Can't Wait to Get to Heaven (9 page)

After his senior year he had joined the army, and Elner was the first person to see him in his uniform. When he came home after serving four years in the tank division, he went straight to her house where she had fixed him a “welcome home” breakfast. Miss Elner’s house was the only real home he had ever known. He wondered what direction he might have gone had he not had her. “Don’t get on that old dope, honey,” she had said. “You don’t want to grow up and be like your daddy, you need to be real careful, will you promise me that?” All he had needed was someone to check in with, to give him a clue how to be a human being. She had even taken him down to Dr. Weiser’s and bought him a front tooth.

Across town, Mr. Barton Sperry Snow had heard the announcement over the radio at the exact time Luther Griggs did. He had been on his way to visit one of his company managers in Poplar Springs, to discuss revamping the entire district. When he heard the name Elner Shimfissle, he suddenly wondered if she was the same Elner Shimfissle he had met so many years ago. It had to be; it was the same town, Elmwood Springs, and after all, how many women in the world were named Elner Shimfissle? It was certainly not a name you would forget, and
she
was not someone you could easily forget.

At the time he met her, he had been working his way through business school and was doing a survey for Missouri Power and Light Company. Elner Shimfissle had been a big country type of a woman and, as he recalled, had a lot of chickens running around in her yard. She had been very friendly and had given him a piece of pound cake, and a sack of figs to take with him when he left. But the thing he remembered most about her was that she loved electricity and appreciated it more than anyone he had ever met before, or since. She told him one of the great regrets of her life was that she never got to meet Thomas Edison in person. “I just hate to think we were on the earth at the same time and I never got to shake his hand and thank him.” She even had a picture of Thomas Edison she had cut out of a magazine on the wall in her kitchen and had been very upset that there was not a national holiday for Thomas Edison. “Why, he lit the entire world!” she said. “Just think, without old Tom Edison, we would all still be sitting in the dark, no lights, no radio, no electric garage door openers. I think, after the Lord, of course, I’d rank the Wizard of Menlo Park number two, that’s how highly I think of old Tom.” She told Mr. Snow that even though they did not have a national holiday, she personally celebrated his birthday every year by turning on all her electrical appliances at once and leaving them on all day.

What a character. He had spent only forty-five minutes with her thirty years ago, and hadn’t seen her since, but somehow he felt sad that she had died. He had just turned fifty, so she must have lived to a nice old age, because she was an old woman when he met her. Mr. Snow had just been named vice president of the Missouri Power and Light Company and now looking back and remembering her so well, he wondered if somehow her enthusiasm for all things electrical had not made him decide to go to work for the company full-time. Come to think of it, it had been his idea to put a picture of Thomas Edison in the lobby. He couldn’t say for sure, but maybe somewhere in the back of his mind she had influenced him more than he knew. All he did know was that if there was a heaven, he hoped the old lady would finally get to meet Thomas Edison in person. He knew old Tom would get a kick out of meeting her. Mr. Snow took out his BlackBerry and faxed his secretary. “Mrs. Elner Shimfissle of Elmwood Springs passed away today. Find out what funeral home. Send flowers. Sign ‘An old friend.’”

Making Arrangements with Neva

11:38
AM

W
hen Tot Whooten got back home from Elner’s house, she picked up the phone and called the Rest Assured Funeral Home, and her friend Neva picked up.

“Neva? I just wanted to alert you that you’re going to get a call from Norma Warren, probably later on today, we just got the word a little while ago, Elner Shimfissle just died at the hospital.”

“Oh no! What happened?”

“Stung to death by wasps.”

“Oh no…poor old thing.”

“Yes, she hit a nest in her tree and fell clear off the ladder. She was out cold by the time Ruby and I went over. The nurse at the hospital said she never regained consciousness, probably didn’t know what hit her.”

“Oh no,” said Neva again. “But I guess if you have to go, that’s the best way…fast.”

“I suppose so…if you have to go.”

“Yes, well, thanks for the heads-up, Tot. I’ll go ahead and get her file out, but as I recall I think it’s pretty much ready to go, Norma did everything in advance.”

“I’m sure she did, you have to admire her for that, she’s always ahead of the game. I guess with everybody dropping like flies, I better get my own file in order. God knows what will happen to me if I leave my funeral details up to Darlene and Dwayne Junior.”

After she hung up, Tot thought about just how much she was going to miss her neighbor. Elner had always seemed happy, always in a good mood, but she had never had children. Tot’s children had been nothing but trouble from the beginning, even more so after they hit puberty. If there was a fool within fifty miles, they had either married it or had numerous offspring with it. Tot had begged her children to please stop breeding. “There’s a serious genetic flaw on the Whooten side, not one of them has a lick of sense. Just because I married beneath my station is no reason you have to,” she had said to her children on many occasions, but her warning had done no good. Darlene, at thirty-two, had five children and more ex-husbands than Elizabeth Taylor, and not a cent of alimony from a one of them. And God knows how many children Dwayne Jr. had roaming around out there. Six that she knew of, and with the women he had picked, it was no telling how those kids would turn out. Whenever he had said of his girlfriends “We think alike, Mama,” she knew she was in big trouble. Her hopes of one of her kids bettering themselves by meeting someone a step above had been dashed time and time again. And now, her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Faye Dawn, was already pregnant by some fifteen-year-old who wore a dog chain around his neck, black fingernail polish, a nose ring, and had no chin. “Why do birds of a feather have to flock together?” she wondered. “Water seeks its own level” was not a good thing in their case. She was already attending a bipolar prayer group, and Al-Anon meetings twice a week. “What next?” she wondered. What fresh hell was in store for her down the line?

Last year when Dwayne Jr. had asked her what he could get her for Christmas, she had requested “a vasectomy” and told him that she would even pay for it, but he had taken the money and bought himself an off-road vehicle instead. He was a lost cause. She was now working on Darlene to have her tubes tied, but that was going nowhere, because she said she was scared of anesthesia. When Linda Warren had adopted that little Chinese girl, Norma had come into the beauty shop wearing a sweatshirt with the girl’s picture on it, and under the picture it said “Someone Wonderful Calls Me Grandma.” Tot figured she would wind up wearing one that said “A Lot of Potential Criminals and Misfits Call Me Grandma,” and she was supporting almost every one of them. Tot got in her bed and pulled the covers over her head and cried about Elner, and herself as well, while she was at it.

A Surprise

11:59
AM

A
fter Tot had gone home, Ruby stayed at Elner’s house to answer the phone in case anyone called. While she waited, she decided to just go ahead and wash the sheets and towels and all the dirty clothes in Elner’s dirty-clothes basket, so Norma wouldn’t have to be bothered, and it was when she opened it and started pulling all the clothes out that she made a startling discovery.

Hidden at the very bottom of the clothes basket was a .38 revolver handgun, large enough to blow someone’s head off. Ruby stood there with her arms full of clothes, staring at it and wondering why in the blazes Elner Shimfissle would be hiding a gun at the bottom of her clothes basket. Ruby assumed there was probably a perfectly good explanation for its being there, but on the other hand, she also was aware that even though you may think you know someone, you can never really be sure about people, it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for. They can surprise you.

This unexpected and sudden discovery of a handgun in Elner Shimfissle’s dirty-clothes basket presented a major dilemma for Ruby. What should she do? After running the thing around in her mind for a few minutes and considering the situation from every angle, she made a decision. “Oh well,” she thought. A neighbor is a neighbor, and Ruby would have wanted Elner to do the same for her if the situation were reversed. So she reached down and picked the gun up, and wiped it off with one of Elner’s nightgowns, in case there were incriminating prints. She then wrapped it up in a pillowcase, took it into the kitchen and looked under the sink for a paper bag, carried it back over to her house, and hid it in her cedar chest in the hall. Norma was going to be upset enough, without having to find a loaded .38 in her dead aunt’s clothes basket.

When she walked back over to do the washing, she noticed Elner’s birdbath and thought, “Somebody’s going to have to keep that filled with water.” And then she suddenly remembered something else. “Who’s going to feed that blind raccoon his dish of ice cream and vanilla wafers every night?” Then she remembered something else. Every afternoon Elner had fixed an old black Labrador named Buster a cheese sandwich. “
Lord,
” Ruby thought, she would do the sandwich, but Merle was going to have to feed the raccoon. She was scared the thing might bite. Elner had not been scared of anything and had let those squirrels come into her kitchen and jump right up on her counter where she kept food. As her friend and as a health professional Ruby had warned her, “Elner, squirrels are nothing but big rats with furry tails and carry all kinds of diseases,” but Elner never seemed to worry about germs. “Come to think of it,” thought Ruby, “right up until this morning when she was killed by wasps, she had never been sick a day in her life.”

The Cause of Death

10:55
AM

N
orma, who was being tended to by several nurses, was now sitting up and talking but still having a hard time. She kept repeating over and over, “I knew it was going to happen someday, but I just can’t believe it.” The hospital chaplain on call, a Baptist with a bad haircut, in a brown polyester suit, stopped in and offered his card and his condolences. A short time later Macky walked back into the room, after having called their daughter, Linda.

Norma looked up. “Did you reach her?”

He nodded. “She’s coming. She said she would get here as soon as she could.”

“Was she upset?”

“Yes, of course, but she’s worried about you and she said to tell you she loves you.” Just then the doctor came back with a chart and sat down beside Norma and Macky and continued giving them all the information he had. He said that it seemed that as far as they could count, her aunt had received over seventeen wasp stings and must have gone into immediate cardiac arrest caused by anaphylactic shock, and then he added that the fall could have caused some brain trauma, but not enough to kill her, and so as of this moment, the official report read: “Cause of death: cardiac arrest due to severe anaphylactic shock.”

“Did she suffer?” asked a tearful Norma.

“No, Mrs. Warren, I can guarantee you she most probably never knew what hit her.”

Norma wailed, “Poor Aunt Elner, she always said she wanted to die at home, but I don’t think she meant out in the yard, not like this and in that awful old robe….” Macky put his arm around her as she blew her nose.

The doctor continued. “Now, Mrs. Warren, just so you know, you have the official cause of death, but if you are not satisfied, we can still do an autopsy.”

Norma looked at Macky. “Do we need an autopsy? I don’t know, should we? Just to be sure?”

Macky, who knew the details of what was involved, said, “Norma, it’s up to you but I don’t think so, it’s not going to make any difference one way or another.”

“Well, I want to do the right thing. Let’s at least wait until Linda gets here.” She looked at the doctor.

“Can we do that, Doctor, wait until our daughter gets here?”

“When would that be?”

“It should only be a couple of hours…maybe less, right, Macky?”

The doctor looked at the clock. “All right, Mrs. Warren, I suppose we can do that, and in the meantime, if you and Mr. Warren care to see her, I can take you back.”

Norma quickly said, “No, I want to wait until Linda gets here.”

The doctor nodded. “That’s fine, whatever you decide, just tell the nurse if and when you want to go in.”

Macky, who had said little, now said, “Doctor, I’d like to see her now, if that’s OK?”

“Sure, Mr. Warren, I’ll take you down if you want.”

Macky looked at Norma. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes, you go on, Macky, I just can’t right now.”

The nurse said, “I’ll stay right here with her, Mr. Warren.”

The truth was, Macky did not really want to see Aunt Elner dead. He wanted to remember her as she was when she was alive, but the thought of that sweet woman lying somewhere in a room all by herself upset him even more. As they walked down the hall, the doctor said, “Your wife seems to be pretty shook up, they must have been pretty close.”

Macky said, “Yes they were, very close.”

As a male orderly passed by, the doctor called out, “Hey, Burnsie, you owe me ten bucks, I told you the Cards would take it in five,” and acted as if it were just another day.

Macky wanted to grab him and choke the living daylights out of him, and out of everybody in the world, for that matter, but nothing he could do would bring her back. So he kept walking.