Cherry Oxendine is dying now, and everybody knows it. Everybody in town except maybe her new husband, Harold Stikes, although Lord knows he ought to, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. And it’s not like he hasn’t been told either, by both Dr. Thacker and Dr. Pinckney and also that hotshot young Jew doctor from Memphis, Dr. Shapiro, who comes over here once a week. “Harold just can’t take it in,” is what the head nurse in Intensive Care, Lois Hickey, said in the Beauty Nook last week. Lois ought to know. She’s been right there during the past six weeks while Cherry Oxendine has been in Intensive Care, writing down Cherry’s blood pressure every hour on the hour, changing bags on the IV, checking the stomach tube, moving the bed up and down to prevent bedsores, monitoring the respirator — and calling Rodney Broadbent, the respiratory therapist, more and more frequently. “Her blood gases is not by twenty-eight,” Lois said in the Beauty Nook. “If we was to unhook that respirator, she’d die in a day.”
“I would go on and do it then, if I was Harold,” said Mrs. Hooker, the Presbyterian minister’s wife, who was getting a permanent. “It is the Christian thing.”
“You wouldn’t either,” Lois said, “because she still knows him. That’s the awful part. She still knows him. In fact she peps right up ever time he comes in, like they are going on a date or something. It’s the saddest thing. And ever time we open the doors, here comes Harold, regular as clockwork. Eight o’clock, one o’clock, six o’clock, eight o’clock, why shoot, he’d stay in there all day and all night if we’d let him. Well, she opens her mouth and says Hi honey, you can tell what she’s saying even if she can’t make a sound. And her eyes get real bright and her face looks pretty good too, that’s because of the Lasix, only Harold don’t know that. He just can’t take it all in,” Lois said.
“Oh, I feel so sorry for him,” said Mrs. Hooker. Her face is as round and as flat as a dime.
“Well, I don’t.” Dot Mains, owner of the Beauty Nook, started cutting Lois Hickey’s hair. Lois wears it too short, in Dot’s opinion. “I certainly don’t feel sorry for Harold Stikes, after what he did.” Dot snipped decisively at Lois Hickey’s frosted hair. Mrs. Hooker made a sad little sound, half sigh, half words, as Janice stuck her under the dryer, while Miss Berry, the old-maid home demonstration agent waiting for her appointment, snapped the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine one by one, blindly, filled with somewhat gratuitous rage against the behavior of Harold Stikes. Miss Berry is Harold Stikes’s ex-wife’s cousin. So she does not pity him, not one bit. He got what’s coming to him, that’s all, in Miss Berry’s opinion. Most people don’t. It’s a pleasure to see it, but Miss Berry would never say this out loud since Cherry Oxendine is of course dying. Cherry Oxendine! Like it was yesterday, Miss Berry remembers how Cherry Oxendine acted in high school, wearing her skirts too tight, popping her gum.
“The doctors can’t do a thing,” said Lois Hickey.
Silence settled like fog on the Beauty Nook, on Miss Berry and her magazine, on Dot Mains cutting Lois Hickey’s hair, on little Janice thinking about her boyfriend, Bruce, and on Mrs. Hooker crying gently under the dryer. Suddenly, Dot remembered something her old granny used to say about such moments of sudden absolute quiet: “An angel is passing over.”
After a while, Mrs. Hooker said, “It’s all in the hands of God, then.” She spread out her fingers one by one on the tray, for Janice to give her a manicure.
AND AS FOR HAROLD Stikes, he’s not even considering God. Oh, he doesn’t interfere when Mr. Hooker comes by the hospital once a day to check on him — Harold was a Presbyterian in his former life — or even when the Baptist preacher from Cherry’s mama’s church shows up and insists that everybody in the whole waiting room join hands and bow heads in prayer while he raises his big red face and curly gray head straight up to Heaven and prays in a loud voice that God will heal these loved ones who walk through the Valley of Death and comfort these others who watch, through their hour of need. This includes Mrs. Eunice Sprayberry, whose mother has had a stroke, John and Paula Ripman, whose infant son is dying of encephalitis, and different others who drift in and out of Intensive Care following surgery or wrecks. Harold is losing track. He closes his eyes and bows his head, figuring it can’t hurt, like taking out insurance. But deep down inside, he knows that if God is worth His salt, He is not impressed by the prayer of Harold Stikes, who knowingly gave up all hope of peace on earth and Heaven hereafter for the love of Cherry Oxendine.
Not to mention his family.
He gave them up too.
But this morning when he leaves the hospital after his eight o’clock visit to Cherry, Harold finds himself turning left out of the lot instead of right toward Food Lion, his store. Harold finds himself taking Route 60 just south of town and then driving through those ornate marble gates that mark the entrance to Camelot Hills, his old neighborhood. Some lucky instinct makes him pull into the little park and stop there, beside the pond. Here comes his ex-wife, Joan, driving the Honda Accord he paid for last year. Joan looks straight ahead. She’s still wearing her shiny blonde hair in the pageboy she’s worn ever since Harold met her at Mercer College so many years ago. Harold is sure she’s wearing low heels and a shirtwaist dress. He knows her briefcase is in the backseat, containing lesson plans for today, yogurt, and a banana. Potassium is important. Harold has heard this a million times. Behind her, the beds are all made, the breakfast dishes stacked in the sink. As a home ec teacher, Joan believes that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The two younger children, Brenda and Harold Jr., are already on the bus to the Academy. James rides to the high school with his mother, hair wet, face blank, staring straight ahead. They don’t see Harold. Joan brakes at the stop sign before entering Route 60. She always comes to a complete stop, even if nothing’s coming. Always. She looks both ways. Then she’s gone.
Harold drives past well-kept lawn after well-kept lawn and lovely house after lovely house, many of them houses where Harold has attended Cub Scout meetings, eaten barbecue, watched bowl games. Now these houses have a blank, closed look to them, like mean faces. Harold turns left on Oxford, then right on Shrewsbury. He comes to a stop beside the curb at 1105 Cambridge and just sits there with the motor running, looking at the house. His house. The Queen Anne house he and Joan planned so carefully, down to the last detail, the fish-scale siding. The house he is still paying for and will be until his dying day, if Joan has her way about it.
Which she will, of course. Everybody is on her side: desertion. Harold Stikes deserted his lovely wife and three children for a redheaded waitress. For a fallen woman with a checkered past. Harold can hear her now. “I fail to see why I and the children should lower our standards of living, Harold, and go to the dogs just because you have chosen to become insane in midlife.” Joan’s voice is slow and amiable. It has a down-to-earth quality which used to appeal to Harold but now drives him wild. Harold sits at the curb with the motor running and looks at his house good. It looks fine. It looks just like it did when they picked it out of the pages of Southern Living and wrote off for the plans. The only difference is, that house was in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and this house is in Greenwood, Mississippi. Big deal.
Joan’s response to Harold’s desertion has been a surprise to him. He expected tears, recriminations, fireworks. He did not expect her calm, reasonable manner, treating Harold the way she treats the Mormon missionaries who come to the door in their black suits, for instance, that very calm, sweet, careful voice. Joan acts like Harold’s desertion is nothing much. And nothing much appears to have changed for her except the loss of Harold’s actual presence, and this cannot be a very big deal since everything else has remained exactly the same.
What the hell. After a while Harold turns off the motor and walks up the flagstone walk to the front door. His key still fits. All the furniture is arranged exactly the way it was arranged four years ago. The only thing that ever changes here is the display of magazines on the glass coffee table before the fireplace, Joan keeps them up to date. Newsweek, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, Gourmet. It’s a mostly educational grouping, unlike what Cherry reads — Parade, Coronet, National Enquirer. Now these magazines litter the floor at the side of the bed like little souvenirs of Cherry. Harold can’t stand to pick them up.
He sits down heavily on the white sofa and stares at the coffee table. He remembers the quiz and the day he found it, four years ago now although it feels like only yesterday, funny thing though he can’t remember which magazine it was in. Maybe Reader’s Digest. The quiz was titled “How Good Is Your Marriage?” and Harold noticed that Joan had filled it in carefully. This did not surprise him. Joan was so law abiding, such a good girl, that she always filled in such quizzes when she came across them, as if she had to, before she could go ahead and finish the magazine. Usually Harold didn’t pay much attention.
This time, he picked the magazine up and started reading. One of the questions said: “What is your idea of the perfect vacation? (a) a romantic getaway for you and your spouse alone; (b) a family trip to the beach; (c) a business convention; (d) an organized tour of a foreign land.” Joan had wavered on this one. She had marked and then erased “an organized tour of a foreign land.” Finally she had settled on “a family trip to the beach.” Harold skimmed along. The final question was: “When you think of the love between yourself and your spouse, do you think of (a) a great passion; (b) a warm, meaningful companionship; (c) an average love; (d) an unsatisfying habit.” Joan had marked “(c) an average love.” Harold stared at these words, knowing they were true. An average love, nothing great, an average marriage between an average man and woman. Suddenly, strangely, Harold was filled with rage.
“It is not enough!” He thought he actually said these words out loud. Perhaps he did say them out loud, into the clean hushed air-conditioned air of his average home. Harold’s rage was followed by a brief period, maybe five minutes, of unbearable longing, after which he simply closed the magazine and put it back on the table and got up and poured himself a stiff shot of bourbon. He stood for a while before the picture window in the living room, looking out at his even green grass, his clipped hedge, and the impatiens blooming in its bed, the clematis climbing the mailbox. The colors of the world fairly leaped at him — the sky so blue, the grass so green. A passing jogger’s shorts glowed unbearably red. He felt that he had never seen any of these things before. Yet in another way it all seemed so familiar as to be an actual part of his body — his throat, his heart, his breath. Harold took another drink. Then he went out and played nine holes of golf at the country club with Bubba Fields, something he did every Wednesday afternoon. He shot an 82.
By the time he came home for dinner he was okay again. He was very tired and a little lightheaded, all his muscles tingling. His face was hot. Yet Harold felt vaguely pleased with himself, as if he had been through something and come out of the other side of it, as if he had done a creditable job on a difficult assignment. But right then, during dinner, Harold could not have told you exactly what had happened to him that day, or why he felt this way. Because the mind will forget what it can’t stand to remember, and anyway, the Stikeses had beef Stroganoff that night, a new recipe that Joan was testing for the Junior League cookbook, and Harold Jr. had written them a funny letter from camp, and for once Brenda did not whine. James, who was twelve that year, actually condescended to talk to his father, with some degree of interest, about baseball, and after supper was over he and Harold went out and pitched to each other until it grew dark and lightning bugs emerged. This is how it’s supposed to be, Harold thought, father and son playing catch in the twilight.
Then he went upstairs and joined Joan in bed to watch TV, after which they turned out the light and made love. But Joan had greased herself all over with Oil of Olay, earlier, and right in the middle of doing it, Harold got a crazy terrified feeling that he was losing her, that Joan was slipping, slipping away.
But time passed, as it does, and Harold forgot that whole weird day, forgot it until right now, in fact, as he sits on the white sofa in his old house again and stares at the magazines on the coffee table, those magazines so familiar except for the date, which is four years later. Now Harold wonders: If he hadn’t picked up that quiz and read it, would he have even noticed when Cherry Oxen-dine spooned out that potato salad for him six months later, in his own Food Lion deli? Would the sight of redheaded Cherry Oxendine, the Food Lion smock mostly obscuring her dynamite figure, have hit him like a bolt out of the blue the way it did?
Cherry herself does not believe there is any such thing as co incidence. Cherry thinks there is a master plan for the universe, and what is meant to happen will. She thinks it’s all set in the stars. For the first time, Harold thinks maybe she’s right. He sees part of a pattern in the works, but dimly, as if he is looking at a constellation hidden by clouds. Mainly, he sees her face.
Harold gets up from the sofa and goes into the kitchen, suddenly aware that he isn’t supposed to be here. He could be arrested, probably! He looks back at the living room, but there’s not a trace of him left, not even an imprint on the soft white cushions of the sofa. Absentmindedly, Harold opens and shuts the refrigerator door. There’s no beer, he notices. He can’t have a Coke. On the kitchen calendar, he reads:
Harold Jr. to dentist, 3:30 p.m. Tues.
Change furnace filter 2/18/88 (James)
So James is changing the furnace filters now, James is the man of the house. Why not? It’s good for him. He’s been given too much, kids these days grow up so fast, no responsibilities, they get on drugs, you read about it all the time. But deep down inside, Harold knows that James is not on drugs and he feels something awful, feels the way he felt growing up, that sick flutter in his stomach that took years to go away.
Harold’s dad died of walking pneumonia when he was only three, so his mother raised him alone. She called him her “little man.” This made Harold feel proud but also wild, like a boy growing up in a cage. Does James feel this way now? Harold suddenly decides to get James a car for his birthday, and take him hunting.
Hunting is something Harold never did as a boy, but it means a lot to him now. Harold never owned a gun until he was thirty-one, when he bought a shotgun in order to accept the invitation of his regional manager, “Little Jimmy” Fletcher, to go quail hunting in Georgia. He had a great time. Now he’s invited back every year, and Little Jimmy is in charge of the company’s whole eastern division. Harold has a great future with Food Lion too. He owns three stores, one in downtown Greenwood, one out at the mall, and one over in Indianola. He owned two of them when his mother died, and he’s pleased to think that she died proud — proud of the good little boy he’d always been, and the good man he’d become.
Of course she’d wanted him to make a preacher, but Harold never got the call, and she gave that up finally when he was twenty. Harold was not going to pretend to get the call if he never got it, and he held strong to this principle. He wanted to see a burning bush, but if this was not vouchsafed to him, he wasn’t going to lie about it. He would just major in math instead, which he was good at anyway. Majoring in math at Mercer College, the small Baptist school his mother had chosen for him, Harold came upon Joan Berry, a home ec major from his own hometown who set out single-mindedly to marry him, which wasn’t hard. After graduation, Harold got a job as management trainee in the Food Lion store where he had started as a bag boy at fourteen. Joan produced their three children, spaced three years apart, and got her tubes tied. Harold got one promotion, then another. Joan and Harold prospered. They built this house.
Harold looks around and now this house, his house, strikes him as creepy, a wax museum. He lets himself out the back door and walks quickly, almost runs, to his car. It’s real cold out, a gray day in February, but Harold’s sweating. He starts his car and roars off toward the hospital, driving — as Cherry would say — like a bat out of hell.
THEY’RE LETTING HAROLD STAY with her longer now. He knows it, they know it, but nobody says a word. Lois Hickey just looks the other way when the announcement “Visiting hours are over” crackles across the PA. Is this a good sign or a bad sign? Harold can’t tell. He feels slow and confused, like a man underwater. “I think she looks better, don’t you?” he said last night to Cherry’s son, Stan, the TV weatherman, who had driven down from Memphis for the day. Eyes slick and bright with tears, Stan went over to Harold and hugged him tight. This scared Harold to death, he has practically never touched his own sons, and he doesn’t even know Stan, who’s been grown and gone for years. Harold is not used to hugging anybody, especially men. Harold breathed in Stan’s strong go-get-’em cologne, he buried his face in Stan’s long curly hair. He thinks it is possible that Stan has a permanent. They’ll do anything in Memphis. Then Stan stepped back and put one hand on each of Harold’s shoulders, holding him out at arm’s length. Stan has his mother’s wide, mobile mouth. The bright white light of Intensive Care glinted off the gold chain and the crystal that he wore around his neck. “I’m afraid we’re going to lose her, Pop,” he said.
But Harold doesn’t think so. Today he thinks Cherry looks the best she’s looked in weeks, with a bright spot of color in each cheek to match her flaming hair. She’s moving around a lot too. She keeps kicking her sheet off.
“She’s getting back some of that old energy now,” he tells Cherry’s daughter, Tammy Lynn Palladino, when she comes by after school. Tammy Lynn and Harold’s son, James, are both members of the senior class, but they aren’t friends. Tammy Lynn says James is a “stuck-up jock,” a “preppie,” and a “country-clubber.” Harold can’t say a word to defend his own son against these charges, he doesn’t even know James anymore. It might be true anyway. Tammy Lynn is real smart, a teenage egghead. She’s got a full scholarship to Millsaps College for next year. She applied for it all by herself. As Cherry used to say, Tammy Lynn came into this world with a full deck of cards and an ace or two up her sleeve. Also, she looks out for Number One.
In this regard Tammy Lynn is as different from her mama as night from day, because Cherry would give you the shirt off her back and frequently has. That’s gotten her into lots of trouble. With Ed Palladino, for instance, her second husband and Tammy Lynn’s dad. Just about everybody in this town got took by Ed Palladino, who came in here wearing a seersucker suit and talking big about putting in an outlet mall across the river. A lot of people got burned on that outlet mall deal. But Ed Palladino had a way about him that made you want to cast your lot with his, it is true. You wanted to give Ed Palladino your savings, your time-sharing condo, your cousin, your ticket to the Super Bowl. Cherry gave it all.
She married him and turned over what little inheritance she had from her daddy’s death — and that’s the only time in her life she ever had any money, mind you — and then she just shrugged and smiled her big crooked smile when he left town under the cover of night. “C’est la vie,” Cherry said. She donated the rest of his clothes to the Salvation Army. “Que será, será,” Cherry said, quoting a song that was popular when she was in junior high.
Tammy Lynn sits by her mama’s bed and holds Cherry’s thin dry hand. “I brought you a Chick-fil-A,” she says to Harold. “It’s over there in that bag.” She points to the shelf by the door. Harold nods. Tammy Lynn works at Chick-fil-A. Cherry’s eyes are wide and blue and full of meaning as she stares at her daughter. Her mouth moves, both Harold and Tammy Lynn lean forward, but then her mouth falls slack and her eyelids flutter shut. Tammy sits back.
“I think she looks some better today, don’t you?” Harold asks.
“No,” Tammy Lynn says. She has a flat little redneck voice. She sounds just the way she did last summer when she told Cherry that what she saw in the field was a cotton picker working at night, and not a UFO at all. “I wish I did but I don’t, Harold. I’m going to go on home now and heat up some Beanee Weenee for Mamaw. You come on as soon as you can.”
“Well,” Harold says. He feels like things have gotten all turned around here some way, he feels like he’s the kid and Tammy Lynn has turned into a freaky little grown-up. He says, “I’ll be along directly.”
But they both know he won’t leave until Lois Hickey throws him out. And speaking of Lois, as soon as Tammy Lynn takes off, here she comes again, checking something on the respirator, making a little clucking sound with her mouth, then whirling to leave. When Lois walks, her panty girdle goes swish, swish, swish at the top of her legs. She comes right back with the young black man named Rodney Broadbent, Respiratory Therapist. It says so on his name badge. Rodney wheels a complicated-looking cart ahead of himself. He’s all built up, like a weightlifter.
“How you doing tonight, Mr. Stipe?” Rodney says.
“I think she’s some better,” Harold says.
“Well, lessee here,” Rodney says. He unhooks the respirator tube at Cherry’s throat, sticks the tube from his own machine down the opening, and switches on the machine. It makes a whirring sound. It looks like an electric ice cream mixer. Rodney Broadbent looks at Lois Hickey in a significant way as she turns to leave the room.
They don’t have to tell him, Harold knows. Cherry is worse, not better. Harold gets the Chick-fil-A, unwraps it, eats it, and then goes over to the stand by the window. It’s already getting dark. The big mercury arc light glows in the hospital parking lot. A little wind blows some trash around on the concrete. He has had Cherry three years, that’s all. One trip to Disney World, two vacations at Gulf Shores, Alabama, hundreds of nights in the old metal bed out at the farm with Cherry sleeping naked beside him, her arm thrown over his stomach. They had a million laughs.
“Alrightee,” Rodney Broadbent nearly sings, unhooking his machine. Harold turns to look at him. Rodney Broadbent certainly looks more like a middle linebacker than a respiratory therapist. But Harold likes him.
“Well, Rodney?” Harold says.
Rodney starts shadow-boxing in the middle of the room. “Tough times,” he says finally. “These is tough times, Mr. Stipe.” Harold stares at him. Rodney is light on his feet as can be.
Harold sits down in the chair by the respirator. “What do you mean?” he asks.
“I mean she is drowning, Mr. Stipe,” Rodney says. He throws a punch which lands real close to Harold’s left ear. “What I’m doing here, see, is suctioning. I’m pulling all the fluid up out of her lungs. But now looka here, Mr. Stipe, they is just too damn much of it. See this little doohickey here I’m measuring it with? This here is the danger zone, man. Now Mrs. Stipe, she has been in the danger zone for some time. They is just too much damn fluid in there. What she got, anyway? Cancer and pneumonia both, am I right? What can I tell you, man? She is drowning.” Rodney gives Harold a short affectionate punch in the ribs, then wheels his cart away. From the door, apparently struck by some misgivings, he says, “Well, man, if it was me, I’d want to know what the story is, you follow me, man? If it was me, what I’m saying.” Harold can’t see Rodney anymore, only hear his voice from the open door.
“Thank you, Rodney,” Harold says. He sits in the chair. In a way he has known this already, for quite some time. In a way, Rodney’s news is no news, to Harold. He just hopes he will be man enough to bear it, to do what will have to be done. Harold has always been scared that he is not man enough for Cherry Oxendine anyway. This is his worst secret fear. He looks around the little Intensive Care room, searching for a sign, some sign, anything, that he will be man enough. Nothing happens. Cherry lies strapped to the bed, flanked by so many machines that it looks like she’s in the cockpit of a jet. Her eyes are closed, eyelids fluttering, red spots on her freckled cheeks. Her chest rises and falls as the respirator pushes air in and out through the tube in her neck. He doesn’t see how she can sleep in the bright light of Intensive Care, where it is always noon. And does she dream? Cherry used to tell him her dreams, which were wild, long Technicolor dreams, like movies. Cherry played different parts in them. If you dream in color, it means you’re intelligent, Cherry said. She used to tease him all the time. She thought Harold’s own dreams were a stitch, dreams more boring than his life, dreams in which he’d drive to Jackson, say, or be washing his car.
“Harold?” It’s Ray Muncey, manager of the Food Lion at the mall.
“Why, what are you doing over here, Ray?” Harold asks, and then in a flash he knows, Lois Hickey must have called him, to make Harold go on home.
“I was just driving by and I thought, Hey, maybe Harold and me might run by the Holiday Inn, get a bite to eat.” Ray shifts from foot to foot in the doorway. He doesn’t come inside, he’s not supposed to, nobody but immediate family is allowed in Intensive Care, and Harold’s glad — Cherry would just die if people she barely knows, like Ray Muncey, got to see her looking so bad.
“No, Ray, you go on and eat,” Harold says. “I already ate. I’m leaving right now anyway.”
“Well, how’s the missus doing?” Ray is a big man, afflicted with big, heavy manners.
“She’s drowning,” Harold says abruptly. Suddenly he remembers Cherry in a water ballet at the town pool, it must have been the summer of junior year, Fourth of July, Cherry and the other girls floating in a circle on their backs to form a giant flower — legs high, toes pointed. Harold doesn’t know it when Ray Muncey leaves. Out the window, the parking lot light glows like a big full moon. Lois Hickey comes in. “You’ve got to go home now, Harold,” she says. “I’ll call if there’s any change.” He remembers Cherry at Glass Lake, on the senior class picnic. Cherry’s getting real agitated now, she tosses her head back and forth, moves her arms. She’d pull out the tubes if she could. She kicks off the sheet. Her legs are still good, great legs in fact, the legs of a beautiful young woman.
HAROLD AT SEVENTEEN was tall and skinny, brown hair in a soft flat crew cut, glasses with heavy black frames. His jeans were too short. He carried a pen-and-pencil set in a clear plastic case in his breast pocket. Harold and his best friend, Ben Hill, looked so much alike that people had trouble telling them apart. They did everything together. They built model rockets, they read every science fiction book they could get their hands on, they collected Lionel train parts and Marvel comics. They loved superheroes with special powers, enormous beings who leaped across rivers and oceans. Harold’s friendship with Ben Hill kept the awful loneliness of the only child at bay, and it also kept him from having to talk to girls. You couldn’t talk to those two, not seriously. They were giggling and bumping into each other all the time. They were immature.
So it was in Ben’s company that Harold experienced the most private, the most personal memory he has of Cherry Oxendine in high school. Oh, he also has those other memories you’d expect, the big public memories of Cherry being crowned Miss Green-wood High (for her talent; she surprised everybody by reciting “Abou Ben Adhem” in such a stirring way that there wasn’t a dry eye in the whole auditorium when she got through), or running out onto the field ahead of the team with the other cheerleaders, red curls flying, green and white skirt whirling out around her hips like a beach umbrella when she turned a cartwheel. Harold noticed her then, of course. He noticed her when she moved through the crowded halls of the high school with her walk that was almost a prance, she put a little something extra into it, all right. Harold noticed Cherry Oxendine then in a way that he noticed Sandra Dee on the cover of a magazine, or Annette Funicello on American Bandstand.
But such girls were not for the likes of Harold, and Harold knew it. Girls like Cherry always had boyfriends like Lamar Peebles, who was hers — a doctor’s son with a baby blue convertible and plenty of money. They used to drive around town in his car, smoking cigarettes. Harold saw them, as he carried out grocery bags. He did not envy Lamar Peebles, or wish he had a girl like Cherry Oxendine. Only something about them made him stand where he was in the Food Lion lot, watching, until they had passed from sight.
So Harold’s close-up encounter with Cherry was unexpected. It took place at the senior class picnic, where Harold and Ben had been drinking beer all afternoon. No alcohol was allowed at the senior class picnic, but some of the more enterprising boys had brought out kegs the night before and hidden them in the woods. Anybody could go back there and pay some money and get some beer. The chaperones didn’t know, or appeared not to know. In any case, the chaperones all left at six o’clock, when the picnic was officially over. Some of the class members left then too. Then some of them came back with more beer, more blankets. It was a free lake. Nobody could make you go home. Normally, Harold and Ben would have been among the first to leave, but because they had had four beers apiece, and because this was the first time they had ever had any beer ever, at all, they were still down by the water, skipping rocks and waiting to sober up so that they would not wreck Harold’s mother’s green Valiant on the way home. All the cool kids were on the other side of the lake, listening to transistor radios. The sun went down. Bullfrogs started up. A mist came out all around the sides of the lake. It was a cloudy, humid day anyway, not a great day for a picnic.
“If God is really God, how come He let Himself get crucified, is what I want to know,” Ben said. Ben’s daddy was a Holiness preacher, out in the county.
But Harold heard something. “Hush, Ben,” he said.
“If I was God, I would go around and really kick some ass,” Ben said.
Harold heard it again. It was almost too dark to see.
“Damn.” It was a girl’s voice, followed by a splash.
All of a sudden, Harold felt sober. “Who’s there?” he asked. He stepped forward, right up to the water’s edge. Somebody was in the water. Harold was wearing his swim trunks under his jeans, but he had not gone in the water himself. He couldn’t stand to show himself in front of people. He thought he was too skinny.
“Well, do something.” It was the voice of Cherry Oxendine, almost wailing. She stumbled up the bank. Harold reached out and grabbed her arm. Close up, she was a mess, wet and muddy, with her hair all over her head. But the thing that got Harold, of course, was that she didn’t have any top on. She didn’t even try to cover them up either, she stomped her little foot on the bank and said, “I am going to kill Lamar Peebles when I get ahold of him.” Harold had never even imagined so much skin.
“What’s going on?” asked Ben, from up the bank.
Harold took off his own shirt as fast as he could and handed it over to Cherry Oxendine. “Cover yourself,” he said.
“Why, thank you.” Cherry didn’t bat an eye. She took his shirt and put it on, tying it stylishly at the waist. Harold couldn’t believe it. Close up, Cherry was a lot smaller than she looked on the stage or the football field. She looked up at Harold through her dripping hair and gave him her crooked grin.
“Thanks, hey?” she said.
And then she was gone, vanished into the mist and trees before Harold could say another word. He opened his mouth and closed it. Mist obscured his view. From the other side of the lake he could hear “Ramblin’ Rose” playing on somebody’s radio. He heard a girl’s high-pitched giggle, a boy’s whooping laugh.
“What’s going on?” asked Ben.
“Nothing,” Harold said. It was the first time he had ever lied to Ben. Harold never told anybody what had happened that night, not ever. He felt that it was up to him to protect Cherry Oxendine’s honor. Later, much later, when he and Cherry were lovers, he was astonished to learn that she couldn’t remember any of this, not who she was with or what had happened or what she was doing in the lake like that with her top off, or Harold giving her his shirt. “I think that was sweet, though,” Cherry told him.
When Harold and Ben finally got home that night at nine or ten o’clock, Harold’s mother was frantic. “You’ve been drinking,” she shrilled at him under the hanging porch light. “And where’s your shirt?” It was a new madras shirt that Harold had gotten for graduation. Now Harold’s mother is out at the Hillandale Rest Home. Ben died in Vietnam, and Cherry is drowning. This time, and Harold knows it now, he can’t help her.
OH, CHERRY! WOULD SHE have been so wild if she hadn’t been so cute? And what if her parents had been younger when she was born — normal-age parents — couldn’t they have controlled her better? As it was, the Oxendines were sober, solid people living in a farmhouse out near the county line, and Cherry lit up their lives like a rocket. Her dad, Martin “Buddy” Oxendine, went to sleep in his chair every night right after supper, woke back up for the eleven o’clock news, and then went to bed for good. Buddy was an elder in the Baptist church. Cherry’s mom, Gladys Oxendine, made drapes for people. She assumed she would never have children at all because of her spastic colitis. Gladys and Buddy had started raising cockapoos when they gave up on children. Imagine Gladys’s surprise, then, to find herself pregnant at thirty-eight, when she was already old! They say she didn’t even know it when she went to the doctor. She thought she had a tumor.
But then she got so excited, that old farm woman, when Dr. Grimwood told her what was what, and she wouldn’t even consider an abortion when he mentioned the chances of a mongoloid. People didn’t use to have babies so old then as they do now, so Gladys Oxendine’s pregnancy was the talk of the county. Neighbors crocheted little jackets and made receiving blankets. Buddy built a baby room onto the house and made a cradle by hand. During the last two months of pregnancy, when Gladys had to stay in bed because of toxemia, people brought over casseroles and boiled custard, everything good. Gladys’s pregnancy was the only time in her whole life that she was ever pretty, and she loved it, and she loved the attention, neighbors in and out of the house. When the baby was finally born on November 1, 1944, no parents were ever more ready than Gladys and Buddy Oxendine. And the baby was everything they hoped for too, which is not usually the case — the prettiest baby in the world, a baby like a little flower.
They named her Doris Christine which is who she was until eighth grade, when she made junior varsity cheerleader and announced that she was changing her name to Cherry. Cherry! Even her parents had to admit it suited her better than Doris Christine. As a little girl, Doris Christine was redheaded, bouncy, and busy — she was always into something, usually something you’d never thought to tell her not to do. She started talking early and never shut up. Her old dad, old Buddy Oxendine, was so crazy about Doris Christine that he took her everywhere with him in his old red pickup truck. You got used to seeing the two of them, Buddy and his curly-headed little daughter, riding the country roads together, going to the seed-and-feed together, sharing a shake at the Dairy Queen. Gladys made all of Doris Christine’s clothes, the most beautiful little dresses in the world, with hand smocking and French seams. They gave Doris Christine everything they could think of — what she asked for, what she didn’t. “That child is going to get spoiled,” people started to say. And of course she did get spoiled, she couldn’t have helped that, but she was never spoiled rotten as so many are. She stayed sweet in spite of it all.
Then along about tenth grade, soon after she changed her name to Cherry and got interested in boys, things changed between Cherry and the old Oxendines. Stuff happened. Instead of being the light of their lives, Cherry became the bane of their existence, the curse of their old age. She wanted to wear makeup, she wanted to have car dates. You can’t blame her — she was old enough, sixteen. Everybody else did it. But you can’t blame Gladys and Buddy either — they were old people by then, all worn out. They were not up to such a daughter. Cherry sneaked out. She wrecked a car. She ran away to Pensacola with a soldier. Finally, Gladys and Buddy gave up. When Cherry eloped with the disc jockey, Don Westall, right after graduation, they threw up their hands. They did not do a thing about it. They had done the best they could, and everybody knew it. They went back to raising cockapoos.
Cherry, living up in Nashville, Tennessee, had a baby, Stan, the one who’s in his twenties now. Cherry sent baby pictures back to Gladys and Buddy, and wrote that she was going to be a singer. Six years later, she came home. She said nothing against Don Westall, who was still a disc jockey on WKIX, Nashville. You could hear him on the radio every night after 10 p.m. Cherry said the breakup was all her fault. She said she had made some mistakes, but she didn’t say what they were. She was thin and noble. Her kid was cute. She did not go back out to the farm then. She rented an apartment over the hardware store, down by the river, and got a job downtown working in Ginger’s Boutique. After a year or so, she started acting more like herself again, although not quite like herself — she had grown up somehow in Nashville, and quit being spoiled. She put Stan, her kid, first. And if she did run around a little bit, or if she was the life of the party sometimes out at the country club, so what? Stan didn’t want for a thing. By then the Oxendines were failing and she had to take care of them too, she had to drive her daddy up to Grenada for dialysis twice a week. It was not an easy life for Cherry, but if it ever got her down, you couldn’t tell it. She was still cute. When her daddy finally died and left her a little money, everybody was real glad. Oh now, they said, Cherry Oxendine can quit working so hard and put her mama in a home or something and have a decent life. She can go on a cruise. But then along came Ed Palladino, and the rest is history.
Cherry Oxendine was left with no husband, no money, a little girl, and a mean old mama to take care of. At least by this time Stan was in the navy. Cherry never complained, though. She moved back out to the farm. When Ginger retired from business and closed her boutique, Cherry got another job, as a receptionist at Wallace, Wallace and Peebles. This was her undoing. Because Lamar Peebles had just moved back to town with his family, to join his father’s firm. Lamar had two little girls. He had been married to a tobacco heiress since college. All this time he had run around on her. He was not on the up-and-up. And when he encountered redheaded Cherry Oxendine again after the passage of so many years, all those old fireworks went off again. They got to be a scandal, then a disgrace. Lamar said he was going to marry her, and Cherry believed him. After six months of it, Mrs. Lamar Peebles checked herself into a mental hospital in Silver Hill, Connecticut. First, she called her laywers.
And then it was all over, not even a year after it began. Mr. and Mrs. Lamar Peebles were reconciled and moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, her hometown. Cherry Oxendine lost her job at Wallace, Wallace and Peebles, and was reduced to working at the deli at Food Lion. Why did she do it? Why did she lose all the goodwill she’d built up in this community over so many years? It is because she doesn’t know how to look out for Number One. Her own daughter, Tammy Lynn Palladino, is aware of this.
“You have got a fatal flaw, Mama,” Tammy said after learning about fatal flaws in English class. “You believe everything everybody tells you.”
Still, Tammy loves her mother. Sometimes she writes her mother’s whole name, Cherry Oxendine Westall Palladino Stikes, over and over in her Blue Horse notebook. Tammy Lynn will never be half the woman her mother is, and she’s so smart she knows it. She gets a kick out of her mother’s wild ideas.
“When you get too old to be cute, honey, you get to be eccentric,” Cherry told Tammy one time. It’s the truest thing she ever said.
It seems to Tammy that the main thing about her mother is, Cherry always has to have something going on. If it isn’t a man it’s something else, such as having her palm read by that woman over in French Camp, or astrology, or the grapefruit diet. Cherry believes in the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Atlantis, and ghosts. It kills her that she’s not psychic. The UFO Club was just the latest in a long string of interests although it has lasted the longest, starting back before Cherry’s marriage to Harold Stikes. And then Cherry got cancer, and she kind of forgot about it. But Tammy still remembers the night her mama first got so turned on by UFOs.
RHONDA RAMEY, CHERRY’S BEST friend, joined the UFO Club first. Rhonda and Cherry are a lot alike, although it’s hard to see this at first. While Cherry is short and peppy, Rhonda is tall, thin, and listless. She looks like Cher. Rhonda doesn’t have any children. She’s crazy about her husband, Bill, but he’s a work-aholic who runs a string of video rental stores all over northern Mississippi, so he’s gone a lot, and Rhonda gets bored. She works out at the spa, but it isn’t enough. Maybe this is why she got so interested when the UFO landed at a farm outside her mother’s hometown of Como. It was first spotted by sixteen-year-old Donnie Johnson just at sunset, as he was finishing his chores on his parents’ farm. He heard a loud rumbling sound “in the direction of the hog house,” it said in the paper. Looking up, he suddenly saw a “brilliantly lit mushroom-shaped object” hovering about two feet above the ground, with a shaft of white light below and glowing all over with an intensely bright multicolored light, “like the light of a welder’s arc.”
Donnie said it sounded like a jet. He was temporarily blinded and paralyzed. He fell down on the ground. When he came back to his senses again, it was gone. Donnie staggered into the kitchen where his parents, Durel, fifty-four, and Erma, forty-nine, were eating supper and told them what had happened. They all ran back outside to the field, where they found four large imprints and four small imprints in the muddy ground, and a nearby clump of sage grass on fire. The hogs were acting funny, bunching up, looking dazed. Immediately, Durel jumped in his truck and went to get the sheriff, who came right back with two deputies. All in all, six people viewed the site while the brush continued to burn, and who knows how many people — half of Como — saw the imprints the next day. Rhonda saw them too. She drove out to the Johnson farm with her mother, as soon as she heard about it.
It was a close encounter of the second kind, according to Civil Air Patrol head Glenn Raines, who appeared on TV to discuss it, because the UFO “interacted with its surroundings in a significant way.” A close encounter of the first kind is simply a close-range sighting, while a close encounter of the third kind is something like the famous example, of Betty and Barney Hill of Exeter, New Hampshire, who were actually kidnapped by a UFO while they were driving along on a trip. Betty and Barney Hill were taken aboard the alien ship and given physical exams by intelligent humanoid beings. Two hours and thirty-five minutes were missing from their trip, and afterward, Betty had to be treated for acute anxiety. Glenn Raines, wearing his brown Civil Air Patrol uniform, said all this on TV.
His appearance, plus what had happened at the Johnson farm, sparked a rash of sightings all across Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas for the next two years. Metal disc-like objects were seen, and luminous objects appearing as lights at night. In Levelland, Texas, fifteen people called the police to report an egg-shaped UFO appearing over State Road 1173. Overall, the UFOs seemed to show a preference for soybean fields and teenage girl viewers. But a pretty good photograph of a UFO flying over the Gulf was taken by a retired man from Pascagoula, so you can’t generalize. Clubs sprang up all over the place. The one that Rhonda and Cherry went to had seventeen members and met once a month at the junior high school.
Tammy recalls exactly how her mama and Rhonda acted the night they came home from Cherry’s first meeting. Cherry’s eyes sparkled in her face like Brenda Starr’s eyes in the comics. She started right in telling Tammy all about it, beginning with the Johnsons from Como and Betty and Barney Hill.
Tammy was not impressed. “I don’t believe it,” she said. She was president of the Science Club at the junior high school.
“You are the most irritating child!” Cherry said. “What don’t you believe?”
“Well, any of it,” Tammy said then. “All of it,” and this has remained her attitude ever since.
“Listen, honey, Jimmy Carter saw one,” Cherry said triumphantly. “In nineteen seventy-one, at the Executive Mansion in Georgia. He turned in an official report on it.”
“How come nobody knows about it, then?” Tammy asked. She was a tough customer.
“Because the government covered it up!” said Rhonda, just dying to tell this part. “People see UFOs all the time, it’s common knowledge, they are trying to make contact with us right now, honey, but the government doesn’t want the average citizen to know about it. There’s a big cover-up going on.”
“It’s just like Watergate.” Cherry opened a beer and handed it over to Rhonda.
“That’s right,” Rhonda said, “and every time there’s a major incident, you know what happens? These men from the government show up at your front door dressed all in black. After they get through with you, you’ll wish you never heard the word saucer. You turn pale and get real sick. You can’t get anything to stay on your stomach.”
Tammy cracked up. But Rhonda and Cherry went on and on. They had official-looking gray notebooks to log their sightings in. At their meetings, they reported these sightings to each other, and studied up on the subject in general. Somebody in the club was responsible for the educational part of each meeting, and somebody else brought the refreshments.
Tammy Lynn learned to keep her mouth shut. It was less embarrassing than belly dancing; she had a friend whose mother took belly dancing at the YMCA. Tammy did not tell her mama about all the rational explanations for UFOs that she found in the school library. They included: (1) hoaxes; (2) natural phenomena, such as fungus causing the so-called fairy rings sometimes found after a landing; (3) real airplanes flying off course; and Tammy’s favorite, (4) the Fata Morgana, described as a “rare and beautiful type of mirage, constantly changing, the result of unstable layers of warm and cold air. The Fata Morgana takes its name from fairy lore and is said to evoke in the viewer a profound sense of longing,” the book went on to say. Tammy’s biology teacher, Mr. Owens, said he thought that the weather patterns in Mississippi might be especially conducive to this phenomenon. But Tammy kept her mouth shut. And after a while, when nobody in the UFO Club saw anything, its membership declined sharply. Then her mama met Harold Stikes, then Harold Stikes left his wife and children and moved out to the farm with them, and sometimes Cherry forgot to attend the meetings, she was so happy with Harold Stikes.
Tammy couldn’t see why, initially. In her opinion, Harold Stikes was about as interesting as a telephone pole. “But he’s so nice!” Cherry tried to explain it to Tammy Lynn. Finally Tammy decided that there is nothing in the world that makes somebody as attractive as if they really love you. And Harold Stikes really did love her mama, there was no question. That old man — what a crazy old Romeo! Why, he proposed to Cherry when she was still in the hospital after she had her breast removed (this was back when they thought that was it, that the doctors had gotten it all).
“Listen, Cherry,” he said solemnly, gripping a dozen red roses. “I want you to marry me.”
“What?” Cherry said. She was still groggy.
“I want you to marry me,” Harold said. He knelt down heavily beside her bed.
“Harold! Get up from there!” Cherry said. “Somebody will see you.”
“I just had my breast removed.”
“Say yes,” he said again.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Cherry said.
And as soon as she got out of the hospital, they were married out in the orchard, on a beautiful April day, by Lew Uggams, a JP from out of town. They couldn’t find a local preacher to do it. The sky was bright blue, not a cloud in sight. Nobody was invited except Stan, Tammy, Rhonda and Bill, and Cherry’s mother, who wore her dress inside out. Cherry wore a new pink lace dress, the color of cherry blossoms. Tough little Tammy cried and cried. It’s the most beautiful wedding she’s ever seen, and now she’s completely devoted to Harold Stikes.
SO TAMMY LEAVES THE lights on for Harold when she finally goes to bed that night. She tried to wait up for him, but she has to go to school in the morning, she’s got a chemistry test. Her mamaw is sound asleep in the little added-on baby room that Buddy Oxendine built for Cherry. Gladys acts like a baby now, a spoiled baby at that. The only thing she’ll drink is Sprite out of a can. She talks mean. She doesn’t like anything in the world except George and Tammy, the two remaining cockapoos.
They bark up a storm when Harold finally gets back out to the farm, at one thirty. The cockapoos are barking, Cherry’s mom is snoring like a chain saw. Harold doesn’t see how Tammy Lynn can sleep through all of this, but she always does. Teenagers can sleep through anything. Harold himself has started waking up several times a night, his heart pounding. He wonders if he’s going to have a heart attack. He almost mentioned his symptoms to Lois Hickey last week, in fact, but then thought, What the hell. His heart is broken. Of course it’s going to act up some. And everything, not only his heart, is out of whack. Sometimes he’ll break into a sweat for no reason. Often he forgets really crucial things, such as filing his quarterly estimated income tax on January 15. Harold is not the kind to forget something that important. He has strange aches that float from joint to joint. He has headaches. He’s lost twelve pounds. Sometimes he has no appetite at all. Other times, like right now, he’s just starving.
Harold goes in the kitchen and finds a flat rectangular casserole, carefully wrapped in tinfoil, on the counter, along with a Tupperware cake carrier. He lifts off the top of the cake carrier and finds a piña colada cake, his favorite. Then he pulls back the tinfoil on the casserole. Lasagna! Plenty is left over. Harold sticks it in the microwave. He knows that the cake and the la sagna were left here by his ex-wife. Ever since Cherry has been in Intensive Care, Joan has been bringing food out to the farm. She comes when Harold’s at work or at the hospital, and leaves it with Gladys or Tammy. She probably figures that Harold would refuse it, if she caught him at home, which he would. She’s a great cook, though. Harold takes the lasagna out of the microwave, opens a beer, and sits down at the kitchen table. He loves Joan’s lasagna. Cherry’s idea of a terrific meal is one she doesn’t have to cook. Harold remembers eating in bed with Cherry, tacos from Taco Bell, sour-cream-and-onion chips, beer. He gets more lasagna and a big wedge of piña colada cake.
Now it’s two thirty, but for some reason Harold is not a bit sleepy. His mind whirls with thoughts of Cherry. He snaps off all the lights and stands in the darkened house. His heart is racing. Moonlight comes in the windows, it falls on the old patterned rug. Outside, it’s as bright as day. He puts his coat on and goes out, with the cockapoos scampering along beside him. They are not even surprised. They think it’s a fine time for a walk. Harold goes past the mailbox, down the dirt road between the fields. Out here in the country, the sky is both bigger and closer than it is in town. Harold feels like he’s in a huge bowl turned upside down, with tiny little pinpoints of light shining through. And everything is silvered by the moonlight — the old fenceposts, the corn stubble in the flat long fields, a distant barn, the highway at the end of the dirt road, his own strange hand when he holds it out to look at it.
He remembers when she waited on him in the Food Lion deli, three years ago. He had asked for a roast beef sandwich, which come prepackaged. Cherry put it on his plate. Then she paused, and cocked her hip, and looked at him. “Can I give you some potato salad to go with that?” she asked. “Some slaw?”
Harold looked at her. Some red curls had escaped the required net. “Nothing else,” he said.
But Cherry spooned a generous helping of potato salad onto his plate. “Thank you so much,” he said. They looked at each other.
“I know I know you,” Cherry said.
It came to him then. “Cherry Oxendine,” said Harold. “I remember you from high school.”
“Lord, you’ve got a great memory, then!” Cherry had an easy laugh. “That was a hundred years ago.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” Harold knew he was holding up the line.
“Depends on who you’re talking to,” Cherry said.
Later that day, Harold found an excuse to go back over to the deli for coffee and apple pie, then he found an excuse to look through the personnel files. He started eating lunch at the deli every day, without making any conscious decision to do so. In the afternoons, when he went back for coffee, Cherry would take her break and sit at a table with him.
Harold and Cherry talked and talked. They talked about their families, their kids, high school. Cherry told him everything that had happened to her. She was tough and funny, not bitter or self-pitying. They talked and talked. In his whole life, Harold had never had so much to say. During this period, which lasted for several weeks, his whole life took on a heightened aspect. Everything that happened to him seemed significant, a little incident to tell Cherry about. Every song he liked on the radio he remembered, so he could ask Cherry if she liked it too. Then there came the day when they were having coffee and she mentioned she’d left her car at Al’s Garage that morning to get a new clutch.
“I’ll give you a ride over there to pick it up,” said Harold instantly. In his mind he immediately canceled the sales meeting he had scheduled for four o’clock.
“Oh, that’s too much trouble,” Cherry said.
“But I insist.” In his conversations with Cherry, Harold had developed a brand-new gallant manner he had never had before.
“Well, if you’re sure it’s not any trouble . . .” Cherry grinned at him like she knew he really wanted to do it, and that afternoon when he grabbed her hand suddenly before letting her out at Al’s Garage, she did not pull away.
The next weekend Harold took her up to Memphis and they stayed at the Peabody Hotel, where Cherry got the biggest kick out of the ducks in the lobby and ordering from room service.
“You’re a fool,” Harold’s friends told him later, when the shit hit the fan.
But Harold didn’t think so. He doesn’t think so now, walking the old dirt road on the Oxendine farm in the moonlight. He loves his wife. He feels that he has been ennobled and enlarged, by knowing Cherry Oxendine. He feels like he has been specially selected among men, to receive a precious gift. He stepped out of his average life for her, he gave up being a good man, but the rewards have been extraordinary. He’s glad he did it. He’d do it all over again.
Still walking, Harold suddenly knows that something is going to happen. But he doesn’t stop walking. Only, the whole world around him seems to waver a bit, and intensify. The moonlight shines whiter than ever. A little wind whips up out of nowhere. The stars are twinkling so brightly that they seem to dance, actually dance, in the sky. And then, while Harold watches, one of them detaches itself from the rest of the sky and grows larger, moves closer, until it’s clear that it is actually moving across the sky, at an angle to the earth. A falling star, perhaps? A comet?
Harold stops walking. The star moves faster and faster, with an erratic pattern. It’s getting real close now. It’s no star. Harold hears a high whining noise, like a blender. The cockapoos huddle against his ankles. They don’t bark. Now he can see the blinking red lights on the top of it, and the beam of white light shooting out the bottom. His coat is blown straight out behind him by the wind. He feels like he’s going blind. He shields his eyes. At first it’s as big as a barn, then a tobacco warehouse. It covers the field. Although Harold can’t say exactly how it communicates to him or even if it does, suddenly his soul is filled to bursting. The ineffable occurs. And then, more quickly than it came, it’s gone, off toward Carrollton, rising into the night, leaving the field, the farm, the road. Harold turns back.
It will take Cherry Oxendine two more weeks to die. She’s tough. And even when there’s nothing left of her but her heart, she will fight all the way. She will go out furious, squeezing Harold’s hand at the very moment of death, clinging fast to every minute of this bright, hard life. And although at first he won’t want to, Harold will go on living. He will buy another store. Gladys will die. Tammy Lynn will make Phi Beta Kappa. Harold will start attending the Presbyterian church again. Eventually Harold may even go back to his family, but he will love Cherry Oxendine until the day he dies, and he will never, ever, tell anybody what he saw.