Queen Bee Goes Home Again (37 page)

Aunt Glory nodded. “Y'all go. But please come back. I need to ask you about the family plot up here and all.”

“Don't worry,” Tommy soothed. “This won't take long.”

I petted my cousins on the way past, then we headed for the Alzheimer's wing. The staff were busy getting Uncle Bedford onto a stretcher when we walked in, but Daddy wouldn't let go of his brother's hand.

Unshaven, the weight of the world in his face, Daddy told us, “He went without me. Just left, without even telling me he was going.” Tears overflowed his red-rimmed eyes. “How am I going to manage without him? I don't even know who I am, without him here to remind me.”

Tommy wrapped Daddy in a fierce hug. “You're going to be okay,” he said through his own tears for our father. “Lin and I are here. We'll take care of you.”

Daddy went limp, pulling away but still gripping his little brother's cold hand. “Not always. And you don't know,” he stated flatly.

“Don't know what, Daddy?” I sat beside him and gently pried his fingers from Uncle Bedford's cold, waxy yellow ones, replacing my uncle's lifeless hand with mine.

Daddy was inconsolable. “What our life was like after Mama died. How I protected Bedford and Waring when Daddy got drunk. The boy I was then. The good things I did. The man I was with your mama in the beginning.” His mouth crumpled. “She loved me then. Before the women. She loved me then.”

So there had been other women. Hardly a shock. “It's okay, Daddy. We love you, too. And so does Miss Mamie. She just told me so.”

I stroked his arm as Tommy let go and faced him. “It's gonna be okay, General. I swear it. I'll come every morning, and you can tell me anything, no matter what, and I'll love you.”

“We both will,” I added.

But Daddy turned his face to the wall as if we'd both just disappeared. “You don't know. Nobody does. He was the last one.”

All our father's brothers had left him here, at the mercy of his fears and decaying mind.

Junior Finnegan and the undertakers arrived outside the door and transferred Uncle Bedford to the long body bag on their stretcher. When he was all zipped in, they added a furry blanket with the funeral home's logo at the center to cover the bag, then rattled off down the hall.

Daddy didn't seem to notice. He just sat there, frozen and unseeing. I wondered if he was catatonic from the shock.

Tommy took the electric razor from its charger by the sink. “Come on, Daddy. Let's get you all spiffed up for the day.”

Daddy didn't say anything, just sat there, totally passive, while Tommy lovingly shaved him, then wiped his face with a warm, damp towel. “That's the ticket,” my brother told him. “Now you're the man.” He wiped Daddy's hands, now limp.

I tried to rouse him. “Would you like me to get you a Blizzard, Daddy?” Sane or crazy, he never turned down a Blizzard from the DQ. Until this time.

He didn't respond.

Then, quick as lightning, he snatched my brother's wrist. “I want to go,” he snarled. “Do you hear me? I want to go!”

Tommy pried at Daddy's fingers in alarm. “Ouch, that hurts! General! Ten, hut!”

The fury in our father's face remained. “I want to go!”

“Go where, honey?” I begged, praying he'd let go of Tommy before he broke something. “Where do you want to go?”

He turned his anger on me. “You know. You all do, but you won't let me! I have to get out of here.” He went canny. “I have to have words with my wife. She's the one who put me here. I'll kill her, that's what I'll do. Knock her in the head.”

I stuck my head out into the hall and hollered, “Help! Haldol! Stat! Help!”

For once, the nurse was at her station. She unlocked a syringe from the meds cart, then double-timed it down the hall. I pulled her into the room. “He just went psychotic, won't let go of Tommy's arm.”

She nodded, then thrust the syringe into Daddy's thigh.

He sputtered for a few seconds, then went limp, his eyes as dead as his brother's.

Tommy reclaimed his wrist as the nurse and I laid Daddy onto the bed, then raised the sides.

“That'll put him out for the day,” she told me.

I hated having to drug him into oblivion. Hated, hated, hated it. But what other choice did we have?

I turned to Tommy, who was massaging his wrist. “Let me take you to the urgent care to make sure that's not broken.”

“No. It's okay. Everything works fine.”

I looked at Daddy, understanding what he'd said and why, which was disturbing, in itself. I knew what had sucked him back into madness. “He wants to die, too, and I can't blame him. Somewhere in there, he knows what he's become.” I exhaled heavily to stem the tears that collected in the back of my eyes. “Why didn't God take them both?”

Why
is the devil's trap,
Granny Beth whispered in my mind.

She must have been whispering to Tommy, too, because he tapped his skull and quoted her. “If you could put God in a box this big, He wouldn't be much of a God, now, would He?”

Seeing my distress, he shook his head. “Tearing yourself up about this will only make you crazy. What is, is. All we can do is deal with that.”

I nodded, aching inside, then went to the head of Daddy's bed to kiss his forehead. “I love you, Daddy,” I murmured into his ear. “So does Miss Mamie. And Tommy. We're all praying for God's mercy for you.”

Then I rose and hugged my brother, careful of his wrist. “Let's go home and tell Miss Mamie about Uncle B.”

Tommy nodded, hugging me back. “She was like a mother to him. She'll take it hard.”

“Not as hard as she will when we lose Daddy.” I had no idea what she'd do then.

We left to talk to Aunt Glory, then deliver the bad news to our mother.

 

Fifty-six

When we told Miss Mamie about Uncle Bedford, she stiffened, said it was a blessing for everyone, particularly him, then turned and went to her room.

I started after her, but Tommy grasped my elbow to hold me back. “Give her some time. Uncle B was like a son to her. We need to respect her privacy. When she's ready to talk about it, she will.”

I nodded. Once again, his wisdom surprised me. “You're right.”

That afternoon, we called Junior, who told us Aunt Glory had won out about burying Uncle B in the family plot by reminding her girls that he'd always wanted to be buried beside his long-dead mother. When that didn't convince them, she'd promised—in writing—that Patterson's Spring Hill could bury her in Atlanta when her time came. That sealed the deal with my status-conscious cousins.

So Uncle Bedford would be viewed (to avoid speculation about how he'd
really
died), then properly funeralized at Junior's, then finally laid to rest beside his beloved mother in the Breedlove burial section of Mimosa Branch Cemetery, along with our departed forebears from the past hundred seventy-five years.

Somehow, Daddy found out Junior was doing the funeral, then insisted on going to visitation, so we took a chance and brought him (heavily sedated) with us. Miss Mamie had been there since the doors were opened, sitting next to Aunt Glory and the girls while most of Mimosa Branch's old guard came to pay their respects, including both of the Mame's prayer chains and her garden club, along with a delegation from the Athletic Board of Georgia Tech and another from the Podiatry Association.

I'd worried what Daddy would do when he saw Miss Mamie, and sure enough, he took one look at her and wrenched free of us with superhuman strength, then strode over to her and grabbed her up from her seat before we could stop him.

Everybody in the room but us froze.

Fearing the worst, Tommy and I raced after him. But the moment our mother gained her feet, Daddy started singing softly in his wonderful baritone and dancing with her.

Before our eyes, the decades fell away.

Miss Mamie laid her head on his shoulder and followed his lead, calling him Mr. Samba, which made him smile. Across the room and back, he led her.

Then abruptly, he halted, confused. “Where's my wife?” The anger returned. “I need to have a word with her.”

I whisked Miss Mamie out into the hall and asked her to stay out of sight till we took him back to the Home. Then I went back in to help Tommy, who'd taken Daddy to the open casket to distract him.

Looking down at Uncle Bedford, Tommy said what most people say. “They did a good job with him, General, didn't they? He looks real natural.”

In a moment of lucidity, Daddy covered his brother's crossed hands with his own and said, “I wish I was in there with him.” Then he turned to the room and bellowed, “This is my baby brother.”

Everyone present tensed, but Daddy went on. “We used to blow up straw hats with firecrackers at the barber shop. And steal moonshine from Scruffy Gober's still, sweet as the corn it was made from. And run wild in the woods like little boys should. And hide together when our father came home drunk and mean. I loved Bedford like my own son. He made me proud. Five-letter man at Tech. Officer in the navy. Top of his class in podiatry school. And now he's gotten out of that hellhole before me.”

Daddy bent over, bracing his hands on his knees, and wept. “Gone, without me.”

My father, who never bent. My father, who never cried.

Everybody present looked away, except Miss Mamie.

From the hallway, she stared straight through Daddy, as if she could erase what was happening by ignoring it, but that didn't work. I could still see the shame and pity in her stoic expression.

Then I realized things could take a turn for the worse at any second. So I signaled Tommy, and the two of us all but dragged our father out of the other end of the room, slowly progressing toward the parking lot.

“Come on, Daddy,” Tommy soothed. “I'll take you home.”

“No you won't,” Daddy moaned. “You'll take me back to that place, that hell. I'll be alone.” He shook his head like a dog that needed to be put down. “How much longer do I have to stay there paying for my sins before I get to go to heaven?”

Tommy and I both almost fell apart, then and there.

We'd become the enemy. Dear Lord, we
were
the enemy.

But what choice did we have? We couldn't control him anymore. He was dangerous.

I hugged Daddy as we made our way toward my minivan. “It's going to be okay,” I lied. “It's going to be okay.”

The lines of grief in his face shifted to sly anger in the blink of an eye. Daddy demanded with hostility, “I want to come to the funeral. I have a right. He's my brother.” His muscles hardened. “Promise me I can come to the funeral, all of it, or I'll knock you both in the head.”

By now we were in the parking lot, closing in on my minivan.

“Promise me!” Daddy growled, his resistance firming.

I hit the key remote and unlocked the doors, then pressed the button to open the passenger-side sliding door.

The General balked. “I have to be at the funeral!”

“We can try, Daddy,” Tommy said, struggling to get Daddy into the backseat, then buckled up. “I promise, we'll try.”

Never mind that he was certifiably insane and homicidal. There were rules about funerals in the South. Uncle B was Daddy's brother, so he had a sacred right to be there (as long as he wasn't armed).

It would take more Haldol, but maybe we could manage it.

 

Fifty-seven

After what happened at visitation, Miss Mamie decided not to go to the funeral. She said she'd rather stay home and supervise the caterers the girls had hired for the reception at our house, but Tommy and I both knew she was doing it for Daddy, to make sure he didn't go off again when he saw her.

Uncle Bedford's girls didn't want Daddy anywhere near the funeral, but Aunt Glory put her foot down, hard, this time. She told them how the General had paid Uncle Bedford's tuition for Georgia Tech and podiatrists' school, then bought a lot for them to build their first house in Hanover West. She reminded her daughters that Daddy had been like a father to Bedford when their own started drinking, and how proud the General had been of his baby brother's accomplishments.

So, grudgingly, the girls agreed to let him come, but only if the General was zonked, which was a reasonable request under the circumstances.

We worked it out with the nursing home, and when we came to pick Daddy up the next morning, he was dressed and clean-shaven, but moved like a zombie when we helped him out of the wheelchair at the front of the Home.

The nurse motioned for me to stay behind as Tommy seated Daddy in the minivan in slow motion.

She handed me what looked like a pencil box. “Take this with you, in case he has another break. The syringe is all loaded and ready to go. It works like an EpiPen. Just jab it into his backside or his thigh, and he'll be out in no time.”

More
Haldol? “He's already out of it,” I protested. How much could he take? “We don't want to kill him, even though I know he'd thank us for it.”

The nurse shook her head. “It won't kill him. It'll just knock him out. But bring him back right away if you have to use it, so we can monitor his breathing.”

Please, Lord, don't let Daddy have another break. Have mercy. Give him peace.

I tucked the emergency sedative into my bag, then hurried to the driver's seat as Tommy closed the slider where Daddy sat like a zombie.

Wishing, wishing, wishing that things were different, but steeling myself for whatever happened.

Might as well accept things as they are,
my Granny Beth used to say.
Banging your head against it won't change things. It'll just give you a headache.

I surrendered the whole situation to God, then promptly picked it up again.