Winter Birds (16 page)

And what would I request today if asked for a Christmas list? The things an old woman wants can’t be purchased with money. My list would be blank.

A picture of Oliver, taken a year ago, fills the television screen. He is hunched in the corner of what appears to be a wooden cage, wearing his age with no trace of dignity—shaggy fur, pot belly, leathery hands, milky eyes. No celebrity now. No grinning poses in tuxedo or kimono. No cigar or jelly sandwich. No holiday atmosphere.

Chapter 12

Men Must Endure Their Going Hence

Carolina wrens are stay-at-home birds, weathering all kinds of winters to increase their population in a region until a severe cold spell kills them off in large numbers. But the process of repopulating begins again, and new nesting sites soon appear in mailboxes, baskets, even pockets of old coats
.

Before she died, my mother said to me numbers of times, “Getting old is no fun, Sophie. Just wait. Your turn is coming.” I was almost fifty-eight when she came to live out her last few months at my house in Carlton, Kentucky. I drove to Mississippi to get her in May, and she timed her death conveniently so that I was free again by the end of September. I speak amiss. There was nothing convenient about the last five months of my mother’s life. Instead of five months, it seemed like five decades. After she died, I had three months, from October through December, to try to rid my house of the smell of death before returning to the classroom in January.

The business one must see to when undertaking the care of a deathbed patient is enormous. It fell to me to clear out my mother’s apartment, where she had lived after selling the boardinghouse in Methuselah, Mississippi, and to sort through her papers and personal effects. She was unable to help in any way, and my sisters, both of whom lived in Vicksburg, less than two hundred miles away, claimed to have family conflicts or health issues that prevented them from driving to Methuselah to lend a hand.

The small towns of Mississippi, like those of any state, have colorful names. Methuselah was only one of many. Hard Cash, Whynot, Increase, Picayune, Errata, Pentecost, and Soso—these are a few others I recall. But every state has its share. In Kentucky you will find Rabbit Hash, Dwarf, Monkeys Eyebrow, Top Most, and Hell for Sure. Arkansas has Need More, Blue Eye, and Ink, and on your way through Louisiana you might pass through Jigger, Plain Dealing, and Many. Georgia has a Lax, Tax, and Wax, as well as a Social Circle, Newborn, Between, and Poetry. Unusual names of towns used to give me pleasure for reasons I no longer remember.

My mother’s apartment was a shambles. She shouldn’t have been living alone. Since Eliot’s death I had not been to see her, and my phone calls had been distracted and infrequent. In my widowhood I hadn’t realized she had become an old woman. Three years before Eliot died, when she was eighty, she had ridden a bus to Bean Station, Tennessee—a state that also boasts the towns of Belt Buckle, Difficult, and Frog Jump—to visit her youngest brother, had found him sick in bed with pneumonia, and had stayed two months to see him back on his feet.

This was before my world changed, when I still thought life was a good and simple proposition, when the idea of nursing a relative to health seemed a decent and reasonable thing to do. I am now the same age my mother was when she spent those two months in Bean Station, Tennessee, emptying bedpans, preparing meals, and keeping nighttime vigils. The thought of my doing such a thing now, possessing either the ability or the impulse to do so, is beyond my powers of imagination.

Sometime during the five years following my mother’s trip to see Uncle Abe, both her mind and body began to break down. My sisters detected it before I did, both of them having more stamina than I for telephone conversations and both of them driving over together for short visits twice a year. When I entered my time of trouble, beginning with the firing of the gun in Alonso’s hand, I had no room in my heart and mind for my mother’s well-being. This sounds hard, but it is true. I suffered her phone calls, her admonitions to “get over” my grief, her accusations about my selfishness in the absence of birthday and Christmas gifts, hearing it all as from a great distance, muffled and garbled.

I soon discovered that her words were indeed muffled and garbled, not because of distance but because she was a sick woman. For three years following Eliot’s death, I knew I had a mother, yes, and that she was living in an apartment in Methuselah, Mississippi. If asked her age, I would have known she was in her eighties, could have figured it to the exact year if necessary. I would not have known, however, that she was inventing and diagnosing illnesses for herself, ingesting large quantities of medications, some of it outdated leftover prescriptions of my father’s and a great deal of it taken off drugstore shelves and slipped into her pocketbook.

And suddenly, it seemed, everyone was alarmed. Within the space of two days, I received four phone calls—one each from Regina and Virginia, one from Uncle Abe, and one from my mother’s landlady, all apprising me that my mother’s condition was extremely precarious. I received the first one on a Saturday morning in early May as I was grading the last of a set of freshman research papers on a topic of my choosing: “The Death of John F. Kennedy—Lone Assassin or Conspiracy?” By Sunday evening I knew that there was a conspiracy against me, to relieve everyone of the burden caused by my mother’s physical and mental deterioration.

I was unattached, with no husband or children. In spite of my weight I was in moderately good health. I had money, one of my primary qualifications. I had a house with an extra bedroom. I had time, at least imminently, with the summer ahead of me, and if need be, a rich single woman could take as much time as she needed to attend to the urgent task of nursing her mother. This was the thinking of my sisters and uncle. And there was no loophole in the argument. I fell victim to the lone assassin of logic.

It could be asserted that my life suddenly had purpose. It was a purpose I was not eager to embrace, yet one I could not escape. I knew Regina and Virginia felt, as my mother had, that it was time for me to become involved with life again, specifically with my mother’s life. The word
involved
is a frightening thing, encompassing such extremes as minimal, polite contact at the one end and absolute immersion at the other. I knew toward which end I was headed. I had the sense of one about to be tortured, who sees his persecutor standing over him, the glint of a blade in one hand, a black hood in the other. This is a grim metaphor for the care of a loved one, yet I speak the truth. I could feel the sensation of too little air to breathe.

And so I gave myself to duty. I finished grading my papers, arranged for a colleague to cover my remaining classes and proctor my exams, received permission to take an early leave, and drove to Methuselah. Never having had children of my own to tend, I felt ill-equipped in a physical sense. Though I had performed basic first-aid skills in my years of teaching elementary school, I knew my mother’s illness would require more than the application of Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, and ice packs.

There was no talk of nursing homes or other facilities. My mother had always said she wouldn’t submit to a “dumping place,” as she put it, and not one of us was willing to test her. My mother had developed a formidable temper in her old age. My sisters and I had heard her say many times since our father’s death, “I will not die in a hospital or a nursing home. I will kill myself, or someone else, if you ever take me to one. If you try it, my spirit will haunt you for the rest of your lives.” I have no doubt that she would have kept her word.

She had not been to a doctor for a checkup in over thirty years, ever since a certain Dr. Halliday, a new doctor in Methuselah, had recommended a hysterectomy, which she considered “mighty presumptuous of a young doctor.” She ignored his recommendation and began ordering herbal medicines to treat her symptoms.

During my father’s illness several years later, she had become further convinced that the medical profession as a whole was not only untrustworthy but also aggressively venal, seeking opportunities to defraud patients of their money by what she called their “hobby of waving their knives around,” by which she meant unnecessary surgeries. When Daddy died, she claimed grounds for numerous potential malpractice lawsuits against various doctors who had overlooked obvious red flags, misprescribed medications, botched simple office procedures, and in general failed to cure him, as if a heart aneurysm was something you could fix with the right pill.

“Step foot inside a doctor’s office,” she would say, “and you’ll never be well again.” She delivered the speech regularly: First you have the checkup, she said, at which time the problem is first brought to light, then another checkup to verify the first one, then a pre-operation visit, then the surgery, then the post-surgery checkup, then the post-post-surgery checkup, by which time “They’ve gone and found something else wrong with you that starts the whole cycle over again.” It was her belief that they “had their hand inside your pocketbook from day one” and “weren’t about to take it out.” They knew where their fancy cars and expensive vacations came from. Further, she suspected many male doctors of having gone into the business simply so they could see naked women.

This was the woman I took home with me to Carlton, Kentucky. I did not know the exact nature or extent of her ailments, except for a few general self-diagnoses she offered from articles she had read in medical magazines, one of which was irritable bowel syndrome. “I’ve had it for years,” she said, “but it’s gotten worse. Lots worse. And this is bad, too,” she said, showing me her stomach. “That’s where it’s growing.” This was no mere irritability. It was a raging distemper.

I had no false notions that this would be a mild illness or that she would be an easy invalid to nurse. Disbelieve me, if you wish, that I did not have the courage to force my mother, almost eighty-six years old by this time, to go to a doctor, that I dared not call an ambulance to take her to the emergency room and thus admit her to a hospital. Tell me, if you know, how to force a fiercely determined old woman to do anything. She may have been losing her mind, but one look into her eyes told me that her will was intact. It was her belief that she was dying, and I knew she was right. She wasn’t afraid of pain, she told me. She was convinced that if she went to a doctor, he would knock her unconscious and operate on her. It was the surgeon’s knife that scared her.

Her apartment, as I said, was in a state of disarray, and, to borrow one of her expressions, it stank to high heaven. Before I moved her to Kentucky, I spent over two weeks throwing things away—stashes of empty plastic milk cartons, bottles of old medication, spoiled food, catalogs and sale circulars, stacks of used wrapping paper, hundreds of brown grocery sacks, old magazines and paperbacks, drawerfuls of receipts, cardboard boxes, and all manner of shabby clothing stained past repair. To see to what depths my mother’s standards had fallen was heartbreaking. She had been a beautiful woman in her prime—very particular and well groomed.

At times she was lucid. One day she said to me, “My arteries are hardening, Sophie. There is no healing for that.” At other times she was lost in the labyrinth of the past. In the back of her closet I found a garbage bag full of strips of fabric. When asked about them, she said, “I was saving them for bandages. The soldiers will need them.” She had four hatboxes in the top of her closet filled with old socks rolled up into balls. “I was darning them while Ivy fixed the buggy wheel,” she told me. Ivy was her youngest stepbrother, who had been killed in a hunting accident over sixty years earlier.

I found an old pair of my father’s high work boots in the same closet, filled to the top laces with coins of all denominations. These I took to the bank, where they poured the coins into a counting machine. When I told my mother that she had collected a little over six hundred dollars in coins, she looked at me sadly and said, “Many’s the time the tramps came to the back door asking for a plate of supper.”

She and my father had never trusted banks but had always kept their money hidden in the house. This was how my father had come to own the printshop. When the original owner had gone bankrupt at the beginning of the Great Depression, my father had paid him cash for the business—“purchased it for a song,” my mother liked to say. My father was not a businessman, however, and the song turned into a sad one. Wary of banks, he had the misfortune of placing his trust in certain individuals who betrayed him.

I discovered that at some point in her widowhood my mother had opened a checking account, into which she deposited her monthly social security check. Her records of deposits and checks were haphazard, however, and the account balance was only a few cents over four hundred dollars.

I found cash in my mother’s apartment, though not much, certainly not the savings of a lifetime. “Where is your money, Mother?” I asked her repeatedly. Once she looked at me calmly and replied, “No one is good, Sophie. No one.” Another time she began crying and said, “They promised it would come, but it never did.” When asked to identify “they” and “it,” she had no information to give. There was nothing in her papers to tell me what had become of her money. The official bank records showed check after check written out to “Cash,” but there was no sign of the cash anywhere.

Regina and Virginia were beside themselves. Both had hoped for at least a modest inheritance, their husbands having proven less than financially stable. They urged me not to discard anything without searching it thoroughly. After I had been there a week, they arrived together one morning and set about combing the apartment for possible hiding places, going through boxes of trash I had set aside. They left late that afternoon, desperately disappointed that their efforts had yielded nothing except two nickels in the bottom of a vase. When Mother saw the nickels, she smiled and said, “And he bought a new radio that Christmas.”

Regina presented the possibility that perhaps Mother had opened a savings account. But there was no record, I said. No book, no statements, no deposit slips. “Did you have another account at the bank?” I asked Mother, but she began crying again and said, “He would have been so angry.” To satisfy my sisters, however, I called the bank the next day and asked if there was a savings account in our mother’s name, but, as I already knew, there wasn’t. There was only the checking account, with its balance of four hundred dollars.