Live Like You Were Dying (7 page)

“All right, now, I've got a Sunday-morning announcement to make. Anybody who stays under my roof is expected to go to church with me.” Heather looked at me wild-eyed, while Malley licked a stream of melting butter from the edge of a biscuit. Church had not exactly been on our weekend schedule back in Atlanta, and the idea of sitting through one of Grand Vestal's church services put a tinge of panic in me.

The pastor I remembered at her church had a black patch over his eye and always brought his pet cockatoo to church. He'd close each service by holding the bird up on his arm and reminding us that if God can take care of the birds of the air, how much more will He do for us? Maybe my doctors back in Atlanta needed to come down here and hear his sermons to remind them that they were not the God who fed the birds or the One who numbered our days.

“Uh . . . let me think if I have something to wear,” Heather said as she wiped crumbs from her mouth.

“Shoot! We . . . uh . . . we forgot to bring anything to wear for church.” I frowned and shook my head.

“Oh, toot on that. Don't you know the good Lord don't care what you show up in? Just as long as you show up.” Malley looked at my stunned expression and laughed right out loud. She held up her finger and touched the air, making a sizzling sound. “Busted,” she whispered.

Opening the refrigerator that was covered in a sea of magnets of every size imaginable, Grand Vestal turned slightly, holding a plate of butter. Her braids flipped across her shoulders. “And don't forget that, after church, your daddy's coming over for dinner.”

“So he's coming to church too?” I asked, knowing good and well he was not. Church suited my father the same way a tuxedo did, confining and restrictive.

“No, but he's not sleeping under my roof, now, is he? Now, hurry up and finish so we can get there on time.”

Before the church service began, the organ swelled with “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” as the Sunday school members filed in through the wooden door next to the altar. Grand Vestal led the way to the same pew she'd occupied since the day the doors opened. She wore a navy dress with a thin belt. The dress had come in and out of fashion through the years, but to my knowledge it had remained the only dress that she owned.

Along the way she stopped by every pew to introduce us. Most of the members of the small red-brick church were people I'd known since I was a boy.

“I think you were just getting married the last time I saw you,” Mrs. Harris said, looking Heather up and down. “How long has it been now?”

“Nineteen years,” I said and pulled Heather closer to me. “And the honeymoon is still going strong.”

Mrs. Harris squealed, and the jiggle of fat under her chin bounced in delight. Grand Vestal shot me a look before turning to the pew across from the aisle.

Homecoming was what the trip to Choctaw Community Church became that day. As the congregation that I'd first known in my younger years stood to sing “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” I mouthed the words and listened. Hearing the off-tune, aging voices sing the hymn I knew by heart was sweet medicine, and my soul lapped up every drop.

But not everything had stayed the same in that little country church that sat next to the highway. The pastor was now a man younger than me. His baritone voice bounced from the plastered walls until not even a child murmured. With each point he wanted to emphasize, he'd run his fingers through his spiky hair and say, “You aren't hearing me, now, are you?”

After the service the pastor greeted us at the door and engulfed Grand Vestal in his arms. She seemed to savor his affection the same way I had savored the hymns about sweet reunions in the sky.

Walking past the cars that lined the gravel parking lot, she lingered to visit with even more people. “Daddy, was Grand Vestal ever mayor of the town or something?” Malley whispered.

“Only in her mind . . . but come to think of it, she'd make a fine one.”

When I started to drive away, I asked Grand Vestal what had become of that pastor, the one with an eye patch who brought his cockatoo up to the pulpit.

Fishing through her wicker pocketbook in the backseat of our car, Grand Vestal never looked up. “Oh, him . . . we had to get shut of him, the preacher and that bird both. I tell you, the final straw was Wednesday-night prayer meeting. Racine Taylor was making announcements about visitation, and out of the clear blue, that bird went to screeching and carrying on. You never did hear such a racket. It was just like the very sound of Racine's voice was getting on that bird's nerves. You know, she always did talk through her nose. Well, sir . . . the next thing you know, that bird flew out and plucked Racine's wig right off the top of her head. I mean to tell you, the preacher had a time calming them down . . . Racine and that bird both. They tell me that to this day she still can't walk underneath a tree without getting the nervous shakes.”

We laughed and carried on the entire drive back to Grand Vestal's house. I saw my father's truck when we pulled up the long drive, and his outline was visible through the screen porch. His thin frame and slanted shoulders were topped off by the John Deere cap he had worn so long that the logo was only partially readable. “Judging from the looks of it, somebody had a good time,” he called out.

“See what you missed, Ronnie Bishop. I declare, the day I get you to church will be the day I'm satisfied the Lord will call me home. My work will finally be done,” Grand Vestal said.

“Now, see, that's how come I don't go. I'm working on keeping you around as long as I can help it.”

Grand Vestal swatted him on the back with a folded church bulletin. Malley moved forward and once again became the prim and proper girl from Atlanta whose party manners were paid for in full. My father looked awkward as he first reached for Malley's shoulder and then settled for tussling her hair.

Men might have spoken softer, but I'd never met one who spoke fewer words than my father. The way he'd shift his weight on his feet and fold his arms always made me think that he was never really comfortable in anybody's presence, except my mother's. This homecoming would be no different.

“You're gettin' so big,” he said. “Ain't she, Grand Vestal?” My grandmother agreed. “And so pretty. Ain't she pretty, Grand Vestal?” My grandmother agreed again, playing with Malley's hair.

Looking up at him through the screen door framed in cobwebs, his grainy image seemed out of focus. I stood on the concrete step as long as I could, watching him shift his weight as he listened to Malley answer one strained question after another.

Now a man of sixty, he wore gold-rimmed glasses. His ruddy and thick-skinned nose seemed better suited for a man ten years older. A farmer and retired mechanic from the Office of Public Works, he continued to spend more time with his herd of cows than with his own family. He looked through the screen door at me.

“How you making it, Nathan?”

“Good . . . good,” I said. “How have you been getting along?”

“Pretty good,” he mumbled. “Yep, doing pretty good.”

Grand Vestal opened the front door and hung her pocketbook on a coat rack in the foyer. “He's got a hernia on his left side.” She never looked back as she offered the report that made my father blush.

“Naw . . . Dr. Lewis didn't say that's for sure.”

Grand Vestal yelled over her shoulder, “Don't tell me. Watch how he gives on that left side when he walks. A hernia just as sure as I'm standing here.”

Rising up on the toe of his boots, for a second my father seemed taller than me as he tried to examine the porch light. Anything to create a diversion from talking about himself. “Vestal, you heard that Louis Franklin died last night?”

Grand Vestal turned around with her mouth wide open. “What?”

“Garrison told me down at the feed store this morning. He said Louis was just ate up with cancer. Didn't tell a living soul neither, not even his boys.”

“Oh, toot,” Grand Vestal finally said. “They don't know what that man had. He caroused every juke joint between here and Albany. I bet a plug nickel that it was his liver that got him.”

Somewhere between Louis Franklin's death and Viola Quinton's hip replacement I slipped away from the porch and retreated down the concrete block steps and into the field, where alfalfa grass swayed with the warm spring breeze. The cow Malley and I had moved into the field a day earlier turned and looked at me with pieces of grass still stuck to her lips. Sitting against the fence rail, I heard the screen door squeak and hoped that if I held my breath the person would drift back inside, never spotting the invisible man that glowed with a spot in his chest. But Heather was never one to give up that easy. She opened the rusted fence gate and sat cross-legged next to me. Saying nothing, she simply picked a long blade of grass and twirled it around her finger.

“What are you doing out here?” she said finally, slapping my arm with the blade of grass.

Shrugging, I fought the urge to say nothing and to make her go back inside. But as foolish as I might have been, I knew that she was the one sure thing that I couldn't afford to push away. So instead, I put my arm around her and buried my nose in her lilac-scented hair.

“Don't think you're going to get me to change the subject by doing that.”

“What?” I whispered.

“You know what. Listen, why can't you be this nice in front of your daddy?”

“I've studied that one for years. The best I can come up with is that he's the moon and I'm the sun. Go figure.”

“All right.” Heather nodded in agreement. “But you know what they say about the moon: it has no reflection without the sun.”

Her words poured into my being, and I was left staring at the cows that had moved closer to the edge of a dried pond, their steps making crackling sounds in the caked mud.

“To be honest with you, he just rubs me the wrong way.” Heather's touch was soft to my arm. “I want so badly for this visit to be harmonious. Can't you look for the common good in your daddy instead of trying to change him? It's there, you know. You just have to dig for it.” She kissed me on the cheek and walked back to the house, but her words stayed on my mind. I tried to think of the common good that Heather claimed stretched between my father and me. Even his features were not mine. I was my mother's son and had her dark hair and green eyes to prove it. My father's hair was redder, auburn in color like the hair that Malley was born with. The one thing that my mind kept going back to was the fact that my mother loved him for forty-two years. Time and again after my mother died, Grand Vestal would remind me that my father was a good man, as if saying it often enough would convince me.

“What makes you say that . . . that you know he's good?” I'd always ask.

“Because my daughter loved him till the day she died.”

I'm sure Grand Vestal was right. When I was a boy Mama would sit on my father's lap and snuggle on his chest as we watched TV. I'd see her primp in the mirror before he was due home from work and then run to kiss him when he walked through the door. But what about his love for her? If there was so much love, then why did he leave her alone on the night she died?

Venturing back to the house for the sake of keeping peace with my wife, if for no other reason, I found my father sitting on the porch step, still trying to make conversation. “Daddy, did you tell Grandpa Ron where we're going?” Malley asked.

“Where might that be?” my father asked.

“Uh . . . I thought I'd take her down to Brouser's Pond. Do a little bass fishing.”

“He made this list of places he wanted to visit,” Malley said. “I'm gonna make sure we hit every one of them.”

“What all's on this list?” my father asked.

“Some place that sells chili dogs,” Malley said.

“Suit yourself, but I'd rather catch me a bass than wind up with a case of indigestion from Holster's Drive-In,” my father said.

Malley laughed and, on cue, my father laughed right along with her.

“Hey,” I said. I paused, not sure if I really wanted to say what I was thinking. My father and Malley looked up at me and waited. “Um . . . why don't you come out to Brouser's with us? You still know the best places, don't you?”

“I reckon we can do that.” My father pushed up the brim of his cap and leaned forward. “'Bout what time you want me to come by in the morning?”

After setting a time after breakfast, I opened the door to walk into the house but paused at the step and patted his shoulder. The roughness of the plaid shirt seemed appropriate for this man who had never to my knowledge spoken the word
love
.

He looked up at me with that squinted look and smiled wide enough to reveal a missing tooth in the far corner of his mouth.

If only for an afternoon, the weight of tension that had held my father and me down so tight that I thought at times I'd bust had been lifted. Just like I knew she would, Malley took our relationship up in a hot-air balloon called hope.

Chapter Six

Dew still covered the ground, and the sun had not yet completely risen over the treetops when my father's red pickup appeared. Grand Vestal was stuffing Malley's book bag with biscuits and a Mason jar filled with green tea. “This tea will give you strength to reel in a big one,” Grand Vestal said before sending her off with a kiss. “Now, Sugar Boy, you sip on that tea too. It'll do you good.”

Riding through downtown for the first time, I felt a sense of sadness drift over me as we passed vacant buildings that had thrived with business during my youth. Only the newspaper office and the Johnston family hardware store had remained intact. “Nothing stays the same,” I mumbled.

Brouser's Pond was appropriately located behind Gil Brouser's house. Fifty years ago his father had bought the property that circled the pond. Even though it was private property, anybody in Choctaw was welcome to fish as long as they left a dollar in an old coffee can that dangled from a rusted nail on a pine tree. Gil's dog chased the dust behind us just like we chased the low clouds that hung over the pond. Vines and tree limbs scratched at the truck, but my father never paid them any mind. He stared straight ahead, his eyes fixated on the body of water that awaited us. Water remained the one place where his eyes would widen and his words would broaden into short conversations.