Beach Music (102 page)

“Everything’s breaking up. It’s coming apart,” she whispered desperately, as I lifted her off the bed. She felt weightless and tiny, no larger than a loaf of bread. Her legs collapsed when her feet touched the cold linoleum floor and I lifted her from beneath her
armpits and carried her like a rag doll to the bathroom. But as I placed her on the toilet, I saw and smelled the trail of diarrhea left in her path across the hospital room floor. Her insides seemed to fall out as she vomited and sprayed diarrhea everywhere. Tears flooded down her cheeks and she whimpered in humiliation and pain.

“Do the best you can, Mama, and I’ll come back for you in a minute,” I said, and I shut the bathroom door after clearing the vomit off her once again. I ripped the sheets and blankets off her bed and changed them quickly. With another towel, I cleaned the trail of puddling excrement from the floor and disinfected it with Lysol. I scrubbed the walls clean of vomit, scrubbed myself, and then hurled a bundle of foul laundry out into the hall. Then I knocked softly on the door, got control of the panic and the disgust in my voice, and said, “You okay, Mama? Everything under control?”

“Could you bathe me, son?” she asked.

“It’d be a pleasure, Mama.”

“I stink. I’m a mess.”

“That’s why they invented soap.”

I got the hot water going and placed Lucy beneath the showerhead. The water healed something inside her and she moaned with pleasure as I soaped her down from head to foot, not feeling a bit odd that it was my mother’s own nakedness I was moving over with my hands. As I washed her hair, small islands of it came out in my hands and I laid them like linen on a towel rack just outside the shower.

When I had dried her off, I put one of her pink turbans over her head and placed a fresh hospital gown on her body. I brushed her teeth gently and let her wash her mouth out with mouthwash again and again until the taste of vomit was gone. I touched her cheeks and throat with drops of White Shoulders perfume, the essence of Lucyhood to me.

When I returned her to her bed, she was already asleep. There were spots where I had not cleaned up completely and this time I went over the entire room from top to bottom and it sparkled when I finished. I arranged the flowers differently, bringing them closer to the bed. I wanted her to awake to the smell of roses and lilies and I
even thought about sprinkling the last clear plastic bag of chemotherapy with her perfume.

An hour later, I was content at last that there was no trace of Lucy’s violent sickness left in the room and I lay myself down, exhausted, on the cot. The moonlight on my face surprised me, and out the window the Southern stars that were written in the sky like the alphabet above a blackboard confronted me. Their light seemed familiar, comradely. I raised myself up on my elbow and looked out toward the river, which repeated the stars in perfect mimicry like a piece of backlit sheet music. I longed to be freed from all responsibility, to withdraw from all human connections, to hide out in that run-down cabin down the Edisto that could not be reached by postman or car, to live on what could be found in the forest or grown in the clearings or trapped in the river. Then I thought of Shyla. Her memory sharpened its knives against my heart, and there was only agony in its echo and encore. Within me, Shyla was sea sound and wind song. Staring at those stars, I made a constellation out of Shyla’s pretty face. She haunted me with light.

Again and again, I sought the cool side of the pillowcase and tried vainly to find a comfort zone somewhere on that unfamiliar, lumpy cot. I tried to hear Lucy’s breathing and could only make out the raw choir of insects calling to each other through the vast fields of grass. Finally, I sat up in the old despair of insomnia and saw the moonlight crossing over my mother’s exhausted face. Her eyes were open and she was looking at the night sky too.

“I thought it was over last night,” Lucy said, her lips chapped and feverish. “If I’d had a gun I’d have pulled the trigger myself.”

“I’d’ve been happy to do it for you,” I said. “I’ve never seen anybody so sick.”

“I’ll be grateful when it’s just me and the cancer again,” Lucy said. “This other stuff was made in factories. Leukemia might be killing me but at least it’s my own recipe.”

“You’re going to be just fine, Mama,” I said.

“I’m not,” Lucy replied. “It’s sweet how all my sons pretend I’m going to walk away from this. What’s interesting is that I thought I’d be more afraid than I am. Oh, sometimes the fear nearly doubles me
up. But mostly I feel a great sense of relief, of resignation. I feel a part of something vast. I was just looking at the moon. Look at it, Jack. It’s almost full tonight and I’ve always known what the moon was doing and what phase it was in even if I wasn’t paying attention. When I was a girl, I thought the moon was mountain born like me. I can barely remember what my mama’s face looked like, Jack. But she was a sweet woman born to too much trouble. She once showed me and my brother the full moon. She told us about the man in the moon and how everyone claimed they could see a man’s face if they stared hard enough. But she had never seen him. Her mother had told her that there was a lady in the moon that very few people ever got to see. It took patience to see her because she was shy about her beauty. She had a shining crown of hair and a perfect profile. The lady in the moon was seen from the side and she was as pretty as those women you see in cameos in jewelry shops in Asheville. You can only see her when the moon’s coming up to full. She doesn’t show herself to everyone. But once you see her, you never even think about the man in the moon again.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell us that story?” I asked.

“I just remembered it. Memories of my past keep flooding in. I’ve no control over them. My poor brain seems to be in a hurry to think everything it can before the end,” she said. “My mind feels like a museum that takes in every painting it’s offered. I can’t control the flow.”

“It sounds kind of nice,” I suggested.

“Help me with something, Jack.”

“Be glad to, Mama. If I can.”

“Since I’ve never died before, I don’t know how to do it right,” Lucy said. “I think I know what to say to Dr. Pitts, because he sees me through such a fog of love that he’ll never know who I really am. But it’s different with you boys. I put you through tests and made you jump through hoops that made your lives hard when they didn’t have to be. I didn’t know that my ignorance could hurt my kids like it did. Because I saw such awful things as a kid, I thought all I had to do was keep your bellies filled and enough clothes on your backs so you wouldn’t hurt during the wintertime. I didn’t know the first thing about psychology. Shoot, I was over forty before I knew the
word started with a p. Psychology was the one animal in the forest I’d never heard tell of. I could track a deer or hunt bears with dogs or wait for a mountain lion to come back to its lair, but how do you set a trap for psychology, for something you can’t see or know? I raised five pretty boys who all seem unhappy to me because something was cracked or missing in our family. Everyone seems mad at me. But my errors were made in the act of trying out the high wire. Every time I tried something it was the first time I ever did it. I was a girl who had to learn everything on the run. Trial and error was the only school I went to.”

“You did great, Mama.”

“I want to thank you for something else,” she said.

“No need to,” I assured her.

“I never thanked you for teaching me how to read,” she said.

“I didn’t know I did,” I answered.

“When you came home from the first grade, you made me listen to everything you learned in school each day. You made me sit down with you while you did your homework.”

“All kids do that,” I said.

“See Spot run. Run, Spot. Run. Run,” she remembered.

“The plot wasn’t very good.”

“I lived in terror that someone would find out,” my mother said. “You were so patient with me, Jack. I was too embarrassed to even thank you.”

“A pleasure, Mama. Just like everything else about you.”

“Then why’s everybody so mad?”

“Because we can’t bear to think about you dying,” I said. “Not one of us can process that one piece of information without going absolutely berserk.”

“Can I help you with it, Jack?” she asked.

“Don’t do it. Stay here. Get off that train,” I said.

“That train stops for everyone,” Lucy said.

“Ginny Penn’s been dying for twenty years,” I said. “She’s still around.”

“Couldn’t kill that girl with a stick,” Lucy said, smiling. “Lord, me and Ginny Penn had some fights that Lee and Grant were glad they missed. Did you and Shyla fight much?”

“I don’t think we fought much at all, Mama,” I said. “We seemed to know what each other was thinking all the time. She seemed just like me in a lot of ways. Do you think Shyla killed herself because I made her unhappy, Mom?”

“No, of course I don’t. You two were crazy about each other. She was hearing the voices that killed her when she was a little girl. John Hardin hears those same voices. There’s a kind of songbird too pretty to fly with the crows and the starlings. The other birds attack it in flocks and tear it apart when it starts to sing. Nothing soft endures. Nature loathes meekness and goodness. Shyla got hurt early and deep. You kept her from the bridge as long as you could, son.”

“You think she and John Hardin’re alike?”

“Same tribe. Both of them so full of love it causes an imbalance. They fall over with the unbearable weight of it. The fall becomes what they do best. They grow accustomed to great odds. Love floods them, overwhelms them, and makes them impossible to be around. They need love in equal proportion to what they throw off. Everyone disappoints them. Eventually, they die of the cold. They can never find the right angel.”

“I’m a cold man, Mama,” I said. “There’s something about me that chills anyone who tries to get close to me. I’ve known women who almost suffered from frostbite after we’ve spent a weekend together. I don’t want it to be that way. But even when I’m most aware of it, I’m helpless to do anything about it. I’ve told Leah that I think that love is another thing that has to be taught. I think it can be divided into parts, numbered, and named to make its mastery easier. I don’t think I was taught it, Mama. I think it might have bypassed you and Dad. Everyone talks about love all the time. It’s like the weather. But how does a man like me learn to do it? How do I unlock those pipes and jets where it lies in the deepest part of me? If I knew how to do it, Mom, I’d let everybody have their fair share. I’d spread it around and I wouldn’t skimp for anyone. But no one taught me the steps to that dance. No one broke it into parts. I think the only way I can love is in secret. There’s a deep, sourceless river I can tap into when no one else is near. But because it lies hidden and undiscovered, I can’t lead expeditions to it. So I love
strangely and obliquely. My love becomes a kind of guesswork. It brings no refreshment nor eases any pain.”

“Leah. You adore Leah. Everyone knows that. Especially the child.”

“But I’m not sure she feels it. And is my adoration the love that others talk about? The danger will come when she tries to love a man with a love that isn’t real. If it isn’t, then her children will have to suffer from the same masquerade. But, except with Leah, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know what it is, Mama. I don’t know what it feels like or looks like or where to find it.”

“It’s something that doesn’t take to worry very well. You can’t handle it too much. You let love be and it’ll find its own way in its own time.”

“It doesn’t work that way for me.”

“Love any way you can, Jack,” Lucy said. “I don’t think you’re very good talking about it. It comes easier to us girls. You get tongue-tied and scared every time the subject comes up.”

“It avoids me,” I said. “I can never say what I mean about it. I think about love all the time. Why can’t there be a definition of it? Nine or ten words that sum it all up, that could be repeated over and over again until it became clear.”

“You want to teach Leah about it?” Lucy whispered. “Is that it?”

“Yes—and I can’t. I don’t have a clue,” I admitted.

“You don’t need words, son. You’ve got all the equipment. Tell her love is cleaning vomit off your mother’s gown and bed, cleaning diarrhea from a hospital floor. Flying five thousand miles when you hear your mother’s sick. Tell her love is finding a very sick brother on the Edisto River and bringing him back without hurting him; bringing a drunk father home a hundred times during your teen years. Tell Leah it’s raising a little girl alone. Love’s action, Jack. It isn’t talk and it never has been. You think these doctors and nurses won’t know you love me when they see what you’ve done tonight? Think I don’t know it, Jack?”

“I like it when I’ve got procedures to follow,” I said. “When I’m moving around with something real to do.”

“You’ll have your hands full in the next few weeks,” Lucy said. “I’m starting to run on empty. Time’s short, Jack. The cancer’s spread to my organs. It’s everywhere now.”

“Does believing in God help any?”

“Hell,” she said. “Believe me when I tell you it’s the only thing that helps at all.”

Both of us laughed and I propped Lucy up on pillows so we could watch the dawn break together. “There it is again. Talk about dependable.”

“Glad to see last night take off,” I said.

“I’ll be going home this weekend,” Lucy said. “No, no. Don’t try to talk me out of it. They’ve done what they can for me here. I’ll hire nurses as I need them. I want to die listening to the ocean. I’d also like all my boys around me. All of them.”

“John Hardin’ll have to do some fast talking up at the state hospital,” I said. “He’s presently the most famous crazy person in the state.”

“John Hardin isn’t crazy,” Lucy said, her head turned toward the light out of the east. “He’s just his mama’s boy. He thought if he hid me good enough, then death wouldn’t know where to find me.”

“Wish it worked that way,” I said.

Lucy said, “Maybe it does. You boys didn’t give it a chance.”

So my mother returned to the Isle of Orion to live out the time allotted her. Though we all knew that Lucy was complicated, unknowable, and difficult, none of us knew exactly how courageous a woman she was until she began the business of dying. Daily, she gave us lessons in the art of dying well. Her house on the beach filled up with friends who dropped by to make their farewells and discovered, to their surprise, that they had come to a house of great joy. Though she may have had many regrets about her origins, Lucy had discovered most of the secrets that the South sugarcoated its ladies with and she charmed her visitors with her vivaciousness. Mama had learned that being nice summed up every book of etiquette ever written or every code of law passed down by word of mouth.