The Secret Sense of Wildflower (11 page)

When the mule stops in front of the porch, Mama says to the men, “Let’s get him to the bed.”

The four men carefully lift Daddy and carry him up the front porch steps and into their bedroom. He looks the color of the ashes in the wood stove.

Mama leaves to go into the kitchen and comes back with a cloth to wipe Daddy’s face. If one of us kids gets sick she always wipes our foreheads with a cold cloth.

Just about the time the men get Daddy situated on the bed, Doc Lester shows up. Every time I see Doc Lester I think of weasels because of the shape of his face. His chin juts out to a point; plus his eyes are beady and too close together. The men step back into the corners of the room, leaving Mama standing at the head of the bed next to Daddy.

Doc Lester places his small black bag on the foot of the bed and peels back the layers of what Daddy is wrapped in. He blocks my view and the only thing I can see is Doc Lester’s weasel-like head shake back and forth.

“Poor devil,” he mutters. “He’s lost a lot of blood.” His voice sounds about as grim as a person can sound.

Somebody nudges me on the shoulder and it is Daniel McBride. “Why don’t we go outside?” he says, looking out toward the porch.

“But I want to see,” I say.

“Best to leave this to the grown-ups,” Daniel says. He takes me gently by the arm and leads me toward the front door.

“But I just turned twelve,” I say, as if this constitutes being grown up. But I let him lead me out of the room anyway.

As I leave the house, I hear Mama gasp when she sees what is underneath the wrappings. An uneasy feeling settles into the pit of my stomach.

A dazed Meg sits on the porch, her face streaked with tears and crimson, as if the color lost in Mama and Daddy faces has become hers.

“Oh my God, Louisa May, we’ve lost Daddy!” Meg says. Her voice cracks under the weight of the words. I don’t like that she’s given up on him so easily.

“Where’s Jo and Amy?” I ask.

“When Mama got word they were bringing Daddy home, she sent Jo to pick up Amy at the high school.”

“I need to go back,” I say to Daniel. “He would want me there.” I jerk away from Daniel’s grip.

Inside, Doc Lester covers Daddy up and closes his little black bag. “Somebody get Preacher. I’ve done all I can do here.”

“He’s on his way,” a voice says from the back.

Doc Lester is the only doctor in Katy’s Ridge, although it is a stretch of the imagination to call him that. He is also the person who signs the death certificates. Preacher being there is merely a courtesy. I push Doc Lester aside and take my place next to Daddy. His eyes are closed and his mouth, stretched tight in pain, is absent the smile he usually wears.

“Hey, Daddy. It’s Louisa May.”

He doesn’t say anything back. Mama sits on the bed putting a cool rag on his head and I wonder if she realizes that he has more than a fever. Next she’ll be breaking out the castor oil and the wooden spoon.

“Daddy?” I whisper, leaning next to him. “It’s Wildflower.”

“Don’t bother him, honey,” Mama says, as if I’m trying to ask him a question while he’s reading. My face burns. I want to shake some sense into her. Does she not see what is happening?

Daddy’s eyes open. They used to be as brown as rich shoe leather, but now are black and dull.

“What happened, Daddy?” I ask.

He looks up at me like he has a lifetime of things to tell me. I know he loves me. But what I see in his eyes is more than love. He is telling me that he will miss me. A lump of sorrow lodges in my throat. I swallow so I won’t cry.

“Take care of your mama,” he says, his beautiful baritone voice now raspy.

This isn’t what I want to hear. I want him to tell me that everything is going to be all right, and that he’ll be better soon. Instead, he is letting me know that nothing is ever going to be all right again.

“Promise me,” he says.

“I will,” I say, not even knowing what I’m promising to do. As far as I’m concerned, it is Mama’s job to take care of me, not the other way around. But I will agree to anything at that moment if it will take that look from his eyes. I silently beg God to make him better and promise all sorts of things in return. If God wants me to, I will even stop thinking that Preacher and Doc Lester are idiots every time I see them.

Daddy turns his eyes toward Mama. She strokes his cheek with such tenderness I can’t bear to watch. I look out the window at a squirrel burying an acorn under the pine tree and wonder how squirrels remember where they’ve buried things. Do they make little treasure maps in the tops of trees? When I turn back, Daddy’s eyes are closed forever.

Dying seems like such a private thing, even with a dozen people in the room. I want to shield him from the watchers, but it is too late. Doc Lester picks up Daddy’s wrist searching for a pulse.

“He’s gone,” he says, opening his silver pocket watch to note the time.

“Gone where?” I ask.

Doc Lester ignores my question and puts an arm on Mama’s shoulder. Mama stares down at Daddy, her eyes vacant, like she’s gone, too.

“Somebody tell me what’s going on,” I say too loud.

Nobody answers. Daddy is the one who always answers my questions, and in the next instant, I realize that I will miss this fiercely. At the same time I keep expecting him to open his eyes and smile and ask, “How’s my Wildflower?” Then he’ll sit up and say he feels much better now and I’ll tell him how he gave us all quite a scare.

Miracles have been known to happen in Katy’s Ridge. Little Wiley Johnson almost drowned last summer. Everybody was crying over him, too, when all of a sudden he spit out a gallon of the lake and choked air back into his lungs. His parents gave Preacher a big offering the next Sunday on account of God giving back their little boy. Afterwards, Preacher said Wiley was destined to do Jesus’ work and spread his gospel. Wiley didn’t look too thrilled about that. I don’t think he has anything against Jesus, but he is still just a kid.

Seconds later, Aunt Sadie arrives breathless at the door. The men part to let her pass. The noise she makes when she sees Daddy is the most lonesome wail I’ve ever heard and it sends ripples through me because it is the sound my heart is making, too.

“Everybody out!” Sadie says, and all the men from the mill obey, until there is just me and Sadie and Mama in the room.

“What’s happening, Aunt Sadie? What’s going on?” I whisper, like my regular voice might wake Daddy up.

“The world just became a much sadder place,” Sadie says.

I step closer and touch Daddy’s fingers and wait for them to close around mine and for his lungs to fill deep and wide like whenever he takes in a big breath of fresh mountain air first thing in the mornings.

“Breathe, Daddy,” I whisper, praying for a Wiley Johnson sized miracle. I take a big breath myself to show him how it’s done.

“It won’t do any good, sweetheart,” Aunt Sadie says. “It’s too late.”

I hear the words but refuse to believe them. I tell Mama that Aunt Sadie is wrong. But Mama won’t stop staring at Daddy. It’s as if somebody yelled “freeze” and she got stuck like a statue.

Just then I remember the little package I received when my grandmother McAllister died. Inside was a small, gold medallion of Jesus as a baby in his mother’s lap. People all over the world and especially in Ireland, where our people are from, believe that Mary can grant miracles and they pray to her all the time.

I run into my bedroom and take the medallion out of my dresser drawer. It is still in the box, wrapped in white tissue paper, along with a card with a prayer written on it. I read the words on the card and repeat them over and over again, trying to pray up a miracle. At our church in Katy’s Ridge, Jesus’ mother isn’t talked about much. The only time Preacher mentions her is on Christmas day when we hear the story about her giving birth to Jesus in a stable when there was no room at the inn.

I pray so hard that Mary’s face is imprinted on my hand. In the meantime, I wait for the miracle. I bite my bottom lip hard enough that it starts to bleed and taste the salty sweetness of my own blood. As far as I can tell, Mama doesn’t even realize I am there. She just keeps rubbing Daddy’s forehead with the cool rag. It makes me angry, how useless she is. But I am useless, too. Death makes everybody useless. The pain in my lip takes my mind away from the pain that starts to creep in around my heart. I go outside to continue my praying there.

A bunch of men from the mill stand under the pine trees, smoking cigarettes, with their heads bowed and voices low. Daniel sits on the top step of the porch and I go to sit next to him, still clutching the medallion.

“I’m sorry,” Daniel says softly.

“Sorry for what?” I ask. “You didn’t do anything.”

“I’m sorry that your daddy’s passed on,” Daniel says.

“Passed on to what?” I ask, genuinely curious what he means. “Is he in heaven now? Just like that? One minute you’re here and the next minute you’re sitting around with angels?”

Daniel looks over at me like he isn’t sure how to answer.

“Well, if anybody gets to sit with the angels, it would be your father,” he says.

“But what if there’s been a mistake and it isn’t his time yet? Does God take it back?” The questions whirl around in my mind so fast they make me feel dizzy.

“I don’t think there’s been a mistake,” Daniel says. “I think it was just a horrible accident.”

Seconds later, Jo and Amy run up the hill. “What’s happened?” Jo asks, out of breath. The men under the pines are a chorus of muteness.

Daniel stands as if he is going to break the news to her but I blurt it out before he has a chance.

“Daddy’s had a horrible accident, Jo. He’s dead.”

Jo and Amy look at me like I’ve just said the worst stream of bad words imaginable. Jo doesn’t believe me at first and asks Daniel what I am talking about.

“It’s true,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

Amy’s eyes are like full moons. She isn’t the type to cry but tears fill her eyes and spill over onto her cheeks. Jo and Amy collapse into each others’ arms and then Meg joins them from the porch and then I follow and it is the four of us sisters holding onto each other for dear life like we’ve just been thrown into a lifeboat together on the Titanic.

Things like this aren’t supposed to happen to my family. Daddy is supposed to live to be a hundred, setting a record for Katy’s Ridge. Outdoing Cecil Ludlow by one year, who died in his sleep at ninety-nine, after having just rocked one of his great-great granddaughters.

Later that afternoon, Mama breaks from her trance and lays Daddy’s hand down like it is a robin’s egg she is returning to a nest. Then she goes into the kitchen, puts on her apron and gets busy. From the empty look in her eyes, I know that I have lost Mama, too. In a matter of hours it feels like I have gone from having two, full-fledged parents to being an orphan.

I run out the front door, jumping from the porch to the ground without touching a step like I used to when I was younger. Then I run down the hill, not knowing where I am going, I just have to run. If I don’t I might suffocate from the sadness that threatens to drown me.

I jump over deep ruts made by the stretcher and reach the dirt road at the bottom of the hill in no time at all. Still running, I turn onto the river road. My shoes rub at my heels and I stop my flight long enough to toss them into the bushes. Mama will have a fit if she finds out, but I don’t care. I run barefoot toward the river. With each stride I try to forget seeing Daddy being pulled up the hill by Simon Hatcher’s mule and all the men he worked with. The same men who visited our house last Christmas and who today carried him so carefully from the stretcher to the bed.

As I run I try to make sense of what has happened, but it is like a horrible dream that I don’t know how to wake up from. I want the day to start over. I want my father to be standing in the kitchen filling his thermos and kissing my mother before he goes to work. I want him to come home safe and sound like he always does.

Only old people are supposed to die, and sometimes babies if they are sick. Nobody is supposed to die who is strong and healthy and happy. It goes against the nature of things. A person dying young makes life seem unfair and too scary. It means it could happen to any of us, at any time, when we least expect it.

At the end of the road, I stop and rest my hands on my knees to catch my breath. I haven’t run like that since the end of the year races in seventh grade. I came close to winning that year and if Freddie Myers had skipped school that day, like he did most days once planting season commenced, I would have won the ribbon.

The look of the land changes the closer I get to the river, as if the mountains are intent on flattening out to greet it. Making my way through tall grass, I follow the path that Daddy and I must have walked together a thousand times. I smell the water before I see it and emerge from the grasses at a small sandy beach. The sight of the water causes me to sigh. Visiting the riverbank is like visiting an old friend. I collapse on a mound of earth, still refusing to cry. Crying might make it too real.

I take in a few deep breaths. Then like a summer rain that sneaks up on a sunny day, the tears come. They arrive slowly at first and I wipe each one away as it falls. But pretty soon I am caught in a downpour of tears, at the very place Daddy and I have fished since the time the grasses were taller than me.

When I got older he showed me how to clean the trout we caught, and one Christmas gave me a special knife to use. I never liked cleaning fish, but Daddy was proud that I was more like him instead of my sisters. They scream at the sight of any kind of fish guts, like I’d torn out my very own eyeball for them to see.

Memories flood over me, and then I remember the last time we were together, earlier that morning.

“Have a good day at school,” Daddy says, giving me a kiss on the forehead. He’s kissed me in that same spot so many times I half expect there to be a worn-out place where his lips touch, like the worn-out place on the kitchen rug where Mama always stands to cook.

“School is so boring,” I say, rolling my eyes.