The Last Odd Day (5 page)

I was in the house packing when O.T. walked in and thought somebody had broken in and robbed us. After rushing from Raleigh to be there during the delivery and staying with me through most of the night, he had left my room the next morning to go to the farm to cut a sow loose that had gotten tangled in a barbed-wire fence. He thought I would stay at the hospital until supper time anyway; but since I had driven myself there in the first place, stone-eyed and cool, again I would choose not to wait. I knew I could get myself home.

Even with the disapproving glances of the staff, a hasty phone call to the doctor, the whisper from an
orderly to a custodian, an attempt to seat me in a wheelchair, I walked up the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door. Just as if nothing had happened. Just like I had gone to the hospital only to visit a friend.

When O.T. came in and saw what I was doing, he did not have a word to say. I still imagine that it was the best thing he ever did in our entire marriage. He left me to myself, a self that at that point and for a long time afterward was not enough to share.

He only stared as I took my belongings and placed them in the car. He did not try to stop me or even ask what I was doing or where I was going. He sat and watched, eyes so full of anguish and despair I asked him to turn away. He dropped his face in his hands but did not cry. I finished packing and then walked away, leaving him there with nothing, just as the hospital staff had left me in the delivery room without any measure of sympathy or hope. I drove out the driveway and onto the street without even speaking a good-bye. I never considered his pain.

I wanted children more than anything; and when O.T. returned from having fought in Europe, closed up like an old wound, I staked my life and love more completely on this possibility than on the notion of creating a joyful marriage. I think I believed that having a child of my own would diminish my mother's sadness, which I
had inherited from her, make it less noticeable, let her finally die and pull herself and all of the ghosts away from me.

I thought that a child would deliver us from the unrelenting silence we had managed since O.T. had come home from the war. And I suppose the desire to nest and give birth kept me from lifting the veils that, over many years, I had carefully and purposely draped across my own heart.

O.T., honorably discharged, never spoke of what he had experienced during his time as a soldier. He never mentioned the places he had seen or the men with whom he lived; but just like I was forever scarred by the death of our baby, I knew he struggled with his demons. Late at night he would often leave our bed and I would find him outside, crouched near a tree or pacing behind the barn. I would call to him to come inside; and he would just move farther away, as if my voice was a command to march out into the fields.

Only occasionally would he mention his service in the armed forces, and when he did, the story was brief, the facts sketchy. Over a meal with his family he would casually comment about the chill of a European winter or how hunger can change a man. But if his brothers or friends wanted more details, he'd just switch to a different topic, his voice having grown distant and somber.

Unlike his family, I never asked what happened to him, how the battle years broke him, what he could not forget. I never offered him a place to release his burdens, slide open his heart. Since I remained closed regarding my own sorrow and grief, I never pushed my husband to talk about his.

O.T. did not seem to mind or be jealous of my obsession to have a child. Perhaps he too thought a baby could ease our disappointments. He accepted my desire without argument or recognition, right along with the house I wanted and built and the cool veneer that existed between me and his mother.

I think I loved O.T. even though I realize it was not passionately or with desperation. We were comfortable together, satisfied. And both of us knew, whether it was early in our marriage or much later, that we had what we had. In the beginning it was his mother who made sure of that. In the end it was simply our own method of measurement. We were what we had decided we were.

Mrs. Witherspoon headed off what she considered to be trouble when she noticed what was happening between me and Jolly while O.T. was away. She was subtle at first, only making sure we stayed busy and tired, that I would come in from the field and then have to babysit Dick or wash dishes. She made us focus on whatever crisis she discovered or invented; but then she took a fast and hard turn.

I never knew what she said to her son late one night, only that their voices were raised and sharp like arrows about to fall; but I soon understood after the community picnicand by the look on her face when she saw us walking up from the creek, clothes wet, feet bare, that she would not let things progress any further than they already had. The next day she was gone to town early, and she brought home with her Sally Pretlowe, the woman Jolly married three months later.

We were not naive or insensitive like she implied with her narrow glances and hypocritical prayers of confession that she prayed at the supper table. We knew nothing would come of what we were beginning to feel. We were both loyal to his brother and my husband and to the United States of America's war efforts against Hitler in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific Islands.

We stifled the attraction, kept our distance in the isolated fields, pretending what we had was merely a relationship between a brother and a sister. And every night while we lay alone in our beds in rooms across the hall from each other, listening to the sounds of each other's sleep, not tasting, not touching, not stepping over the lines, I willed it to be so.

I guess I was drawn to Jolly because he was the same age as I when O.T. brought me from the mountains. He was a teenager, caught beneath the shadow of a strong
and honorable oldest son and pushed from his mother's heart by a younger and more affectionate baby. He was solemn, spoke few words; and he reminded me of everyone I loved. There was nothing excessive about him. He lacked the confidence of O.T. and the tenderness of Dick. He was slow in everything he did, from math problems to fixing the engine of the tractor. He would disappear for hours at a time, down at the creek or out riding a horse.

He was awkward and yet easy to be with, unassuming and honest. And unlike O.T., who in the beginning seemed to regard me as some accomplished goal or some event he had planned, Jolly treated me like I was someone he could never have imagined. To my husband's younger brother, I was a complete and unexpected surprise.

Sally, the young woman Mrs. Witherspoon brought home for her middle son, was keen to both her mother-in-law's suspicions and her own intuitions about what was between me and Jolly. So that as soon as they were married and the war was over, she and Jolly moved to Alabama to work in her uncle's ladder factory.

I have only seen them four or five times in over fifty years, his parents' funerals and a wedding or two. I called when O.T. had a stroke. I thought it was the right thing to do. Sally answered the phone and was curt but appropriately sympathetic. She said that she would tell Jolly but that she wasn't sure they would be able to come. She
suffered terribly with arthritis in her hip. “Had to have been all those years standing on a concrete floor,” she added and then quickly mentioned a bridge game and said good-bye. Jolly never called; and I never made anything of it.

After O.T. returned from Europe and before Emma, I had forgotten what was between me and his younger brother. O.T. and I had to learn and relearn each other several times. He was burdened by a soldier's sorrow and I, because I so desperately wanted a child, by the disappointment of a monthly period. For most of our marriage, these experiences defined who we were. And even though I didn't really know him before the war—he came into my life and left so quickly—I knew that what happened during the years he was gone had changed O.T.

He was blank by the time he got home; and because I was already accustomed to the silent nights and the cooling of cravings, and then later when my baby came and went, we knew how to manage our life together. We expected little and were therefore rarely disappointed. Once I was off the mountain and living in the home of Oliver Thomas Witherspoon, his mother and father and two younger brothers, once I gave birth to death, I realized I hadn't a lot of hope for happiness.

I suppose it is this choice to accept an unfulfilled life that has caused me to be surprised that most people live
their whole lives in a state of disappointment. I discovered this initially at the mill, where I spent the majority of my adult life. Loading needles and tacking elastic to the tops of women's panties, I was shocked to learn that most of the people there were expecting something more.

The women who gathered around the tables at lunch talked openly and without shame about the poor states of their children, the lack of opportunities for them in the textile industry, and the heaviness of unfulfilled dreams. Then they'd peer over at me, while I was eating my can of pork and beans or dry bologna sandwiches, and I'd just shrug my shoulders.

“No dreams,” I'd say, remembering the hunched shoulders and empty palms of my mother's kin, the fading of the colors when Emma died. “Might lend itself to boring sleep, but it sure does let you get up in the morning.”

And they'd stare at me like I had just grown pointed ears and a tail. Most of them did not know what it was like not to have dreams, least not the young ones, anyway. Of course, by the time most of them hit forty or so, divorced, bored with children who would not leave their houses, still working at the same job, they realized that they had not had a dream of their own in more than a decade. That's about the time the lunch conversations changed from lost hope to concrete plans for medical
insurance and saved-up vacation days. Those were the conversations I deemed as sensible, and joined.

O.T. and I had planned to buy an RV and travel down to Florida, maybe up to Niagara Falls. But since I kept delaying my retirement because the boss would beg me to, by the time I was free O.T. started feeling nervous, having headaches. So that we never got to Bob's Vacations on Wheels, and we never camped in the Everglades. Soon Sunhaven collected most of our retirement money; and I didn't think much about our ideas for a long time.

In fact, before O.T.'s declining health and the sudden appearance of a woman named Lilly, I hadn't thought much about anything in a long time. Not the unrelenting spirits of my dead parents and siblings, who refused to leave the old house, or me and O.T. buying a Winnebago or the way Jolly would hold my hand, soft as rain, when he helped me down off the tractor.

Like the stories of a silent soldier and the way a woman's body cramps and tears during labor, some memories are simply put away deep, deep down and below, so that former things appear to have passed away and only those events at hand require attention.

Not since I was pregnant and then not, a mother and then only a wife, had I actually remembered things or felt things or noticed things, like the way a fly sings when it's
caught in a spiderweb, the formidable strength of desire, and my father's empty eyes, which saw everything I did not.

I had spent so long turning away from life—refusing it, denying it, pinching and squeezing the sorrow and the pain and the possibilities—that the only emotion I could muster up when I finally met Lilly, other than the physical one of getting sick, was just the sense of being a little surprised.

Right before fainting, I saw a burst of color and heard my name being spoken. I said out loud, “Hmmm,” like I had suddenly figured something out, nodded my head, and fell forward.

O.T. died on a Wednesday when the sing-along in the dining room down the hall from his room had just started and the nurses had all been called to a meeting downstairs. Since I knew for about a week that his time was close at hand, I had been staying all night, sleeping in the chair next to his bed, and showering in the bathroom down at the end of the hall.

The last days of his life I, not the nursing staff, bathed and shaved him, read him stories from the paper, and gave him things to smell. Oranges and strawberries, wet grass and lavender. O.T. had always noticed and enjoyed the smell of things, so I had Maude bring me stuff from the house or the barn or pick up something
from the store that I thought might bring him pleasure. My perfume, a homemade brand that was a light floral scent he had found at some boutique in Chicago when he drove to a tractor show years ago, handfuls of dirt, tea with cinnamon sticks, and clove.

He enjoyed the aromas from outside the most, because when I held old tools or leather work gloves up to his nose, he seemed to soften and relax. I don't know if he really knew it or not, if it meant anything to him or nothing at all, I only hoped it eased his passing, helped him see that he was only going home.

When he did die I did not panic. I did not ring the call button on the railing of his bed. I sat beside him, having just placed a small sprig of lilac near his chin, rubbing his hand and listening to a cheerful pianist leading the group in “Bicycle Built for Two.”

I smiled at the thought of passing to such a tune and wondered if the spirits who heard it would not come and take him until it was over, that they stood along the wall waiting, respectful, thinking it was some unknown tribal chant or worship song meant to send his soul into the next life.

He died without any meaningful final words or astounding moment of clarity like I have heard others speak of when they tell their dead one's story. Unlike even my mother, who died as she had lived, in sadness, or my
father, who died begging for death to come, O.T. didn't suddenly turn to me and call out my name or tighten his grip or smile or shed a tear. He simply eased into it, accepted it, welcomed it like a man who had been waiting for his lover finally to come.

The warmth drained from his hand and the lines around his eyes and brow melted. His lips fell; and his breathing slowed and finally stopped. It was not desired or wrestled with, it was simply his time, and he acquiesced. Not a burden or an escape, it was merely death.

I clasped his hand tightly, pausing like the ancestors until the chorus was over; then I reached up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, straightened the sheets around him, and waited for someone to find us.

After almost half an hour, it was the housekeeper who came and bowed beside me, said a prayer delivering my husband into somebody else's hands, and quietly and quickly left us once again to be alone. Soon, once the news was told, a few of the nurses came, the administrator, and a chaplain; but none of them, just like O.T., had very much to say.

When I was asked by Mrs. Fredericks, the director of Sunhaven, about relatives to contact, I said politely and confidently that I would call his two brothers, Dick and Jolly, from home. She leaned toward me, placed her hand on my shoulder, and gave me a sympathetic squeeze. I
returned to his room to wait for the funeral home personnel, and that's when a nursing assistant, one I had not known or noticed, tiptoed into the room and handed me a little piece of paper, torn from a notebook, with a name and number of someone, she said, who would want to know.