Chinaberry Sidewalks (25 page)

O
ne Monday morning, just after dawn, the phone rang by my bedside. The night before, I’d gotten back to Nashville from three weeks in England, and my jet-lagged brain wouldn’t or couldn’t put into context where I was or what the caller was asking me to do. I picked up on “You need to get down here as soon as you can!” at the end of a loud whooshing noise, most likely an early morning garbage truck on busy Franklin Road, and I wondered where down here might be. “Your daddy probably won’t last till you get here.” … Well, that should’ve been the tip-off, but it wasn’t. I identified my own mother’s voice only by determining that the urgency of the words didn’t fit the serenity of the delivery. No one else would be reluctant to disturb my rest with the news that my father was dying.

“What’s going on?” Rosanne asked, with the familiar grogginess of a sleep-deprived woman who’d just been awakened after settling back into bed following the three a.m. breast-feeding of our six-month-old daughter. I was leaning over the bathroom sink and splashing water on my face. “Dad’s not going to last the day,” I said to her reflection in the mirror.

I climbed halfway up the hidden staircase leading from the bathroom to my third-floor office, sat down on the steps, closed my eyes, and said (telepathically, I suppose),
Hang on until I get there, Dad. I’m on my way
.

Rosanne, baby Carrie, my cousin Larry, and I were on the first plane to Houston—Larry booking the flights and arranging for a car and driver to deliver us to the community hospital north of Baytown where my father lay dying.

I assessed the situation in the intensive-care unit as just short of too little, too late. My father was in a coma, the ventilator stuffed down his throat keeping him alive. The doctor pointed to his blue lower legs and feet as telltale proof that the life support was beginning to fail. “Your mother has said she would rather you make the key decisions from here on out,” he confided to me. “As soon as you’ve made your peace, I’ll advise you of the options.”

My mother wore the glazed look of the sedated. It also appeared that she hadn’t slept through the night in months. Her own doctor was hovering in the wings and dispensing drugs. I know this because I overheard him saying, “Do you need something to tide you over?” with a chin gesture I knew all too well from my days of buying cocaine and marijuana from dope dealers back in Los Angeles.

I motioned for her to follow me to the chapel down the hall. “What’s he giving you?”

“Who?”

“That doctor.”

“You mean Doctor Fritts?”

“Yeah, that guy.”

“Just somethin’ for my nerves.”

“Listen, Mom, it’s none of my business what you do. But it’s clear to me that Dad’s getting ready to die in there. You can be present when he goes, or you can be whacked out and miss the whole thing. It’s up to you. That doctor isn’t doing you any favors by keeping you blotted out like this. I’m about to send him packing.”

“Be nice to him, son. He’s been good to me while your daddy’s been sick.”

“I’ll bet he has.”

When politely told his services were no longer required, the doctor argued, with all due respect, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that pulling her off the meds cold turkey could be life threatening. “We’re in a hospital,” I said nastily. “I’ll take my chances.” He countered this with “So you’re willing to gamble with your mother’s life?” I assured him I was indeed willing to roll those dice, and that I had her permission to run a check on his billing records, a lie that prompted his sulking exit.

Once the pill pusher was banished, I leaned in close to my father’s right ear, hoping the medical staff couldn’t hear my thirty-eight years of hero worship distilled down to a few mumbling sentences. Sensing as much, they quickly left the room. “Go ahead, Dad,” I said. “It’s all right if you want to slip on out of here. You’ve been a good father to me. I love you. And don’t worry, I’ll look after Mom.” I backed away so Rosanne and Larry could say their good-byes, but they already had.

His body shuddered, a leg gave a jerk, the temperature in the room shot up a degree, an alarm went off somewhere behind the lifesupport equipment, the medical team hustled back into the room, and my father came back to life. The doctor flashed a penlight in his eyes, checked his pulse, and stepped back, shaking his head. “This is a miracle,” he said. “What’s left of your father’s heart is beating again. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was two seconds from advising you to disconnect the life support when his vitals came back. Can I speak to you in the hallway?”

Out there, apparently having changed his mind again, he recommended pulling the plug and moving my father to a private suite where, with help from the nursing staff, we could spend the time he had left however we liked.

For the next four days and nights my mother made herself as comfortable in the sitting room as a person coming off Valium possibly could be. There was a sofa bed and enough furniture in there to accommodate a revolving cast of well-wishers and supportive church folk, whom my garrulous cousin Dee thought could help Sister Crowell through this troubled time by babysitting our little Carrie, who seemed happy to provide some distraction.

Determined that my father should die peacefully, I taped a
MEDICAL STAFF ONLY
sign to his door, and Dee enforced my decree that only my mother, Rosanne, and Larry were allowed to enter the bedroom without my permission.

A nurse showed me how to operate an apparatus designed to siphon off the fluids filling my father’s lungs—his heart being too weak to pump blood away from his chest cavity—and this became a chore I very much looked forward to. Every third hour, I’d rig up the contraption and we’d harvest another pint of the red liquid; then I’d hoist the container in the air and ridicule its contents for supposing it had the power to drown my partner. “Not on my watch,” I’d declare, a boast that produced a faint, wordless smile from my father.

On the second day we found our rhythm. If I needed sleep, I crawled in bed beside him. And when I was hungry, food would appear. We even watched an inning or two of an Astros game on television. That night I woke with a start from a restless nap. The window was open and the curtains swayed gently, courtesy of a moonlit breeze. He was awake.

“Who’s that girl you used to sing for?” he asked.

The girl was Emmylou, whom he knew well. He and my mother had visited her house on several occasions.

“She wants me to move that pile of dirt out yonder by the street,” he said, pointing out the window.

I teased him for getting his jobs mixed up with mine, but soon found that decoding snippets of the fantastic reality he’d hauled back from some dreamworld was one more thing to look forward to.

Later, after he’d drifted off again, I found myself watching scenes from our shared past that were being projected, in no particular order, onto a memory screen behind my eyes. We’re on the beach in Galveston when I’m five years old, and he’s teaching me to dance. We’re doing the toe-to-heel bop in the hard-packed sand, with the car doors flung open and “Hearts Made of Stone” blasting from the dashboard radio.… I’m thirteen and mired in a batting slump, my average dropping to a dismal .238. Before the game, he takes me to the ballpark and throws two hours of batting practice. That night I go four for four, with two home runs, and finish the season batting .375.… I flash forward to a sub-zero, full-moon three a.m. in Nashville. We’ve finished assembling a Christmas extravaganza for my three little daughters and decide that a brisk walk in a foot of snow is just the ticket to a few hours of sound sleep before the first of countless happy squeals. I insist on trading my insulated boots for the senior Santa’s Tony Lamas, but midway through the trek I’m halted by cramping feet. His boots are too small. Bracing each other, we stand one-legged and swap boots again, then lose balance, topple to the ground, and lie there laughing in the frozen snow. I’m thirty-five, he’s sixty-two.… There he is, a second-string defensive back for the semi-pro Jacinto City Bears, pulling his blue jersey with a silvery-white 29 sewed on both sides over his leather shoulder pads. He’s thirty-six, and I’m both his proud son and the team’s waterboy.… I see him walking barefoot down a red-dirt road with a stringer of crappies in one hand and our cane poles in the other. He’s drunk on moonshine and singing “There’s More Pretty Girls Than One.” I join him singing, knowing that, like me, he can’t wait to get back to Grandma Iola’s farmhouse and start bragging about what great fishermen we are.… In an empty field beyond the railroad tracks, we’re running after a kite he’d made from balsa wood and grocery sacks. The wind’s too strong and the string has snapped, so our giant flying cobra hangs limp in the air, its tail-first plummet destined to end in the middle of six-lane Interstate 10.… I’m pacing the dressing room of some showcase club in Dallas, waiting to go onstage when word that he’s had a massive heart attack arrives in the pinball fashion reserved for news of the real world when you’re on tour in 1980. One cousin calls another cousin in Nashville, who calls my wife in California, who calls my booking agent, who gives her the number of the Dallas promoter, who doesn’t believe she’s who she says she is, so he has my tour manager call her back, and she notifies him that my father’s not expected to live through the night, at which point he informs me—two minutes before I go onstage—that he has bad news. And the next day, when my father’s heart quits a second time, my mother and I are standing in Baytown General Hospital’s cafeteria line, optimistically discussing the merits of Jell-O over banana pudding for recovering heart patients. And back in intensive care, we’re told the attack destroyed 60 percent of his heart, words that test our ability to process cold, hard data. Acting on the advice of a physician I know, we have him airlifted to Ben Taub Hospital in Houston and into the care of a Dr. Cauthren, an all-star cardiologist whom Dad admiringly calls Dr. Cottridge.… Then there’s the digital Casio watch I gave him to help monitor the good doctor’s prescribed walking regimen, to which he adheres with Olympian dedication. It’s a watch he loves to show off to friends and strangers alike.… There are memories of walks we take on the north side of Kauai, in New York City, our last on Radnor Lake in Nashville on Christmas Day, 1988. We’re a hilly half-mile from the car when his shoulders droop and he stops midstride. “I can’t do it anymore, son,” he says, moving in a long, slow stagger to the parking lot, me carrying him the last two hundred feet.… Later that same night, we find him in the pitch-dark nursery, cradling two-week-old Carrie in his arms, rocking his granddaughter in the old wicker rocking chair at the beginning of her life and at the end of his.

“You see them two Spanish girls standin’ at the foot of the bed?” he asked, late on the third night.

Not wanting to challenge or deny his version of reality, I said that I did.

“They want me to go with ’em through that door up yonder,” he said, motioning toward the corner of the room.

“I can see them, Dad, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.”

“Time for me to go.”

“Go where?”

“Through that door with ’em.”

“Are you ready to go?”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

“After a while.”

“Are you afraid, Dad?”

“Naw.”

I made a point of mentioning the Spanish girls every so often, and according to my father, they never left the end of his bed.

Earlier that day, I’d allowed my mother’s least-favorite brother to pay his final respects and regretted it the minute Uncle Porter stomped into the room with horseshoe taps on the heels of his cowboy boots. I nearly had a heart attack myself when he whacked my father on the back in greeting. Ignoring the blood spilling down both sides of his mouth, a direct result of the blow, he then lit into a rambling prayer identifying my father as a lowly sinner he thought Saint Peter ought to go on and let through heaven’s pearly gates on account of all that being behind him now. While Larry escorted Uncle Porter to the parking lot, I seethed and swore that no one else would be allowed into the room.