The Last Odd Day (8 page)

Mama heard him as well; and night after night she would go out and lie at his feet, begging him to believe her that she was not going away, begging him to come inside and lie with her in bed. I would watch from my window as she took his fingers and slid them across her brow, pulled them along the curve of her neck, then gently placed his hand inside her gown, to feel the beating of her heart, she would tell him.

“John,” she would say in just the way only she could, “feel my heart. Feel my heart. It will tell you what your eyes cannot. It will tell you that I only have love for you. I will never leave you.” She would cry to him, “I am yours for all time.”

And they would fall into each other while he begged for mercy and assurance and she gave him all that she had. Then he would come in, ragged and afflicted, and she would love him back to life.

“Why does he do that?” I asked my mother after one of his dark nights. “Why does he think you are leaving him for someone else?”

“He loves me too much,” she replied as she began fixing his breakfast. “He knows no other way.” And she turned to me, pulling me into her arms, and then sent me out to school, burdened and pleased at the same time.

I realized on that morning, sitting at the table with Lilly, that when a nonattentive wife reflects on her marital history with a new line of information, specifically that her husband was having an affair, things begin to make sense that never did before. The late-night arrivals or early-morning departures that he said had to do with traffic, the new shirt or pressed trousers that he claimed he needed, and the way his eyes could move past the matters at hand and out across a horizon he never explained.

I understand that O.T. and Clara cannot be the cause for every failed conversation or unloving moment we had between us for the two or so years they were together, but it certainly does clear up a lot of things I could never completely grasp. Like why he looked at me as if he owed
me something or how, for the longest time, he never seemed comfortable being near me. I realize that the years he was with Clara, he was restive and uneasy, never fully attuned to the things that happened at home.

Nothing he did, however, led me to ask him about his behavior. I was never troubled or worried enough that I said, “We need to talk,” or, “What's going on with you?” Unlike my father, who begged for proof of my mother's fidelity because he was so madly in love with her, I went on with my marriage without hesitation or pause even when I knew O.T. was not engaged.

For so many years of our life together, I focused my energy on things beyond ourselves. I was distracted and unavailable. I concentrated so completely on getting pregnant, staying pregnant, pushing away the sorrow, I never saw that my husband was preoccupied or guilty.

Suddenly, hearing the story of my husband's affair, I realized that it's possible that if my father loved my mother too much, I did not love O.T. enough. I'm not saying that I excuse what he did. My husband broke his vow to me; he was not faithful. He did not tell the truth. He loved another woman. I was betrayed.

But the truth is, I could not stay angry at him for very long. After all, even though I did not sleep with someone else, didn't I commit the same offense as O.T.?

Even years after Jolly was gone with his new wife, I continued to give great and weighty consideration to the idea that I had married the wrong Witherspoon. After all, isn't the gospel clear? The lust that we hold in our hearts makes us just as guilty as the lust that binds two people in bed.

The truth is, O.T. and I were more roommates than husband and wife. We shared responsibilities around the house, took our meals together, had a few common interests.

In the beginning, he stayed with me because he felt responsible for bringing me into his family and I stayed loyal to him because I was the wife of a soldier, because my husband was a brave and honorable man. Years later, we stayed together simply because of inertia. Grief and guilt can sometimes fall like a thick, smothering blanket. It can cover a lot of desire.

I wanted a family more than I wanted a husband. For too many years I was more devoted to the idea of being a mother than to the actuality of being a wife. And when we were together, it was making a baby, never making love.

While I was absorbed in becoming a mother, O.T. left me to myself. He knew better than to step between a woman and her longings, and so he found himself
tempted and drawn to the dreams of another. Dreams that were completely and all about him.

I cannot blame him for finding what I was not willing or prepared to give. I am only sorry I did not know before now. Perhaps I could have given him my blessing since he had found what I had not, pleasure in commitment, happiness multiplied and divided with someone other than a ghost.

I buried my husband, gave him to the earth; and I did so with thoughts of forgiveness. And I hope that he has found himself in a place where it is kindly given. I hope that in those final days when he did meet Lilly, before the time of his death, he was relieved of his guilt about Clara and Emma and me.

I pray that as he entered into that new realm he was welcomed and received, redeemed and sanctified. I pray that every unwashed, unholy strand of his being was made clean.

I hope that before he passed, Lilly came into his life and unbound him, that just as the coming together fit for her, it fit for him too. And that in death and in heaven O.T. has found mercy and release. Because even knowing what I know, hearing what I heard, even with the punch and stupor of realizing that he loved someone more than he loved me, I pray that maybe and finally, O.T., my husband, can rest.

In my rented room at the beach, where I stayed after Emma died, I cut out pictures of children and taped them to the mirror, all along the wall, and near the headboard of my bed. I began buying children's clothes, girls' mostly, pink and white and yellow suits that I could bundle over the smooth newborn body that I imagined would appear if I prayed hard enough. I purchased a pacifier and diapers and tiny slippers that were meant to be worn to church. All these things I smuggled quietly into the motel, placed them around me, and waited for my dead baby, for Emma, to arrive.

I had spent Thanksgiving at the Holiday Inn eating the lunch buffet with a few travelers, a bitter waitress,
and a busboy who did not speak English. I was not sad or in need of pity, I merely thought a full meal might shift a bit of my sorrow. It was one of only a few times I ate out during my retreat from life. Most of the time I just had crackers or cereal or soup I fixed on a little camping stove the innkeeper let me use in the office.

I found that just as when I was fifteen and orphaned, I was perfectly capable of being alone. It seemed as if I needed no one living to be near me, only the ghosts of those who had left. I cleaned the other guest rooms to make a little money and cover the expenses of my rent. I read magazines and cut and dyed my hair. I slept until eight and went to bed at ten. I rarely spoke a word. But in spite of my silence and hair that was too blond for my dark eyebrows, I appeared to the people who watched me as if I were perfectly fine, as if the callused pumping organ that used to be my heart was still in normal working order. To anyone who noticed, it seemed like there was nothing out of sorts. I, of course, knew otherwise.

In my room, between the walls, the front window, and the floor, the clamor of despair was trying to snatch the life from the weak fingers of a woman who had lost herself. I welcomed the slow but confident march of resignation and even begged for it to take over my severe and tortured thoughts.

I did not realize what I was doing at first. It was without thought, unplanned. I would simply see a little dress or a soft pastel blanket, and I would add them to the other items I had gone to the store to buy. I never said a word, never asked about a size or answered any question about how old was my baby. I just began collecting things between Thanksgiving and Christmas to give to the child I knew would eventually join me.

It took a few weeks, but I soon saw signs of my own departure, recognized my actions established during the bereavement of my parents' deaths. I noticed how I began counting and setting aside my dollars and quarters, saving for a particular piece of clothing or toy, stuffed bunny or storybook. It was familiar, like choosing to wear the dress my mother most loved, the hat that bore my father's prints.

I saw the break when I started having to sneak out of my room so as to keep the other guests from peeking in and seeing the shrine I was building. It was exactly the same as before, when I had not allowed Aunt Carolyn in the house, taking her casseroles from her and obstructing her line of vision when she would come over to see about her peculiar, grieving niece.

I started feeling desperate and unhinged the way I did when Daddy's pipe went out and the cold touch of the tobacco signaled that something was gone. When I ran out of my mother's perfume.

I remembered that I had once before chosen to make my life with death and that Grandmother Whitebead had been the first ghost to come to me with a warning, a heavy strip of tar left on the frame of the door, a sign that what I chose would leave me fastened, stuck between two worlds, gummed and tied for the rest of my life. I had not listened to her then; and only after the spirits became heavy and selfish did I begin to search for a way out.

This time, when I saw the bloody stain in my pants, I felt a faint but definite pull to recognize and at least acknowledge that I was once again making the subtle but obvious choice to live with who and what had already passed. That I was giving way for the dead to swallow me whole.

For a few days I fought it. I was feverish and loosed. And then I started to smell the fragrance of pine and coal, the odor that lingered inside my father's house when everyone was gone but me. I tried to air out the room, get rid of the smell; but it only grew stronger and more ponderous. I was creating that which I wanted to come.

So when I could no longer stand the stench that thickened in my mind, I fled my room like a stranger had invaded it. I ran down to the water, begging to be baptized, praying to be relieved. I hadn't even realized that it was on the eve of Christmas. So that just as most families were beginning to open presents and sing carols, when
church bells were ringing in the birth of the Christ child and friends gathered to enjoy the holiday, I took to the ocean, the flood of tears, knelt then lay there beside the slippery hand that seemed, after time, to push and pull me back to life. I, in a fit of despair, delivered myself to be given and returned.

The whole night of Christmas Eve of the year of my baby's death, I stayed at the shore. Hour after hour I remained in the palm of my pain, unable to move away. Until finally, when I could cry no more and the sea had reached further into herself and I had not drowned, I dragged myself from the sand and the broken shells, returned to my room, fell into the bed, and slept three days. When I awoke, I packed up only what I had brought with me, left the baby gifts as they were, and drove home. I left the mountain once again.

There is an old Russian fable that tells the story of village women who lost their children. Out on the edge of the community was a small shed where the mothers, still fresh from their grief, were allowed to stay for six weeks. Food was brought to them by the other women; and except for the knock on the door signaling the arrival of a meal, there was no outside contact.

At the end of the appointed time, the women from the village set the small cottage on fire. It would be up to the woman inside, the mother who had buried her child,
whether she came out or stayed inside and perished. If she could not face her past and future, so intricately tied to her feelings of that particularly clear morning, then she gave herself to the flames. If she found that she desired to fight the smoke and look for some reason to live, she came out of the burning shed and was given her first responsibility in her new life: to rebuild the sorrow house for the next mother who would need to go and choose.

There by the ocean, on a frigid Christmas Eve, I had laid myself down, brought it all up, and laid it down. So that when the flames began to singe, the smoke of hell like a crooked finger motioning me to join death, I stood up and walked out of the burning house and returned to what had been mine.

I came home from the beach, the holidays over, and found that there was still a little artificial Christmas tree in our living room. I noticed its flashing lights, red and blue and orange, a small display of cheer and hospitality, when I turned off Highway 301 and onto Old County Road, the street on which we lived.

When I left the ocean, I made the choice to live, to return to O.T., to be once again his wife, a seamstress at the mill, a friend. I left the sorrow and the dreams and the smell of charred sticky wood there at the edge of the shore, a heap of kindle and ash; and I never returned to pick it up.

I let it go out, simmer and cool, and finally die. And since O.T. and I never discussed it, I believed any embers of hope or disappointment or shame had long ago subsided and been put out.

I never considered that O.T. had kept a small fire burning.

Almost a month after the funeral, Lilly came to Forsyth County to help me go through O.T.'s things. I thought there might be something that she would want, a pair of cufflinks, a book, his watch, maybe the service medals that I thought he kept locked in a jewelry box in a safe out in the shed. Since I had not known her very long and wasn't certain about her sentimentalities or her pleasures, I wasn't sure what thing or things she might choose to help her remember my husband and her father.

I thought she might like the picture of him when he was young, an old but undamaged photograph just before he entered the war. It was my favorite; but I thought maybe she would want it. He stood tall and
proud, his shoulders square and his hands tight but open at his side. He wasn't grinning or toothy; but he had a smile of confidence that seemed to dictate his posture and his readiness. He was dashing then, brave and eager; and Jolly had captured his brother's strength in the moment he clicked the shutter. I thought it spoke well of who he had been.

Perhaps, I thought, she would prefer having his military records or the trophies he had won at the state fair for his treasured bulls, the Black Baldies. I thought she might want his father's pocket watch or an old sweater, something personal and cherished, something, anything, she could keep like I have kept my grandmother's china, to remember how I belonged. I thought she would need something to balance out the heavy force of her mother's side of the family.

But I was wrong about her, what she needed, what she thought she had to have. It turns out, she didn't want anything. Said it seemed too artificial, made O.T. into something he had never been to her. That she understood he was the world to her mother, but he had merely been handed down to her. And besides, what she knew about him had been so late and sketchy, there wasn't anything, other than the memory of the moment when she says he realized who she was, that she believed she would find that could capture what it was she had not yet started to feel.

She had not come searching for him to uncover anything about her life but rather only to add to what was already there. Then even though she would not take anything of his, she offered to help me just the same since she knew how endless and painful the process of sorting through death could be.

Lilly is smart that way, clear about things that I have to sit with for a while before I figure them out. I am not nearly so lucid. Things never feel so plain. And I found that I am drawn to that quality she possesses, envious of that strong sense of herself. And I wondered as she gently but without any attachment handled the belongings of her father, how things might have been different for me if, at a younger age, I could have had that same idea about myself.

We went through his chest of drawers and desk, the sparse side of his closet and the shelves in the garage. Not many of his things were left since I had boxed up and given away a lot when he went to Sunhaven. It didn't really take so long in the house. And after we finished we had a bite of lunch. When she asked if that was all, I remembered that I hadn't ever gone through the shed where he kept his tools and farm equipment.

I had not yet decided what to do with all his work things. And I hadn't seen what was in the safe wedged in a corner. I had always had all the necessary papers, wills
and insurance contracts, kept in a safe deposit box at the bank, so I hadn't really had a reason to go out and open it. I hadn't really wanted to open it. It was and always had been the collection of his private matters, his sanctuary, his altar. Before he died, and even after, it felt obtrusive and somehow disrespectful to go there. But knowing that I would have to get into that shed and the safe sometime, and since his daughter was there for support, so open and willing, I decided to finish what had been started and straighten up the rest of his affairs.

“It smells like my granddaddy's barn,” Lilly said as we walked into the old structure.

I smiled at her and watched as she reached up and touched the tools and the reins draped alongside a saddle.

“O.T. loved to farm; and he loved farm stuff.” I glanced around at all the rakes and shovels, saws and hammers. “Maybe Dick wants it all, or maybe I should just have an auction, let someone else take care of all this.”

“Mama and I did that. We went to Savannah because we didn't want to watch people handling all Papa's things. Thought it would be a nice getaway. See a new city, bum around. So that's what we did. When we got home, there was nothing left but a check from the auction house and a yellow sticker on the last lawnmower with a sign that read Sold.”

Lilly sighed, remembering, I guess, and stuck her face into the leather. Then she walked around the tractor, away from the door, where there was a light hanging from the ceiling. She switched it on.

I stood with my cheek against the fender on the rear wheel of the tractor. It was cool, and I closed my eyes, remembering how it was to see him driving away in the fields, knowing at the time that the entire day would pass before I saw him again.

Lilly was at the back of the shed where the safe was placed, low beneath the workbench.

“You know how to get in this?” She fiddled with the tumble.

I walked to where she was. “Seventeen, nine, thirty-seven.”

She faced me, surprised that I would remember a set of numbers I claimed I had never used.

“He kept it written down in a lot of places. I learned it,” I said, “like a phone number.”

She shrugged and waited for me to bend down beside her. She was expecting that I would choose to unlock it.

“Go ahead,” I told her. And I rested on the front tire.

It took her a couple of times to get it, but finally it clicked and the door pulled open. It was too dark to see inside the safe, so she reached in and took out his jewelry box, which I knew was there, and a fistful of papers. She
handed them all to me while she felt around, making certain there wasn't anything left. When she was sure she had gotten everything she shut the door and turned to see what we had found.

At first glance there wasn't anything surprising or unexpected. His army discharge papers, an old farm deed that didn't mean anything anymore, pictures from the war I had already seen, the soldiers gathered and friendly, and a few documents that his father had given him about his genealogy, the Witherspoon family tree.

The jewelry box was locked, but a small key was taped to the bottom. I pulled it off and unlocked it. Lilly sat down on the ground in front of where I was seated, and I placed the box on the tractor beside me and opened it.

His military awards were inside, his mother's pearl ring he had brought to her from France, a faded old hair ribbon that I was sure wasn't mine, a sketch of me he had penciled when he drove up to see me before we got married, and a folded piece of paper stuck way behind everything else in a small compartment, under a narrow and secure lid.

I held each of his army medals, the ring, the ribbon, and the folded paper, then passed them on to Lilly, one at a time. I steadied the picture across my lap, keeping it for myself.

Lilly handled the items I gave her, examined them, delicately placing them beside her as she went from one to the other. When I handed her the ribbon, she rolled it in her fingers, held it to her nose, and closed her eyes.

Without either of us saying it out loud, we knew whose it was. We both knew it was Clara's, the only thing O.T. had kept, the only thing to remember her, the only thing that linked him to Lilly and her to me. She stretched it out and then tied it in her hair. Quickly, I turned so as not to watch her.

I can't say if it was embarrassment, shame, or even disappointment to find proof of my husband's love for someone else, to see a token, a tangible expression, a keepsake of something he fell into and then forsook. To find and hold a thing, a memory, that he had kept and hidden and treasured even when it was all over. I do not know the motivation behind the action, only that I turned and looked away. I fumbled with the picture in my hands.

“It's Mama's,” she said after a few minutes.

I kept my eyes down. “Yes, I imagine it is.”

“Does it hurt you that he kept this?” Her voice was as innocent as a child's.

“A little,” I confessed. I finally glanced up. Her hair was pulled back, away from her face, and I saw again the resemblance to O.T.

“I can understand that,” she said.

A flock of geese flew above the shed heading toward the pond behind the field where we used to grow tobacco. They were loud and clamorous, sounding like a room full of angry old women. We smiled at each other. The cries faded and a silence fell.

“He picked you, you know.”

I turned away.

“I mean, you can say it was because your baby died or because he was a dutiful man or because he was racked with guilt; but regardless of why, he still picked you.”

I glanced down at the picture my husband had drawn of me more than fifty years ago, a picture he drew when we were younger than Lilly, when we were filled with hopes and grand ideas, when we were not old from life.

I studied the lines, the curves, and remembered the day he had come to the mountains with his pad of paper and pencils, how he had coaxed me into going out behind the house to sit under a tree. I remembered how he worked so long and diligently, trying to capture in his drawing, he said, the likeness of my deep beauty. I remembered how I blushed when he said that, because no one had ever called me beautiful. No one had ever looked at me so completely.

“Yes,” I answered his daughter and remembered the moment of tenderness there in a yellow meadow, framed
in wildflowers and a wide blue sky. I remembered that in fact he had made it very clear, on that day and others that were to stretch before us, that he had chosen me—to draw, to love, to marry. And somehow the memory and the reminder of his choice eased the awkwardness that had pushed its way between Lilly and me.

After a few minutes she reached up and touched me on the arm. “What about the paper?” she asked, changing the subject.

I handed it to her without opening it for myself. I thought it might be something else that was more hers than mine.

She unfolded it and began to read. “I don't know what it is,” she replied and handed it to me.

I took it from her and realized that it was a deed to a cemetery plot on the far side of town, a park that I had once told O.T. I thought was genuinely lovely in spite of the fact it was full of death.

“I'm not sure,” I said. “It appears as if he bought a place at Memorial Gardens.” I tried to see the date of purchase. “I don't understand that,” I added, “since we both have plots with his parents.” Then I had a flashing thought that maybe I had buried him in the wrong place.

“Do you know where it is? Maybe we should go see,” Lilly said, and she waited a minute then got up from her seat and began walking toward the front of the shed.

She was so confident and so easy about it that I agreed. I took a last glance around at the old place where my husband had spent most of his life, switched off the light, and followed her. I dropped off the jewelry box, the drawing, and safe papers in the house, found a jacket since it was cold outside, and got my purse and keys.

The sun was high and bright as we drove almost to the county line. It took about fifteen minutes to get there, and neither of us said much. A comment about the coming of spring, the way she loved to ride in the country, a reminder to myself to take the car to the station. I drove as if I was only going to the store or to vote. It didn't seem at all like what it really was, that I was riding out with his illegitimate daughter to see what else my husband had hidden from me for almost forty years.

The green land sloped toward a pond where ducks were always lounging about. There were a few trees, the flowering kind, dogwood and Japanese maple, and a bridge that seemed to signal a passageway from one life to the next. It was restful there, I had told O.T., a good place to go and remember a life. I parked near the entrance and turned off the engine.

Lilly got out of the car first. And suddenly as I sat watching I became afraid. I remembered the things I had said about the cemetery, the way he seemed to take note,
and in just the amount of time that it takes to recognize the face of a friend, I knew what I would find.

I sat there for what seemed a long time before she tapped on the window, right beside me, and motioned me to get out of the car.

“What's the matter, Jean?” she asked as I opened the door.

“I think I know who's here,” I said, still not moving from the driver's seat.

“Yeah?” She glanced out across the cemetery, the green and rolling hill marked with flowers and stones, telling the stories of those buried there. “Family?” she asked.

I nodded. Then there was a long pause.

“You want me to go find the plot and come back to tell you?” She waited for me to answer, and I remembered how quiet O.T. had gotten when I called and told him what I feared. The baby was dead.

I shook my head. “No, I'll need to go.”

She turned away from me and waited until I felt a little more steady and stepped out of the car. I pulled the deed out of my purse and handed it to her. “I don't know how you follow this,” I said as she unfolded the paper and began to read over it.

“It says row 44, plot H.” She studied the cemetery. “But I don't know how you figure out what is row 44. I
don't see any numbers.” She shielded her eyes as she inspected the graves ahead of us.

As I focused out beyond the paved circle where we were parked, I knew without counting. It was simple once I saw the tree. There next to the mountain ash on the far side of the hill, where the grass was deep green and the angle of the sky seemed to lift the ground right into the rays of the sun, that's where I knew she'd be.

Mountain ash, like friendship and old grief, offers something unique and different with each passing season. There is a pattern to it, an order that becomes familiar and yet unpredictable, both warm and glaring, at exactly the same time.