“Neelie made you some oyster soup,” Neelie said to him proudly, knowing he liked the soup. “Carrie, get up and get your daddy a bowl of that soup,” she directed.
Carrie moved from her chair and ladled the soup into a bowl and placed it before him.
“Get him some water while you up, honey,” Neelie added. “You know your daddy likes his water on the table.”
Carrie did as she was told. He ate the soup slowly—it was thick and hot, the way he liked it—and listened as Neelie jabbered in her weapon-voice, telling loud, exaggerated stories of his sons and daughters as children. Stories of temper fits and tears and runaways and ghosts and awe. His daughters listened and nodded politely, irritated smiles fixed on their faces, and he knew they were annoyed because Neelie was not properly solemn for such a properly solemn occasion.
“Jesus, Lord, Carrie here was the worst of them all. Always coming to me, saying, ‘Neelie, Mama done whipped me and I ain’t done nothing.’ And she’d throw her little fit and say she was gon’ run away from home.”
“I didn’t do that, Neelie.”
“Jesus, Lord, honey, yes you did. One time, you made Neelie pack you some runaway brown-sugar biscuits, and you went off down in the pasture and ate every last one of them and come back home at sundown, sick to your stomach.”
“I don’t remember that, Neelie.”
“Honey, you wadn’t but a little bitty thing. Little bitty things don’t remember nothing. You was a mess, honey. Not like Paul. He was the sweetest thing you ever saw when he was little. Always helping Neelie. Only thing Paul ever done was get left behind in town one day, when your mama took everybody in with her. Jesus, Lord, they was so many babies she done forgot about having Paul, and she come all the way back home. And when they go back to find him, they wadn’t the first sign of that baby. Not one. He wadn’t but four or five. Your poor mama most went out of her mind, worrying about him, saying he was done snatched up by somebody and took off. Bless his soul, he done went dead to sleep in the dime store, up under some boxes. They found him around about nightfall. Jesus, Lord, he was a good baby. Ain’t no wonder to Neelie he come out a preacher.”
He remembered the day. She had cried in great horror that their son, their good son, would be lost. One son had already been lost and the pain of his death had never left her.
The stories rained from Neelie. Her voice became a caw, like a bird’s fuss. She sat at the end of the table, near the windows, her thin, brittle body rocking rhythmically against the chair-back, her long hands and fingers fluttering, skimming across her forearms and then her face—forearms and face, forearms and face. The doctors had told Neelie that she had a disease of the nervous system—she could not pronounce it and could not explain it—and they had given her a prescription that she carried always in her purse like a prize. Yet, when she became excited, or agitated, the medicine did not work and she could not stop her hands from moving or trembling, but she had trained her hands to the control of touching forearms and face, like a repeated signal of distress. Now, with the daughters of her dead friend, Neelie was excited. She was again among them, again listened to, again important.
“Jesus, Lord, it’s a wonder we raised these children, ain’t it, Mr. Sam?”
“I guess so,” he said. He liked Neelie. Neelie had tended all but the oldest of their children, Alma and Thomas, and she had treated them with off-balance moods of discipline (“Neelie’s gon’ cut a switch, you don’t straighten up.”) and favoritism (“Honey, you know Neelie loves you more’n anybody on God’s green earth.”), and in the uncertainty of those quick moods, she had always been triumphant. Her lamentation had always been tragic and noisy: “Poor old Neelie, honey. Poor old Neelie. Ain’t got nothing, don’t know nothing. These babies don’t even like to be around poor old Neelie.” And the babies—his babies—would hold tightly onto Neelie, begging to do something to keep her from being poor. It was a soliloquy that had worked when the children were very small, and it worked when they became adults. Once a visitor had asked Kate if Neelie belonged to the family, saying the word “belonged” with the acid of cynicism, and Kate had answered, innocently, “No. We belong to Neelie.”
“You get anything to eat, Neelie?” he asked.
“Had me some oatmeal this morning, Mr. Sam,” Neelie said sadly. “Can’t keep much more’n oatmeal on my stomach. Arlie’s coming by in a minute to pick me up. Neelie’s got to go feed that bunch of his.”
“How is Arlie?” Carrie asked.
“He’s fine, honey. Arlie’s a good boy. Runs around with a bad crowd sometimes, that sorry bunch of white boys over on the Goldmine ridge. Them boys ought to be put under the jail, they so sorry. Sorriest bunch I ever saw, white or colored. Always stealing or running moonshine liquor. But Arlie’s all right when he ain’t with them. It’s that bunch of his that keeps me going. Jesus, Lord, them grandbabies don’t know poor old Neelie can’t go like she used to. Way they eat, they got worms. Never saw such. Eat all the time. All Neelie does, honey, is stand over the stove.”
“Why don’t you take some of these sandwiches we made for lunch?” Alma said. “There’s a lot more than we’re going to eat.”
Because Alma was the oldest of the children and because Neelie had not tended to her as a child, Alma was the only one who made Neelie feel uncertain.
“Honey, I couldn’t do that. Can’t take food out of the mouth of my babies here to put it in the mouth of babies somewheres else.”
“It’s all right,” Alma said evenly.
“Neelie, you know you wouldn’t be taking food away from us,” Carrie argued. “You know we got more than we need. We’ll put some of these sandwiches in a bag for you.”
“Well, honey, do what you want to do,” Neelie said, her voice softening to exhaustion. “I ain’t gon’ argue none with my babies. It’d keep Neelie from standing over a stove. Guess I done pushed myself a little too much this morning, being here with my babies. Jesus, Lord, I love you children. And I loved your mama. She was the best person I ever met, white or colored.”
Neelie was still talking when Arlie arrived. She was still talking, still giving orders, when Carrie followed her through the back door and to the car. She was still talking, thrusting her head out of the car window, when Arlie drove away.
In the kitchen, his daughters stood numbly, staring at one another. A piercing ring, the echo of Neelie’s voice, seemed suspended in the silence of the room. “What’s the matter?” he asked teasingly. “Neelie wouldn’t let you talk?”
“I’ve got a headache, Daddy.”
“She didn’t stop talking the whole morning, not a single minute.”
“I swear, she’s been bossing us from day one and she’s never let up.”
“Well, she’s been around long enough to belong, I guess.”
“You can’t forget how much of a help she was to Mama when there were so many of us at home.”
“That’s true. And she did love Mama. And Mama loved her.”
“Did anybody pay her?” he asked.
“No,” answered Alma. “I offered, Daddy, but she said she didn’t want anything. Said she just wanted to be here to help out. Said it was little enough for what Mama had done for her.” Alma sat in the chair beside him. “Daddy,” she said, “you’ll have to be careful about Neelie wanting to come over here to help out. She’ll want to do that, especially for a while.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “She won’t be able to do much, but I won’t need much done.”
“We just want you to know that it won’t be necessary,” Alma said gently. “We’ll be here. All of us. I know some of us live away, but Kate and Carrie are right here, and the rest of us can make arrangements. We can help out, too.”
He nodded. He stared at the empty soup bowl and played with the handle of the spoon. He knew his daughters did not think he could live alone. His daughters did not trust his age. His daughters were afraid for him.
“Did you take your medicine?” Carrie ask
ed.
“I will in a minute,” he said. He could sense his daughters moving close to him, hovering. The tired, parchment face of his dying grandfather flashed in his mind.
“You’re not going back out in this heat, are you?” asked Alma.
“Maybe later, when it cools off.”
“Daddy, you’re going to worry us to death if you keep going out in those fields by yourself,” Kate said fretfully. “You’re just going to have to promise us you’ll stop it.”
He looked at his daughter. She lived in the house near his plot of pecan trees. When he worked among the trees he could see her standing at her living room window, watching him. He said, “Well, I guess you’re just going to have to worry. I know what I can do and what I can’t. If you want to worry about it, that’s up to you.”
His daughters retreated from him in silence.
He could not hear them from his bed. He knew they were being deliberately quiet, waiting for the druggist’s medicine to seize him and lull him into sleep. The house was strangely quiet, quieter than he had ever realized. The house had always whispered to him—wall and floor and ceiling voices—but now it was silent, and he thought: So this is it. This is what it will be when they leave. Quiet. Quiet, deep as velvet. Quiet beyond silence. The house had always known noise—giddy, screaming, angry, crowded noise. And now he was the only leftover of that noise. He rubbed the ache in his leg. He could feel the medicine oozing through him, flushing his skin with heat. He rolled to his elbow on the bed and raised his head and looked out of the bedroom window. At the edge of the yard, against the wheat-brown of broom sedge in the unplanted field, he saw a flash of white, low against the ground. He pulled the pillow against his head and closed his eyes. The medicine reached the stem of his neck, flowed like a vapor into his brain, coated against his forehead, and he slept.
For another week, there was always someone with him—Lois and Tabor from South Carolina, Paul and Brenda for a weekend, Sam, Jr. and Melinda for three days mid-week, the nearby Kate and Carrie with their daily coming and going, bringing him food from their tables. The arrivals and leavings of his children were deliberately and smoothly timed, like runners in a relay, and their transparent, covert planning amused him.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were here.”
“Haven’t been long. I was just leaving.”
“Can’t you stay a few minutes?”
“Wish I could, but I’ve got to go. Daddy’s looking good, don’t you think? You are, Daddy. You look good.”
“Yes, he is. Real good. See you soon?”
“Sure. I’ll be dropping back by.”
He said nothing to them of their frantic scheduling. He pretended that he was not aware, but at night he would make notes in his journal:
Carrie arrived at 8:30 with breakfast. She left at 10:30 when Lois arrived. Lois stayed through lunch. She left at 3:00 when Kate arrived. Maybe they think old people are also dumb.
They were watching him carefully, not wanting him to know but betraying themselves with their faces and with their poor acting of poor scenes, and he knew they were talking constantly about him in telephone calls to one another, saying, “What do you think? How’s he doing? Is he bearing up? What should we do? What?”
And then the time between the leavings and arrivals began to increase—at first, a few hours, and then a day, and then two days. And he realized his children had made their decision: they would inch cautiously away from him, giving him time and space. It was their weaning of him, their reluctant admission that he wished to be alone.
On a Sunday night, he wrote in his journal:
My son James and his wife Saralyn came to visit today and Saralyn cooked a good lunch, as she always does. Kate and Noah stopped by after church and ate with us. Brenda called to say Paul had a funeral service to conduct. I have good daughters-in-law in Brenda and Saralyn and Melinda. Alma and Hoyt arrived about three o’clock and we had leftovers for supper. Hoyt fixed the radiator in my truck, where the hose had been leaking for a few days. Hoyt is the only person who knows my truck better than I do. I am grateful to my children for wanting to take care of me, though I can manage all right for myself. Before I married their mother, I “batched” for several years and avoided poisoning myself and kept a clean enough room. I know my children are concerned about me, but I am all right and I am glad they are letting me have a few days to myself now and then. Their mother taught them to care and I see her hand in all of this. I guess I should think of it as her staying around to watch over me. But they’ve got their own lives to live.
4
He saw the dog through the window near his roll-top desk. It was morning, pre-dawn. He had awakened with a burning in his stomach and had mixed a glass of baking soda and water in the kitchen, and after he had taken it, he had gone back into the middle room to sit at his desk. On mornings when he awoke early he liked to sit and watch the sun rising from the fog cap that billowed nightly over the waters of the swamp. The sun would lift out of the spreading silk of the fog cap, and balance itself, impaled, in the tree tips of black gum and oak. Always there was a moment—a quick slip of time—when the sun broke free of the trees and bled from its yolk, spilling in red-orange rivers over the silk. It was, to him, the most awesome spectacle in the universe.
He had not switched on the lights of the house. He knew if his daughters who lived near him saw the lights, they would worry and call him or send their husbands to inquire about him, and the peace that he enjoyed would be interrupted.
The dog was on the steps of the back porch, licking the cement with its tongue. He knew there were grease spots on the cement steps, where it had dripped the day before from a cooking pan as he carried the pan, precariously balanced on the grip of his walker, to the pasture fence to be emptied. He’d left the splatterings to be washed away in the next rain.
Dog’s starving, he thought. Belly thin, ribs showing in its ribcage, licking at grease spots. Scared, too, by the look in its eyes and the way its ears were down against its skull. Maybe run off on its own from some place where it had been tied and badly treated. Maybe thrown out of a car somewhere along the creek, left to die.
Watching the dog angered him. Dog like that ought to be put out of its misery, he thought. But maybe it was close enough to dying on its own. Odd-looking dog. Whitest dog he’d ever seen. Nose as long as a greyhound’s, tight-muscled over the back legs. He remembered the flash of white from the broom sedge and wondered if what he had seen had been the dog. But that was days ago, and he’d not seen it again, though he had looked, out of curiosity. Not likely, he decided. A dog that hangs around, looking for food scraps, makes itself seen to play on pity. He could afford pity, was, in fact, quick with it, but he could not afford to have a stray taking up at his back porch. He’d quit feeding strays now that his daughters lived close by and were tender to the woeful begging of animals that showed up out of the night.
He tightened his hands on his walker and pushed-walked back into the kitchen and to the back door. He could still see the dog through the kitchen window, sniffing, licking at the cement steps. He opened the door and pulled himself quickly onto the porch and, raising his walker in his hands, thrusting it before him, said, “Get! Get!” The dog leaped backward off the steps, falling on its side and rolling. “Get! Get!” he said again, striking his walker on the porch. The dog turned slowly, lowered its head and crept away, across the yard and road to the pasture’s edge. There, in a nest of high grass, it dropped to its belly and stared back at the house.
“Hiding from me, huh?” he said softly. “Think I can’t see you out there in that grass? Won’t do you no good. I know you’re there. Guess you been hiding out down there for days. Guess you think I didn’t see you out there in the broom sedge.”
He moved on his walker to the screened door of the porch and opened it and looked at the grease spots where the dog had licked. He could see strings of blood where the dog had cut its tongue on the cement. Must be sick, needing grease like tha
t, he reasoned. Couldn’t have survived without something to eat. Rabbits, maybe. But licking at grease spots like that must mean that it’s sick. Rabies, maybe. Maybe in the early stages. He had once killed a dog with rabies, one snarling, slobbering at the mouth, but that had been a dog they’d hunted down in the swamps, one that had chased at people and animals.
He backed onto the porch and closed the screened door. Slow as he was on his walker, he couldn’t have a dog rushing at him. He looked toward the pasture and saw the dog’s face, a white dot in the grass. He knew the dog was watching him patiently. Best to get rid of it, he decided. Best thing to do. Run it off or kill it.
He remembered how she would become depressed and sullen when he killed the diseased, slow-dying animals that needed the kindness of euthanasia. He had finally stopped telling her about the killings. He had lied and said the animals had run off or he’d found them dead of their own causes and buried them. He did not know if she believed him, but she had pretended she did. There was nothing wrong with lies of mercy.
He moved back into the kitchen and set a pan of water on the stove to boil for his oatmeal and for his cup of instant coffee. He’d have Noah kill the dog, he determined. Noah was good with a gun, being a hunter. He’d do it himself, but the dog had the look of quickness, muscled across its back legs as it was, and he’d have to balance with the gun on his walker. Besides, his eyes were no longer clear enough for shooting. He’d do nothing but waste shells.
The thick, pewter gray of pre-dawn had thinned to shadowed light and he mixed the oatmeal, sugared and buttered it, and ate it at the table, watching the white dot of the hidden dog through the kitchen window. If she had been there, she would have fed it and then tried to shoo it away, as she’d fed beggars and sent them away during the Depression. Well, there was nothing wrong in that, he thought. Maybe it’ll go off, if it has a full belly of food.
He did not finish the oatmeal (he ate sparingly now, even when his daughters filled his table with bowls of soft food and pushed it before him with worried urging), and he took the bowl and crumbled a day-old biscuit into it and spooned bacon grease from a cup over the biscuit and oatmeal and blended it. He then took the bowl to the steps of the back porch and left it and went back inside the house and sat in his chair beside his desk. Sitting, he could not see through the window over his desk, but he thought he heard the dog pushing the bowl across the cement, and later, when he checked, the bowl was empty. We’ll see now, he thought. Maybe it’d go on and take up somewhere else, with some boy that would like to have a dog. If it didn’t, he’d have Noah come out with his gun.