Twang (35 page)

“Sure. You can count on me. Will you be home tomorrow?”

“Guess I better get back to Aunt Gomer. I don’t want her to . . .” Tonilynn’s voice faded and the line went dead.

I sat down at the table, resting my head in the crook of my arm for a long time, thinking about how disposable, perishable, temporary, the human body is. What struck me hard was how much I’d miss Aunt Gomer if she died. I had some things I really wanted to tell her, like how beautiful her flowers were and how seeing the sunrise with her had been priceless. Things on Cagle Mountain would sure be different without her around.

I didn’t want to be alone, and I didn’t know if Erastus was allowed in the featherbed, so close to nine, I made a pallet on the floor of the front room from an old army-green sleeping bag I found in the coat closet. I lay down and invited Erastus to join me. “Lie down, boy,” I told him. “Let’s go to sleep.” But I stayed awake for a long time, waiting for what I did not know.

I awakened around six the next morning to a loud clap of thunder. Erastus buried his head underneath the sleeping bag and his hindquarters trembled. “It’s okay, buddy,” I crooned, and lay for a while on my pallet, wondering what was going on with Aunt Gomer and how early was too early to call Tonilynn. Then I started thinking about getting back to Nashville, to Riverfront Park for my missed time at the river. Whenever I missed a visit—and that was rare—it felt like an important piece of me was missing, and I was not myself. I was lost somehow.

Finally, I let Erastus outside, went to the bathroom to cup my hands and splash water on my face and made my way back to the kitchen. As I was scooping coffee into the percolator and pouring food into Erastus’s bowl, he came barking at the back door. When I opened the door to let him in, his fur was
slick from the drizzle, and the land beyond him stretched out dreary and wet.

I can’t say I was surprised when I turned on the television to see more warnings about flooding in Nashville. The rains continued. Roads were submerged and houses were surrounded by water where people were climbing out of windows into boats. The sight of a house trailer tipped on its side as it floated by made me draw in a breath and hold my hand to my mouth. The deluge was incredible! It seemed almost like a movie: concerned officials warning, citizens stunned and stuttering, their hands slicing the air as they described what was happening. The camera panned to a woman sitting in a rescue boat. Her voice was shaky, her red hair falling crazily into her distraught face. “It’s all I have,” she said, nodding toward the floating mobile home. “We never dreamed . . .”

Moved to tears, I pulled my eyes away, and just as I did there came a long rumble of thunder laughing at me. “It’ll be okay, boy,” I sang to Erastus as he quivered beneath the kitchen table.

That entire May weekend record-breaking amounts of rain fell in Music City. If I turned on the television, there were muddy rescue people, reports of power outages, gloomy skies, and gloomy forecasts. Erastus and I paced the farmhouse, listening for word from Tonilynn. Through lunch it rained, and all that early afternoon, steady, soaking, and surreal.

At three my phone rang, and I hit the Talk button while looking out the window at trees slumped dark and dreary in the downpour.

“She’s gone, Jennifer.”

I held the phone, Tonilynn’s words like a punch in my stomach.

“Jennifer?”

“
What?
What do you mean?”

“Aunt Gomer crossed the Jordan at 12:14 p.m. She’s with Jesus now.”

“No!” Tears bloomed in my eyes.

“Yes, and I’m glad,” Tonilynn said in a faltering voice that belied her words. “Aunt Gomer didn’t want to suffer the indignity of growing feeble and losing her faculties. Anyhow, I wanted to warn you that when the news hits the church’s grapevine, there’ll be ladies by the dozens bringing food to the house. If I’m not back yet, could you please let them in and keep up with who brought what?”

“Sure. When are you and Bobby Lee coming home?”

“There’s a few things to handle here, so I’d say not until late. I talked to the preacher, and it’ll be a few days until we can get things together for her funeral. I can carry you back to Brentwood tonight after you help me pick out something for Aunt Gomer to be buried in. Will you help me with that, hon?”

“Of course.” I was pretty sure Tonilynn was unaware of the severity of the flooding, and I didn’t want to tell her because a big part of me wanted to deny it was actually happening. Earlier I’d caught snippets of television footage of Brentwood. The Little Harpeth River was almost white water rapids at the Brentwood Country Club, and the golf course was a lake. Also, it looked like Manley Lane was flooded and the road surface of Holly Tree Gap Road was buckled from floodwaters. I heard a reporter say Granny White Pike was literally under water.

“Tonilynn? I’d like to stay up here on Cagle Mountain tonight.”

“You sure? What about that cat of yours?”

I heard the teasing mixed with the gratitude in Tonilynn’s voice. “I’m sure.”

“Thanks, hon. You’ll be a big comfort. I better go see about Bobby Lee. Now, watch out, I imagine they’ll start showing up
any minute with food. Help yourself to whatever your heart desires.”

Erastus went berserk at the sound of Bobby Lee’s wheelchair on the ramp. Zigzagging around the den, he went straight to Bobby Lee’s knees to whimper with delight the instant the door opened. For a while I watched their reunion, then Tonilynn putting her handbag away in the pantry, peeking up underneath tinfoil and Tupperware lids, wedging some dishes into the already overflowing refrigerator. She looked decidedly unglamorous—flat lifeless hair, dark smudges of mascara underneath her eyes, clothes wrinkled and weary. I stood wordlessly in front of the pantry, feeling useless in the face of such grief. What could I do to make things better?

“Hey, Jennifer.” Bobby Lee wheeled over to me in his wrinkled Allman Brothers T-shirt, his hair in a tangled ponytail, one of Aunt Gomer’s pale blue bedroom slippers perched on his thighs. “How are you?”

“Okay,” I said, feeling tears starting in my eyes. “I’m sorry about Aunt Gomer.”

“Yeah. I still can’t hardly believe it. I’m gonna put on one of her albums.”

I understood. Without Aunt Gomer, the house seemed empty, too quiet.

I went into the guest room, lay down on the featherbed, and listened to the Louvin Brothers singing. I must’ve fallen asleep because the next time I was aware of anything, the quilt was spread over me and it was pitch dark. The luminous numerals on the digital clock read 4:22 a.m. A faint aroma of coffee drifted to my nostrils.

Tonilynn was in the kitchen hunched over a shoebox full of photographs. I saw she’d laid several out on the table: a feathery-edged
sepia-toned portrait of a baby in an old-fashion buggy, one from a 1960s Christmas if you went by the clothes, what looked to be a young Tonilynn, ten or so, holding a basket full of kittens with Aunt Gomer standing behind her, four women with matching bee-hive hairdos posing behind a banner that read “Bake Sale,” one of Aunt Gomer in 1980 with her brand-new Ford. Tonilynn looked up at me, her face haggard. “The funeral director asked me to gather up some pictures of Aunt Gomer. He wants to put them up on a screen at the front of her funeral, rolling like a movie! Ain’t that crazy?”

“Well . . . maybe it’s so people can remember when she was in a younger, happier time of her life.”

Tonilynn shrugged. “He asked me to bring them with the clothes we want her buried in. I’m thinking she’ll look best in her magenta pantsuit and that cream-colored polyester blouse with the bow at the neck.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down across from Tonilynn. “I think she’d rather be in her gardening getup—the straw hat and that threadbare chambray shirt and those ancient men’s khaki’s she held up with a rope.”

A laugh flew out of Tonilynn. “Let’s do that! Oh, Jennifer, wouldn’t she be proud of all this food in her honor?”

“She would.”

Tonilynn looked thoughtfully at the counter. “Whenever Aunt Gomer heard somebody’d died, she was the first one there with a fresh-from-the-oven cake. I’m amazed when I think of all the cooking, serving, cleaning, gardening, and putting-by she used to do.” She paused, and got a faraway look. “Aunt Gomer stayed right by Bobby Lee’s side for months after his wreck. Fixed him breakfast, lunch, and a big supper every day. Refilled his tea, fetched the remote for him. She
lived
to serve folks!

“Remember after her first stroke, when I had to feed her? I thought she was just ornery and stubborn and didn’t want to accept help? But now I think it was that she couldn’t get up and do for folks! She wanted nothing more than to hop up out of that bed, get home, and take care of me and Bobby Lee!”

Tears ran down Tonilynn’s cheeks. “She spent her lifeblood caring for others. For me! And I wasn’t easy. I don’t deserve all that woman’s done for me. Know what, Jennifer?”

“What?”

“I had issues with certain stories in the Bible, some stuff that bothered me? Well, Aunt Gomer’s stroke gave me a whole new perspective.”

There were a lot of things I had issues with, but at last I asked, “What?”

“Remember that woman Jesus healed in the gospel? She had a fever, and Jesus touched her? Well, she hardly got herself a breath before jumping right up from her sickbed and serving. I always thought that was awful, sexist. I mean, here the poor woman’s been at death’s door, and then she hops right up and starts serving the menfolk! I thought she deserved a little R&R. Let the men serve themselves for a change!

“But I bet she was like Aunt Gomer. She was absolutely thrilled to death to serve, to be able to fix a nice plate of loaves and fishes.” Tonilynn’s jaw shook with her fervency. “See?”

“Um . . . sure.”

Tonilynn smiled. “Oh, hon, I appreciate you saying that, but you don’t really.” I started to argue, but she held up her hand. “It’s okay. We all have things that are difficult to wrap our minds around.”

I was thinking,
Yeah, like letting Bobby Lee go to live his own life?

Tonilynn looked at me hard. “Before she passed, I told Aunt Gomer who Bobby Lee’s father is.”

I knew what a huge thing that was for Tonilynn, but immediately I discounted it by telling myself that Aunt Gomer had been mentally out of it.

Leave it to Tonilynn. “It was before her first stroke, when she was still mostly in her right mind. It computed with her, Jennifer. It really did. I know because we had several conversations about it.”

“Okay.”

“I showed her the tattoo. For once, she didn’t give me her sermon about desecrating the temple of the Holy Spirit. She just started bawling about a memorial garden her friend Viola got her to plant at the church in Robert’s honor.”

“What?”

“Might help if I told you Robert was the son of her best friend, Viola Gooch, the pastor’s wife. Robert died in a motorcycle wreck when Bobby Lee was an infant. He never told nobody he was a father.”

“Is that why you didn’t tell her who Bobby Lee’s father was?”

“Well, partly. A baby out of wedlock was a huge scandal, and I didn’t want to crush Reverend and Mrs. Gooch any more on top of burying their son. Just didn’t seem necessary. But there were other reasons. I realized I still loved Robert, and Bobby Lee was like my secret, a way to hold Robert to my heart.”

I was quiet a while, pondering the odd thought that it had been a motorcycle wreck that claimed Robert’s life and another that had disabled his son. I stood unsteadily, squinted at my watch, which said five a.m., glanced toward the window. No moon, no stars were visible. Only low, dark clouds. “Mind if I turn on the news?”

“Go ahead, hon.”

It was like a slap in the face to hear the National Weather Service meteorologist saying, “Weekend storms dumped more
than thirteen inches of rain in two days. Dark brown waters are pouring over the banks of Nashville’s swollen Cumberland River, spilling into historic downtown where businesses are being shut down and authorities have closed off streets. In residential areas, the catastrophic flooding has ruined homes, and families are being evacuated. Four bodies have been discovered dead in their homes, two in cars on the standstill lane of the interstate and four outdoors. Stay tuned for—”