Rain Song (15 page)
The news I hear at the coffee-scented nurses’ station when I arrive at the hospital this rainy June morning is that Ducee asked for pineapple chutney. The nurses on duty are clearly amused.
“Pineapple chutney!” A short nurse in a pink smock laughs and takes a sip from her Starbuck’s cup. “Sounds very tropical.”
Tropical, I think. I’ve never heard that said about our family’s pineapple chutney. If the tradition of making the sweet condiment really started in Ireland, and Mama took the recipe to Japan, there is nothing tropical about it at all. Except for the pineapples, which grow in balmy regions.
I walk into Ducee’s room and swallow hard. She is still here, still in the white bed, living, being tended to now by a nurse named Violet.
Just as Violet begins explaining her concern over Ducee’s blood pressure, the door swings open and Iva bounces into the room with a jar. It’s pineapple chutney; she went home to get a pint for her sister.
“The chutney is here. The party has begun,” Iva says with delight.
I know Ducee would like tea with chutney and crackers, and Violet is kind enough to provide us with both crackers and tea.
We help Ducee sit up in her bed, two pillows propped at her back.
I get the task of opening the glass jar. It takes me only two tries—not bad—and the lid is off.
With a knife, Iva spreads dark yellow mounds of sweetness on the tops of a few crackers. She hands a cracker to her sister.
Ducee takes three meticulous bites, leans back on the pillows that seem bigger than she is, and says, “Ah, did that hit the spot.”
Violet asks what it is that she’s eaten.
“The finest food this side of heaven,” replies Ducee.
“Fried chicken or pizza?” asks Violet with a smile.
Ducee says with all the enthusiasm in her tiny body, “Pineapple chutney.”
Violet looks as if she might be sick.
“It’s tradition food,” explains the older woman. “It’s what keeps us strong and united.”
Violet says, “United?”
“Yes, yes. Like family. Do you know what the difference between united and untied is?”
Iva and I shoot each other looks of, where is she going with this?
Ducee smiles. “The letter
i
,” she says. “It just depends on where it sits, doesn’t it? Yes, that’s it, yes. Where one sits determines how she hears and views the world around her. In unity or untied.” She shifts her body slightly under the sheet and repeats, “Untied.”
Violet is used to all types of patients, I’m sure, and in her medicine chest of replies, finds a response to my grandmother. “You are quite wise, Mrs. Dubois,” and then she takes her blood pressure and heads out the door.
Iva fidgets, moving from Ducee’s bedside to the window and back to her bed, like a caged animal.
Finally, Ducee cries, “Oh, Iva, go have a smoke!”
Iva stops in her tracks, and I see relief spread across her face. “Really? I won’t be long.”
“I’ll be here. It’s okay,” I reassure my aunt. I know she would never want her sister to be alone, especially during the day in this hospital room.
We watch Iva slide out of the room, dodging a potted Begonia sent from The Twins, her long legs gliding over the linoleum.
When we are alone, Ducee turns to me and gives a warm smile. “How are you, my dear?”
“Me?” I snort. “How are you?”
She smiles again, and I see flecks of life in her bluish-green eyes, eyes that were sallow just days ago. “My heart just fluttered,” she says.
“It wasn’t just a flutter this time. You had a heart attack.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
Ducee grins. “Well, well.”
She asks for a sip of tea, and I apologize that it’s not ginger.
“I don’t know what happened to me. It was a glorious morning. Brilliant.”
It was. I’d been shopping. Shopping as if all was well while just miles down the road my own grandmother was having a heart attack.
“Did you see the sky?” Ducee closes her eyes. “As blue as a Staffa Aster. Yes, yes.”
I couldn’t pick an Aster out of a lineup, much less a Staffa kind.
“Maggie McCormick and I did enjoy a few sugar cubes, and she ate a whole baked potato as I gave her a good brushing. And then, quick as a flash, here I am.” She smiles broadly, her thin lips barely visible.
“Your heart must have hurt. You had a heart attack.” I wish the woman would realize that she’s not at a picnic in the park.
“Aren’t those nice?” she says referring to a lime green vase filled with pink and white roses, yellow daisies, and purple horns of plenty.
There are so many vases and baskets of flowers on every flat surface of this room. Relatives, neighbors, and church friends have come out of the woodwork to send flowers and cards to my grandmother. The fourth-grade Sunday school class even delivered a stuffed brown bear with an attached red balloon that reads, “We can’t bear to be without you.” The get-well card from a grandniece in Elizabeth City with the pink-tongued poodle on the front is ironic, since Ducee is far from fond of the breed. Lou Anne, the relative who is a Realtor and sold my house to me, sent a tin in the shape of a house. The tin is filled with peppermints.
Ducee looks at me as I admire the newest addition from Cousin Aaron and Puddin’. It is a stone sculpture of two opened hands, palms cupped, and on the index finger of one of the hands sits a tiny sparrow. The line from a song Ducee often hums, “His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me,” is printed in silver letters across the other palm.
Birds of the air. Lilies of the field. Here today and gone tomorrow. God cares for them and oh, how much more He cares for you and me. This is one of Ducee’s Southern Truths she’s paraphrased from the book of Matthew.
Suddenly she says, “Don’t miss your flight.”
I look at her, my little grandmother in a bed surrounded by tangible love—all these gifts from others.
“You haven’t missed it now, have you?”
I shake my head. I am about to protest.
“I wish she’d written more.” She yawns. “Nowadays we have video cameras. I so wish she had one back in the sixties so that she could have filmed it all. Then I could have watched, and you could see what it was really like then. But no, all we had were letters. And I’m afraid your mama didn’t write enough of those.”
So Mama didn’t send enough letters back home to her parents in Mount Olive? Mama wasn’t perfect.
Ducee seems to be in a talkative mood. Perhaps her heart attack has triggered her memory. Maybe she will say that she knew Mama was pregnant when she died.
“Ducee, what else do you remember?”
But Ducee is asleep, her head against the pillows, her mouth in the shape of a tiny O.
I make my way to the stool by her bed and just watch.
She’s told me that she used to hover over my bed as I slept during the first nights at her house after Father and I came back from Japan. She says she would cry because she missed her Emma so much and that to watch me without my mother tore her heart to pieces. She knew her lap would never be large enough to hold me and give me what I needed from a mama. But she made a promise that she would certainly try to be the best grandmother she could be.
And although a part of her wanted to die and join her beloved Emma because she didn’t think there could be life without her daughter, she knew her work on earth was not complete. “My, my,” she has told me over the years as she caresses my arm, “I thought what a huge task God has given to me in my old age—to care for this tiny one. But you know what? The task was not a chore at all. No, no. Every moment with you has been a gift.”
At this point, I always feel honored, special, and immensely worthy—like a beautiful quilt has been swept over me, engulfed me, and warmed me with sunlight even brighter than the sun beaming over the Carolina coast.
Ducee’s mouth is fully opened now, and she is snoring. Many times as a child the husky sound of her snoring annoyed me. Now I welcome it; it means she is alive.
I lift the sheet that has slipped around her stomach, tucking it over her chest and around her shoulders and neck. When I pat her shoulder, it feels fragile to me. Like a Japanese porcelain doll I once saw displayed in a glass case at an Asian store in Goldsboro. I was so afraid it would topple off the shelf, shatter, and break. I worried that if my footsteps were too hard or loud, the doll would come crashing down. I didn’t want to see damage come to that delicate porcelain face.
Ducee murmurs something I can’t understand, and a slight smile forms across her mouth. Then the door to her room is flung open and a frazzled Iva announces, “Clive is here. He was in a fight.”
In the emergency room of the same hospital, seated on a crisp bed, is Great-Uncle Clive. His head is wrapped in a white bandage and a scarlet-and-blue bruise lines one side of his jaw. His right arm rests against his side in a bulky cast. There are streaks of blood around the neck to his white “Drink Pepsi” T-shirt. His denim overalls are torn at the knees.
“He hit first” is all he says.
Iva, who cajoled her brother into telling, relayed the incident to me as we headed down to the ER in the elevator. Clive heard Dennis had come back to see Grable and collect his things. Furious, Clive asked where Dennis was staying. Grable told him he was at a friend’s apartment in Goldsboro. Clive found the telephone number mounted to Grable’s refrigerator with the forest green Mount Olive magnet and tracked Dennis down, entering the apartment this morning. Dennis yelled at him to get out, and the fight began. Clive left town right when Dennis threatened to ram an axe into one of the truck’s doors—the one heavily adorned with the Pepsi logo. It wasn’t until Clive’s daughter Chloe saw him hours later, in his broken condition, that he agreed to take her advice and head to the ER.
Of course, Iva didn’t know that Dennis had left Grable and Monet. Her brother’s fight with Dennis was the first she’d heard that Dennis had not been living at home in ages.
“I just don’t know why Grable didn’t tell me or Clarisa Jo,” Iva says with shock.
I am surprised that our clan has kept a secret. Grable didn’t want her mom, Clarisa Jo, or her grandmother Iva to know that Dennis was gone more than he was home and that she knew of his affair. She confided in Clive, and a little in me.
“He had it coming to him,” Clive tells me through clinched teeth and eyebrows that rise in fury.
“What does he look like?” I ask tentatively. “What did you do to Dennis?”
“He’s a selfish good-for-nothing.”
Clive, even as a child, I’m told, was a person of few words. He has nothing else to say. He waits for the doctor to release him to go home so that he can tend to his cucumber crop, sit on his newest John Deere and mow the grass, and work on a playhouse he is building on his property for Monet. I heard he painted a bottle of Pepsi on one side.
I touch his arm, the one without the cast. “I’m sorry, Uncle Clive.”
“She needs her daddy.” His eyes hold flames.
I nod, knowing he is referring to Monet. “She needs so much.” I let the sentence hang in the air and then am tempted to add to it, but what is there to say? Monet is suffering without her daddy. And Grable is clearly at her wits’ end.
“How’s Ducee?” Clive asks after moments of silence pass between us.
“Better . . . I think.”
He stares at his cast. “She can’t leave us.”
My sentiments exactly.
When a nurse enters with what Clive calls his exit papers, I leave the room.
Among the relatives, it has always been said of Great-Uncle Clive, “He has a temper. You think he’s all silent and strong, but when his temper boils, it boils.”
It boiled today.
I’m sorry I missed all the drama. I would have liked to have seen what really happened. I have a hard time believing that Dennis, who can act so refined in his pressed lawyer’s suit, threatened my great-uncle’s Pepsi truck with an axe.
No wonder he reminds many family members of Aunt Iva’s ex, Harlowe.
———
Ducee sleeps when I visit the next day. It seems the flowers in the room have multiplied overnight. I read the new cards and notes attached to the vases of day lilies, roses, and one delicate purple orchid. Against one of the vases is a thick piece of paper with a picture painted on it. In the picture, the sun is shining through a set of dark clouds. Below the clouds is a square fish tank with a little angelfish inside. Around the tank are strands of purple, green, and blue. The picture, obviously drawn by an elementary school student, makes me smile. I wonder who painted this artwork for Ducee. The artist used acrylic paints and did quite a good job.
Violet enters Ducee’s room and greets my sleeping grandmother by touching her cheek with one hand and exclaiming, “How are we today, Mrs. Dubois?” Then Violet sees me studying the picture. “Nice, isn’t it? That little girl does love your grandmother.”
“Which little girl?” I ask.
“The one with the Chinese kimono doll and the Dora the Explorer T-shirt.”
My eyes grow wide. “Not Monet!”
Violet nods and laughs. “She’s a noisy thing, but when I gave her paper and some paints I found in a drawer, she went right to work.”
“She was here?”
Violet manages to convince a sleepy Ducee to open her mouth for the thermometer. “Last night after you left,” the nurse says as she sits on the stool by Ducee’s bed. “I squeezed paint from a few tubes onto a paper plate and filled a small tray with water. She did all the rest.”
I shake my head and want to laugh. All these years we’ve been giving Monet the wrong artistic medium to use for her drawings. We’ve supplied her with crayons and markers when the child needed—who would have guessed—acrylics!
The colors in Monet’s painting are like a rainbow, a promise of hope. I imagine her holding the brush in one hand and dipping it into the pools of paint the way she dips her hot dog slices into ketchup. She’s even given the fish eyes and fins.
If the original Claude Monet were here, what would he title little Monet’s masterpiece? I’d like to think he’d agree with me and name it Beauty Within.
———
Harrison wonders why I haven’t written. “I guess you’re busy preparing for your trip,” his message says. “I do miss hearing from you. I’ll see you soon. I can’t believe how much I’m looking forward to your visit.”
His words stir within me an excitement—a feeling of magic—like a child experiences on Christmas morning.
I haven’t written to him since Ducee has been hospitalized. I guess I don’t know what to say. I do not know if I will go to Japan after all this. My longing is for my grandmother to be back on her tennis-shoes-encased feet.