Winston heard her struggle, her low grunts obviously painful. He didn’t want to embarrass her, so he stayed put in bed wishing he could do more for her. This was just all so animalistic and barbarous, he thought. He could tell by her movements and quiet sounds that she was “dealing” with her own waste and felt proud of her, knowing how belittling and humiliating the experience was. Soon, Winston would have his turn.
The curtain opened and closed and May sat back down on the bed.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” she said.
“I’m proud a you. That was a hard thing to do.”
May was on the verge of tears.
“I used too much water and I’m worried about Amadeus.”
“Use as much water as you need. As far as that cat goes, I’m sure he’s doin’ jes’ fine. Probably pretendin’ ta be with the resistance. You know, like Snoopy.”
Winston said the word “resistance” with a French inflection that made May smile.
“Make me some breakfast,” she said, “biscuits and sausage gravy, two eggs over easy, wheat toast, bacon, more bacon, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.”
“What, no grits?”
“I think I ordered enough.”
“I’ll see what I can whip up,” he said and pushed his old bones to an upright position. He rifled through their foodstuffs, chose their breakfast, and sat back down next to May, who had already finished Heart of Darkness and had Moby Dick opened on her lap.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we out a everythin’. Can I interest you in a stale brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tart and half a can a peaches?”
“This restaurant sucks.”
At noon on the fifth day, an enclosed truck pulled to the Sparrows’ gate. Two ambulances — both emblazoned with EMT/Fire Rescue graphics from Tampa and Oldsmar, Florida, near where this particular PLA division began its invasion — followed through the gate. May fell asleep reading just as Queequeg tried to eat the protagonist, and Winston, nodding off at the lower slit, jerked open his eyes when he heard the vehicles turning into the driveway. As they approached, he realized that the cots in the barn were not meant to be a barracks, but a makeshift hospital. The enclosed truck carried medical devices and equipment, which was quickly and efficiently offloaded by a swarm of soldiers. Their loud activity in the adjacent room woke May up, and within minutes, a brash generator buzzed to life. It sounded like it was positioned on the same outside wall as their septic system — which caused Winston major discomfort at the thought of its discovery.
No sooner had the improvised hospital been prepared when four bloodied trauma patients were carried into the barn. Winston couldn’t identify their nationalities as they rolled on by, but he assumed that they were all PLA. They were accompanied by two teams of doctors and nurses — one Russian, the other North Korean. They worked on the patients for several hours, their directives calm and calculated, though difficult to hear above the generator’s drone. By dusk, they had all fallen back into their routines — May reading, Winston peering out the slits, a dozen or more soldiers milling about the compound, and the generals, presumably, in the house calculating their next offensive.
Winston was frustrated that he had not considered that the enemy might actually occupy the space in the barn next to them when he built the apartment. He wasn’t entirely positive that anybody else in the barn couldn’t see their shadows or feet shuffling about. He had built the door with a small gap for easy, silent operation. So, with an unfortunate and regretful tone, Winston advised May that there could no longer be any lights on after dusk — she would have to read during the daytime only. May balked at the edict, but put Moby Dick down and went to sleep, which was uncharacteristically earlier than ever, even for her.
Winston kept watch well into the night, finally getting his nerve up to peer into the barn. Sure enough, it was now a makeshift trauma center. Sometime before midnight, one of the wounded soldiers died, his heart monitor screeching its monotone warning. He watched the doctors and nurses scramble — they appeared to also be living in there with the patients — and the monitor was silenced almost immediately. Two Russian soldiers loitering near the port-a-potties were directed to take the body into the woods. They bounced out of the barn with the corpse, and walked out the front gate into the woods.
May hadn’t stirred. Winston checked on her — she was in deep REM sleep. He checked on the house; Med’s head was still jammed on the wrought-iron fence, and it angered him. He had wondered if it was possible to sneak out of the apartment, dislodge the skull from the fence, and dispose of it properly. But now that the barn had been converted into a field hospital, there was little hope of ever leaving the barn, which was ever the more disconcerting since Winston knew that they would run out of fresh water soon.
Savanah
It was a thirteen-year tradition, their annual trip in the fall to Savannah — Georgia’s oldest and most beautiful city. May, an avid reader and patron of literary fiction (even though she taught math to middle school students in the Henry County Regional school system), counted Flannery O’Connor among her favorite authors. Each year, a literary symposium — the Annual Ursrey Memorial Lecture — was held near Flannery’s childhood home in Savannah, where erudites would converge to commemorate her great literary achievements.
May had dragged Winston to Savannah since 2009 when the symposium held its inaugural lecture. While May attended the event, Winston enjoyed walking the compact, historical city. He’d sit and watch the immense cargo ships maneuver the Savannah River for a spell, their impossibly heavy payloads an engineer’s fantasy-cum-reality. Then, he’d stroll the city’s numerous squares and explore the seemingly ever-changing, lush flora and discover and rediscover monuments and statuaries scattered throughout the city. Savannah was always a place of discovery for Winston, which he enjoyed, because he had zero interest in literary fiction. Or fiction. Or reading. But husbands do what they must to maintain order and civility in their marriages, which is why he drove the nearly four-hour trip each way every fall for the past thirteen years — it just made his wife happy.
There was a photo titled, Me and May in Savannah, 2010, from their second trip to the lecture. They had just eaten at the 17Hundred90 restaurant, which was also their weekend getaway hotel, and had wandered toward Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home — a five or six minute leisurely stroll from the hotel. It was still early in the evening; the sun was sinking, they were satiated, and Colonial Park Cemetery was on the way. And Winston had discovered something earlier in the day in the cemetery that caused his hands to tremble slightly during dinner, though May hadn’t noticed his quivering. He led her into the graveyard and to a section near the west boundary, but Winston, like a good husband, let May make the discovery — and acted surprised when she did.
She had always known that her family was descended from slaves, though there was never any mention of the Wellbeloved surname as a Georgia slave owner in any historical documents that they could find — that was what the Mayor had always told her, and his father had told him the same — that very little was known of the first Wellbeloved. May had performed the requisite internet genealogy searches, only to find dead ends. But on that trip in 2010, Winston, err, May, discovered a gravestone with their family name. May fell to her knees when she discovered the sandstone marker, its chiseled impressions still deep and legible. It read: