The Last Odd Day Page 2

  You would have taken one glance at them and passed a quick judgment, believing that surely they were all wrong for each other. That’s if you had seen them just out of the corner of your eye. But if you had taken a few minutes and followed, quietly watching them as one stood near the other, and saw the way my mother softened and my father bloomed, you would have seen clearly how right it was that they were husband and wife.

  If you had taken just a little time and studied how they melted into each other, how they flowed together, one beginning where the other ended, two streams now a river, you would have understood. The force of their union would have persuaded you.

  It defeated any doubt. The two of them together, married and in love, is one of the few things in life of which I have been certain.

  My mother said she loved my father because he knew her through hearing her, through feeling her, loved the way she was at the tip of his fingers, the way he touched her sorrow and did not retreat. She loved him because he was not interested in how her body curved or how her eyes flashed, how she appeared walking across a room. She knew his love grew from inside his heart.

  She claimed she was drawn to him because he bore the soul of a woman; he was not ashamed to cry. He said he loved her because she was not afraid of silence and because she smelled of chicory and buttonbush flowers. He loved her because she had an uncanny way of letting things be, that he knew her to be as old as the mountain upon which we lived.

  They stumbled upon each other late on a summer evening when he walked in the direction of the haunting call of a horned owl. John Clover was standing near a stream, just in the curve at the side of the hill where wildflowers grew tall and unbothered. He stood, alone and satisfied in the dark because at night he felt undamaged and whole. He followed the sound because he believed it was leading him, steering him toward some destiny; and when he fell upon my mother, asleep in the jewelweed, he was confident that she had been waiting for him.

  Mary had wandered into the woods, down from the mountain where she lived, to spend the night, to rest between the roots of box elders and sugarberry trees, to lie upon the warm earth and feel its pulse. When my father came upon her, having tripped on a stone near where she lay, my mother was dreaming that she was weaving strands of grass, bending and folding them into the perfect basket, that her fingers became the golden pieces of straw and that she was being pulled into something strong and fast. When she awoke and heard the breath of the man sitting near her, behind a rock, listening but not watching, she too believed he came to her to tighten the strings around her heart.

  Neither family was particularly happy. Lives were threatened, tears spilled. Bloodlines were broken and battle lines drawn. But my mother, labored and delivered into sadness, searching only for someone who would not pull her from it, and my father, blinded by love and dependent on someone who could tell him the colors of a storm cloud, would not be denied.

  They slipped away farther into the hills, were married by a shaman and later a circuit-riding minister, and returned to claim ten acres of his great-grandfather’s stolen property, her ancestors’ burial land. And there, edged by the graves of those who died and were thought to have rested, they built a house on the far corner of the acreage and a new life together for themselves.

  That is where we lived, my parents and me and long, roaming spirits in search of peace and two distinct but intersected histories, old and young, Indian and white. Over the years I came to understand that they are both equally and uniformly me.

  I was born November 15, 1927, another odd day, in my parents’ bedroom late in the afternoon. I was their second child, the middle one, hoped for but unexpected, the one who lived. Bennie Whitestream was their first, named for the men who had presided at their weddings; and he died several years before I was born. He was seven months old, thin and rickety like my father, silent and pensive like my mother.

  Aunt Carolyn said it was cholera, that it had taken more than one baby from a mother’s arms but that Bennie’s death was even more difficult since my mother did not tell anyone for thirteen days that he had died. Daddy knew something had happened. The baby, who had been crying for almost a month, was quiet; and my mother, while burning heavy incense, stayed in a rocking chair, her back to the door for almost two weeks. He tried to get her to talk to him, tried to take Bennie from her, but Mama would not let him near her or the baby, repeating to him to go away, to stay out of the room, and that everything was fine.

  Finally, even though Daddy was blind and incapable, he hitched up the horse and drove the wagon into a town three counties over, returning with the doctor and the preacher, who ultimately forced her to let the baby go.

  Her sister-in-law claimed the baby had been dead for more than just a few days, that the little body was stiff and blue, and that when they pried my brother out of my grieving mother’s arms the stench almost knocked those three grown men to the floor.

  Mama never seemed to notice; and in fact when I finally did hear this story from my aunt as she walked with me to our house after Mama’s funeral, I remembered how the old Indian women always cut sagebrush and waved the burning sticks around themselves when Mama came near. She would cut her eyes at them and say they were just acting crazy, but I later figured out that they could still smell my brother’s passing on her breath. His death had melted inside her chest like boiled glaze on a cake, and even years and years afterward, she carried him on her like a bundle of blankets tied around her heart.

  When my sister Emma died, Aunt Carolyn and the others said Mama did much better. She did not fast or weep. She was cooperative and forthcoming. She wrapped my sister in her grandmother’s quilt and took her to the clearing behind the house where other family members and her ancestors were buried. There hadn’t even been time for a grave opening. But she sat there on a stump, waiting, rocking her dead child until the men came with a pine box, the preacher arrived and said a few words, and my daddy and his brothers were able to dig a hole fast and wide.

  I watched from behind a tree as she willfully laid her daughter in the coffin and even helped nail it shut. I was surprised at her ease with it all even without knowing about Bennie. But I guess she was so weary of death and resigned to the whims of God, she just accepted that to balance out the suffering on the mountain, one more child of hers had to be taken.

  She was always talking about the pain up there in the hills, how the young ones never knew the torture that occurred on the long walk to Oklahoma, which was deeper and longer than the one shown on maps. It was, she had said, a truly groaning path that etched its way alongside the mountain, deep in its valleys, and within the veins of every Indian.

  Mama was born within a small segment of the nation that had managed to escape the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced all the Native Americans of the southeastern United States to move west. Particularly harsh for the Cherokee, the U.S. government sent more than seven thousand troops into the territory, pushing the people away from their homes without any warning or time to prepare.

  She would tell the story stone-eyed and quietly of how the soldiers had pulled her great-grandmother from her home, forced her away without any of her belongings and without even knowing where her children or husband were. They ransacked and pillaged, even destroying the sacred resting grounds, so sure they were that gold was hidden among the ruins.

  My mother’s great-grandmother buried herself in a pile of leaves, and listened for the sounds of her children as the whole community, aimless and broken, wandered by. She finally recognized the cries of her baby son and daughter and reached up from the ground, pulling them down with her. They stayed there, the old story goes, for more than a day waiting for the sounds of her husband, their father, until finally the soldiers and all of the other Indians had passed. Then without any word from my mother’s great-grandfather, they fled deep into the mountains where a few other Cherokee had hidden out.

  My great-great-grandmother never found her husband though she listened for him every da
y until she died. Everyone says she claims that she heard his spirit along with all the others who had been captured or killed that dreadful day calling out their dying whispers in the wind that poured down from the hill. Every autumn, in a prayerful and learned manner, my mother would turn toward the tallest mountain and say words I did not understand.

  “They still speak,” she would say, her voice choked and small. “They still call out from oosti ganuhnuh dunaclohiluh.”

  Later I would find the words she pronounced in a book in the small library Dr. Hughes had built for the school. Oosti ganuhnuh dunaclohiluh: it means the trail where they cried.

  In a perfect twist of irony, my daddy’s great-grandfather was one of the settlers from farther south who moved onto my mother’s people’s land. They came up and staked off a hundred acres, claiming it was open territory and theirs for the taking. The Georgia women begged to go home because their crops failed and because the family was plagued with illness and melancholy, the land seeded in sorrow. But the men would not be moved. They remained convinced that they belonged to the land and that the land belonged to them, convinced that Indian gold was somewhere up in those hills and that it would all be theirs. They would not leave the mountain. Even God would not turn them away.

  I believe that just like my mother, my father wrestled with his family’s history, with the evil that was done by those in his lineage, by those whose lines led down to him. I never asked and he never spoke of how he measured their sins. He never mentioned his parents or grandparents.

  Sometimes though, late in the afternoon, when the mountain was brushed in sunlight, shimmering in hot, brilliant streams of yellow, he would ask as if he were trying to make sense of something, a thread of sadness in his voice, “Does it seem to be made of gold?”

  My mother would always answer graciously. “Yes,” she would say, pretending it didn’t hurt, “it bears the glimmer of dreams.”

  My father would nod slowly, as if he understood.

  Somehow, watching, listening from my bedroom window, I was reminded of how their marriage, just as that brief conversation, always felt to me like so much more than the words that were spoken, so much more than what was visible just on the surface.

  The question, the answer, the way they loved each other, the way they bore one another’s grief, the way it was between them, without everything always having to be said out loud and with witnesses, these things always felt to me like prayer.

  3

  Winter in North Carolina, two hours east of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Ridge, is like a new wife. Neither demanding nor harsh, she is a season of submission, a lovely opportunity to create the illusion that the world is a perfect place. She is easy and mild, the period that lulls you into a false sense that little to no maintenance is required. Then when the husband has grown accustomed to fresh baking smells in the kitchen and passionate surprises in the bedroom, when he is used to wearing no coat and leaving the windows opened, suddenly there is a brutal blast and the sky changes colors and a storm snaps power lines and brings any movement to a halt.

  Women more than men, I have noticed, hide vital information about themselves from the one they promise to love. It is an old trick handed down from mother to daughter, an ancient tool of survival that says in subtle hints, “Pay attention to this!”

  It is as if we learn that what we have is not acceptable and that if we are found out, the cat discovered and let out of the bag, we will be left abandoned and ashamed. So that even after years of courting, intimate conversations, and private moments, there are still secrets we do not share. We marry in hopes that the secrets will be consumed by the fire of our love and the ashes buried by vows of fidelity and our sincere longing to please one man.

  We start out with a grand twisting of desire and romance, actually believing that we can guess what a husband needs even before hearing it and that we are capable of fulfilling every craving he might have. We spend hours, days, weeks scheming and planning to make him surprised and happy that he would have picked such a mate, such a woman as I.

  And for a few months, maybe even a year, we think it has worked; we believe that we have tamed the blues and hushed the relentless whisper from our hearts that says, You cannot be the thing you are not. We push and pull, starve and curse the parts of ourselves we have been told are not to be mentioned or shown; and we pray that they will not spill or sneak outside our hold.

  Then a sharp crack of lightning flashes, a tiny fissure develops. There is a shifting of the low heavy clouds. He comes home and doesn’t seem to appreciate enough or notice enough; and like a sudden and surprising storm of jagged, blinding pellets of ice, we freeze, paralyzing what has become familiar.

  Generally, this unexpected storm of truth does not destroy the landscape or obliterate the home. It merely chills things, causes a marriage to catch its breath, the trees to bend low. Eventually everything snaps back into place. But after that first unsuspected blow of winter, no one walks about carelessly again.

  O.T. and I weathered our first winter storm when he walked in on a Saturday, from the hog lot, mud on his shoes and a stupid grin on his face, and sat down at the table at a quarter after eleven expecting lunch. Never mind that I had worked my shift and three hours overtime or that I was on my way out to the grocery store to replenish what was gone.

  Because of what I had been doing for nine and a half months since he had returned from overseas and because of what he had seen his mother do all his life, he just assumed a meal, hot and hearty, would greet him anytime he sat down at the table. I threw a loaf of bread, the jar of mustard, and two slices of bologna at him and walked out the door, slamming it behind me. He never came in the house in quite the same way again.

  The storm, fast and furious, blasted through; and from then on O.T. and I understood how quickly the sky can change. Afterward, we never took warmth or comfort for granted again. We survived, but there was a shift in the marriage.

  Three months from the day after Maude had her crazy water dream about me, that day a young woman called for my husband, there was a flimsy report of potential snow flurries in central North Carolina. Since I had skidded across the road and into the side of a bridge the previous year during a bout of freezing rain and because I understood the consequences of dismissing such signs both in the weather and in relationships, I left early for Sunhaven to visit O.T.

  Usually I arrived at the nursing home just after the shift change, and therefore I did not know the early staff as well as I did those who came in after 2:30 p.m. I met almost everyone when O.T. first went in because I used to go right after breakfast and stay all day; but over time I drifted into the comfortable schedule of leaving home at the same time I had for more than fifty-one years while I worked at the mill.

  I slept until 10:00 a.m. By the time I was through piddling about, taking care of chores and errands, I didn’t get to Sunhaven until around 3:00. I stayed until after supper, helping him eat and change for bed, and I was with him until he fell asleep. It had become our routine. So that after more than twenty months, in season and out of season, this is how we did our marriage.

  I was friendly with all the nurses and nursing assistants from the afternoon shift. They became like a second family. We saw each other so often that we began to learn all sorts of things about each other; and before I knew it we were sharing intimate details of our lives and giving advice as freely as we shared recipes and gardening tips. Everyone knew O.T. as well as I did since he became a different person after the stroke. So it seemed, after a while, that they were telling me more things about him than I could share with them. They knew his favorite activity and his worst time of day. They knew what frightened him and what reassured him. And they knew what he liked to eat.

  Before moving to Sunhaven, O.T. had never cared for Jell-O or pudding, called it “ladies’ food,” but once he moved there, it appeared he’d do anything for cherry Jell-O. Like a child hearing the threat of no allowance, O.T. performed whateve
r task was needed for a promise of the red food that wiggles.

  It was, of course, quite a shock to discover that other women knew more about my husband than I did. I had come in for my regular visit, and Betty, the nursing assistant who lives only a couple of miles from me, was feeding him a snack.

  I saw the spoon in her hand, the red cube shaking on top. “He won’t eat it, Betty, he hates Jell-O.”

  And the next thing I know, O.T. is grinning and clapping his hands, “Ollie wants jiggly.”

  Betty shrugged her shoulders, trying to downplay her significance in my husband’s life. “You can never tell with stroke patients, Mrs. Witherspoon, their likes and dislikes can change from one day to the next.”

  But I didn’t let that bother me. I had left most of my ego outside the door when I brought O.T. there in the first place. And then, two weeks after he had been there and they were able to get him to drink a milkshake and finally get that awful feeding tube out of his throat, I humbly accepted that they were more qualified and better caregivers than I was.

  On that cold day in February, I walked past the nurses’ station and down the hall to room 117. O.T. was in the bed by the window since he liked staring outside at the bird feeder and had seniority over his roommate who had moved in only one month earlier.

  I said hello to Mr. Parsons, a double amputee whose wife had only recently died and whose son lived out west and never visited. He hardly ever had anything to say.

  “Hey, baby,” I said as I pulled open the blinds and looked over and smiled at my husband. “Getting a little cloudy today, maybe snow.” I began cleaning up around his bed, straightening papers, throwing away trash.

  “Snow today,” he said and nodded.

  “What did you eat for breakfast?” There were large yellow stains all down the front of his pajamas. “Looks like oatmeal,” I answered myself and went over to the closet and pulled out a clean shirt. “Let’s get you changed.” And I helped him out of the pajama top and pulled a sweatshirt over his head.