Our Souls at Night (9 page)

Louis said, It was awful for her that last year. She was just always sick. They tried chemotherapy and radiation and that slowed it for a while but it was still there and it never was out of her system completely. She got worse and she didn’t want to have any more treatments. She was just wasting away.

I remember, Addie said. I wanted to help.

I know. You and all the others brought food. I appreciated that. And the flowers.

But I never saw her in her bedroom.

No. She didn’t want any company upstairs except Holly and me. She didn’t want anybody to see her, how she looked then in the last months. And she didn’t want to talk. She was afraid of death. Nothing I said made any difference.

Aren’t you afraid of death?

Not like I was. I’ve come to believe in some kind of
afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We’re just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.

I don’t know if I believe that, Addie said. Maybe you’re right. I hope you are.

We’ll see, won’t we. But not yet.

No, not yet, Addie said. I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.

I love all that too. But Diane was worn out. At the end she was too tired and too weary to pay attention to her fears anymore. She wanted out, relief. An end to her suffering. She suffered terribly in the last months. So much pain. Even with sedatives and morphine. And she was still scared most of the time, underneath. I’d come in, I’d check her in the night and she’d be awake staring at the dark through the window. Can I help you? I’d say. No. Do you want something? No. I just want it to be over. Holly would help bathe her and would try to get her to eat but she wasn’t hungry. She wouldn’t eat anything. I suppose in some way she knew she was starving herself. She was so frail and tiny at the end, her legs and arms like sticks. Her eyes looking too big in her head. It was awful to watch and more than awful for her, of course. I wanted to do something
for her and there wasn’t a thing more to be done than what we were already doing. The hospice nurse came every day and was very good and helped make it possible for her to die at home. She didn’t want to go back to the hospital ever. So that’s how it was. Finally she died. Holly and I were both in the room. She stared at us with those big dark staring eyes like she was saying Help me Help me Why won’t you help me. Then she quit breathing and was gone.

People say the spirit stays around for a while floating over the body and maybe hers did. Holly said she had the sense of her mother being in the room and maybe I did too. I couldn’t be sure. I felt something. Some kind of emanation. But it was very slight, maybe just a breath. I don’t know. At least she’s at peace now in some other place or higher realm. I think I believe that. I hope she is. She never really got what she wanted from me. She had a kind of idea, a notion of how life should be, how marriage should be, but that was never how it was with us. I failed her in that way. She should’ve had somebody else.

You’re being too hard on yourself again, Addie said. Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out of old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.
Except I still say that this isn’t true of you and me. Not right now, not today.

I feel that too. But you might get tired of me too and want out.

If that happens we can stop, she said. That’s the understood agreement for us, isn’t it. Even if we never actually said so.

Yes, when you get tired of this, you can say so.

And you too.

I don’t think I’ll get there. Diane never got to have what we do. Unless she had somebody I didn’t know about. She didn’t, though. She wouldn’t think that way.

In August there was the annual Holt County Fair and rodeo and livestock judging at the fairgrounds on the north side of town. It started with a parade coming up from the south end of Main Street, coming up the street toward the railroad tracks and old depot. It was raining the day of the parade. Louis and Addie put on raincoats and cut a hole in the end of a black plastic trash bag to put over Jamie and the three of them walked over to Main Street and stood along the curb with the other people. There were crowds along both sides of the street despite the weather. The honor guard came first, carrying the limp wet flags and shouldering dripping rifles, then there were old tractors muttering up the street and old combines on flatbed trailers and antique hay rakes and mowers, and more tractors, puttering and popping, and the high school band, reduced
in the summer to only fifteen members wearing white shirts and jeans all soaking now and sticking to their skin, then the convertible cars with the county notables inside but with the tops up because of the weather, and then the rodeo queen and her attendants on horses, the girls all good riders wearing ranch slickers, followed by more fancy cars with advertisements on the doors, and cars for the Lions Club and the Rotary and Kiwanis and the Shriners zigzagging around in the street, like fat show-off kids, in their hopped-up go-carts, and more horses and riders in yellow slickers and a pony cart, and toward the end of the parade there was a flatbed truck with a cardboard religious picture on it and a riser at the front, entered in the parade by one of the evangelical churches in town. On the riser there was a wooden cross and a young man standing in front of it with long hair and a dark beard, wearing a white tunic and because of the rain he was holding an umbrella over his head. When Louis saw him he laughed out loud. The people standing nearby turned and stared at him.

You’re going to get yourself in trouble, Addie said. This is serious here.

I guess he can walk on water, but he can’t keep it from falling on his head.

Hush, she said. Mind your manners.

Jamie looked up at them to see if they were really angry.

At the end of the parade the Holt street cleaner came sweeping up the street with its big rotating brushes.

In the afternoon the rain stopped and they drove out to the fairgrounds and parked and walked through the stock barns past the sleek horses and the groomed cattle with their puffed-up ratted tails, and looked at the great hogs lying on the straw on the cement flooring in the pens, lying there fat and panting and pink, batting their ears, and they walked past the goats and sheep all trimmed and shaved, and then out through the cages of rabbits and chickens and around to the carnival area. They put Jamie on the Ferris wheel with Addie, Louis said the rides made him sick. Addie and the boy rode up and around and when they were at the top she pointed out Main Street and the grain elevator and water tower and pointed to where their houses were on Cedar Street.

Do you see my house?

No.

Right over there. With the big trees.

I don’t see it.

They looked far out beyond the edge of town to the open country where they could see farmhouses and barns and the windbreaks. Afterward they tried some of the games, the rifle shoot and ball throw, and bought Jamie pink cotton candy on a paper cone, and icy slushy drinks for themselves and wandered around watching the people and then went back and she and the boy rode the Ferris wheel again. By now it was late afternoon. They could hear the rodeo still going on from the arena on the other side of the grandstands, the loud cheerful voice of the announcer. They didn’t buy tickets to go into the rodeo stands but walked down past the far end and looked over the fence at the calf roping and bull riding. There was a quarter-mile horse race on the dirt track and they watched as the horses galloped by, the jockeys standing up now in their irons after they had passed the finish line, the horses wide-nostriled and stirred up. Then they went back to the car and drove home and the boy got the dog out of Louis’s kitchen and they had supper on the front porch as the day was ending.

Louis mowed his lawn and then mowed Addie’s and dumped the grass out of the rear catcher into a wheelbarrow and Jamie pushed it around back and tipped it out in the alley onto the musty pile there and came back for more. When they were finished Louis sprayed off the mower with the hose and put it away in the shed.

In the corner he lifted the lid from the nest box.

Do you think we’ll ever see those mice again?

We might, Louis said. We’ll have to keep watching.

I wonder where they went. I wonder if the mother ever found them.

They went into Addie’s kitchen and drank iced tea and then went out into the side yard in the shade and played catch. Addie came out with them. Bonny raced back and forth chasing the ball and jumping in the air
and grabbing it up when it hit the ground and ran in circles until they caught her.

At noon Louis went home and Jamie kept the dog with him at Addie’s and ate lunch with her, talking quietly, and then he and Bonny went upstairs to the back bedroom and the dog lay sleeping at the foot of the bed in the warm room while he played with his phone and called his mother.

I’ll be seeing you soon, his mother said. Didn’t I tell you? I’m coming back home.

What does Dad say?

He says that’s good. We both want to try again. Aren’t you glad?

When will you come?

In a week or two.

Will you live in the house?

Of course. Where else would I live?

I don’t know. Maybe some other place?

Honey, I want to be with you.

And Dad.

Yes, and Dad.

A few nights later Addie and Louis and Jamie went out to the Wagon Wheel restaurant on the highway east of town and sat at one of the tables near the big windows. There was a view of the wheatland out to the south. The sun was going down and the stubble was beautiful in the lowering light. After they ordered their dinner an old man walked over and sat down heavily in the vacant chair. A big solid-looking man in a long-sleeved shirt and new jeans, his face very red and wide.

Louis said, You know Addie Moore, don’t you, Stanley?

Not as good as I’d like to.

Addie, this is the famous Stanley Thompkins.

I ain’t too famous. More like infamous.

And this is Addie’s grandson Jamie Moore.

Let me see your grip, son.

The boy reached out and shook the old man’s thick hand and the old man winced and Jamie stared at him.

I heard you two was seeing each other, Stanley said.

Addie’s willing to put up with me, Louis said.

Makes me think there might be hope for somebody else in this life.

Addie patted his hand. Thank you. It is a hopeful thing, isn’t it.

You know anybody wants to curl up with a old wheat farmer?

I’ll start looking, she said.

I’m in the phone book. I can be reached.

So what’s happening? Louis said.

Oh, you know, the usual. My boy got the wheat in and took off for Vegas. He couldn’t stand having a little money in the bank. Took some gal with him too from over at Brush. I never met her. I guess she’s good looking.

Why didn’t you go with them?

Oh hell. He looked at Jamie. Scuse me. I never got much out of sitting around with strangers messing with cards. If you was to have a game of poker at your house or somebody else here did, that would be a different story. You’d know who you was playing with and it would be more fun. But I’m no good in cities anyway.

How did your wheat do?

Well, it was pretty good this year, Louis. I don’t want to say this out loud. But this was one of the best years we’ve had in a long time. The rain came at the right time and there was a lot of it and we never got no hail on our place. Our neighbor to the south did. But we was just lucky all around.

The waitress brought the plates of food.

I’m keeping you from your supper. He stood up and reached out to shake the boy’s hand again. Now take it easy on me. The boy tentatively took his hand and barely touched him. Okay, I’ll be seeing you.

Take care.

Good to meet you, Mrs. Moore.

After they’d finished eating they rode out to the country and drove to the Thompkins place northeast of town and stopped and looked at the stubble fields in the starlight and they all looked thick and even.

He must have done pretty well, Louis said. I’m glad of it. He’s had bad years too. Everybody has.

But not this year, Addie said.

No. Not this year.

He died during church on a Sunday morning, Addie said. You know that.

Yes, I remember.

It was in August, it was hot in the sanctuary and Carl always wore a suit even in summer even on the hottest days. He thought it was what he had to do as a businessman, as an insurance agent. He had some notion about keeping up appearances. I don’t know why or for whom it mattered. But it mattered to him. Halfway into the preacher’s sermon I felt him leaning against me and I thought, He’s gone to sleep. Well, let him sleep. He’s tired. But then he slumped forward and bumped his head hard on the back of the pew in front of us before I could catch him. I reached for him but he just kind of folded forward out of the pew and dropped onto the floor. I bent over, I whispered to him, Carl. Carl. The people around us were watching him
and the man sitting next to him slid over in the pew to try to help me lift him up. The preacher stopped talking and other people got up and came to try to help. Call the ambulance, someone said. We got him lifted off the floor and laid him out on the pew. I tried breathing into his mouth and pumping his chest but he was already gone. The ambulance men came. Do you want to take him to the hospital? they said. I said, No, take him to the funeral home. The coroner will have to come before we can move him, they said. So we waited for the coroner and then finally he came and pronounced Carl dead.

The ambulance took him over to the funeral home and Gene and I followed them in the car. The funeral director left us with him in the back room where it was sort of formal and quiet, not the room where they do the embalming. I said I didn’t want him embalmed. Gene didn’t want him embalmed either. He was home from college for the summer. So we sat in the room with his father’s body. Gene wouldn’t touch him. I bent over his face and kissed him. He was already cold by then and his eyes wouldn’t stay shut. It was eerie and strange and very still in the room. Gene never did touch him. He went out of the room and I stayed there for a couple of hours and pulled a chair up beside him
and leaned over and held his hand and thought of all the times that had seemed good between us. And eventually I told him good-bye and got the director and told him we were finished for now and that we wanted his body cremated and made the arrangements. It was all too sudden. I was in some kind of trance. I think I was just in shock.

You would be. Of course, Louis said.

But even now I can see it all clearly and feel that kind of otherworldliness, the sense of moving in a dream and making decisions that you didn’t know you had to make, or if you were sure of what you were saying.

Gene was terribly upset by it. He wouldn’t talk about it though. He was like his father in that. Neither one of them ever talked about things. Gene stayed here for a week then went back to college and was allowed into his apartment early and he stayed there the rest of the summer. It would have been better if we could have helped each other but that didn’t happen. I don’t think I tried too hard myself. I wanted him to stay but I could see it wasn’t helping either one of us. We were just avoiding each other and when I tried to talk to him about his father he said, Nevermind, Mom. It doesn’t matter now. Of course it did matter. He had a great buildup of anger and resentment toward Carl and
I don’t think he’s gotten free of it to this day. It’s partly what affects his connection with Jamie. He seems to be repeating what happened between him and his own father.

You can’t fix things, can you, Louis said.

We always want to. But we can’t.