondering where you were.”
“In the front.”
“I’m glad you’re still here. I wanted to tell you something before you father gets back. Want more coffee?”
She refilled my cup and poured one for herself and sat at the table. I sat across from her.
She said, “I want to thank you for the other night, for staying up with your father, I mean.”
I said, “I was glad to do it,” and felt like I had stumbled over the awkwardness of the words, “I don’t mean glad, I just mean I thought I ought to.”
She pulled a small piece of paper out of her apron pocket and laid it on the table.
She said, “He marked the time,” and smoothed the paper with the heel of her hand.
I looked at the piece of paper. It said, 5:47, and I was puzzled. There was no clock in my grandmother’s room. Neither my father nor I wore a watch; something about his body chemistry made a wrist watch run fast and I hadn’t been able to afford one yet. And I did not see him write it down. It seemed a strange number.
“It helped him a lot, you being there. He said so. And I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
My father’s car crunched the rocks in the driveway. I don’t know where my mother’s talk was going, but I was relieved when it was interrupted.
What my father wanted me to help him with was to get rid of the old, cotton mattress. We rolled it up and tied it with a piece of clothesline. Then we stuffed it in the trunk of his car the best we could. It would not go all the way, and we used another piece of clothesline to tie down the trunk. Then we carried it to the dump.
On the way there I said, “I saw the note you made. How did you figure out what time Grandma died?”
“I don’t know that I really did. It was just getting daylight, but it wasn’t sunrise yet. I read in the paper that sunrise wasn’t until 6:07, so I just subtracted twenty minutes. Why? Do you think it matters?”
I said, “No, I guess not. Not really.”
Truth was, I didn’t know whether or not I thought it mattered. I wondered if it mattered if he was wrong in a certain direction. If he gave a few minutes to the record of her life, that would be all right, I thought. But what if she had lived longer than 5:47? Would it have been fair to take minutes off her life? That’s crazy, I told myself, and asked him if he had decided what he was going to do when Will’s school was over.
“Your mother and I are talking about going to Chicago. We can both find work there. It’ll be good for your mother to have something to do.”
“What about Will?”
“There’s bound to be work for him in a city like that. His ankle ought to be all right before we go.”
It was definite. He had thought it through, and he had enlisted my mother. The new rainbow rose from the shore of Lake Michigan, and I was more eager than ever to catch my bus to go South.
My clothes were dry by the time we returned from the dump. My mother made me eat a sandwich and pleaded with me to stay at least until Will got home. That would mean not getting back to Hot Springs until late that night. I wanted to go sooner.
“Tell Will I said goodbye and good luck in Chicago.”
She said, “I think he’ll like it there.”
She did not sound convincing.
My father took me to the bus station. The bus was already there. When we shook hands, he held on an extra moment. He wished me well and said he would stop in to see me next time he was in Twin Lake City. He probably would get there at least once before they moved. He thanked me for coming home and for spending that night with him. I got on the bus and took a window seat and looked for him, but he had already gone to his car. As the bus pulled away, I leaned forward enough to catch a glimpse of him as he drove around the corner, his shoulders hunched over the steering wheel as though he was already halfway to Chicago.
Will said, “Is that all you got?”
“It’s enough. I don’t plan to stay long.”
He slammed down the trunk lid.
“Who the hell does?”
When we got in the car, Will added, “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t come home,” then he burned rubber and sent a loud squeal hurtling through the silence of the dark town. He turned onto College Street in front of the Catholic church, hit the accelerator and went nearly airborne over the hump that held the railroad tracks.
I said, “What’s your problem?”
“Nothing.”
He pushed hard on the accelerator and drove through the stop sign at the next corner.
I said, “What the hell?”
Will didn’t look at me. He didn’t turn his head, but I could tell he wasn’t exactly paying attention to the road either. We had almost a mile to go without any more stop signs or any turns to make. I didn’t really get scared. I’d driven the same street the same way late at night. There almost never was anyone else out and about that late at night. We made that nearly a mile in no time and Will slammed on the brakes.
As he turned the corner, he said, “He’s going to move again.”
He meant our father. What he said didn’t surprise me. Will and I both had decided when we were even a lot younger that moving probably was what our father did best.
“When?”
“Just as soon as they get Grandma in the ground.”
“Why do you think so?”
We were only three or four blocks from home, and he turned the corner onto Watkins Street too fast, again sending a high squeal through the clear night air.
He said, “Shit. I don’t think so. I know it. He’s going to move and I’m going to have to go with him. I’ll bet you’re not home ten minutes before you know it, too. You better be careful, ‘cause he’s going to try to talk you into going, too.”
We had gotten to our driveway by then. Our father stood in the backyard, waiting in a square of yellowish light that spread outward from the kitchen window. He glared at Will as we walked toward the house. He clenched and unclenched his fists, a sure sign of anger about to get the best of him. When our father started to say something, Will stopped and turned toward me.
Will said, “Go ahead. I’ll get your bag.”
I shook hands with my father. We didn’t hug. He wasn’t a hugger. He told me how glad he was I had come and how anxious my mother was to see me, and all the time he glared at Will walking back to the car in the driveway.
“How is Mother?”
“Tired, mostly.”
“Grandma?”
“Hanging on. The doctor can’t figure out why she’s still here. Don’t be surprised when she doesn’t know who you are.”
As we climbed the steps to the back door, Will came up behind us.
Our father said, “From the sounds I heard when you turned the corner, you must’ve been in some kind of hurry. Money for tires doesn’t grow on trees.”
Will said, “You’ve been talking all evening about how you wished Mark would hurry up and get here. So, I hurried.”
He walked through the back door I had opened and added to me, “I’ll put your bag in the bedroom. You get the cot.”
Our father put a hand on my shoulder and urged me into the house, as he said, “I swear to Christ I don’t know what to do with him. He acts pissed off at somebody or something all the time.”
Mother came through the door leading into the back bedroom, put her arms out to hug me, and said, “My big boy. I’m glad you’re here. Your grandma will be glad, too.”
When the hug was finished, I said, “Dad said she might not recognize me.”
She turned her head, or did she? Maybe just her eyes moved. I could not have told you even right then exactly how it happened, only I knew her light blue eyes had in an instant stopped my father where he stood with the back door still half open, letting June bugs and moths attracted by the light fly into the kitchen.
Growing up with them I had long since learned to fear my father’s voice, his blood-darkened face and the threat of his wide, thick hand, even though it had hardly ever struck me. Though his hand and his voice threatened, nothing he ever said or did could stop me or him or change the atmosphere of a room the way my mother could with her look.
A glance emphasized by one raised eyebrow used to make me try to crawl inside myself and hide away like a thief looking for the darkest part of the night. My father simply stood still and looked down at his feet as my mother turned me toward the door that led to the other side of the house.
“Come see your grandmother,” she said, and added, “Shut the door, Ernest. You’re letting all the bugs in.”
She ushered me through their bedroom and into the hall that led to the front of the house. “She’ll be happy you came.”
My father was right. My grandmother did not recognize me. She seemed not to recognize anything. Her eyes fluttered open now and then, and she mumbled something unintelligible. My mother held her ear close to my grandmother’s mouth and waited longer than I could comfortably hold my breath before she stood up and wiped moisture from her ear with her sleeve.
She said, “She was trying to say something.”
“I couldn’t hear anything.”
“Maybe if you spoke to her, just to let her know you’re here.”
I did. I heard myself speaking louder and slower, the way I would speak to a small child in order to be understood. I said my name, told her she looked beautiful, and I had come home just to see her. I told my grandmother I couldn’t wait to have a cup of tea with her. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, then came the sound like air being let slowly out of the squeezed opening of a balloon and I jerked backwards from the ammoniac sting of the smell of urine.
My mother turned toward a small chest against the wall. She pulled out a fresh nightgown from one drawer and clean sheets from another. She held the sheets to her face and took a deep breath.
Mother said, “She always liked the way sheets smelled after they’d been hung out in the sun.” She laid them down at the foot of the bed and added, “Go tell your father I need him.”
The house was small and divided down the middle. On one side were the kitchen and the living room that was large enough to include a dining room table. On the other side were a bedroom in the back and another in the front connected by a hall, off of which were the bathroom and another, very small bedroom. The small one was Will’s and mine. Will was in the bed. Somebody had put up a folding canvas cot under the single window in the room for me. It left little space for walking, but I could see well enough to keep from bumping into things. The moon was nearly full and Will had not bothered to pull down the window shade. I tiptoed and squeezed my way to the cot, got undressed, and stretched out.
Will said, “Did you ever see anything like it? She’s like a goddamned breathing skeleton.”
Being home and getting in bed had not softened the anger out of Will’s voice.
I said, “I don’t think she knew I was there.”
“She doesn’t know anything, man. You’re lucky you’re not still living here.”
I looked through the window at the moon and tried to remember all the things my grandmother had told me about it when I was little. The man in the moon. Green cheese. Werewolves and other madnesses inspired by a full moon. She loved to tell scary stories.
Will said, “You ought to come back and stay for a while.”
“I have a job.”
He said, “Someday, I’m out of here,” and pulled the covers up and turned away from me. I was nearly settled into the depression in the center of the cot when he raised his head and added, “And soon, too.”
I had had a long day at work and a four hour ride on a bus. Too tired to respond. I fell asleep, too tired even to dream.
I looked into the bright light of a sun well up when loud voices coming down the hall from another part of the house woke me.
“Goddamnit, Goldie, you’re being unreasonable.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“My daddy died with nobody there, and I’m not going to let that happen to Momma.”
“That was a county hospital. It was because he was a charity case. We’d be paying this time.”
“How? We can’t pay all of the grocery bill this month. I told you not to start buying groceries on credit.”
“We’d pay it, maybe a little bit at a time. It would be different.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I’d make sure.”
“No, Ernest. No!”
Her footsteps on the wood floor in the hall sounded like rocks hitting the wall. His footfall, slower and weighted, followed hers, then the front screen door slammed and I knew he had gone outside onto the porch. In a minute, the porch swing creaked rhythmically, punctuated by the sound of his shoes tapping the floor.
Will was not in his bed. I grabbed my pants, put them on and hurried to the bathroom. I relieved myself, dashed cold water on my face and combed my hair. I looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t need to shave. A light beard was something I inherited from my father and I often went a day or two without a razor. To avoid going through my grandmother’s room, I went through the back bedroom into the kitchen and then to the front and out onto the porch.
My father said, “I was wondering how late you were going to sleep.”
I looked at my watch. It said nearly half-past nine.
“I was tired.”
“I didn’t know selling shoes was that hard on you.”
I said, “It’s not. It was the bus ride,” and walked down the steps into the small front yard and looked at the dogwood tree in full bloom across the street.
He said, “I’m thinking about planting tomatoes along the fence in back this year.”
“That will be nice.”
“It’s early yet. In another month, it should be right. We’ll have them for summer.”
I remembered Will’s anger from last night, and I said, “Are you going to still be here then?”
He stopped the motion of the swing.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Will thinks you’re getting ready to move again.”
He kicked the floor hard and the chains holding up the swing trembled.
“Maybe.”
“So who’ll pick the tomatoes if you’re not here?”
The chains on the swing creaked louder and his foot stomped once on the floor.
“The landlord can have the goddamned things for all I care.”
I don’t know where his small outburst might have gone, but it stopped cold when Mother walked out onto the porch.
She said, “I called Dr. Roblyer. He said he’d come by and see her this afternoon.”
My father said, “Good. I want to talk to him.”
They glared at each other for a long moment until my mother turned to me and said, “Good morning, sleepy head,” then looked again at my father and said, “Ernest. If you want chicken for dinner this afternoon, you need to kill one, maybe two, ” and again to me, “Mark, why don’t you say good morning to your grandmother?”
I knew that was not really a request. I went into the house and into my grandmother’s bedroom. It occurred to me right then that I wished I had been awake earlier and I could have gone with Will, wherever he went.
My mother said, “You can keep her company. I just changed her a few minutes ago. Why don’t you talk to her? I’ll call you when your breakfast is ready.”
Why don’t I talk to her? Simple answer was I was afraid to be alone in the room with my grandmother. What if something happened? What if she died? At eighteen I didn’t know what dying would look like? I had only seen one other corpse in my life, and that was my father’s father. But he had been dead for a couple of days already and was all dressed up and made up lying on a white satin pillow. Three years before this. I was Will’s age then. Would it be different from that? What did a dead body look like, not dressed up and lying in an ordinary bed meant for someone still alive? I would rather have gone in the backyard to watch my father kill a chicken.
I remembered a lot of times I saw my father wring a chicken’s neck in the backyard and watched it run around the yard, its head flopping from one side to the other. He and I sat on the back step and laughed at it.
My father said, “If you ever wondered how dumb a chicken is, the damned thing doesn’t even know it’s dead.”
Suddenly it jumped and flapped and flopped and one time it fell right in front of my feet. It trembled and then was still. I tried to measure the time between the trembling and the stillness, and I couldn’t. It trembled. It lay still. It was alive. It was dead. That’s when I learned there is no time, no anything, between being alive and being dead.
Grandma’s eyes followed me as I walked around the foot of the bed and came up beside her. Did she smile? Her lips moved, and I bent over as my mother had and put my ear close to her face. I heard whisperings—or was it just the struggle of air to move in and out?—and leaned closer, until my ear almost touched her lips. The sounds were like thin water running over pebbles, or like small dry leaves stirred by a breeze. I stood and wiped my ear with my handkerchief.
I told her, “The dogwoods are blooming. The tree across the street is almost finished. The leaves are starting to come out.”
She closed her eyes. I watched her breathe. There was neither motion nor sound between her breaths. There was only time. I felt dizzy and realized I had been holding my breath every time she took in one until she finally let it out. I couldn’t think of anything else to say or do, and I’m certain my mother saw a wide look of relief on my face when she came into the room and told me she had put some breakfast on the table for me.
“After you eat, you can help Daddy in the kitchen? He’s already killed the chickens. I can watch her.”
Her mood had changed. I knew that when she said, “Daddy,” instead of “your father.”
My father didn’t refuse my help. He talked to me while I quartered potatoes, and peeled onions and did whatever else he pointed out for me to do. He was good in the kitchen, better than my mother. He liked to spend late Sunday mornings preparing a huge dinner for mid-afternoon. Often he made it a necessity. It kept him from going to church with Mother.
As I chopped some onions, he started to tell what he and my mother had been arguing about earlier. He wanted to have my grandmother put in the hospital. He said because she could be more comfortable there. People who knew how to take care of someone dying would be there. Mother had decided she would keep my grandmother at home. He had not found a way to turn her mind to another direction. He believed Mother didn’t realize how unreasonable she was being, and how hard it was to do this thing she was asking him to do, and he didn’t know what he would do if Grandma died while he was watching her, and how would he know she was really dead, anyway.
He said Dr. Roblyer told him just to take a small hand mirror and hold it up close to but not touching her mouth and her nose and hold it there for a minute or so—and my father said he wanted to know just how damned long an “or so” would be—hold it there, anyway, and wait and if the glass was clear when he pulled it away, if there was no moisture on the mirror, then my grandmother would be dead. There wouldn’t be any need to call the doctor. Just make a note of what time it was, approximately would be good enough, and call the funeral home, and someone would come and take my grandmother away. The doctor could sign the death certificate later.
As my grandmother nears the end she may have something like convulsions. She might jump or thrash around. Someone ought to tie her down in the bed, just a rolled up sheet stretched across her body and tied to the bed frame would do. We would all be fine and it wouldn’t be long, it wouldn’t be long at all, probably sometime this weekend, and she’ll surely appreciate being at home and having her family around her. My father held a wooden spoon while he talked about holding the mirror close to my grandmother’s face to look for the moisture of breath, and his hand shook so hard he sprayed the stovetop with gravy drippings.
Dinner was tense. Will did not come home. Mother said he spent Sundays at his girlfriend’s house. She and my father both acted as though it wasn’t possible to do enough for the other one.
“Would you like some gravy?”
“No, thank you.”
“Did it get cold?”
“It’s fine. I just don’t…”
“I can heat it up for you.”
“No, that’s all right. You’ve done enough. I appreciate it. Maybe Mark wants his heated.”
I said, “No, it’s okay, really.”
I have recalled that hour many times. It took me a long time to get the understanding I have now about what was happening between them. Tension between them wasn’t anything new. Growing up, I had sat through interminable silent dinners just waiting for some kind of eruption, but this time was different. This time it wasn’t just stubbornness or hurt feelings because he or she couldn’t have his or her way, or because one had flung a real or imagined barb at the other. This time it was fear. They were afraid—I was afraid—that my grandmother would die alone while we were eating dinner. I knew that then. What I didn’t know then was we all feared she wouldn’t die soon, she would take too long to reach those two points between which there is no time. Their fear made the gravy get cold. Even the salt shaker was stopped up. But they, we, pretended.
My mother asked, “How’s your work? Are you selling lots of shoes?”
I said, “I’m selling some. I don’t think it’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
She said, “It’s a good job. Don’t be too quick to give it up.”
“No, ma’am.”
My grandmother used to call a day filled with tension that had everybody wondering when it would be over, wide days. This one promised to be a very wide day.
Dr. Roblyer came in the very late afternoon. He went with my mother into the front bedroom, and my father and I waited on the front porch. He sat in the swing and I sat on the top step. We were out there maybe ten minutes when I spotted Will walking up the street. He was limping. I looked back to the swing and saw my father was watching him, too.
He said, “What the hell did Will do now?”
Will stopped by Dr. Roblyer’s Cadillac parked on the street in front of the house. He put his face against the window to look inside, and when he turned to come up the path to the porch, he limped and carried one shoe in his hand.
My father said, “What the hell happened to you?”
Will said, “We went climbing the bluffs out at Toadsuck Landing. We wanted to see the eagles’ nests. I fell. Ain’t nothing broken, though.”
He hobbled up and sat down beside me before he said, “Is she dead yet?”
My father lunged out of the swing and shouted, “What kind of goddamned question is that?”
He took only a couple of steps toward us, but that was enough to have Will already up and backing away from him. I thought he was going to turn and run, but he stumbled and his face twisted with pain. He sat on the path and looked up at our father.
Will said, “I saw the doctor’s car and I thought that something had happened.”
I moved quickly down the steps, reached out a hand, and said, “Here.”
Will allowed me to pull him to his feet. I helped him hobble to the porch.
My father said, “Sit there. I’ll get the doctor to look at your ankle.”
When our father disappeared into the house, Will said, “Jesus, I didn’t mean anything.”
I said, “He’s scared. He’s never been around anyone dying before.”
“Shit. Who has?”
Dr. Robyler came outside with our mother and father and knelt down to look at Will’s ankle. He laid Will’s foot in one hand and gently probed the swollen flesh with his fingers. Will’s leg jerked. The doctor told Will to come to his office in the morning for x-rays, and in the meantime to stay off of it, keep it elevated, maybe put some ice on it.
My mother said, “I have an ice bag,” and went back into the house.
Will stood, leaned on me and hobbled up the steps and across the porch to the screen door. As we went I heard the doctor tell my father, “I don’t know what’s keeping her going, Mr. Rambler, but it can’t be long now. It just can’t be.”
My father said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this.”
The doctor said, “You’ll do fine, Mr. Rambler.”
He started to go, turned back and added, “Your wife seems awfully tired. Make her sleep tonight. If I haven’t heard anything, I’ll call in the morning.”
Through the screen door I saw my father standing alone in the path as the doctor went to his car and drove away. My father looked smaller, his shoulders slumped, and when he turned to come back to the porch, he moved slowly, like someone measuring the effort it took to lift a leg and put one foot in front of the other. At that moment, whatever else in the world he might believe, he did not believe he would be “just fine.”
Will hobbled to his bed, and mother worried over him and put an icepack on his ankle. Afterwards, she gave me the choice of watching my grandmother or making the sandwiches for our supper. I made the sandwiches. She went into the front bedroom, and my father sat in the porch swing and waited.
Will’s course for the evening and night was clearly set, but the rest of us were trying to find our separate ways to make it until the next morning.
I went several times into my grandmother’s room. Her breathing seemed even slower, but it was also louder, like someone gargling, only from deeper than the throat. We could hear it even on the porch.
My father said, “It’s the rattle.”
“The what?”
“The death rattle. I’ve never heard it before, but I remember people talking about it when one of my uncles died. They said it lasted for days.”
He quickly changed the subject and asked questions about my work and my life in Twin Lake City. I assured him my life was rather dull and my work was neither more nor less than what I expected it to be. Selling shoes at Stricter’s Discount Fashion Shoe Store was my first job combined with living away from home. I lived in a furnished room, ate all my meals in greasy spoon restaurants, and without a car, had little or no social life. Yes, I had met a girl, but no it wasn’t serious. I assumed he knew I wasn’t telling him everything, and that he didn’t really want me to tell him everything. He said, “Stick with it. Something will work out,” and I didn’t know whether he was talking about the job or a girl, or his intention to move.
At another point, he said, “I don’t know what to do with Will.”
I looked at the stars. The sky was clear, the moon shone bright.
He said, “I’m gone all week and your mother has to deal with him and he’s in a new kind of trouble every time I call home.”
“He’s afraid you’re going to move again.”
He pushed the swing harder. Sheet lightning brightened the sky in the distance.
He said, “The Arkansas territory isn’t as good as it used to be. People aren’t buying like they were when I first came here.”
That was a little over a year before.
I said, “Will wants to stay here and graduate.”
He said, “I don’t know,” and after three or four squeaks of the swing, “I’m thinking about going to Chicago. There’s more opportunity there. You could sell a lot more shoes up there.”
I don’t think he took a breath between those last two sentences.
I said, “I don’t think I want to go to some other new place so soon.”
My mother called to him right then, and he got up off the swing.
“Later,” he said. He made sure I knew our conversation wasn’t over.
I stood beside the bed opposite from my mother and father. Will had said she was almost a skeleton. I couldn’t have imagined how anyone could look so gaunt and still be breathing. She was a tall woman, nearly five-ten, and she weighed less than ninety pounds. When I put my hand on one of her arms, I felt skin and bone, with nothing between them. The rattle was louder. Small bubbles were forced to the edges of her lips whenever she let out a breath.
My father looked at me and said, “Let’s check the tie-down sheet.”
We retightened the knots of the rolled up sheet that stretched across her chest.
My father said, “I’ll be back in just a minute.”
I must have looked startled, because he quickly added, “I’ll just be a minute,” and he took hold of my mother’s arm and guided her out the door, into the hall toward the back bedroom. She didn’t want to go, but she didn’t have the strength to resist him. She tried to protest.
“No, Ernest.”
He said, “You need to rest, to sleep.”
“I can’t do that. “
“The doctor said I had to make sure you got to sleep tonight. I’ll call you if anything happens.”
They got quiet, then I heard my father say, “You sleep now. Mark will stay with me.”
When I heard him tell her that I would stay with him I instantly remembered the thought I had when he had called to ask me to come home, and I wished I had told him to call me again when it was over. I wished I was in the shoe store sitting on a stool putting a too tight shoe on a woman’s sweaty foot. I wished I was anywhere else.
Grandma jumped. It was like a reflex action, a sudden, all-body twitch. I put my hand on her shoulder. Her breathing had changed. Fewer bubbles at her lips when she let out a breath. The rattle sounded like a whisper. I pulled up the light blanket that covered her so that I wouldn’t have to touch the cold flesh on her shoulder.
My father returned. He stood across from me and next to a small night stand. He examined the items on the night stand—a comb, a brush, a china bowl half filled with water and a folded wash cloth—and seemed to be looking for something. He opened the shallow drawer in the nightstand and picked up a small, maybe three inches square, piece of mirror glass.
He said, “I’m glad I remembered we had this.”
He wiped the mirror with the washcloth, dried it on his shirt, and laid it on the night stand.
“Just in case,” he said.
He took a pencil and a small piece of paper from his shirt pocket and put them on the table beside the mirror.
He said, “To mark the time.”
The best, the only, way I know how to describe the rest of that night that went on into the earliest hours of the next morning, is that it kept getting wider and wider. The air in the bedroom was still, the light dim, barely bright enough to see all the way across the small room. The skin around my grandmother’s mouth had grown gray and pasty.
My father now and then dampened the washcloth in the china basin, rung it out and carefully wiped my grandmother’s brow. He took the brush and lightly pushed her gray-streaked hair up and back from her face. He fussed with the blanket, rearranged it in the slightest possible ways he thought might make her more comfortable. He spoke to her. “There you are,” and “That’s better,” and “It’s not so bad, is it?”, and “It’s all right, Elizabeth. Everything is all right.” He brushed away a hair or dried a bead of spittle with a gentleness of touch I had never seen from him before.
My mother came into the room some time in the middle of the night. She stood beside me.
“How is she?”
My father said, “She’s resting.”
“She seems quieter.”
“She is.”
“Do you think it’ll happen tonight?”
“Yes. I think so.”
The walls of the room could not stop the spreading out of the minutes that followed minutes that stretched the shadows in the room. Wider and wider.
My father came around the bed and again took my mother’s arm and guided her out of the room.
He said, “Go back to bed. I’ll call you.”
“You’ll be with her? You’ll stay?”
“I’ll stay.”
Shortly after he returned, my father picked up the small piece of mirror and held it out in front of him. He held it delicately, with his thumb and forefinger, the way one might hold the wing of a wounded butterfly, as though he expected the slightest pressure, maybe even the mere thought, of his fingers squeezing the glass any tighter, would shatter the mirror into thousands of tiny fragments. He breathed on it himself and looked at the fog caused by his breath. He wiped it off with an edge of the blanket.
My grandmother let out a breath. He waited. The space between breaths was much longer now. He moved the mirror toward her and held it next to her mouth and nostrils. Wideness covered all. He pulled it away, looked at it, then turned it and showed it to me. I had to lean slightly across the bed to see the light outline of moisture on the bottom part of the mirror. He wiped it off and put it back on the nightstand.
It was not until nearly morning that she finally died. Gray light seeped through the one window in the room. There had been some false alarms, some long spaces waiting for her to breathe, and a few checks with the mirror, before he finally held the mirror to her face and pulled it away only to see in it a clear, unhindered image of himself. He did it twice again—each time his hand trembled a little more, seeming to make light ripples in the air—and he made me look at it, too. I do not know exactly when she died. It happened between the last breath and the time she should have taken another one. Like the chicken that had fallen at my feet, there was no time between she is and she was, no hours or minutes or seconds, even, between was and is trading places. I was there. I waited through the ever widening night for it, and I missed it.
The next few days narrowed into a tight, twisting path like the one that goes up the side of the bluffs where Will had fallen. Only instead of eagles’ nests, there were arrangements, telephone calls, visits from people we had never met, a lot of tension about what the funeral was going to cost, and who, since my grandmother had not seen the inside of a church in more than twenty years, was going to conduct it. There were also Will’s ankle—a hairline fracture that required a cast—and my job. Added to the mix were the mutterings of my father, and I knew Will was right. He was going to move again. When the funeral was scheduled for Tuesday morning, I decided to catch the bus back to Twin Lake City that afternoon.
Two ladies sang “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Life is Like A Mountain Railroad” at the funeral. I kept thinking my grandmother would have preferred someone to play a recording of Red Foley singing, “Peace In The Valley.” The preacher had never met my grandmother and all of what he had to say about her had come from a short talk with Mother. There was no family to come from out of town. My sister, Angie, lived in Texas, but she was pregnant and couldn’t travel. The preacher talked for about ten minutes and didn’t say anything that should have surprised anyone. When the funeral ended, my mother seemed pleased with the way things had been done. She thanked the preacher and the ladies who sang, and she clung to the small bouquet of flowers the funeral home director took off the casket and pressed into her hands.
On the way home, in the backseat of the funeral car, my father said, “He talked too long,” and might have said more, but out of the corner of his eye, he caught that quick turn of my mother’s head and the way she looked at him. He settled back into his seat and remained silent the rest of the way.
When I woke the next morning I intended to catch the first available bus. Will was not in his bed, and the house was silent. My clothes were not where I had left them. I found a clean pair of pants and went looking for my mother. She was in the backyard hanging my freshly washed clothes on the clothesline.
She said, “Good morning.”
I said, “Good morning. I had hoped to catch an early bus.”
She said, “It won’t take long for them to dry. It’s such a warm day.”
It was warm, and a small wind would hurry the drying. I didn’t have much choice.
She added, “Your father wants you to help him with some things when he gets back. He took Will to school. There’s coffee on the stove.”
A big porcelain coffee pot sat in a deep pan almost filled with water over a low flame. I poured a cup and walked through the house to my grandmother’s room. I walked into emptiness, a vast hollowness that sucked my breath out of me. The bed linens were gone. A large brown and yellow stain covered the middle of the old, cotton mattress. I walked around the bed to the nightstand, picked up the small piece of mirror and looked at myself in it. I breathed on it and wiped off the moisture with my sleeve. I breathed on it again, and watched the moisture over my reflection slowly disappear. I was amazed by the fragility of even the sign of life. Maybe I didn’t really think that then, but that’s how I remember it.
My mother’s footsteps sounded from the kitchen, and I went to meet her.
She said, “I was wondering where you were.”
“In the front.”
“I’m glad you’re still here. I wanted to tell you something before you father gets back. Want more coffee?”
She refilled my cup and poured one for herself and sat at the table. I sat across from her.
She said, “I want to thank you for the other night, for staying up with your father, I mean.”
I said, “I was glad to do it,” and felt like I had stumbled over the awkwardness of the words, “I don’t mean glad, I just mean I thought I ought to.”
She pulled a small piece of paper out of her apron pocket and laid it on the table.
She said, “He marked the time,” and smoothed the paper with the heel of her hand.
I looked at the piece of paper. It said, 5:47, and I was puzzled. There was no clock in my grandmother’s room. Neither my father nor I wore a watch; something about his body chemistry made a wrist watch run fast and I hadn’t been able to afford one yet. And I did not see him write it down. It seemed a strange number.
“It helped him a lot, you being there. He said so. And I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
My father’s car crunched the rocks in the driveway. I don’t know where my mother’s talk was going, but I was relieved when it was interrupted.
What my father wanted me to help him with was to get rid of the old, cotton mattress. We rolled it up and tied it with a piece of clothesline. Then we stuffed it in the trunk of his car the best we could. It would not go all the way, and we used another piece of clothesline to tie down the trunk. Then we carried it to the dump.
On the way there I said, “I saw the note you made. How did you figure out what time Grandma died?”
“I don’t know that I really did. It was just getting daylight, but it wasn’t sunrise yet. I read in the paper that sunrise wasn’t until 6:07, so I just subtracted twenty minutes. Why? Do you think it matters?”
I said, “No, I guess not. Not really.”
Truth was, I didn’t know whether or not I thought it mattered. I wondered if it mattered if he was wrong in a certain direction. If he gave a few minutes to the record of her life, that would be all right, I thought. But what if she had lived longer than 5:47? Would it have been fair to take minutes off her life? That’s crazy, I told myself, and asked him if he had decided what he was going to do when Will’s school was over.
“Your mother and I are talking about going to Chicago. We can both find work there. It’ll be good for your mother to have something to do.”
“What about Will?”
“There’s bound to be work for him in a city like that. His ankle ought to be all right before we go.”
It was definite. He had thought it through, and he had enlisted my mother. The new rainbow rose from the shore of Lake Michigan, and I was more eager than ever to catch my bus to go South.
My clothes were dry by the time we returned from the dump. My mother made me eat a sandwich and pleaded with me to stay at least until Will got home. That would mean not getting back to Hot Springs until late that night. I wanted to go sooner.
“Tell Will I said goodbye and good luck in Chicago.”
She said, “I think he’ll like it there.”
She did not sound convincing.
My father took me to the bus station. The bus was already there. When we shook hands, he held on an extra moment. He wished me well and said he would stop in to see me next time he was in Twin Lake City. He probably would get there at least once before they moved. He thanked me for coming home and for spending that night with him. I got on the bus and took a window seat and looked for him, but he had already gone to his car. As the bus pulled away, I leaned forward enough to catch a glimpse of him as he drove around the corner, his shoulders hunched over the steering wheel as though he was already halfway to Chicago.