High Crime Area
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
    To Richard Burgin
An Invitation from the Publisher
Early shift is 6:30
A
.
M
. which was when I arrived at the elder care facility at Eau Claire where I have been an orderly for two years. Maybe thirty minutes after that, when the elderly nun's body was discovered in her bed.
In fact I'd gotten to work a few minutes before my shift began as I usually do, in nasty weather especially (as it was that morning: pelting-rain, dark-as-night, first week of November), out of a concern for being late. For jobs are not easy to come by, in our economy. And in Oybwa County, Wisconsin, where I have lived all my life except for three and a half years “deployed” in Iraq as a medical worker. I am a conscientious orderly, with a very good reputation at the facility.
If I am interviewed by the county medical examiner I will explain to him: it is a wrongly phrased descriptionâ
Body discovered in bed.
For when I entered Sister Mary Alphonsus's room in Unit D, my assumption was that the Sister was alive, and the “discovery” was that she was not alive, or in any case not obviously alive. I did not “discover” a “body” in the bed but was shocked to see Sister Mary Alphonsus unmoving, and unbreathing, with a gauzy fabric like muslin wrapped around her head (like a nun's veil or wimple), so that her face was obscured.
She was unresponsive to me. Yet even at this, I did not “discover” a “body”âit was natural for me to believe that the elderly woman might have lapsed into a coma.
(Not that death is so unusual in an elder care facility like oursâhardly! All of our patients die, eventually; Unit E is our hospice wing. But the death of the resident in room twenty-two of Unit D was not expected so soon.)
In my Iraqi deployment my instinct for things
not-right
became very sharp. Out-of-ordinary situations there might ariseâsuddenlyâas in a nightmareâan explosion that could tear off your legs. You had to be alertâand yet, how is it possible to be always alert?âit is not possible. And so, you develop a kind of sixth sense.
And so as soon as I entered the room after knockingâtwiceâat the doorâI saw that things were
not-right,
and the hairs at the nape of my neck stirred. There was no light in the room and Sister Mary Alphonsus was still in bedâthis was
not-right.
For Sister Mary Alphonsus was always “up” before the early shift arrived, as if pride demanded it. The nun was one of those older persons in our care who
does not accept that she is elderly,
and will turn nasty with you if you behave as if she is.
Sister?âin a lowered and respectful voice I spoke. Always I addressed Sister Mary Alphonsus with courtesy, for the old woman was easily offended by a wrong intonation of voice. Like a bloodhound keen for scent, this one was sharp to detect mockery where there was none.
Not a good sign, Sister Mary Alphonsus wasn't yet awake. Very strange, the light above her bed hadn't been switched on.
And a strong smell of urine in the room. Unexpected, in Sister Mary Alphonsus's room, whose occupant wasn't incontinent, and who was usually fussy about cleanliness.
When I switched on the overhead light the fluorescent bulb flickered like an eye blinking open.
The shock of it, then: seeing the elderly nun in her bed only a few feet away, on her back, not-moving; and wrapped around her head some sort of gauzy white fabric like a curtain, so her face was hidden. And inside the gauze the Sister's eyes shut, or openâyou could not tell.
Died in her sleep. Cardiac arrest.
By the time of our senior consulting physician's arrival at the facility, at about 9
A
.
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., it was clear that elderly Sister Mary Alphonsus was not likely in a coma, but had died. The strip of gauzy material had been unwound from the woman's head by the first nurse who'd arrived at the bedside, and dropped heedlessly onto the floor.
I am not a “medic”: I am an “orderly.” In all medical matters orderlies defer to the medical staff. I had not tried to revive Sister Mary Alphonsus nor even to unwind the cloth from her head, which did not appear to be tightly tied. So far as I knew, the patient might have been alive following a stroke or heart attack.
A legal pronouncement of death can only be made by a physician.
In a senior care facility like ours, Death strikes suddenly, often overnight. Often, within an hour. Cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolism, strokeâlike strikes of lightning. If an elderly resident becomes seriously ill, with pneumonia for instance, or is stricken with cancer, he or she is transported to Eau Claire General for specialized treatment; but most of our residents have long-standing medical conditions, of which the most insidious is
old age.
In the matter of Death, when a living body becomes “dead,” there are legal procedures that must be followed. Our senior consultant was required to sign the death certificate and the county medical examiner's office had to be informed. If the deceased had listed next of kin in her file, this individual or individuals would now be notified and arrangements would be made for removal of the body from the facility and for burial.
About this, I knew nothing, and would know very littleâthough I would learn, inadvertently, that the elderly nun had died
intestate
.
(
Intestate:
a fancy word for dying without a will! A kind of nasty ring to this word
intestate,
makes you think of
testicles,
worse yet in this facility of old men
testicular cancer
. Not a welcome thought.)
Next time I came into contact with Sister Mary Alphonsus was after Dr. Bromwalder's examination, when the body was covered with a white sheet. With another orderly, I lifted it onto a gurney to push quickly and as unobtrusively as possible to the facility's morgue in the basementâ
Man, she heavy for an old lady!
I couldn't resist peeking under the sheet: Sister Mary Alphonsus's face was mottled red, a coarse-skinned face you could not have identified as female. The thin-lashed eyes were shut and the mouth that had resembled a pike's wide mouth in life hung loosely open.
She anybody you knew, Francis?
No.
There'd never been any doubt in Dr. Bromwalder's mind that the eighty-four-year-old woman had died of cardiac arrest, in her sleep. She'd been a cardiac patient: she'd had a chronic condition. It had not seemed to be life threatening, but all signs suggested heart failure and not a stroke; under these circumstances, an autopsy was not warranted.
The gauze wrapped around the nun's head was certainly too flimsy to have caused suffocation. It had seemed to the senior consulting physician but mildly mysteriousâ“eccentric”âbut many “eccentric” things happen in elder care facilities, among patients who may be mentally as well as physically ill, and so not much was made of the gauzy fabric except by some of the nursing staff of Unit D, who were puzzled, curiousâ
Why would the woman do such a thing? What does it mean?
The fabric was believed to have been taken out of the Sister's belongings, some of which were kept in a small bureau in the room. It did appear to be a curtain, or part of a curtainâwhite, dotted-swiss, somewhat soiled, a cheap material.
Maybe she was confused, in her sleep. Wrapped a curtain around her head thinking it was a nun's wimple!
Maybe she knew she was dying. It was some kind of religious thing, like after a Catholic confesses her sins to a priest
âpenance?
Among the staff of Unit D, Sister Mary Alphonsus had not been a favorite. To her face the nurses called her
Sister,
behind her back
the old nun.
Or,
the old nun who'd run that terrible orphanage at Craigmillnar.
It would be noted that Sister Mary Alphonsus was discovered to be unresponsive in her bed by the Unit D orderly, Francis Gough, who'd immediately notified the nursing staff. Time: 7:08
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.
Less certainly, it was determined that Sister Mary Alphonsus had died several hours earlierâDr. Bromwalder's estimate was between 3
A
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. and 6
A
.
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. This was a reasonable estimate judging by the temperature of the corpse when it was first examined by the doctor, in the absence of a pathologist. In the pitch-black of the early morning, hours before dawn, patients are most likely to “pass away” for these are the hours of Death.
There was a death here today. Old woman in her eighties, in my unit. She was found dead in her bed
âdied in her sleep they think.
Oh Francis! That's so sad. I hope it wasn't you who found her.
It's OK, Mom. It wasn't me.
Most mornings when the early staff began their rounds we would find Sister Mary Alphonsus fully awake and sitting in the chair beside her bed, a blanket over her knees, and a missal opened in her hands, though after near-seventy years of the Catholic missal, you would not think that the nun required an actual book to help her with prayers; or, Sister might have her rosary of wooden beads twined in her fingers, as she waited for an orderly to help her into her wheelchair. Her gaze would be vacant until you appearedâand like a raptor's eyes the vague old-woman eyes would come sharply into focus.
If you greeted her with a friendly smileâ
Good morning, Sister!
â
she was likely to frown, and to make no reply, as if you'd disturbed her in prayer, or in some private and precious drift of her mind. And so I'd learned to say nothing to her, much of the time. What would be rude behavior with other patients had come to seem, to me, expected behavior with Sister Mary Alphonsus.
Sister Mary Alphonsus was one of those residents at Eau Claire who ate meals in the patients' dining hall, not one whose meals were brought to her room. Despite the difficulty involved in delivering her to the dining hall, which was sometimes considerable, depending upon her medical ailment of the moment, Sister Mary Alphonsus insisted upon this.