Charms for the Easy Life (8 page)

My mother shouted, “You mean you
rolled
him?”

My grandmother said, “If that means I let him take what he wanted and then I took what I wanted, I suppose I did.”

I had to know, so I asked my grandmother how much she had there, and she said, “Four-fifty, six, six-fifty, seven...” She licked her finger and counted the last few bills silently and then said, “One thousand three hundred and sixty-five dollars, to be exact.” Then she stuck the wad back into her satchel, snapped the huge clasp, and that was that.

My mother asked her what she intended to do with it and, more important, what she was going to do when he came after it.

My grandmother said, “I don’t know and I don’t know. I’m tired. Wake me when we’re home.”

Later I learned that she donated all this money to the Confederate Ladies’ Home, where three of my mother’s spinster teachers from Miss Nash’s School were spending their last years penniless, playing an endless game of bridge in a dank parlor, wearing cameo chokers and little spots of rouge in the middle of their cheeks. She wrote very specific instructions for the disbursement of the money. It was to be used to buy a seven-tube radio, a new Victrola, magazine subscriptions galore, leather-bound editions of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hardy, and Dickens. She also included writers of the South, but not Thomas Wolfe, whose style addled her to distraction even though she took his part in the debate over
Look Homeward, Angel.
Whatever was left was to be used for group trips to Charleston and Savannah. It appeared as though she meant to liven the place up. I wish I knew whether she succeeded. I like to think she did.

As for my grandfather’s coming after any of this money: He knew better. We never heard from him again.

My grandmother had run to him so convincingly. Love seemed to be screaming out as she ran, or maybe, since love and revenge grow from the same kernel of want, I was mistaken. She could’ve been hoarding a dream of vengeance for more than twenty years, and that run was part of the plan. Or the run may have been true, and the reality of starting her life over with a stinking, old, untrustworthy man hit her as she watched him gum his food in the best room in town. She may have looked at him sleeping and despised him for leaving her, after all those lovely times he had carried her back and forth across the river on his barge, leading her to believe that she would always be cared for so sweetly. I wondered what they said to each other in the room, what they did for each other until that moment when my grandmother decided the man had had use of her heart long enough.

A
WOMAN telephoned our house for my grandmother about six months after she abandoned my grandfather at the Sir Walter Hotel. She took the receiver, listened a few minutes, and then said to the person on the other end, “I imagined you would be dead.” She listened a little more and asked, “Did he purge?”

The woman was an old family acquaintance my grandmother had not seen or heard from in years, and was calling to tell her that my grandfather had passed away at her home earlier that day. My grandmother motioned for a pen and paper to be brought to her, and she wrote down the funeral arrangements, such as they were. When she was off the phone, she turned to my mother and said, “Your father died. We need to go to Pasquotank County tomorrow.” She gave no indication of wanting to talk about it further, and went to the stove to make tea.

My mother’s eyes filled quickly, and she dabbed them dry with a dish towel. She said to her mother, “I heard you ask if he purged. Did he?”

My grandmother stopped midway to the sink with the teakettle and looked out the window, out toward the spot where we had seen him standing, and sighed and said, “Yes, he did.”

The fact that he had foamed at the mouth immediately upon dying indicated that he had had a great backjam of wishes and desires and truths that were never spoken. His love for his wife and child and his remorse over having left them were expressed, at the end, in spite of himself. Out bubbled all the words he had swallowed while he was alive. My grandmother put aside everything she knew about the automatic reactions of bodies in order to hear a dead man say that he was sorry.

I said, “Suppose he hadn’t purged?”

My mother spoke for the two of them. “We would’ve sold him to the medical school in Chapel Hill and let them do as they pleased with him.”

The next day the three of us went to Pasquotank County. He was laid out at the home of the friend who had called. Besides the woman, who was wearing a thin dress without a much-needed brassiere, the only person there was my grandfather’s uncle. He was the oldest person I had ever seen. He had lived on the Pasquotank next to my grandparents. My mother acted genuinely happy to see him, but my grandmother ignored him.

When my mother asked her why she couldn’t say just a couple of words to Uncle Otha, she was told, “He does not exist.”

My mother asked, “Still?”

My grandmother said, “Yes. I have not forgotten, and never will.”

Later in the day, I asked my mother about this and was told that the man had once stolen five dollars from my grandmother and then lied about it. “If he had only stolen from her,” she said, “she’d at least act like he was in the room.”

I mentioned how very old he looked. My mother told me he was probably well over a hundred, and although he was repugnant to her mother, she held fond childhood memories of him. She and I were sitting on the back steps of the old woman’s house, sneaking a cigarette together. She said, “He was at Shiloh and loved to tell about it, although the people he told couldn’t bear it because it broke their hearts in a million places. But I thrived on hearing about it, so he talked to me continuously. Listen to this. He took a bullet in the head, and the doctors in the field got it out, cleaned the wound, and then took a silver dollar and mashed it into this thin sliver and put it in the place in his head. Isn’t that wonderful?”

She had always been drawn to horror tales, ghost stories, and real-life accounts of the weird and unusual. Her curious nature and her mother’s profession made this more or less unavoidable. She was going through a phase of addiction to magazines like
True Crime and Weird Tales and Startling Adventures,
and right before this trip she had come into my room, awakened me, and read aloud a story about Bonnie and Clyde and how they were blown all apart, their limbs and things then preserved and later basted together in some slaphappy fashion. Curiosity-seekers apparently lined up to see all this, and one man who was interviewed said he would’ve readily paid money for the privilege, as would have my mother. She asked me as she did with regard to Uncle Otha’s head, “Isn’t that wonderful?” I said it was not. I said it was gruesome, and I thanked her in advance for my nightmares. She argued that it was an example of the marvelous extremes present in human nature, and thus began an argument that made me too tired to sleep. That is why I let the silver dollar in the man’s head pass as wonderful. I never possessed her stamina for debate.

When we went back inside we saw that four pallbearers and a preacher had arrived, ready to do their business. They all expected to be paid for their services, and my grandmother was expected to pay them. She said she had no intention of doing this, and so she asked my mother to ask Otha if he had any money with him.

My mother said, “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

My grandmother said, “In my eyes, he does not exist.”

I asked my mother how much money she had, and she asked me the same. Between us we had sixty cents.

My mother looked at the old family friend in her too thin dress and red lipstick, and said, “What about you?”

She said, “I’m broke. He ate up every penny I had.”

My grandmother pointed first to the coffin and then to the woman and said, “You know, if a woman’s husband comes to your house to pleasure himself and then dies, I’d think you could at least split the cost of the arrangements with his widow.”

The old woman pled poverty again, and my grandmother said, “That’s okay. Give me that clock on the mantel, and I’ll give these fellows fifty cents each and the preacher a dollar.” The clock was taken from the mantel and handed to my grandmother in the calm manner of all rituals. She carried it as we walked the short way to the cemetery. I still can see her walking along the narrow path through the meadow, holding time against her breast like a baby.

My mother asked her what she planned to do with herself now that she was officially a widow. She had asked the question in a lighthearted, teasing manner, but my grandmother didn’t respond in the same spirit.

She said, “What makes you think I’d want a man now? I’d take a poison pill before I’d take a man.” Then she told my mother it was rude and maybe even bad luck to talk nonsense on the way to a grave.

My grandfather wasn’t so much buried as he was put in the ground. After the preacher finished his dollar prayer, he tried to console my grandmother, who told him, “I don’t want to hear it.” The three of us started back across the meadow without saying much of a good-bye to anyone, except that my mother hugged Otha, who told her he expected to be dead before the end of the year.

He was, too. We heard through another phone call from the same old woman. My grandmother said to her again, “I imagined you would be dead.” Then she listened a moment and said, “No, I don’t care to come see him buried. You know he did not exist for me. How many does this make now?” She listened again and said, “You may not think it’s your fault, but you get a man in there with a bad heart and do all these things to him, and there he goes. You’ve been doing this for fifty years, you’d think you’d find one with a dime to leave you. You’re stupider than I thought you were.” She hung up the phone, looked at me, and said, “I’d rather you wash chamber pots the rest of your life than conduct business on your back.”

On the way home from Pasquotank County that afternoon, we passed the path that led through the woods to the home of Maveen’s sister. We turned around and drove down the path, talking all the way of how good it would be to see her. We had not hired a replacement. We had tried, but my grandmother turned candidates away midway through the interviews. When one after another of them was out the door, she would say, “I found her lacking.” After she did this five or six times, my mother gave up and announced that we would cook and clean for ourselves. The three of us cooked and ate like bachelors, and the only real challenge with our laundry was soaking blood out of garments.

Maveen’s sister let us in. She didn’t greet us as much as grab and pull us through the long hall, saying, “I should’ve sent for you. I should’ve.” When she opened the door to Maveen’s tiny room, we saw the reason she was so alarmed. The room reeked of vomit. Maveen was asleep on her side, facing us, her mouth white-rimmed with bicarbonate. She looked to weigh sixty pounds. She had been a large, strong woman, raw-boned. My mother asked what was wrong with her, and her sister said, “She screamed for two weeks and then slacked off, and now something’s in her eating all her food, at least what doesn’t come back up. Whatever it is won’t let her have enough to eat. They say it’s tapeworm indigestion.”

My grandmother asked, “Who is
they
?”

Maveen’s sister said, “Mr. Roosevelt’s crowd.” By this, she meant one of the public health clinics that had been established in county seats.

My grandmother went over, leaned down, and gently ran her hands over Maveen’s stomach, palpating her as best she could through three layers of calico. Then she laid a hand on her forehead, frowning all the while, and when she stood up she said she would be back the next morning. She told Maveen’s sister to stop giving her bicarbonate or solid food and to strip her down and rub her with alcohol every three hours. My grandmother left quickly, my mother and I following at a trot. If we had not been able to keep pace with her, I believe, we would’ve been left. My grandmother was thoroughly preoccupied. As soon as the car doors shut, she told us that Maveen had cancer and would be dead in six weeks. She would starve to death.

We asked my grandmother what she intended to do. She told us she was going to ask the real doctor, the one whose career she had spared, to admit Maveen to the hospital, where she could be more comfortable. When we got back home, my grandmother went right in and called him at his house. She answered his questions calmly at first: “She’s seventy. She’s lost probably a hundred pounds. Distended abdomen. Temperature of a hundred and three or thereabout. No, no sign of pain now, but I’m sure there’s intestinal paralysis. I’m worried about rupture. She’s got to be hospitalized right now.” When she disagreed with his response, she tried not to shout. She spoke in a high, thin voice. “I don’t believe it! It would take nothing for you to do this. You’d better watch out! Soon I might not be the only one around here practicing without a license.”

She slammed the phone down, plopped down at the kitchen table, and mimicked him. “The only thing that goes wrong below an old colored woman’s waist is fibroids. That, and too much grease. Let’s keep on with the bicarbonate.”

We went back to Maveen’s house the next morning. I remember packing a snack of graham crackers and apple butter and putting a copy of
The Mill on the Floss
in the bag to read if I had any spare time. As it turned out, I had no time to read, and afterward I associated the book so much with Maveen that I could never bear to finish it. When I walked into her room with my grandmother I was startled to see her completely naked body. She lay curled like a baby with her arms up over her head, a bad-luck sleeping position that means a person is calling trouble. In spite of the breeze from the fan, she looked buttered, glistening with sweat. My grandmother checked for dehydration, which was present, and then slipped a thermometer underneath Maveen’s arm, and when she read it, she whispered, “Why she’s not dead is a mystery.” Then she told us we were all going to stay there as long as it took. I asked her how long she thought that might be. She unclipped the railroad watch from her bosom and said, “It’s ten o’clock now. Mercy will take her by suppertime.” My mother led Maveen’s sister, dazed and staggering, from the room.