“Push down my blankets, Terence,” my mother said. “Why are there so many? I’m burning up.”
“It’s Jamie, Mom. Terry’s out in the garage with Dad.” I turned down the single blanket, exposing a hideously gay pink nightgown that seemed to have nothing inside it. Her hair (all white by the time the cancer struck) had thinned to almost nothing; her lips had fallen away from her teeth, making them look too big, and somehow equine; only her eyes were the same. They were still young, and full of hurt curiosity: What’s happening to me?
“Jamie, Jamie, that’s what I said. Can I have a pill? The pain is awful today. I’ve never been in such a hole as this one.”
“In fifteen minutes, Mom.” It was supposed to be two hours, but I couldn’t see what difference it made at that point. Claire had suggested giving her all of them, which shocked Andy; he was the only one of us who had remained true to our fairly strict religious upbringing.
“Do you want to send her to hell?” he had asked.
“She wouldn’t go to hell if we gave them to her,” Claire said—quite reasonably, I thought. “It isn’t as if she’d know.” And then, nearly breaking my heart because it was one of our mother’s favorite sayings: “She doesn’t know if she’s afoot or on horseback. Not anymore.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Andy said.
“No,” Claire sighed. She was closing in on thirty by then, and was more beautiful than ever. Because she was finally in love? If so, what a bitter irony. “I don’t have that kind of courage. I only have the courage to let her suffer.”
“When she’s in heaven, her suffering will only be a shadow,” Andy said, as if this ended the matter. For him I suppose it did.
The wind howled, the old panes of glass in the bedroom’s single window rattled, and my mother said, “I’m so thin, so thin now. I was a pretty bride, everyone said so, but now Laura Mackenzie is so thin.” Her mouth drew down in a clown-moue of sorrow and pain.
I had three more hours in the room with her before Terry was due to spell me. She might sleep some of that time, but she wasn’t sleeping now, and I was desperate to distract her from the way her body was cannibalizing itself. I might have seized on anything. It just happened to be Charles Jacobs. I asked if she had any idea where he’d gone after he left Harlow.
“Oh, that was a terrible time,” she said. “A terrible thing that happened to his wife and little boy.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
My dying mother looked at me with stoned contempt. “You don’t know. You don’t understand. It was terrible because it was no one’s fault. Certainly not George Barton’s. He simply had a seizure.”
She then told me what I have already told you. She heard it from the mouth of Adele Parker, who said she would never get the image of the dying woman out of her head. “What I’ll never get out of mine,” Mom said, “was the way he screamed at Peabody’s. I didn’t know a man could make a sound like that.”
Doreen DeWitt, Fernald’s wife, called my mother and gave her the news. She had a good reason for calling Laura Morton first. “You’ll have to tell him,” she said.
My mother was horrified at the prospect. “Oh, no! I couldn’t!”
“You have to,” Doreen said patiently. “This isn’t news you give over the phone, and except for that old gore-crow Myra Harrington, you’re his closest neighbor.”
My mother, all her reticence washed away by the morphine, told me, “I gathered up my courage to do it, but I was caught short as I was going out the door. I had to turn around and run to the toidy and shit.”
She walked down our hill, across Route 9, and to the parsonage. She didn’t say, but I imagine it was the longest walk of her life. She knocked on the door, but at first he didn’t come, although she could hear the radio inside.
“Why would he have heard me?” she inquired of the ceiling as I sat there beside her. “The first time, my knuckles barely grazed the wood.”
She knocked harder the second time. He opened the door and looked at her through the screen. He was holding a large book in one hand, and all those years later she remembered the title: Protons and Neutrons: The Secret World of Electricity.
“Hello, Laura,” he said. “Are you all right? You’re very pale. Come in, come in.”
She came in. He asked her what was wrong.
“There’s been a terrible accident,” she said.
His look of concern deepened. “Dick or one of the kids? Do you need me to come? Sit down, Laura, you look ready to faint.”
“All of mine are all right,” she said. “It’s… Charles, it’s Patsy. And Morrie.”
He set the big book carefully on a table in the hall. That was probably when she saw the title, and I’m not surprised that she remembered it; at such times one sees everything and remembers it all. I know from personal experience. I wish I did not.
“How badly are they hurt?” And before she could answer: “Are they at St. Stevie’s? They must be, it’s the closest. Can we take your station wagon?”
St. Stephen’s Hospital was in Castle Rock, but of course that wasn’t where they had been taken. “Charles, you must prepare yourself for a terrible shock.”
He took her by the shoulders—gently, she said, not hard, but when he bent to look into her face, his eyes were blazing. “How bad? Laura, how badly are they hurt?”
My mother began to cry. “They’re dead, Charles. I am so sorry.”
He let go of her and his arms dropped to his sides. “No they’re not,” he said. It was the voice of a man stating a simple fact.
“I should have driven down,” my mother said. “I should have brought the station wagon, yes. I wasn’t thinking. I just came.”
“They’re not,” he said again. He turned from her and put his forehead against the wall. “No.” He banged his head hard enough to rattle a nearby picture of Jesus carrying a lamb. “No.” He banged it again and the picture fell off its hook.
She took his arm. It was floppy and loose. “Charles, don’t do that.” And, as if he had been one of her children instead of a grown man: “Don’t, honey.”
“No.” He banged his forehead again. “No!” Yet again. “No!”
This time she took hold of him with both hands and pulled him away from the wall. “Stop that! You stop it right now!”
He looked at her, dazed. A bright red mark dashed across his brow.
“Such a look,” she told me years later, as she lay dying. “I couldn’t bear it, but I had to. Once a thing like that is started, you have to finish it.”
“Walk back to the house with me,” she told him. “I’ll give you a drink of Dick’s whiskey, because you need something, and I know there’s nothing like that here—”
He laughed. It was a shocking sound.
“—and then I’ll drive you to Gates Falls. They’re at Peabody’s.”
“Peabody’s?”
She waited for it to sink in. He knew what Peabody’s was as well as she did. By that time Reverend Jacobs had officiated at dozens of funerals.
“Patsy can’t be dead,” he said in a patient, instructional tone of voice. “It’s Wednesday. Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day, that’s what Morrie says.”
“Come with me, Charles.” She took him by the hand and tugged him first to the door and then into the gorgeous autumn sunshine. That morning he had awakened next to his wife, and had eaten breakfast across from his son. They talked about stuff, like people do. We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.