The Last Odd Day Read online

  “Clara,” he said as I smoothed his hair back down.

  “No, baby, I’m Jean.”

  I balled up the stained top and put it in a plastic grocery bag I had brought to carry home his dirty laundry. I washed his clothes on Wednesdays and Fridays.

  “So sorry, Jean.” A tear rolled down his cheek.

  After O.T. had his stroke, his personality changed. He was more volatile, more emotional, sometimes screaming for no reason, sometimes crying for hours. It was very difficult at first since O.T. was never high-strung. The most upset I ever saw him was when he pulled the tractor off his daddy and carried him all the way to the fire station, a good mile and a half from the house.

  He was raw and fierce, determined to walk his father back to life. The coroner said Papa had to have died instantly, that amount of weight crushing his whole right side; but it wouldn’t have mattered to O.T. even if he had known that when it happened. He was not about to put his father down until he laid him on the stretcher in the fire truck.

  I yelled at him from the house, told him I’d bring the car around; but he threw his father across his shoulders and just started walking. By the time I got the keys and pulled the car out of the driveway, he was halfway across the field and farther away from me. I followed him along the road, blowing the horn and trying to get him to walk to the car. He just kept moving, until finally he stopped and in a voice that could only come from grief, he roared, “Damn it, Jean, just go to the station and tell Jimmy to meet me with the truck.”

  And so I did. I left my husband walking across a field of soybeans, his father, bloody and broken, slung around his shoulders, and drove down the dirt road to the fire station. Jimmy Morgan and Ellis Rumley jumped in the paramedics’ truck and met him just as he was coming out of the field. And by the time I got to them O.T. had calmed down and was standing behind the two EMTs, just rubbing his neck and shaking his head. He didn’t even cry at the funeral.

  The time I left him to go to Wrightsville Beach, he showed up the fifth day. But after seeing me and realizing that what I mostly needed was space, he never said a word, never explained how he found me or why it took him five days. He never talked about what happened or what it was like for him.

  He put some money on the table by the window in the motel room, cupped his big hand around the top of my head, pressing me to the earth, and walked out.

  When I got home, he was a little more tender, a little more careful with his words; but he did not cry or twirl me around in glee, he just helped me take the bags out of the car, placed the china back in the corner of the hutch, drew me a bath, and fixed me a banana sandwich, which he fed to me as I sat in the tub.

  He never, in our entire state of matrimony, ever raised his voice or became overwhelmed by emotion. Only that scream from the field of sorrow and a look in his eye when he came to the ocean that almost melted the hard shell surrounding my heart.

  There at the last, seeing him cry became a normal thing. Although it was troublesome and difficult for me at first, after more than a year and a half it was just a part of who my husband had become.

  “There, there, old man, there’s no need to lose it over spilled oatmeal.” And I wiped the tears from his eyes. “You’re just having one of your sad spells.”

  He turned away from me and stared out the window. He nodded his head like there was nothing more to be said. “Red birds run the others off.”

  I noticed where he was watching the feeder. A large male cardinal was sitting on the small post that extends from the dark round opening where the seed was most plentiful.

  “Fat ole thing, isn’t he?”

  O.T. laughed. “Who you calling fat?” And somehow through the bars of his hospital bed he was able to reach out and pinch me on the rear. He startled me.

  O.T. could seem clear and normal at certain moments. He would remember names and dates, circumstances surrounding events that I had forgotten. He was at times conversational and winsome, able to tell you what he wanted or needed, when he was cold or what channel of the television he wanted to watch. And during those moments, rare as they were especially in the last months, I would think the effects of the stroke had passed, that he had been given a reprieve, a healing; and in just a blink of the eye, I was consumed by shame that I had sent him to a nursing facility and began considering what it might mean to take him home.

  Those moments would quickly dissolve, however. And he would start to cry, call me Mama, or scream at somebody passing by the room. He had been permanently damaged by the stroke, a cerebrovascular accident, a thrombosis, the doctors named it; a train wreck, Maude more aptly called it.

  In less time than it took me to open the car door and wave hello, O.T. fell from the first step of the porch to the bottom step beside the sidewalk, deprived almost half of his brain of oxygen, and went from being a 230-pound man of such dignity and pride he wouldn’t even ask for help when the tobacco came in and who could quote entire passages of Shakespeare and the Bible to being a 135-pound man who had to wear a diaper and could not understand something as simple as sucking milk through a straw.

  Seeing him the way I did those last few months, an infant in a grown man’s body, reduced my faith to something smaller than a mustard seed, leaving my spirit as cracked and withered as the skin on an old woman’s hand. And even when I found out what he had done, the chilling realization that there was more to our marriage than what I knew, I still would never have wished such a thing as his declining condition on anyone, even and especially on him.

  Karen Hertford was his nursing assistant that day. Her mother had worked with me at the mill. I remember pictures of the girl when she was only a toddler, and I recognized her last name the first time I met her when O.T. was new at Sunhaven. Her mother and I were never close friends, but we knew things about each other like the facts that she had a steel pin in her left ankle and that we both enjoyed jalapeño peppers cut and quartered and soaked in a little vinegar.

  Karen had just started working at the nursing home when O.T. first came. She had a pleasant nature about her, which after more than a year and a half, I noticed, had remained intact. She was slightly overweight, pulled her hair up in a ponytail, and always kept a fine manicure.

  “Well, hello, Mrs. Witherspoon, what are you doing here this time in the day?” She moved the swivel table into the curtain that separated the two beds so she could get beside O.T. “I haven’t seen you since your husband was a new patient.”

  She pulled the blood pressure cuff down from the attachment on the wall behind O.T.’s head and added, “And how is my favorite fellow?” O.T. smiled.

  “I know. I’m so used to those afternoon hours it’s hard for me to change my ways.” I straightened O.T.’s shirt.

  “This is Jean.” O.T. smiled at Karen.

  “Yes, Mr. Witherspoon, I know.” She wrapped the sleeve around his arm. “Did Walter help you eat your breakfast?”

  “Walter’s an asshole.” He yanked his arm away, and Karen had to pull it toward her, brace it under her arm, and start again.

  “O.T., that’s not fair,” I said, then, “I’m sorry,” to Karen.

  “Oh, no need to apologize; your husband’s right. Walter is an asshole.” She said it so matter-of-factly I was shocked. I had always assumed there was some rule against talking badly about the other staff.

  O.T. nodded. There was a pause as she listened for the thumps that registered my husband’s flow of blood.

  “Well, your pressure’s fine.” She jerked the cuff off and put it back in its holder. The black cords dangled over O.T.’s head. “Let me hold your hand now.” O.T. held out his arm while Karen softly placed her fingers around his wrist. She took his pulse while she winked at him.

  All the attendants babied him, flirted with him like that. At first it made him angry and I found it degrading, but then I figured it was just the way they offered care; and O.T. grew to love the possibility that he might still be a virile man, attractive to younger women. So while h
e was enthralled with this kind of attention, Karen stuck the thermometer in his ear and noted his temperature. I realized it was more than just a means of care giving, it was also a scheme to get his compliance.

  She took out a small pad of paper and jotted down the numbers. “I hope you’ve been doing okay,” she said.

  “Just fine,” I replied. “How’s your mother?” I opened up the drawer in the little chest right by O.T.’s bed. I found a comb and began fixing his hair.

  “She had gallbladder surgery last week, the hard kind where they cut you all the way across your belly; but she’s home now and doing better.” She peered out the window, “You think it’s going to snow?”

  I glanced outside with her. The sky appeared heavy, full and ready to split. “They sure have been calling for it,” I answered. “I’d love to see a little snow.”

  “Yeah, me too. It’s like a tonic.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “You know, a tonic. My grandmother used to make them for us, laxatives, moisturizers, homemade remedies to fix things.” She was rolling O.T. over and changing the sheets. “Just seems like snow is a natural way to soften the steely ground, free us up of pests.”

  “Well that’s true,” I replied, thinking of my own grandmother’s poultices and bottles of cream. “Without a good snow, the bugs are worse in the spring and summer.”

  I put the comb in the drawer. “There you are, sir, you are looking mighty fine this morning.”

  O.T. grinned and shook his head slightly. Karen slid the clean bottom sheet under him while pushing the dirty one toward me. I pulled it out and rolled it into a ball. While she finished with the bottom one I walked around and helped with the top sheet. I noticed that the bedsore on O.T.’s heel had closed and was not nearly so inflamed.

  “Well that’s a lot better.”

  Karen twisted his foot around so that she could see. “Yeah, that one took a lot of work. It’s amazing how quickly their skin wears down; that sore came up in a day.”

  She went over to the closet and pulled out a slender strip of lamb’s wool and cupped it around the bottom of O.T.’s foot. Then we draped the sheet over him. She checked his catheter bag and jotted down a few more notes.

  “All right, sweetie,” she said to my husband, “you are finally all done.” She touched him on the shoulder. “I bet you and your wife will have a lot to talk about today.”

  I appeared a little surprised, I’m sure, since I didn’t understand what she meant. O.T. and I hadn’t carried on a real conversation in years. There was always more silence than discourse.

  Then she added, “Because of the weather, and,” she whispered this, “he made you something.” And she pointed her chin toward the window, near the bottom right side.

  “Oh,” was all I said, and I turned and saw a red construction heart pasted on the inside of the window. Somehow I had missed it when I came in. It was a valentine card he had made with the help of the recreation director.

  I walked over to it. “Ollie loves Jean” was written on the inside of the heart with broad purple strokes. I touched it and smiled at O.T.

  “It’s lovely, honey, thank you.”

  He just watched the birds.

  Karen pushed the table to where it had been and stood just inside the curtain that divided the room between her two patients. “By the way, I guess you realize you just missed your daughter.” She began pulling aside the blue flimsy drapes so that she could work on Mr. Parsons. “I think it’s so nice that she’s moved home to check on him; it must be a real comfort.” Then she disappeared behind the curtain and dragged it around the tracks for privacy.

  I remember that Mrs. Loflin from across the hall started yelling then. She was shouting for a nurse to help her get out of the bed and that some boy was trying to kill her. Then there was the response of someone screaming at her to hold on a minute. I remember Mr. Parsons’s deep breaths as Karen was checking his lungs. An old man’s sigh followed by a command of “Again.” I remember the quick turning of O.T.’s head like he had heard his mother’s voice. And I remember the sudden flash of red, just at the corner of my eye, a cardinal, brash and bothered, pushing the other birds away from the feeder.

  It’s funny the things you remember at significant moments. Colors, sounds, the reaction on somebody else’s face. It’s so odd how when you reflect about a particular event of revelation—a news report, a doctor’s prognosis, a sudden jolt in an otherwise monotonous chain of moments—you can be so completely clear about the unimportant details that you actually have a difficult time defining the event in terms that other people can understand.

  Like Mary Magdalene in the garden when they discovered Jesus’ body was gone. I imagine that she would have been able to tell the other women, the disciples, things like how the flowers, tiny pink ones, were particularly redolent and how the angle of the sun had cast a shadow across a mound of stones. She could have told them how the morning dew had settled upon slender leaves, bowing them toward the ground like a child’s head dropped to pray.

  She would remember that her veil had fallen from across her face and that the cool breeze chilled her lips, causing her to reach up and slide her fingers across them, leaving the taste of the spices she and the others had brought and dropped when they realized someone had been to and opened the grave. Rose oil and spikenard, aloe and a hint of myrrh. And she would remember exactly where she stood when he called her name.

  They would want to know things like how he seemed or where he said he had been, how it happened; but it would be the golden light in his eyes, the way he held his hands open and loose, the softness of his voice, these would be the things that came to mind.

  And though Mary would never share such memories, these would be the only cues for remembering how it was when she saw a resurrected Jesus, the one she loved more than anything, life itself, dead and now alive.

  Maude would ask me later, “Oh, my God, Jean, what did you do when you heard?” And I would think of the gasp and exhale of my husband’s roommate, the terror from somebody’s never-ending nightmare, a sudden blink of O.T.’s eyes that convinced me he knew what was about to be told, and the distracting blast of scarlet just beyond my line of vision.

  O.T. closed his eyes like he was going to sleep. I started walking around him toward Mr. Parsons’s side of the room. “Karen, what daughter?” I did not pull the curtain open since I knew privacy was one of the few luxuries the patients at Sunhaven only rarely were able to afford. I stood at the foot of his bed.

  “Why didn’t you eat anything?” She was still engaged with her patient.

  He mumbled something in return. I checked O.T. He was sleeping. His brow wrinkled and fell.

  “What is it, Mrs. Witherspoon?” She was coming toward me. She found the opening and walked through. She wrote down some things on the little pad she kept in the front pocket of her uniform.

  “My daughter who’s been visiting O.T.?” I stepped aside so that she’d have room to stand in front of the door.

  “Yeah,” she spoke hurriedly, “Lilly.” Then she saw that Mrs. Loflin was hanging upside down on the side of her bed. “Lord, Lucy, what have you done this time?” She ran across the hall before I could ask another question.

  Mrs. Loflin had not gotten the help she wanted, so she had decided she could get out of the bed by herself. What she hadn’t taken into account was the thick band of cloth tying her right arm tightly to the side rail. She had managed to undo the left restraint, but the other one was a bit too knotted for her to pull apart. She had fallen over on her head trying to release herself. I stood in the hallway while Karen managed to get her back into bed.

  The only visitors I know who came to call on O.T. were Maude when she happened to be on that side of town, his youngest brother and his new wife, Beatrice, once every other week, the preacher from the Baptist Church because he visited everybody, and an occasional friend from the Rotary Club where O.T. had served as president and been a member since 1958.
r />   No other women had ever visited my husband. We just weren’t close to any. We didn’t have a lot of friends. There were no nieces within a hundred miles; and even if one of them did come by they would certainly contact me since I can’t believe they would be able to find this place on their own. The women I worked with and considered acquaintances were as old as I was, and most of them were taking care of their own husbands. I didn’t think any of them would have time to visit, and even if they did, none of them was young enough to be my child.

  I was absolutely puzzled, and I stood there in the hall waiting for Mrs. Loflin to get turned right side up so that I could find out who my daughter was. It was like trying to chase down a real person to talk to when you call the phone company. Karen went from Mrs. Loflin to Mr. Trabor, who was urinating in the corner of the hall, to a new physical therapy assistant who had put the walking belt backward on Charles Foust and was about to drop him by the linen chute. Then she hurried to the nurses’ station to answer a phone call and explain why the Alzheimer’s patient on the other hall needed to be moved to another room. She would keep trying to talk to me, but the interruptions were fast and furious. And I followed her around like a child.

  Finally, it seemed things slowed just enough for her to stop and catch her breath. She seemed surprised to see me. “Mrs. Witherspoon, what’s the matter? Does your husband need something?”

  I shook my head no and saw her focusing around me at a commotion near the door of the dining room. I stood up taller, trying to block her view. “The woman you said who’s been visiting O.T.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Karen, we don’t have any children.”

  She seemed confused. “Miss Thomas, quit pushing Aunt Babe,” she yelled to the women behind me. Then she turned to me. “She’s been coming about three months now. Said her name was Lilly, from somewhere east of here, not too far, I think.”

  She sighed because Aunt Babe was starting to cry. “Every day,” she added, “about the time I get here.” Then she was gone. Miss Thomas had started pulling hair.