Chinaberry Sidewalks (26 page)

Dawn broke ominously on the last morning. My father woke up looking hideous and grew more appallingly so as the day progressed. His skin turned the color of cigarette ash, his eyes bulged, and his head swelled to what seemed like twice its normal size. His condition seemed to mirror every ounce of self-loathing I’d managed to accrue in thirty-eight years of living, and an overwhelming desire to kill him screamed through every pore in my body. Horrified at the thought of harming a dying man, I asked Larry and Rosanne if they could understand what I was feeling. Larry said he wasn’t sure, only that Uncle J didn’t look too good to him. “He’s burning off the past, Rodney,” Rosanne said quietly.

Her gentle wisdom stilled the storm inside me, but the urge to knock his head off soon came roaring back on a wave of anger larger than I could contain. Just then, a voice in my head—the same last-ditch counselor who’d told me to go with the flow when I was drowning in the Brazos—said,
Call Brother Looney
.

This suggestion made me realize that my determination to keep people away from my father had more to do with me not wanting religion to cast a lowbrow pall over his death than with what he might want. Turns out I was the one who was ignorant and prejudiced. It was an embarrassing, even shocking, revelation.

Forty minutes later, Brother Looney entered the room, took my father’s left hand, and looked deep into his eyes. I cried at the beauty of the moment, one that I’d had every intention of preventing. Rosanne and Larry cried, too, as one must when compassion opens your heart. Elegantly and simply, the country preacher said, “Go to God, J.” Then he took a respectful step back and bowed his head.
His
prayer was said silently through tears.

With his friend in the circle, my father was finally free to die. I was humbled by how quickly the hideousness gave way to astounding beauty. My father was a nineteen-year-old boy again. I called my mother and everyone else in to see it. Sister Looney, Dee, Sister Ballard, and people I’d never met, those who’d been keeping a vigil with my mother, said soft good-byes and quietly rotated out of the room. My mother was the last.

“You gonna be all right?” he asked her, as gently as he might have that long-ago night when he stepped in to defend her honor at the Roy Acuff concert.

“Yes, baby, I will,” she replied.

Half an hour later, his last three breaths came like a set of waves off the ocean. The pause between the first and second was so unusually long that I thought he’d surely breathed his last. The pause between the next and his final was a full forty seconds, an absolute eternity when you’re trying to pinpoint the exact moment when a life is over. And then his life
was
over. One day short of nine years after his heart quit for the first time, my father was gone.

In the minutes that followed, his eyes shined a shade of sparkling blue deeper than I could’ve imagined. His skin seemed sculpted from marble ten grades finer than Michelangelo’s
David
. The peace settling over the room was so intense that everyone cried at the joy of knowing such serenity. I found it hard to close his eyes, not because of the finality of this act but because I couldn’t bring myself to alter something so beautiful.

My mother and her friends were shown in. “Your daddy looks like he did the day I married him,” she told me in a long embrace. “He may be gone but he’ll never be forgotten.”

All was a heavenly glow until the funeral director arrived stinking of highballs. Three sheets to the wind was six short of where this guy hung. Luckily, his assistant was sober, so I informed the undertaker that once he was in a cab headed home, I’d release my father’s body to his assistant, whom I made promise he wouldn’t let his boss touch my father until he was sober. I wrote all this out on a sheet of paper, which both he and I signed. Doubtless it wouldn’t have been binding in a court of law, but I took the assistant’s word as truth.

The funeral wasn’t without its comedic moments. Aunt Nadine showed everybody her girdle when she screamed, “Don’t go without me, J.W.!” and tried to climb inside the casket. I calmed her down with reassurances that we all knew how heartbroken she was that her brother had died. She went sniffling back to her seat but was soon up and at it again. This time I told her that she made an excellent grieving sister, the best I’d ever seen, and, satisfied she’d grabbed her share of the spotlight, she settled down and let the preacher have his say. Brother Looney gave a short, respectful eulogy, and we laid my father to rest in the shade of tall pines and sycamores.

I arrived back at the house on Gum Gully ahead of everyone else to find Uncle Porter loading my father’s hunting rifles into the trunk of his car. The backseat was filled with his clothes.

“What are you doing with all Dad’s stuff?” I asked, more amused than angered by his audacity.

“He won’t be needin’ none of this where he’s going.”

The Browning 20-gauge automatic was a gift from my father on my twelfth birthday and I wanted it. The bolt-action .270-caliber deer rifle had been promised to Brother Looney. Feeling charitable, I gave Uncle Porter the Ithaca 16-gauge pump and the single-shot .22 that I used to break up the New Year’s Eve party in 1955.

My mother lived alone in the house on Gum Gulley for five years, an amazing achievement given that she’d never learned to drive. The driving lessons I arranged in Nashville six weeks after the funeral didn’t pan out, not after an informal practice session instigated by my well-intentioned wife when Mom launched a minivan off a dangerously steep cul-de-sac.

“My right foot just froze all the way down,” my mother explained, when I arrived on the scene. “I couldn’t get it to unstick and we flew headfirst over that bank into the top of them trees, with the motor still runnin’. It like to have scared Rosanne to death.”

“You know how your mother keeps telling you she’ll never learn to drive?” Rosanne said, laughing. “You should listen to her.”

Nerves were Mom’s familiar excuse for never climbing back in the driver’s seat. But she soon developed a stable of church friends and well-intended young women who clamored for the right to drive “Miss Cozy”—the pet name she picked up early in widowhood—anywhere she wanted to go.

She claimed never to know loneliness. “I don’t mean to speak bad about your daddy,” she said, “but I feel freer than I ever have. I miss him all the time, but I wouldn’t trade these last few years for nothin’.”

When the phone rang early on her seventieth birthday, I was a year and a half into the shared-custody arrangement that Rosanne and I had concocted during our selfishly amicable and thoroughly modern divorce. Meanwhile, our daughters were having trouble adjusting to this revolving-door policy that kept them shuttling between private schools in New York City and Nashville. Their grandmother saw the need for a stabilizing influence in all of our lives.

“You know what I want for my birthday?” she asked. But before I could issue the usual reminder that FedEx would arrive with her presents by ten a.m., she provided the answer to her question: “I want to move to Nashville and help you with the girls.”

I then made the mistake of thinking she’d be happy in an assisted-living facility. My mother hated it. “The women in this hellhole are all in competition for three old men who can’t remember their own name,” she fumed the first time I paid a visit. “I never seen so many nasty women in my life. Did you know they have a morgue in the basement?” She claimed her neighbors were simply too grumpy to get along with and vowed to get out of there before their irritability started rubbing off on her.

She’d spent many happy weekends in the house I’d bought overlooking Radnor Lake. Still, she turned down my invitation to move in with me and the girls on the grounds that she wanted the freedom to leave whenever she felt like it. Instead, she found an apartment and, at an old-school Assembly of God out on Nashville’s western edge, another set of Sisters who were delighted to ferry their frisky new friend anyplace in the city. Her congregation took up a collection and bought an easy chair to make Miss Cozy comfortable during the long, drawn-out Sunday morning sermons while the rest of them made do with straight-back wooden benches. With a church and friends and her grandchildren nearby, Cauzette blossomed yet again.

Over the next four years I jettisoned the traveling musician’s lifestyle and the nanny and housekeeper I’d been paying to fulfill my own responsibilities. In the bargain, my mother and I grew very close. We had dinner twice a week at my house or a restaurant near her apartment—I couldn’t brave eating at her place—and we shared the exaltation and misery that accompany a house full of teenage girls.

In these years I was also approaching a marriage. My mother adored Claudia, and I learned to laugh when she’d brush me off in favor of spending time with my girlfriend. I also came to understand that their relationship was healing something inside them both that they alone could comprehend.

My daughters, too, grew close to their grandmother, and she to them. By her insistence, Miss Cozy was known to them only as Nana Zeke. “I swear on Nana Zeke’s soul” became their blood oath. It still is.

Aping Mae West, she once sprung a bright red bathing suit on her granddaughters, prompting squeals of delight. “Please, Nana Zeke, don’t ever take it off,
please
!” The occasion was white-water rafting in Tennessee. And later, on the same vacation, in the same red bathing suit, she was tossed in the Florida surf for six straight days, along with my daughters, in giggling unison. “Anybody can stand up in the ocean, Nana Zeke,” one of them announced, “but Crowell girls like to roll around in it.”

“I learned how to make do with the short end of the stick bein’ married to your daddy all those years,” she said one evening over bologna-and-cheese sandwiches at my house. “I never was mad at him for thinkin’ the world revolved around him. That’s just the way he was. But if anybody ever tried to tell his and my life stories, J.W.’s would take up a whole encyclopedia. Mine might take up half a funny book. All I ever done was love you and your girls and your daddy and Tex Edward and Momma.… I guess that’s not really the short end of any stick, is it? But I’ll tell you this: Where I’m goin’ to be with Tex Edward, son, there ain’t any stick at all.”

“What do you mean,” I asked, “ ‘going to be with Tex Edward’?”

“Oh, he comes to see me just about every day now,” she said, as if my long-dead brother lived in an apartment two doors down. “It’s as real as you and me sittin’ here talkin’. I’ve held him in my arms. He’s about four years old and has beautiful curly black hair. He needs me now more than you do. I’m gettin’ ready to go be with him.”

Ever since she’d moved into the house on Gum Gully, my mother had become something of an authority on dead friends and relatives, and my father and I rarely gave more than a passing thought to her assertions that from time to time she visited unseen worlds where she held lucid conversations with family members and strangers alike. Whether these occurrences were genuine or imagined seemed beside the point: They were real to her, and that was good enough for us. But this Tex Edward business was different. Until then, in fact, she’d claimed there was a protective veil between the two of them that neither was allowed to cross. But now her reports of these daily visits seemed so vivid, the details so specific, that I myself started having visions of a beautiful boy with curly black hair, though I knew these imaginings were the product of my lifelong wish to have a big brother. Nevertheless, I was taking her claims as seriously as she was.

Claudia and I were married on what would have been my parents’ fifty-sixth wedding anniversary. After the ceremony, my mother took my face in her hands, as she often did when she had something important to say. “I need you to listen to me now, Rodney. My work here is done. I don’t need to worry about you anymore. I love Claudia like she’s my own daughter. God sent her to me the same way he sent her to you. I know she’ll take care of you. I’m not goin’ to be around that much longer now. I’ve got other things to go do.”

I wanted to say something flip, but she held my face tight in her hands. “I said listen to me, son,” she continued, summoning more gravity than I’d ever heard. “I’m not goin’ to be around much longer.”

Five weeks later, she made good on her word.

The phone rang at seven a.m. “I’m havin’ a heart attack,” she said, with no more urgency than if she was commenting on the weather. “I need you to come drive me to the hospital.” So casual was her request that had she not tacked on, “You better get on over here in a hurry,” I might’ve gone for a walk around the lake before moseying across town to her apartment. Instead, I raced there.

I was bewildered by the call. Just the day before, dressed as Madonna circa
Desperately Seeking Susan
—torn fishnets, miniskirt, red lipstick, and a polka-dot bow tied around her head—she’d appeared in a big-budget music video that Claudia was making. During the shoot, she’d kept the cast and crew in tears of hilarity by speculating on her new career as a television pitchperson. How a heart overflowing with happiness on one day could be malfunctioning the next was hard to comprehend.

“She’s adamant about being taken to Baptist Hospital,” I told Claudia on my car phone.

“Don’t you dare take her to Baptist,” she said. “They’ll kill her. I promise you they will kill your mother. Take her to St. Thomas—they have the best cardiac care in Tennessee.”

Mom wouldn’t hear of going to St. Thomas. I was told that she was her own boss and I could either take her where she wanted to go or buzz off. So I took her to Baptist.

“It’s a mild attack located in an area on the back side of her heart,” the attending physician said. “I can give her an IV of thinner to help the blood flow past the blockage, or I can order up a simple angioplasty to get her stabilized.”

That it was a mild heart attack should’ve been welcome news, but listening to this fine young doctor’s deliberations on the pros and cons of each procedure made me anxious. I was beginning to think he was going to flip a coin instead of making up his mind. I had him walk me through each procedure again, hoping the better decision might seem obvious, but it wasn’t. He then assured me that both procedures were routine and in either case the side effects would be minimal. I still felt ill at ease, yet talked myself out of demanding a second opinion. “It’s your decision,” I said, and he chose to thin her blood.