Long Drive Home (20 page)

I’d learned all about Alzheimer’s in middle school, when I studied up on it in the school library. I read about the change that occurs in the brain, the formation of a mysterious, gummy plaque whose presence can be verified only by autopsy. It had made me think of our pecky cypress walls, and sometimes I imagined my grandfather dead on a conveyor belt, a buzz saw slicing into his head as curious lumberjacks leaned in for a look. Of course, whereas a pecky cypress shows no external signs of its illness, an Alzheimer’s patient shows plenty, so I’d compiled a list of warning signs in my notebook—memory loss, difficulty performing familiar tasks, problems with language, changes in mood or behavior, etc. For years I watched my grandfather and waited, ready for doom every time he so much as misplaced his keys or confused the names of my friends.

And now that the dark clouds on the horizon had finally rolled in, I found myself facing an even worse wait.
The doctors told Cal he might last three years or he might last twenty, but Cal knew that in our family, the disease tended to hit hard and fast, and he seemed determined not to put things off. It made sense that he’d want to take care of business now, while he still had the presence of mind to do so. The day after he was diagnosed, he met with his lawyer about putting his affairs in order, and that weekend he made clear to me that he wanted to finish work on the house as soon as possible. “How soon?” I asked him. It was after the end of spring semester, a Saturday morning, and we were unloading boxes into the swaybacked barn that once sheltered his farming equipment—tractor, sickle mower, silage chopper, disc harrow, bottom plow. The cannibalized remains of an old combine still filled one corner, but the other machines were gone, sold at auction in 1977, the year Cal buried the Colonel and herded his cows between the milking parlor’s stanchions for the last time.

“End of summer,” he said. “Labor Day at the latest.”

“That’s not much time.”

“Lyle’ll manage,” Cal said, lifting another box from the pickup and piling it onto a wooden pallet alongside the combine. We’d been clearing out the attic so Lyle’s crew could add new insulation, and we were down to the last load, mostly boxes containing my mother’s belongings. After my father skipped town, Cal had gone to the little lake house where we lived, packed her stuff, and stowed everything in the attic. As a child, I wasn’t supposed to go up there—Cal told me there were bats—but that never stopped me. I’d spent hours going through her clothes, poring over her photo albums
and scrapbooks. Now, rearranging the boxes on the pallet, my arms felt dead, like elastic bands that had lost their snap. Cal was tireless, though. His sun-leathered hands looked as if they could still wrestle a breech calf from a panicked heifer. While he went back to the truck, I took a breather, digging through a box until I found my mother’s wedding dress in its plastic dry cleaner’s bag. It was more sundress than wedding gown, a bit too Summer of Love for my taste, but as I held it against me and swished from side to side, I could see its appeal. When I glanced up, Cal was standing in the doorway of the barn, a wistful smile on his face. “You know, I never did think I’d see you in a wedding dress.”

“And maybe you never will,” I said. I was hoping to hurt him a little, to remind him what he had to live for, but Cal just seemed confused. He started to say something and then stopped, staring at me as if I were a familiar face he couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t until he turned back to the truck, clearly shaken, that I understood it wasn’t me he’d been talking to.

I moved back to the farm the following weekend. Cal tried to talk me out of it, suggesting I stay put in the sorority house, but I said I wanted to spend more time with him, and he couldn’t argue with that. For the first few weeks, life wasn’t so different than it had been the previous summer. The doctors had fine-tuned Cal’s medication, and it was possible, watching him peruse the newspaper or tie a fishing lure, to imagine his diagnosis had simply been wrong. Then June melted away into July, and the blast-furnace heat of midsummer seemed to slow everything down, including
Cal. Simple conversation began to confound him, his thoughts like knotted rope, and twice he got lost driving in town, unable to solve the once-familiar streets. Determined not to embarrass himself, he gave up his poker game, turned down fishing trips, stopped answering the phone.

We continued our Friday cocktails against doctor’s orders, but even with Lyle there, those evenings were strained. I’d never realized how much you talk about the future until the topic was off limits. With nowhere to be, Cal invariably ended up drunk. Lyle encouraged me to water down his drinks, but instead I poured him doubles, so he’d sleep sooner. By then I was spending two or three nights a week at Lyle’s apartment, hurrying home each morning so I could have grits and toast waiting on the table for Cal. After breakfast, he’d spend a few hours doing whatever he could to help Lyle, but the afternoons were ours. When we finished lunch, usually leftover fried chicken or barbecue sandwiches bought for the workers, we’d head out to his makeshift driving range, a onetime soybean field he’d seeded with Kentucky bluegrass after he gave up farming. For years he’d been wanting to teach me golf; now I took him up on his offer. We’d start by walking the range together, gathering balls in an old milk pail, and then he’d coach me until the afternoon sun drove us inside, all the while fielding questions about my mother and Josie as I worked to keep his memory sharp. I wasn’t really expecting to hear anything new, but after fifteen years of mostly dodging the subject, Cal surprised me by talking more frankly about his problems with my mother. In between pointed critiques of my grip and stance, he confessed
to having been overly protective and overly strict, not letting my mother live her own life, as she used to say to him.

The trouble between Cal and my mother started when she came down with rheumatic fever. She was seven years old, and the doctor said she’d be crippled for life if her heart wasn’t given sufficient time to heal. He ordered six weeks bed rest. She was not to get up at all—Cal and Josie would feed her, bathe her, change her clothes, even take her to the bathroom.

That was 1954, the summer Cal tore down the old barn and built a new one. One of the farmhands, Willie Jones, used to ferry my mother around on his shoulders while she was sick. Sometimes he’d set her on a blanket under the chinaberry tree so she could watch the barn rising in the field. The chief carpenter, Old Man Carey, carried a bar of Octagon soap in his pocket, and with the help of Cal’s binoculars, she’d study the way he soaped each nail before driving it into the boards of hard, green oak.

One afternoon, my mother got restless. She couldn’t lie in bed examining her arrowheads one minute longer. Sneaking downstairs, she bumped into Josie coming inside with a basket of laundry. Normally, Josie was in charge of discipline, but this was such a serious offense that she summoned Cal from the fields. He carried my mother back upstairs, held her in the air by her wrists, and beat her with his belt, determined that his daughter would not end up a cripple. My mother was so upset she stopped speaking to him, even though that meant wetting the bed while she
waited for Josie to return from market. At the time, Cal tried not to trouble himself much about the whole episode. He was sure she’d forgive him when she was older, when she could see he’d done it for her own good.

Labor Day came and went, and still Lyle worked on the house. His final project was to paint the exterior, a huge job that involved scraping off the old paint, repairing broken clapboards, sanding the wood, treating it with a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine, and then finally priming and painting. He hired a third man, but even with the extra help, the job took longer than expected. They worked every day, six days a week, starting at dawn. Sometimes they attached floodlights to the scaffolding and worked into the evening. I begged him to slow down, but Cal was pushing him to finish. “What am I supposed to do?” Lyle said. “He wants it done yesterday.”

I’d taken the semester off to stay home full-time with Cal. His spells had worsened, and he was growing more anxious by the day. I reminded him that treatment had gotten a lot better since the Colonel’s time, that some doctors even believed a cure was near, but it was clear he just wanted to get it over with. After my golf lesson, he often had me drive him to the cemetery, where he stood at the graves of my mother and Josie, telling them, I imagined, that he’d be with them soon.

It was late September when Lyle finally sealed the last bucket of paint and dismantled the scaffolding. That afternoon, my grandfather was to meet with his attorney to finalize his will. As the two of us stood in the yard admiring the house, I told him he should leave the farm to his sister, who lived out West. “The house, the land, whatever,” I said.
“I don’t want it.” He fixed me with a fierce look: There I was, the one person who mattered to him, making things even harder. But I didn’t care. He was hurting me, and I wanted him to know it. He told me he and Josie had worked all their lives to make sure my mother would be taken care of once they were gone. “You’re her daughter,” he said, “so like it or not, it’s all coming to you.”

When the lawyer arrived, I slipped into Cal’s workshop, pocketed the pill bottle from his tackle box, and told him I needed to run some errands. My plan was to see Dr. Miller and tell him what Cal intended to do, but after an hour in the parking lot at the VA, staring at the pill bottle on my dashboard, I lost my nerve imagining the look on Cal’s face if he found out I betrayed him to a doctor. I spent the rest of the day driving around with a pint of vodka between my knees, eventually making my way out to Lexington, across the dam to Irmo, and then up Highway 5 toward White Rock. I wanted to see the little lake house where I’d lived with my parents before my mother’s accident. I hadn’t been there in years, and at first I thought I’d made a wrong turn in the shadowy dusk. But it turned out the house was gone, as were the other cottages that had once dotted the shore, and in their place stood a row of condominiums overlooking the lake. Also gone was our rickety dock. Now five new docks pointed like fingers into the cove, each one ringed by expensive-looking sailboats.

By then, of course, it had begun to rain. For weeks I’d been praying for a storm, rain being the only thing that would have slowed Lyle’s crew, but the late summer sky had
stayed clear and blue. Lights shone in a couple of the condos; figuring the weather would keep people inside, I took a seat at the end of a dock, letting my feet dangle in the water. Across the lake, lightning speared the sky.

My mother’s accident happened on the day after the Fourth of July. The night before, she and my father had hosted their annual cookout, a big bash that involved a bonfire, several coolers of Schlitz, roman candles, and loud music from the eight-track player in my father’s Firebird, which he parked near the lake’s edge. While the grown-ups drank and danced the shag, I wandered along the moonlit bank until I found myself staring up at a neighbor’s tree house. On a sagging platform that jutted out over the water, I sat watching the party, indistinct figures moving in the firelight. It had been maybe ten minutes when my mother noticed I was missing. After she checked the house, she stood at the end of the dock and called my name. There was real fear in her voice, and it sent a shiver through me. I climbed down and ran to her as fast as I could, calling out all the way, I’m coming, I’m coming.

When I was done with the vodka, I tossed the bottle into the lake, along with my grandfather’s pills. By then it was late, almost ten, and the drizzle had turned to a downpour. I hardly noticed. On the way into town, I rolled down the windows and hit ninety miles an hour, the highway tightening around me like a tunnel as raindrops pelted the windshield. It’s a miracle I made it to Lyle’s.

“Where’ve you been?” he said, answering the door in his boxers.

“Nowhere.” I wrung water from my shirt. “Out for a drive.”

He fetched a towel while I slipped off my sandals and emptied the soggy contents of my pockets onto his kitchen counter. He was not happy about my going AWOL. He’d been calling the farm all day, and when nobody answered, he’d driven out to check on us. He found my grandfather sitting out front with a pitcher of bloody marys, waiting. He had his days mixed up; he thought it was Friday.

“That’s my grandfather,” I said. “Knows he wants a drink even if he doesn’t know the day.” I opened the refrigerator and helped myself to a beer as Lyle went on about how embarrassed Cal had been when he realized his mistake.

“I’m just glad he was okay,” Lyle said. “I mean, at first I was almost afraid to go out there.”

I had to roll my eyes at that. “If you’re so afraid of him dying, why don’t you get off your ass and do something?”

Lyle got up from the table and went into the bedroom to find some dry clothes. He was not going to fight with a drunk. “It’s been a blast,” I said, taking another swallow of beer and putting my sandals back on, but my keys were gone. Lyle had them, and he wouldn’t give them back. “I don’t think driving is a good idea,” he said. When it finally sank in that he was serious, I locked him out of the bedroom and told him to sleep on the sofa. Then I lay in his bed, staring at the shadow of his feet beneath the door and waiting for him to come get me. I wanted him to pick the lock, climb the fire escape, kick down the door, stop at nothing. But he just stood there knocking and asking me to open up, and eventually he went away. I heard him rummaging
through the closet, getting blankets and a pillow. I couldn’t believe he would give up so easily. I was sure he’d be back, but after a few minutes, the light clicked off.

My mother loved water-skiing and swimming in the ocean and horseback riding, but most of all she loved to race stock cars. Before I was born, she was a two-time track champion in the hobby division at Columbia Speedway, the only lady driver among men who hated racing against a woman and hated losing to one even more. Cal told me she’d always liked driving fast, even before she got her license. Back then he owned an old delivery truck he’d modified to haul silage. In the fields along the edge of the swamp, he grew corn for his cows. He’d cut the corn while it was still green and pack it into a bunker silo, then cover it with a sheet of plastic until it fermented, at which point he’d drain the runoff into silage troughs that ran to the cattle lot at the back of the dairy building.