1

He understood what they were thinking and saying: Old man that he is, what’s to become of him? Let’s talk it out, they were saying cautiously.

Let’s talk it out and come up with some solution while we’re here, all of us, and it’s on our minds. See if we can approach him about it, reason with him even if the timing’s bad.

Makes sense. Can’t put it off forever, no matter how painful it’ll be to say aloud.

I don’t know. Not now. Can’t we wait? Just a few days, maybe.

But he’ll not make it being alone, not likely, not half-crippled as he is.

Not used to being alone, they were saying. Not at all.

That’s true. That’s true. Always been somebody else around, even with all of us taking our leave, one by one.

She was here. When we were all gone, at least she was here.

Yes, that’s true. Won’t be the same now, not at all, not without her. Something’ll have to take up the slack.

What are we going to do? We can’t say anything, not now.

Soon. We’ve got to, soon.

He’ll be stubborn about it, whatever we think.

He’s got pride, all right. It’s his mark. Thinks he’s still bull-strong, and it’s sad.

Still that way in his mind—bull-strong.

They were saying these things about him and did not know that he understood them, that he knew what they were saying. They were whispering among themselves that an old man’s mind plays tricks, that it feeds on the swill of illusion, like carnival shell games that are faster than the eye. They were saying it would be a great pity to see him that way.

It was now past midnight. They had arrived—his sons and daughters—in the afternoon and during the hours of the dark May evening, and they had embraced him and wept before him and then they had huddled around the large kitchen table to drink strong coffee and talk quietly among themselves in sad, worried voices.

They would not know it, but he understood what they were thinking and saying: Old man that he is, what’s to become of him?

He sat alone in his padded rocker in the middle room, near his rolltop desk, his good leg propped on the bottom brace of his aluminum walker, his head against the pillowed headrest of the chair, his eyes closed. He was not asleep, but he pretended sleep. It was better that way. He wanted his sons and daughters to get it said. Maybe by saying it, they’d get over it and wouldn’t hover over him as though he was an invalid.

He knew about hovering. He had been called home from Madison, from school, to care for his grandfather when he was seventeen and he’d hovered, watching his grandfather wither into death. He had not wanted to stay with his grandfather, but it was expected and he’d done it. He’d hovered, watching, watching. He did not want his children to be watching, watching.

They mean well enough, he thought. And they need to talk of something. They need to feel needed. They would not bicker, though. It was not the time or the place or the mood for bickering. Not now. Perhaps later, when they had stopped their pitying. And perhaps they should. They had tempers for it, each of them—temper and his pride (and hers). It would not be enough for any of them to give up an argument without their say. God knows, he thought, I’ve listened to them for more than fifty years, and they’ve never backed off without having their say. But they mean well, sitting there in the kitchen, drinking their strong coffee at the crowded table, talking of what would become of him.

The window beside his roll-top desk was open and he could smell the greening of spring and hear the squalling of swamp bugs, and clearer than the swamp bugs and the low, serious voices of his children from the kitchen, he could hear the sharp, spirited whistle of a whippoorwill below the barns. He opened his lips slightly, moistened them, drew in a breath and soundlessly answered the whippoorwill. She had liked him answering birdcalls—the whippoorwill, the bobwhite. In spring and in summer, at dusk, they had often sat on the screened-in sideporch and listened to the birds, and he had answered them, cry for cry, and it had pleased her to hear him playful after a day of field work. Sometimes the bobwhites would walk into the grass of the lawn when he whistled for them and she would whisper, “Look!” She would not permit anyone to kill the bobwhites that lived in the grainfields of their land. The bobwhites were too trusting, too easy to call up for the gunsights of a hunter.

Because of her, he had learned to look for the birds—the darting flight of wild canaries (yellow sun on yellow wings), the chesty preening of redbirds and bluebirds, the blackbird with the red-tipped wings like startling epaulets. Often he had strewn grain over the ground outside the kitchen window so she could see the birds feeding as she worked.

The grass of the lawn had been cut earlier that day by one of the sons-in-law off work, and the smell of the cut grass, through the window beside the roll-top desk, was sweet as mint.

He reached for a letter on the desk. It was an invitation to a reunion for the classes of 1910–1915 at Madison Agricultural and Mechanical—Madison A&M. Sixty years, he thought. Sixty years. The invitation had arrived that day. She had said, “I want to go to this. It’s been a long time since we went back.” And he had taken the letter and put it away on his desk. He had said to her, “We’ll see about it.” He read the letter again in the dim light of the table lamp. It was signed by Martha Dunaway Kerr. He put the letter back on his desk and nestled his neck against the pillowed headrest and closed his eyes again.

He could hear the footsteps of someone—perhaps two people—entering the middle room from the kitchen, but he did not open his eyes. The footsteps stopped at the door. There was a pause of silence, and he knew he was being watched. Then he heard the soft, backward steps of retreat. He knew what was being said inside the kitchen: “He’s sleeping.” And he knew someone (one of the daughters, likely) answered: “Let him. He needs it.”

Curious, he thought—knowing there was someone, perhaps two people, at the door leading into the room, knowing exactly where they were standing as they watched him, knowing they had walked back to the kitchen table. Or was it curious? No, he decided. No. It was his house. He knew it board by board, could hear the voices of its timbers and walk its walls in blind dark, reading its raised-lettered Braille with his fingertips.

He had walked the walls many times at night, going to her bed to see if she was sleeping, but he would not go to her bed this night. No, not this night.

He opened his eyes, felt them dampen. He moved his head on the headrest of the chair. He could feel the ache in his bad leg, in the thigh, in the hip that had been twice replaced with an artificial joint. One of his daughters (he could not remember which) had given him aspirin for the ache, but it had not helped. Tomorrow he would ask for something stronger from the druggist, something to numb the bruise deep in his hip, something pleasant to calm him, to keep him from reeling before the dizzying swarm of sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters and drawn-faced neighbors who would fill the house with their mumblings and their platters of food offerings. The druggist was wise enough to know what was needed. The druggist would know better than anyone.

The whippoorwill called again, but was farther away, deeper in the swamp.

He pulled his watch from his shirt pocket. The watch was tied by a cut-off shoestring that he had threaded through a buttonhole high on his shirt—a practice that annoyed his daughters because it made him appear unkempt. It was twelve-forty. It does not take long to die, he thought.

He stared at the face of the watch, at the dull lime green of the see-in-the-dark numbers and the long and the short hands, and he subtracted away the hours in his mind. Five? Almost six? He counted the hours again. Yes, almost six, he decided. It had happened quickly. He slipped the watch back into his shirt pocket and closed his eyes again. From the kitchen, he could hear the mewing of crying.

I, too, want to die as quickly, he thought.

***

She did not answer when he called (though he could no longer hear all voices well, he had trained his senses for her, knew her quietest words) and he pulled himself from the oversized armchair, up to the top brace of the aluminum walker, and dragged-walked from the living room to find her.

“What’re you doing?” he said in a loud voice. “Thought you were coming back. Thought you wanted to see the show on the TV.”

She did not answer, and he went from the middle room to the kitchen and then to the back bedroom. He saw her on the floor, near the bed, on her left side, and he knew immediately what had happened. He shoved his walker aside and tried to run to her, but could not and he hobbled, good leg, bad leg, leaning against the walls for support until he reached her. He touched her neck. He could feel a quivering pulse, a twitch of blood flow, but he could not feel her breathing, and he sank beside her on his good leg and turned her to him and slipped his arm beneath the cradle of her neck and pushed open her mouth with his fingers and closed his own mouth over hers and began to search for life with his tongue, but there was only the cooling taste of saliva. He kissed her gently.

“Don’t,” he said aloud. “Don’t do this. Don’t do this.”

He knew he could not lift her and it angered him. Old damned body, he thought. Old damned body. He eased her head down and pulled his arm from beneath her neck and rolled awkwardly and caught the knob of the closet door near him and drew himself up from the floor. The telephone was in the hallway and he stumbled, good leg, bad leg, to it and dialed a number. Four hundred yards away, across the sidelawn and a road, a daughter answered.

“It’s your mama,” he said.

“Mama?” his daughter asked, frightened. “Mama?”

He could not answer. He put the receiver back onto its rest and moved painfully back into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed and looked down at her.

“Don’t do this,” he said again. “Don’t.”

He did not hear them entering the house and the room. He saw his son-in-law, worker-strong, lifting her and placing her on the bed beside him, and he knew the daughters—there were two living close and the one he called had called the other—were talking frantically, saying words to him that he did not understand or did not care to hear. And then there were men with a stretcher, and he could feel the muscled arm of another son-in-law helping him to his walker, and he was in the hospital where the antiseptic smell of medicines flowed into his senses and he was aware of other daughters, hastily called, and one of his sons.

His son led him to a chair near the bed and he sat, holding his son’s hand, and watched as his daughters approached her, leaned to her, whispered in small-child voices, “Mama? Mama?” And his son, the youngest of their children, a large, strong man, cried in a large, strong voice, like a prayer flung from his throat, “Old woman, I love you.” He could feel his son’s hand tighten in his hand. His son was sobbing.

He saw her push her head into the pillow and she opened her eyes and her lips parted, but she did not speak. Her eyes drifted across the faces of her children, then turned to him, held on him, closed. She swallowed once.

“Daddy?”

He opened his eyes and looked up. It was his oldest living son, who had driven the greatest distance in the dark May evening, across the mountains from Tennessee.

“It’s late, Daddy. I think you’d better go to bed,” his son said. The voice of his son was baritone and gentle, an orator’s voice.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“A little after one,” his son answered.

“That late?”

“Yes.”

He had slept remembering her dying, and he did not know it. He thought again: It does not take long to die.

“The others are here,” his son said.

He turned his head toward the kitchen door. His other children were cuddled, touching one another, staring at him. His children seemed very old to him.

“We’re all about to get settled in for the night,” his son told him. “Some of us will be here with you. We just wanted to say good night.”

He nodded and pulled himself forward in the chair and caught his walker with his hands. His son helped lift him. He could feel a burning in his bad leg.

“Do you hurt?” his son asked.

“A little.”

“You want something, Daddy?” asked one of the daughters.

“I gave him some aspirin,” another daughter answered.

“I’ll be all right when I get to bed,” he said.

“We’ll get the doctor to give you something stronger tomorrow,” his oldest daughter said forcefully. “He’ll do that.”

He stood leaning against his walker. He could hear the static of the swamp bugs, but not the whippoorwill. There was a pause, an uncomfortable lapse of time, an off-beat hesitation. His oldest living son embraced him. “We love you,” his son whispered. And they all came to him, bending across his walker, each embracing him, each mumbling to him, each stepping away, back into the cuddling of the group.

He looked at them. He could feel his head nodding. He said, almost numbly, “We’ll miss her.”

One of the daughters cried very suddenly, “Mama! Mama!”

2

There were many flowers at her funeral and many people, and he believed she would have approved of the service, though, for him, the preaching in the eulogy was a message of panic rather than promise—“Everybody’s going to die. Get ready for God now, while there’s time. O sinner, nobody knows the time. Nobody knows but Jesus. Amen. Amen. Amen.”—and he tired of the singing trio with its off-key whine conjuring up images of angels and an old rugged cross and a gathering at the river.

He had always missed her intensely when crossing rivers, going away to work in other places. The rivers had been a ground rip in the space that separated them. Yes, we shall gather at the river. Gather. But why? Gather to wait? Gather to stare across? Gather to hear the waters rushing?

He wanted to touch her face.

“Remember this day,” the Preacher said to him and to his sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters. “Remember the passing of this loved one.”

On the night of her death, he had taken from his desk the journal that he kept daily and he had written:

Today my wife died. We were married 57 good yearsj.

It was the simplest entry he had ever recorded.

He would not forget the day. The Preacher would. But he would not.

***

He was led from the sanctuary of the funeral home where the service had been performed (her desire) to the car of his oldest living son and was driven to the gravesite where his oldest son—not living, but dead—had long been buried, and there he listened to a final, toneless litany. The Preacher paused before him, bowed just so at his gravesite chair, offered a handgrip and supplicant mutterings, and then moved to his sons and daughters, repeating himself like a parrot.

“Let’s go home, Daddy,” one of his sons said.

“In a minute,” he replied.

The coffin was before him, balanced on strong nylon straps like a prop in an aerial act. A blanket of roses covered the chest of the coffin. He looked at the dug grave and, beside it, the grave of his oldest son—smooth mound, brilliantly white, glittering with mica dust—and he wanted to be alone. He could feel a hand on his shoulder.

“All right,” he said softly. “All right.” He stood at his walker. He could sense eyes staring at him. “Goodbye,” he said to the coffin. He turned on his walker and moved away.

It was a day of sun—warm, bright, a soft wind from the west. The earth was green. The sun felt good on his face and hands.

***

In the afternoon, he took the druggist’s pill and went into his bedroom and slept and dreamed of Neelie, the Negro woman who had worked with his wife. In his dream, Neelie was sitting beside his wife’s coffin, talking to it. “I’ll put up the beans. Don’t you worry none. And cook up the biscuits, just like you been doing. Don’t you worry none about it, none at all. I’ll be around, taking care.” And from the coffin, in a voice from the roses, his wife answered, “Put his water glass on the table, Neelie. Put ice in it. He likes it that way. And salt and pepper. He’ll be asking for his salt and pepper.” And Neelie said, “Oh, yes, I will. All them things. Don’t you go worrying none. You just go on over and don’t be worrying none about it. Neelie’s here.”

When he awoke he could hear voices through the walls of the bedroom. The house is still crowded, he thought. The church committee of women, there to clean and cook and grieve, would still be placing food on the tables and there would still be buffet lines of visitors picking at the sorrow feast. He wondered if Neelie was there, with them, telling them what needed to be done. Neelie had rushed into the house when she learned of his wife’s death, had stormed loudly inside, shoving past children and grandchildren, and had embraced him with a squealing cry of torment. “Don’t you worry none,” she had said in a wail. “Neelie’s here. Neelie’s here.”

He could hear the smaller grandchildren outside, playing.

“Patty’s it.”

“No, she’s not. Patty’s already been it. Greg’s it.”

At the funeral home, one of his daughters had said, “This is only the second time we’ve all been together, in the same room. The first time was the anniversary. You remember, Daddy? The fiftieth anniversary for you and Mama?” And the funeral director had asked—for the obituary notice—how many grandchildren there were in the family. No one knew, and so the director had taken his pen and written down the name of each child and that child’s husband or wife in parentheses, oldest to youngest, and the number of children each couple had. The children were Alma (Hoyt), Lois (Tabor), Sam Jr. (Melinda), Kate (Noah), Carrie (Holman), Paul (Brenda) and James (Saralyn). When the director added the number of grandchildren, the number had been twenty-eight.

“You’d think somebody would know how many grandchildren there are,” Sam Jr. had said.

“Mama did,” Lois had answered. “She was the only one.”

***

He did not leave his bed until late, after the visitors and the church committee of women left. He ate a bowl of soup (made by Neelie; she had remained) and listened to his daughters speak of house-cleaning. He knew he could not object, though the house-cleaning was only part of it. They would want to watch over him now, hovering. For a time, at least. They would want to study him, like an uncertain experiment. They would want to know if he could care for himself. If he could not, they would want to say what should be done for him.

“We won’t be in the way, Daddy. We just want to get things straightened up.”

“There’ll be a lot of thank-you notes to write. We’ll take care of that.”

“Anytime you get tired of us, you can just tell us to leave.”

“Daddy, you think you’ll be all right here by yourself?”

In his journal, late at night, he wrote:

This is the saddest day I have lived in my 81 years. My wife of 57 years was buried today beside our son, who died in 1941 as a result of a truck accident when he was hitchhiking to take a job. She has longed for him all these years and now she is with him. I know they are embraced in happiness. Today ended for me a lifetime of joy and I am grateful to the Almighty for giving me the wife I wanted and the children we both wanted. Times were not always easy and I wished often that I could provide more than I was able to, but I can say that we had things that money could not buy. I will miss seeing her face and hearing her voice and knowing she was always there close to me. She has crossed a river from me that I must wait to cross before I see her again. When I see a river, I will think of her. All of our children have been here. They are very kind.

Again he took the druggist’s pill and again he dreamed of her. She was in the kitchen, at the cabinet counter, kneading dough. Two of their daughters were with her in the kitchen, working.

“He’ll be marrying again when I go. You’ll see. He’ll be marrying again. Find him some woman to come in here and do the cooking, some woman to take care of him. You’ll see.”

“Mama, don’t say that.”

“You don’t know him. I do. You’ll see. Somebody else’ll be living here, making him biscuits with my biscuit cutter, three times a day.”

“Is that right, Daddy?”

“That’s right. But she won’t have to cook a lick. Gonna find me a woman from one of them leg shows out in Atlanta.”

“Daddy!”

“He will, too. Find some old woman, hiking her skirts. Maybe Sybil Hillard. She’s had her eye on him twenty, thirty years. Used to come around at the canning plant when your daddy was running it. Didn’t know beans about canning. But he’d do it for her. Didn’t think I noticed, but I did.”

“Mama, that’s just being silly. Sybil Hillard’s one of the nicest women around here. She’s got a husband. They must have been married forty-five years.”

“You don’t know her like I do. I remember her at the canning plant.”

“Daddy, is that so?”

“I don’t remember Sybil Hillard ever being at the canning plant.”

“See, Mama.”

“But she’s a fine-looking woman, all right.”

“Daddy, stop it!”

“Let him go on about her. I don’t care. You wait and see. You just wait and see. There’ll be somebody here making biscuits.”

He awoke with the dream still clear in his mind. He smiled easily. The dream pleased him.

3

His daughters returned the following day to clean the house, and Neelie was there, also—not because she had been asked, but because she insisted and none of his daughters knew how to object.

“How can you tell her she’s not needed?” they said among themselves. “She thinks she’s got the right to be here. Ask her. She’ll tell you. She’ll tell you she’s been around longer than any of us, helping out when Mama needed her.”

And: “She’ll be telling us what to do, that’s for sure.”

And: “I guess she will. She always has.”

And: “Seems to make Daddy feel better, having her here.”

And: “Maybe she thinks we’ll be taking things out of here without her permission.”

He did not stay in the house with his daughters and Neelie. He got into his truck and drove it to the edge of the field and got out of the truck and began to work in the small nursery plot of pecan trees, pulling away weeds, laboriously pushing himself from tree to tree with his walker. He thought of himself as an ancient turtle, dragging in inches across the crust of topsoil, legs clawing and legs pushing, stopping, resting, moving, resting again. But it did not matter. He was at peace in the nursery plot. Once he had had acres of trees growing out for the selling, but now there were only a few rows. She had not wanted him to plant them, but he had. “No need of it,” she had said. “You can’t get about on that walker as it is. Can’t take care of them. No need of it.” And he had argued, “I’ll go easy with it. Just put out a few, just enough to have some on hand if people want them.” But he had known, even when he planted the seeds, that the trees were for him, not for people who may want them. He liked the growing of them, liked the surgery of budding and the smell of the wood and the pruning of limbs. “They’ll be the last,” he had promised, and she had scowled at his stubbornness. She had said, “You get to hurting, and see if I run off to get you some medicine. No sense in it. You got trees all over this county. No need to be growing any more.”

He moved along the row of trees, setting the walker, leaning his weight onto it, feeling the walker sink into the topsoil, slowly, slowly moving, pulling at the dead weeds of winter and the new, tender weeds of spring, shaking the soil from roots of the new weeds, throwing the weeds, roots up, into the middle of the row to wither in the sun.

He looked back down the row, at the peculiar tracks he had made—the single, hard footprint, the four punch-holes of the walker. He looked at the slender stalks of the trees, at the pulled grass in the row’s middle. He had not moved more than fifty feet in two hours. Old turtle, he thought. Going nowhere slow. The sun gathered like a pillow in his hat and across the bridge of his shoulders.