The Last Odd Day (3 page)

“Well, hello, Mrs. Witherspoon, what are you doing here this time in the day?” She moved the swivel table into the curtain that separated the two beds so she could get beside O.T. “I haven't seen you since your husband was a new patient.”

She pulled the blood pressure cuff down from the attachment on the wall behind O.T.'s head and added, “And how is my favorite fellow?” O.T. smiled.

“I know. I'm so used to those afternoon hours it's hard for me to change my ways.” I straightened O.T.'s shirt.

“This is Jean.” O.T. smiled at Karen.

“Yes, Mr. Witherspoon, I know.” She wrapped the sleeve around his arm. “Did Walter help you eat your breakfast?”

“Walter's an asshole.” He yanked his arm away, and Karen had to pull it toward her, brace it under her arm, and start again.

“O.T., that's not fair,” I said, then, “I'm sorry,” to Karen.

“Oh, no need to apologize; your husband's right. Walter is an asshole.” She said it so matter-of-factly I was shocked. I had always assumed there was some rule against talking badly about the other staff.

O.T. nodded. There was a pause as she listened for the thumps that registered my husband's flow of blood.

“Well, your pressure's fine.” She jerked the cuff off and put it back in its holder. The black cords dangled over O.T.'s head. “Let me hold your hand now.” O.T. held out his arm while Karen softly placed her fingers around his wrist. She took his pulse while she winked at him.

All the attendants babied him, flirted with him like that. At first it made him angry and I found it degrading, but then I figured it was just the way they offered care; and O.T. grew to love the possibility that he might still be a virile man, attractive to younger women. So while he was enthralled with this kind of attention, Karen stuck the thermometer in his ear and noted his temperature. I realized it was more than just a means of care giving, it was also a scheme to get his compliance.

She took out a small pad of paper and jotted down the numbers. “I hope you've been doing okay,” she said.

“Just fine,” I replied. “How's your mother?” I opened up the drawer in the little chest right by O.T.'s bed. I found a comb and began fixing his hair.

“She had gallbladder surgery last week, the hard kind where they cut you all the way across your belly; but she's home now and doing better.” She peered out the window, “You think it's going to snow?”

I glanced outside with her. The sky appeared heavy, full and ready to split. “They sure have been calling for it,” I answered. “I'd love to see a little snow.”

“Yeah, me too. It's like a tonic.”

“A what?” I asked.

“You know, a tonic. My grandmother used to make them for us, laxatives, moisturizers, homemade remedies to fix things.” She was rolling O.T. over and changing the sheets. “Just seems like snow is a natural way to soften the steely ground, free us up of pests.”

“Well that's true,” I replied, thinking of my own grandmother's poultices and bottles of cream. “Without a good snow, the bugs are worse in the spring and summer.”

I put the comb in the drawer. “There you are, sir, you are looking mighty fine this morning.”

O.T. grinned and shook his head slightly. Karen slid the clean bottom sheet under him while pushing the dirty
one toward me. I pulled it out and rolled it into a ball. While she finished with the bottom one I walked around and helped with the top sheet. I noticed that the bedsore on O.T.'s heel had closed and was not nearly so inflamed.

“Well that's a lot better.”

Karen twisted his foot around so that she could see. “Yeah, that one took a lot of work. It's amazing how quickly their skin wears down; that sore came up in a day.”

She went over to the closet and pulled out a slender strip of lamb's wool and cupped it around the bottom of O.T.'s foot. Then we draped the sheet over him. She checked his catheter bag and jotted down a few more notes.

“All right, sweetie,” she said to my husband, “you are finally all done.” She touched him on the shoulder. “I bet you and your wife will have a lot to talk about today.”

I appeared a little surprised, I'm sure, since I didn't understand what she meant. O.T. and I hadn't carried on a real conversation in years. There was always more silence than discourse.

Then she added, “Because of the weather, and,” she whispered this, “he made you something.” And she pointed her chin toward the window, near the bottom right side.

“Oh,” was all I said, and I turned and saw a red construction heart pasted on the inside of the window. Somehow I had missed it when I came in. It was a valentine card he had made with the help of the recreation director.

I walked over to it. “Ollie loves Jean” was written on the inside of the heart with broad purple strokes. I touched it and smiled at O.T.

“It's lovely, honey, thank you.”

He just watched the birds.

Karen pushed the table to where it had been and stood just inside the curtain that divided the room between her two patients. “By the way, I guess you realize you just missed your daughter.” She began pulling aside the blue flimsy drapes so that she could work on Mr. Parsons. “I think it's so nice that she's moved home to check on him; it must be a real comfort.” Then she disappeared behind the curtain and dragged it around the tracks for privacy.

I remember that Mrs. Loflin from across the hall started yelling then. She was shouting for a nurse to help her get out of the bed and that some boy was trying to kill her. Then there was the response of someone screaming at her to hold on a minute. I remember Mr. Parsons's deep breaths as Karen was checking his lungs. An old man's sigh followed by a command of “Again.” I remem
ber the quick turning of O.T.'s head like he had heard his mother's voice. And I remember the sudden flash of red, just at the corner of my eye, a cardinal, brash and bothered, pushing the other birds away from the feeder.

It's funny the things you remember at significant moments. Colors, sounds, the reaction on somebody else's face. It's so odd how when you reflect about a particular event of revelation—a news report, a doctor's prognosis, a sudden jolt in an otherwise monotonous chain of moments—you can be so completely clear about the unimportant details that you actually have a difficult time defining the event in terms that other people can understand.

Like Mary Magdalene in the garden when they discovered Jesus' body was gone. I imagine that she would have been able to tell the other women, the disciples, things like how the flowers, tiny pink ones, were particularly redolent and how the angle of the sun had cast a shadow across a mound of stones. She could have told them how the morning dew had settled upon slender leaves, bowing them toward the ground like a child's head dropped to pray.

She would remember that her veil had fallen from across her face and that the cool breeze chilled her lips, causing her to reach up and slide her fingers across them, leaving the taste of the spices she and the others had
brought and dropped when they realized someone had been to and opened the grave. Rose oil and spikenard, aloe and a hint of myrrh. And she would remember exactly where she stood when he called her name.

They would want to know things like how he seemed or where he said he had been, how it happened; but it would be the golden light in his eyes, the way he held his hands open and loose, the softness of his voice, these would be the things that came to mind.

And though Mary would never share such memories, these would be the only cues for remembering how it was when she saw a resurrected Jesus, the one she loved more than anything, life itself, dead and now alive.

Maude would ask me later, “Oh, my God, Jean, what did you do when you heard?” And I would think of the gasp and exhale of my husband's roommate, the terror from somebody's never-ending nightmare, a sudden blink of O.T.'s eyes that convinced me he knew what was about to be told, and the distracting blast of scarlet just beyond my line of vision.

O.T. closed his eyes like he was going to sleep. I started walking around him toward Mr. Parsons's side of the room. “Karen, what daughter?” I did not pull the curtain open since I knew privacy was one of the few luxuries the patients at Sunhaven only rarely were able to afford. I stood at the foot of his bed.

“Why didn't you eat anything?” She was still engaged with her patient.

He mumbled something in return. I checked O.T. He was sleeping. His brow wrinkled and fell.

“What is it, Mrs. Witherspoon?” She was coming toward me. She found the opening and walked through. She wrote down some things on the little pad she kept in the front pocket of her uniform.

“My daughter who's been visiting O.T.?” I stepped aside so that she'd have room to stand in front of the door.

“Yeah,” she spoke hurriedly, “Lilly.” Then she saw that Mrs. Loflin was hanging upside down on the side of her bed. “Lord, Lucy, what have you done this time?” She ran across the hall before I could ask another question.

Mrs. Loflin had not gotten the help she wanted, so she had decided she could get out of the bed by herself. What she hadn't taken into account was the thick band of cloth tying her right arm tightly to the side rail. She had managed to undo the left restraint, but the other one was a bit too knotted for her to pull apart. She had fallen over on her head trying to release herself. I stood in the hallway while Karen managed to get her back into bed.

The only visitors I know who came to call on O.T. were Maude when she happened to be on that side of town, his youngest brother and his new wife, Beatrice,
once every other week, the preacher from the Baptist Church because he visited everybody, and an occasional friend from the Rotary Club where O.T. had served as president and been a member since 1958.

No other women had ever visited my husband. We just weren't close to any. We didn't have a lot of friends. There were no nieces within a hundred miles; and even if one of them did come by they would certainly contact me since I can't believe they would be able to find this place on their own. The women I worked with and considered acquaintances were as old as I was, and most of them were taking care of their own husbands. I didn't think any of them would have time to visit, and even if they did, none of them was young enough to be my child.

I was absolutely puzzled, and I stood there in the hall waiting for Mrs. Loflin to get turned right side up so that I could find out who my daughter was. It was like trying to chase down a real person to talk to when you call the phone company. Karen went from Mrs. Loflin to Mr. Trabor, who was urinating in the corner of the hall, to a new physical therapy assistant who had put the walking belt backward on Charles Foust and was about to drop him by the linen chute. Then she hurried to the nurses' station to answer a phone call and explain why the Alzheimer's patient on the other hall needed to be moved to another room. She would keep trying to talk to me,
but the interruptions were fast and furious. And I followed her around like a child.

Finally, it seemed things slowed just enough for her to stop and catch her breath. She seemed surprised to see me. “Mrs. Witherspoon, what's the matter? Does your husband need something?”

I shook my head no and saw her focusing around me at a commotion near the door of the dining room. I stood up taller, trying to block her view. “The woman you said who's been visiting O.T.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Karen, we don't have any children.”

She seemed confused. “Miss Thomas, quit pushing Aunt Babe,” she yelled to the women behind me. Then she turned to me. “She's been coming about three months now. Said her name was Lilly, from somewhere east of here, not too far, I think.”

She sighed because Aunt Babe was starting to cry. “Every day,” she added, “about the time I get here.” Then she was gone. Miss Thomas had started pulling hair.

I stood there in the hallway, a crazy world spinning around me. Clouds building up on the horizon, practically bursting at the seams. People screaming for help, others moaning like they were facing death head-on, nurses and staff trying to create some semblance of order, and the news that a woman, a daughter named Lilly, had discovered my husband and was visiting him.

More than eleven weeks she had been coming. Three months. Almost ninety days. Somebody who believed herself to be family had sat near O.T. and watched him, learned him, maybe even cared for him. There had been a flood of unexplained emotions, a storm blowing through hearts, and I had not known.

Emma Lovella Witherspoon. That's what I had named my baby before she died. Emma Andrews Witherspoon is on the birth and death certificates because at the time of my labor and her passing, I could not muster up the strength or the words to tell them a middle name. They simply used my maiden one. O.T. remembered the Emma part because I had told him in the eighteenth week my decision about what she would be called. He had forgotten about Lovella.

Emma was the name of my sister, who died when I was seven. She was younger than me by almost three years. So what I recall of her is mostly baby and toddler stuff. Crying, resting at my mother's breast, pulling on
things—the table or sofa, my legs—as she learned to walk. I know that she was weak, prone to coughs and colds, a thready breath, Grandma Whitebead called it as she held the baby over a pot of steaming herbs, worry spread across her face.

Emma was lethargic, not very playful; she mostly stayed in the house, near my mother's lap. But I do remember one time not long before she died when I carried her to the creek and helped her climb a tree. It was the happiest I ever saw her. I lifted her while she grabbed for the sturdiest limb, and she pulled herself up until she was standing six or seven feet above me.

Of course I got in trouble for taking her outside without dressing her in hat and coat, for letting her get so high; but even my mother's anger quickly subsided when she saw the glee and excitement on her younger daughter's face and listened as she talked about what she saw from so lofty a perch.

That's the way I think of her even now, a little girl standing in a saucer magnolia tree, tiny cups of purple and white all around her, the sounds of her laughter, a thin voice calling out to the birds and butterflies that floated so near. I like the thought of her that way, happy and playful, surrounded by the sights and smells of spring.

After the death of my baby, however, I wondered if I had cursed her in some way, naming her after another child, a little girl, who had died unnecessarily. I considered the possibility that my sister Emma had returned and claimed her for herself since she had been disallowed most of the pleasures of living. I even thought it was fair. But that only lasted a few days. Grief doesn't let anything stay true for long.

Lovella was the name of my elementary school teacher. Dr. Lovella Hughes. She was black as coal, wiry, and not the least bit interested in excuses as to why you couldn't be or do the thing she knew you could.

It was, of course, in the 1930s, so the minority children were not permitted to attend the white school or be taught by white personnel. Dr. Lovella Hughes was the only teacher willing to travel up into the caverns of the Great Smoky Mountains and find and educate the children that no one else even acknowledged were living up there. She was hired by the state to teach the black children and the Cherokees.

The white teacher and the white school were in Bryson City, twelve miles away; and being half white and shaded more like my father's side of the family, I could have passed. But since my daddy was blind, literally and figuratively, he saw no reason for me to travel so far
away just to go to a white school when I could walk down my driveway and across the field to the little cabin on the reservation where Dr. Hughes taught all nine grades. That's as high as you went in that school if you were even able to get that far. Most of the students were finished with the education system and Dr. Hughes's enormous amount of homework by the time they were ten.

She was hard, like wood, steady eyes and unyielding; and she would say to me, “Jean Andrews, there isn't a reason written down or spoken why you can't leave this mountain, go to college, and be anything you want to be. You have a gift, young lady, and God knows all about it. You just call him up and ask him what it is he's got in mind for you.”

“Just call him up,” she'd say, like he had a phone number and a direct line.

She thought I had a natural inclination for words and theorizing, suggested I considered journalism or science research. When I came home and told my parents what she had said, my mother smiled and nodded, her way of showing me she was proud. My father mulled it over much like a theological proposition and said, “Words and writing is a dangerous way to make a living; I'd pick the science option.”

I laughed at the irony of this statement coming from a blind man trying to farm on the side of a hill. But then
he continued. “I never want to see no record of the stupid things I ever said. Be like a snake you only hit and stunned, he'll be back to bite.” Then he reached out his hand, a sign to my mother, who came over to his side, bringing him a cup of coffee.

Even though I understood my daddy's wisdom and had seen only one newspaper in my whole life, I still liked the idea of writing. I thought that with my teacher's guidance and support I could leave the mountains and the farming and make a life for myself with words.

But Dr. Lovella Hughes, the only person in my life who made me think I could do something other than dig up bloodroot or ginseng, milk cows, and grow a productive garden, left the mountain just as I was finishing seventh grade. She developed tuberculosis after caring for the Crainshaw baby when the mother died and the father just ran off. Everybody knew the baby was sick, that it had taken in its mother's bad milk; but Dr. Hughes was not about to let the child die just because he had a bad start. She cared for him as long as she could then turned him over to the state.

We heard that she lived a long time in one of those sanitariums near her hometown of Wilson and that she was never sorry for doing what she did. The baby grew up to become a famous lawyer, a senator or judge or something. To this day I don't think he has any idea how
shaky his beginnings were and how one black woman, who rode a train, two buses, and a farm truck up the mountain to teach the children, gave him back his life.

When Dr. Hughes left I lost the motivation to keep learning, the drive to write reports or stories. So I quit school and helped on the farm and took care of my parents. There was always something that needed to be done, cows to be milked, weeds to be pulled, floors to be swept. And with just the three of us trying to make a go at harvesting crops and managing a farm, there was no extra time for studying or planning for the future.

Sometimes I think about how my life might have been different if I had finished high school and made it to college. I think I could have been smart and ambitious. I could have put the words together describing a life or researched the patterns of animal behavior. I could have been more interesting. But just like Dr. Hughes made a choice to put herself at risk to nurture the life of an orphan boy, I sacrificed the thoughts of being educated and clever and lived my life at home.

We stayed up there together, the three of us, working, figuring, managing, until I turned fifteen and Mama died from a heart attack. It was her third, the first two having come over a period of four years, leaving her weak-spirited and unable to walk a row of beans or stand at the stove and cook. After her passing, Daddy lasted just a
few months. His trouble, though diagnosed by doctors as the same reason for death as Mama's, cardiac arrest, was of another sort. He simply quit living. Bleeding heart, the old folks called it. My daddy died from having been forsaken. He always thought he should go first.

After my daddy's death, I was briefly cared for by my father's family, his sister and her husband. But every day I would walk the three miles to our old house and stay longer and longer, until one evening I just didn't leave. I preferred the silence and the reminders of being a part of something to a house full of noise and routine in which I did not fit.

Aunt Carolyn would bring me food, check on me from time to time; but I found living by myself was not too unlike the couple of months I had lived with my daddy after Mama died. The only thing that was different was that the sunlight coming through the window seemed to last longer and the general spirit of the house, at least for a little while, was lighter.

For about nine months I lived by myself like a hermit. I wore my mother's clothes, the dresses, all made from cotton, a lavender one with faded blue flowers, a spring pink one dotted with tiny white buttons, a long black skirt that fell well below my ankles. I wore the pearl earrings she had won in a raffle and kept her silver combs in my hair. I donned her red blouse with beads on the cuffs,
and I walked about the farm and even inside the house in my father's old work boots, the brown ones scuffed and resoled.

I lit candles and talked to the walls and the spaces in the air, like my family, even my dead siblings, was still there. I brought out the old high chair and set it near the table. I bottled milk and made juice. I cooked the way Mama had with spices of cayenne and mint. I baked bread and dried fruits so that the kitchen felt the same as it always did, hot and fragrant. I spoke to her while I kneaded and worked the dough. I asked questions. I sang lullabies. I called them to myself.

I took to smoking a pipe like Daddy so that the smell of tobacco, sweet and mild, remained along the edges of windowsills and high in the air above my head. I read stories from his favorite books, and I told him news of the mountain. I rocked in his chair, and I would not let him rest.

Once I realized that I was responsible for my dead family coming back, that I had asked for the spirits of those who had passed, it was too late because I had made it too easy for them to return and stay. It was all too familiar. I had created a house that was full and prankish, and eventually the dead ones were filling up the rooms and crowding me out.

I met O.T. when I left the ghost house and went into town one Saturday to sell apples and the herbs I had harvested. He was there with his family sightseeing, visiting the mountains and the Indian reservation. It was late summer, August or September, the afternoons still hot, the sky heavy. He kept coming over to my table, tapping the fruit, rolling them across his fingers, smelling the ginseng, like he knew what he was doing.

He was handsome, attentive, a tall young man who claimed he wanted to be a soldier. He had dark brown hair and the bluest eyes I had ever seen. He was wearing work pants, denim, that were clean and unfaded. I think they were new.

He had on a tan shirt that was bordered in a bold black thread, a design of embroidered curls, that edged along the collar. He looked as fancy as a girl; and later I asked him why he was so dressed up. He announced that he was expecting to find me, that he woke up that morning and knew his future wife was waiting for him on that day. So he took a bath and shaved and put on his nicest clothes. And when he saw me, he said, he was certain that I was the one.

I was not nearly so convinced that we were meant to be together. It didn't seem to matter about how much faith I had, however, because before I or his mama and
daddy knew it, he was driving almost up to the Tennessee border once a month just to visit me, the one they called “that dark mountain girl who both farmed and lived all by herself.”

O.T. was easy to talk to in the early months we were together; he was shy and ham-fisted. He made me laugh. He made me feel pretty. He showed off a lot, more than he needed to, since truth be told, I'd have left the mountain with anybody.

It wasn't that I hated being alone up there or that things were too hard for me, a teenage orphan. It's just that once the house started growing my family's spirits, it became unruly. They had no regard for me or my space. It was as if they thought that since I was by myself and I had made things so satisfactory for them, I wouldn't mind the company of four unequal ghosts.

There were little things at first, hardly noticeable—dishes falling off the shelves, windows being pushed open, fires being blown out. But after a while they just got too comfortable staying there with me. It unsettled me.

Not that there were ghosts. Everybody in the mountains knows about ghosts. I expected ghosts; I lived on their property, hemmed in by the reality of death. It wasn't their presence that bothered me; I had asked for that. But rather what became upsetting is that they didn't respect me enough to believe I would mind their reckless
ness, their destructiveness. That they kept hanging around like they were sure I would keep taking care of them, cleaning up after them, staying awake for them.

I mean, what did they think, that I would stay up there for the rest of my life entertaining them? Fixing them suppers and pallets of color for them to lie in? Keep pasting and gluing together the things they broke?

It's true that I didn't have much and that I had longed for them to be with me. But I knew I was quickly reaching my limit and that I would have to make a choice to leave them to the place they wanted or die in resolution to join them.

So I closed up the house without saying good-bye, left the ghosts to fend for themselves, and took off with a young man called by two letters rather than a proper name. He brought me to his home in Forsyth County, married me, then promptly left to fight in the Second World War. I lived with his family, trying hard not to miss the one I'd abandoned, trying hard to make myself at home, away from the mountain, away from everything familiar.

I compensated for all that was missing by working hard. Since I preferred to be outside, I worked with O.T.'s brother, Jolly, and his father. I helped bring in soybeans, corn, and hay. I slaughtered cows, slopped pigs, plowed the fields, and put up tobacco.

Even though his parents did not like it much when he brought his new bride in to live with them, by the time O.T. had left and come home, I was more of an asset to them than a son. I was there. I farmed the land and helped raise the youngest child, Dick. And even though his mother always seemed to be studying me like she thought I brought in trouble, I know I kept that family farm afloat.

When O.T. returned, I had become grown and old like him. He was aged by the atrocity of war and by things he would never say out loud, and I by the costs of leaving home and being left alone too many times.