Roxanna Slade Part 25

Simon, who had been upright behind him, put out his enormous left hand and held Palmer's shoulder.

Not looking back Palmer reached up his own right hand and set it beneath Simon's palm.

The options were exploratory surgery to see how much of the ma.s.s could be removed, a course of

radiation or no action whatever.

When Dr. Root finished, Palmer and Simon both were looking at me. So the doctor faced me too.

I suddenly thought Lord, Palmer doesn't understand and can't answer. Simon won't. I've got to speak now.

But no, Palmer finally said "Number three" and held up three fingers.

I think we all believed he was deluded. But again before I could know my thoughts and speak, Palmer shook three fingers in the doctor's face and said "Number three."

It was Simon that saved us, though what a salvation. He looked to me and said "No action, Miss Anna. He's picking the third choice." Simon was clearly ready to head home.

That at least gave me something final to ask the doctor. I said "What exactly are our chances with this--with each of the choices?"

Dr. Root said "I'd be lying if I didn't say "Slender or none" in every case." He was speaking straight at me. Palmer might as well have ceased to exist with the last word the doctor had said in his direction. "Mr. Slade might get a few extra months with surgery or radiation. If he just goes home, he might have a year."

With all the hardness I'd lived through, it was still way past incredible to me that one trained human in the business of mercy had said such words to live and breathing other creatures from the very same species. I didn't doubt his honesty, just the composition and purpose of his soul. And I sat there dumb, forcing that news down my own mind's gullet.

While I waited Palmer took his hand out of Simon's giant shelter and traced a design on the back of my hand. It seemed to be a circle with a small repeated dot in the center. He drew it again and again, no more words. Then he stopped and pointed behind him to Simon.

So I said "Simon, help us out of here now." I don't know what I meant except maybe Pick up my poor husband and me this instant and fly to the moon, the farther side.

Even that cold doctor looked up into Simon's half-blind gaze.

Though Simon had long since discarded his eye patch and though his doctor had finally st.i.tched the

empty socket shut, the huge face boiled with careful strength and the power to flatten whatever it chose to remove from its path. When he'd held the doctor's attention long enough, Simon said to him softly "We're going to take Mr. Slade to his own home right now, thank you, Doctor. One of us three will call you as soon as we know what's the right thing to do. That may take us awhile. This is one good man." He'd never lifted his hand off Palmer. It was Palmer he meant. For whatever knotted incalculable reason, Simon Walton meant to save him.

But it turned out to be the third choice after all. The doctor had called it no action whatever. There was no cutting, there were no burning rays, but there were real acts, and they went on for months in Palmer's own home with his people around him. I hesitate to call the invention of television an unmixed blessing, though it's been my personal college education; but Palmer's last months came just when TV sets were getting affordable. Completely on my own I made the decision to invest in one at an after-Christmas sale, and it brought Palmer--and all of us really--a good deal of peace in those hard months.

It appeared that Palmer's deafness hadn't got any worse and that his eyesight was fair for a man his age. So once Simon got him washed and dressed every morning, the two of them would sit in front of that big old cabinet-TV and stay till you'd have thought they'd go into fits or start screaming. But no, they'd laugh a good deal and point at the screen frequently, though Palmer almost never said words now.

The Jackie Gleason show was his absolute favorite. He'd watch that with me and Simon and Dinah, and he'd always beam with silent contentment. When I'd say that I hoped Jackie did my favorite of his many characters--the Poor Soul-- Palmer would nod at me fiercely without a word.

The only show I recall him actually speaking about was Liberace. One night when Liberace's boneless hands had played through a lovely piece by candlelight and he'd turned to the camera with that creepy cat's smile of his and started talking to the audience in his slick mortician's voice, Palmer faced me as if he were utterly normal again and said "Anna, can't something be done for him?"

It was the last time Palmer called my name. And

he'd done so while making a kind inquiry about an unfortunate fellow creature, a fact I continue to think about.

That happened at the frozen end of February. From then on the only words he would say anywhere near me were "Where are my mother and father please?" Miss Olivia was alive of course up by the river. Dinah would sometime pay her short visits when I couldn't get away, but the major had been gone forever.

So I'd tell him "Palmer, they're all right without us. They send you their love." And that would mostly calm him--so much so that soon he'd gone entirely mute. After that it was only another few days before he lapsed into frequent long naps and finally one deep unbroken coma that slid into death so painlessly we never heard him pa.s.s nor knew he was gone till Simon woke me at four one morning.

By then of necessity Palmer and I were sleeping apart. After Christmas when he'd really ceased to know me steadily, he found it hard to sleep in our usual bed. Maybe by then he thought I was a stranger or maybe he needed the extra s.p.a.ce to think his last thoughts, mute though they were. So Simon and I had fixed up August's old room--Palmer in August's bed, low to the floor, and Simon on an iron bed of Muddie's in the farthest corner.

Not long after that, when Simon woke me on a warm night near dawn, the first thing I thought was "Spring starts today." And so it did. It was March 21/, had been since midnight.

But what Simon said as he pointed toward the other room was "Oh Miss Anna, Palmer's cool to the touch."

I'd noticed weeks before, when Palmer got too blind and weak to walk safely and Simon carried him most everywhere, Simon had gone back to calling his old boss-man and boyhood friend by his first name--Palmer, the name they'd used in a thousand country baseball games up by the river. Though Palmer was not an old man by any means, he'd been such a sober responsible soul that there were very few people left who addressed him familiarly, and Simon was the last one.

Tired and stunned as I was so close to daybreak, I understood that cool to the touch was Simon's try at telling me gently that

Palmer was gone. I found my robe and slippers, and we went back toward him.

Cool is what he was, though his limbs were soft and movable still.

I looked at him a long time till I'd finally convinced myself he died calmly. Then I put his clenched fists under the cover and kissed his long-lashed eyes that Simon had already closed. I fully realized that he'd died on the morning of his mother's birthday. But I didn't mention that.

And Simon bent to kiss Palmer's forehead. Then I went to the hall phone and called August Slade. I let Dinah sleep as long as she could. She was near fourteen and didn't need one more deep sorrow any sooner than morning.

As I said that happened at the spring equinox. Shrubs, trees and bulbs were well on their way to full leaf and bloom. I noticed the fact most plainly at the funeral when I first realized that spring this year was more than usually welcome. I and the children could deal with their father's death in longer brighter days than if he'd died in winter. Neither August nor Dinah had showed any signs of inheriting my tendency to dark depressions, and I'd been stable for seven years.

Still I watched us all, and the sky, for signs and omens we should try to antic.i.p.ate and nip in the bud. Again there was no real treatment for depression except electric shock followed by awful seizures that sometimes broke your neck or limbs and always wiped your memory out. But awful as the shocks and seizures were, I'd have taken them gladly to escape the tunnel I'd known so well. The thought of my son or daughter in that darkness was a constant worry.

They made it very strongly through the next weeks however and took many burdens off my tired shoulders. It turned out Palmer had eased most burdens before he died. He must have had some premonition of the ma.s.s that killed him. For some reason anyhow six months before his diagnosis, he'd secretly made a detailed will and left a long letter to August in his lockbox. It contained a full set of suggestions for his funeral and some other advice. So August arranged the funeral with the slim comfort of knowing he'd done his father's wishes.

A little to my surprise, Palmer asked to be

buried at the old Slade place by Larkin and Major and all those other vanished ancestors including the three children his mother had lost too early. His older half-brothers were buried elsewhere by then with their distant wives. He'd scarcely seen them since early childhood.

Miss Olivia was on the front steps to face us as the hea.r.s.e pulled up the now overgrown alley to the tall immortal house itself. One match could have ended it centuries ago, and there were no dogs to greet all arrivals. But here it stood with its main present occupant, immortal herself.

She was ninety years old, had turned ninety just two days ago as Palmer died. But she stood there straight as a young green tree, and she had no need to hold the stair railings to her left and right. Her hair had whitened in a few scattered strands. Still as we stepped out of the car to face her, it looked dark as ever in the fresh March light.

For an instant I thought I can't bear this. Now this can finally kill me. But I knew that was wrong. In recent years Miss Olivia and I had kept our ties in clean cool order, partly by almost never meeting but mainly by a silent understanding that--as Palmer aged--he needed both of us, not one or the other. So I went on toward her.

And when she leaned her dry cheek down to meet my lips, she said "You know you had the world's best boy?"

August was holding my left elbow, but I knew the boy she meant was Palmer, and I said "Yes ma'm. I did. I know I did. And I'm thanking you for him."

All the pallbearers had been picked by Palmer--six Negro men he'd known since birth. They each looked big enough to carry the coffin in their sole arms, but Simon was bigger than all the rest. Our young little preacher read the burial service. And as in olden days when people were stronger than they've been since, we didn't leave the grave till two other black men--both old but able--had shoveled enough sandy dirt in the hole to cover the coffin lid.

When I finally had to look away, I glanced to the house. It had changed not a speck since the day I first saw it, despite the toll of years and deaths. For a moment that felt too hard to bear-- the fact that dry unpainted boards could outlast

Lark and Major and Palmer and all their outright gifts and cravings. I think I might have gone straight to the car if my eye hadn't suddenly found relief.

There in the absolute center of the porch to my real surprise stood Mally Shearin in an immaculate blue and white maid's uniform.

She'd long since moved up North, I thought. Had she come just for this?

In any case when Mally met my look, she gave a slow deep nod with her head and then a calm smile as welcome as dawn on troubled seas. After that we entered the house for one more ceremonious meal, bountiful and splendidly cooked by Mally and Miss Olivia herself who'd still not surrendered a single ch.o.r.e to age and old bones.

I spent the next few weeks tending to business too small for August and straining to keep Dinah cheerful and upright. It initially shocked my sister, but one of the first things I undertook was clearing all Palmer's clothes from the house. I well knew that the garments of a lost loved one are generally treated as holy or haunted anyhow for years to come. But practical as Palmer was and eager as I was to sidestep melancholy, I convinced myself it would be a sin to let good clothes hang slack till they wound up in some moth's belly. What I could, I gave to men Palmer's size whom I knew he respected. Since Leela seemed so sensitive about them, I wrapped all the rest (shoes included) and sent them to the Salvation Army in Durham postpaid. Sad to say all of it was too small for Simon.

Palmer was never a sentimental man, so his personal effects were two slim handsful. August took the gold pocket watch and the hearing aid. Major had carried the watch through his war, and it still kept good time. Dinah asked for the little white bust of George Was.h.i.+ngton which I'd bought Palmer at Mount Vernon on our honeymoon. It was five inches high, made of powdered marble and had quietly dissolved through the damp long decades till now General Was.h.i.+ngton looked jowly but smiling, more like his chubby Martha than his own stern self.

I thought of asking Simon to drive out to Montezuma for me and find those two gold bands

that Palmer had flung to the wind--I'd have worn his band on a chain near my heart--but then I recalled again that Palmer had made the choice to fling them. So there they are still unless some wandering hunter has found them.

The only sizable article left was his personal knife. It was surely not gold, probably not even silver though it was sided with mother of pearl. But Palmer had used it every day since the major gave it to him at sixteen. It opened out to a really serious implement nine inches long and always a little scary to me. So I gave it to Simon, silently hoping he'd use it as peacefully as Palmer mostly had. Beyond that, Simon of course had his small fund to draw on; but he hadn't yet touched it, just lived on the wages Palmer paid him quarterly for work and that I gladly paid for the faultless final care he gave to the boss who'd required his whole left eye for some mysterious reason three years ago.

It turned out Palmer had quietly done better than I knew with his timber. And I had a fund as well, certainly not riches but enough to see me through to the grave and Dinah through college if she wanted college and we managed wisely. It was not a trust exactly but a combination of life insurance, government bonds, some electric power stock, certificates of deposit and--neatly stored in Palmer's bank lockbox--to my amazement a five-pound sack of modern gold coins that he'd invested in, in case of disaster. It seemed entirely typical that the son of a Confederate officer would gravely distrust all subsequent currency but gold. There were also the deeds to hundreds of acres of timber land that Palmer had partly inherited and slowly acquired through the years of his own hard work in all weathers.

So here I was at age fifty-two, strong apparently as any grown bear, decent to look at if still no beauty, the mistress of a s.p.a.cious house that was clean as any hospital operating room and in sole charge of a good deal more than I'd dreamed we owned or ever would. August joked that "the widow Slade" would be a nice catch for any man on the loose at middle age with a taste for good cooking. I allowed that was true, though I was too old-time in my ways to spend more than three seconds thinking of any man to fill

the place that Palmer had vacated in my mind.

--Heart and body as well. If anything I've said anywhere here gives the impression that Palmer Slade didn't earn my love every day of his life (with the stated exceptions) and that I didn't feel and return that love from the depths of my being, except for the years of blank torment, then I've badly misstated myself and I'm sorry. Not of course that love has to be earned.

Isn't that the whole point of mankind's inventing such a scarce and costly trait? The sight and presence or just the mental odor of some other person presses love from your heart, and you donate it freely whether your object wants it or not. I've had the great fortune all my life not to have felt real love for any person that didn't seem to want it--my brother Ferny, Larkin and Palmer, my children and Wilton. Not only did they want what I offered, they all but ran to take it from me even at times when I felt parched dry.

I'm not especially speaking of love that has a powerful physical side, though I confess that in every case I mention above there were instants when the lay of a strand of hair on a brow or the dry little tuck in the midst of a lip seemed like the total of what they were and demanded some direct form of honor from all the neighboring flesh in the room, then and there that moment. I loved, and love, every one of those names but Palmer Slade's in the coolness of kins.h.i.+p that was still strong enough to lift granite blocks if a block had fallen and trapped their leg. It was only with Palmer that I knew, and recall with increasing plainness the older I get, what women of my time and place simply never discussed. We even lacked the words to convey it.

And forty-odd years of watching television and reading occasional risqu'e books haven't taught me how to describe one of the better things Palmer and I built together. But to do any justice to him and our marriage, I need to try. In telling about our honeymoon in Was.h.i.+ngton and our one trip to Wilmington, I've already tried to suggest the careful way Palmer helped me into the most private part of a woman's grown life. I've also told how at the time of our marriage all I knew about what s.e.x was for was children. I just

thought it was G.o.d's very peculiar invention for providing more humans to fill the ranks of the old and dead. Plus it did seem a little funny.

In fact to this day I still wonder what people think they are doing when they have s.e.xual relations using birth control. Not that I think such relations are wrong. By no means. Deep at the core I'm one of the least prudish persons I know. But what are two grown people of the opposite s.e.x--joined naked together--making for themselves, for their partner and the big world around them if it's not a baby? Is it anything more than a game, a dance or a private inexpensive pleasure trip? I've never known anybody in person who has thought out a sensible answer. And the only impression you get from TV and reading is that it's a way to have a quick patch of fun and in the process gain some kind of upper hand in whatever comes next in your time together.

Without going into more personal detail than the world could use, I will say that the physical pleasure part was never uppermost for me. I don't know whether that was the result of Palmer's not being a perfect rider. No young woman that I knew in my time had ever been told to take an active part in the whole process, so Palmer may well have felt the same thing about me. If so he never mentioned it. And if he did have that one spell of using a woman other than his wife, he never once suggested that it was somehow caused by coldness from me. If he hinted at any cause at all, it was him having more in the way of need than he could ask one woman to bear.

No, what I think Palmer Slade and I built with our bodies--and it was a building long years in the making, a home as real as any Mount Vernon--was a kind of separate life that we lived in the dark with no other watchers. It was a life with its own foreseeable motions andwitha language that, even if my husband and I spoke scarcely five hundred words in all the years we shared each other's bodies, could calm our daytime grudges and fears and make our normal daylit faces not only easier to meet but to welcome. And even in the early stages of my torment before my body hurt too much to touch, the nearness of a soul as good as Palmer Slade's--a soul I could feel--sometimes served as a momentary balm.

And once I'm dead I want both August and Dinah to know that their father and I went on meeting, even once or twice in his final weeks when all I really had left to give was my aging body that he still seemed to want. Even the final time he walked into my bedroom in the dark, when I wasn't certain he knew my name, he had the same kind hands and bones that had come to me first in the upper reaches of the old Slade house when I was as innocent as any spring leaf and he'd just lost a younger brother that all the world had loved more than him.

I hope I managed to wipe that feeling out of Palmer's mind before he died. I surely worked at it. By then Larkin Slade scarcely existed in my full memory. It was Palmer whose every touch earned what I gave him, if that was anything to his stunned mind.

So no, though I had more than forty years left, the thought of yoking up again with some old codger, slack in the hams, barely creased my mind. In fairness I'll state that no old codger or any other man ever showed that kind of interest in Roxanna Slade again. It didn't surprise me nor turn me bitter toward all humanity as it has with one or two older women I've known.

What it's mainly done is make me wonder how some of the creatures I see on real-life television--women way into their seventies and eighties--will trek to Florida or fly to Las Vegas, put polyester pants on their withered legs, glue on eyelashes and cake their wattles with clown makeup just to win a year or so in a mobile-home retirement village with some parched scoundrel and his loose false teeth whom they never so much as glimpsed in his naked youth when he might still have been steered by nothing but the sight of you and your clean smell or the promise of your hair.

When I'd lived through the shock of Palmer's departure and had laid all the business matters to rest, I very slowly began to see that a sizable job had been left for me to do. Palmer had partly left it to me, but I had mainly postponed it for myself. The job was Dinah our only daughter and the one soul who still needed me for more than occasional visits. I mentioned her being nearly fourteen when Palmer died. With Simon she was my main other

standby through that hard time, a quiet strong help with a man she'd loved as much as daughters ever love their fathers.

Toward the end Palmer had entirely forgotten who she was and often responded as if she were some attractive maiden to whom he might have paid some court if he'd been younger. He understood that he was old, so he never was less than a thorough gentleman in her presence. He would call her Maylee, a name I'd never heard in real life. I suspected he'd got it from one of those country music stations he'd learned to like on the radio. At first I thought the name was wrong for a child as quiet and backstanding as Dinah, but Palmer persisted in calling her that, and I let it go. At the supper table he'd urge her to eat--"May, you eat like a bird."

She'd say "Birds eat every minute of the day worse than pigs."

He'd laugh and say "Like a wren. You eat like a wren." Then he'd draw what he remembered of a wren on the tablecloth with just his finger. It had long since ceased to look like a bird.

Palmer's eyes were affected by then. He could see TV if he sat back from it. But without his bifocals, he scarcely knew his daughter.

If anything, Dinah was large for her age--already five foot eight and well filled out, though not the least plump. By then she was in the first year of high school, the ninth grade. I never kept her home, not once, to help me out. And she brought back gratifying report cards that proved her diligence. So with everything else I had to do, I naturally thought she was on a safe track and could manage without my full attention as she'd had to for so much of her life. Busy as I was though, I was wrong not to guess that--at her age and hungry as she was for serious care--Dinah might set out to find attention on her own. Or to take the first likable offer she met with.

That came from a neighbor, a boy who'd spent his entire life--and Dinah's--a quarter mile up the road from our house. He was nearly two years older. But because of rheumatic fever in childhood, he'd stayed home a year and was in Dinah's grade. His name was Harley Beecham. He was tall for his age, and across his brown eyes was a kind of invisible band of mist. He wasn't