15

Trying to Help

Early in Ronnie’s fourth week in the hospital, he awoke in tip-top form. He was almost jolly. He licked his breakfast plate clean. By lunchtime, though, he’d transformed into a weak, ghostly-white figure. He fainted on his bedside potty. The chief resident quickly determined that Ronnie was losing blood from his small intestine.

Ronnie grabbed the nurses’ hands. “Help me!” He thought he was bleeding to death. He rushed them to transfer him to the gurney and whisk him to the OR. It had been only two weeks since his last surgery. Once again, I watched as they wheeled him away. Once again, I didn’t know if I’d see him again.

From a pay phone, I called Mom to let her know he was headed back to surgery. Cheery “uh-huhs” were her odd response. A neighbor lady was visiting. Mom kept a smile in her voice as, on the other end, I described the grim scene at Community Hospital. Mom didn’t want to signal that anything was wrong. She didn’t want her friend to know she had a son fighting for his life down in Roanoke, or that she had a son at all.

My therapist believed Mom was incapable of seeing Ronnie as a valuable person. That’s why she responded with coldness to my reports of his difficulties. If she were to believe that Ronnie was a worthy individual, she’d have to face a lifetime of her errors concerning him. So it was easier for her to consider him of marginal importance.

As before, doctors had been throwing medications at Ronnie’s matrix of maladies, doing their best to help him. His body still couldn’t tolerate all the drugs. This time, apparently, an anticoagulant set off the blood loss. His gut was a mess. The surgeon went in and vacuumed out great globs of clotted blood. Once again, nurses began pumping blood and plasma back into Ronnie.

He went days without eating. He’d lie in bed and imagine the aisles of his Vinton supermarket. “Oh, Kroger,” he said dreamily. “Melons, cheese, peanut butter . . .” He was mastering his new talking trach, so we were conversing again. He was looking forward to dipping a slice of deep-dish pepperoni into the Italian dressing of a tossed salad at his favorite pizzeria.

I was back at the newspaper but coming by to see him before work, at lunch, and at night. I was keeping up with the doctors’ medical strategies and trying to learn about disability and Medicaid in hopes I could talk Ronnie into applying for them. His hospital bill was at about $60,000 already, three times the amount he had in savings. When I wasn’t thinking about his financial fix, I was still assimilating this awful family history. Plus, I was trying to get some sleep, some exercise, some peace while calling Mom and Max two or three times a day with updates.

Meanwhile, Ronnie’s doctors were talking with him more urgently now about lining up pituitary surgery at the University of Virginia Medical Center. A specialist there was eager to get that tumor out. Ronnie said he’d rather die from his disease. He thundered to his doctors, his big hands splayed out in front of him, “Put on the top of the ledger: ‘He is going back to work!’ I want OUT of here!”

What I was imagining was far worse than Ronnie’s vision of a quick death. Acromegaly could blind him, cause a stroke, and land him in a nursing home, which would be far more torturous than a hospital. A nursing home would spell the end for Ronnie.

I was growing more impatient by the day with his simplistic views. He thought he could pay a few dollars a month on his medical debts, but the figures he was imagining—ten dollars a month, twenty, twenty-five dollars tops—wouldn’t be enough for his surgeon, anesthesiologist, pulmonologist, radiologist, internist, pathologist, laboratories, or for the hospital itself. Even if they agreed to such tiny outlays, would Ronnie be able to remember payments on a dozen bills each month? He was disorganized. He’d lived an old-fashioned life. He’d been able to walk or drive to his creditors and plop down cash. He rarely wrote checks or mailed them. I offered to help with his debts. I could afford $200 a month.

As Mother’s Day approached, I toyed with the idea of sending Mom a card “from both of us,” which would have been cruel. In her mind, Ronnie and I were not really connected. Instead, I mailed a card “from your daughter.” She was so distrustful of Ronnie that I had recently asked what awful things had he done. Had he exposed himself as a boy? “No.” Then, “Well, what did he do?” Rape somebody? Injure somebody? “No,” she said, annoyed. “He just stole things, Mary Carter.” She didn’t tell me he’d threatened to kill her.

* * *

A MONTH AFTER he arrived at the hospital, Ronnie was out of the ICU and in a regular hospital room. They’d removed his urinary catheter and taken the pesky oxygen cannula out of his nose. He was attached now only to intravenous bags of fluids and to antibiotics. Now that he was out of the woods, I was letting go of some of my watchful edge, and my adrenaline was on the wane. I nearly passed out as I walked back to work after a lunchtime visit. For the first time, Ronnie called me at home that night to make sure I was okay.

He was back in physical therapy and on the road toward home. I was cutting back to two visits a day. Shortly before he moved from the ICU to a regular room, a nurse looked at him and his bags of belongings sitting there, ready to go, and commented that he looked like an orphan. I wondered if he caught that.

Max had been in to see him. He promised her that he wouldn’t be so grumpy anymore. He was going to be nice.

* * *

MAY WAS MY favorite month. I’d spent most of it in the hospital with Ronnie. The tight fern fronds, the purple wild violets, the broad-and-glossy-leafed wildflower called mayapple—I’d failed to even notice them in the lowland Roanoke Valley that year. They’d matured into their thick, dusty summer incarnations by the time Ronnie was better.

I dialed back the season and found the freshness of early May again in a one-night stay at Mountain Lake, a lodge an hour west and four thousand feet of elevation away from home. Ronnie had taken his girlfriends there in the old days. Tender celery-green leaves were just popping out on the trees. The hotel, set within a nature preserve, allowed trees to fall undisturbed in the woods and be shrouded with moss and lichens. I tromped through the woods with the chipmunks and heard birdsong that was new to me. Even Ronnie was glad to see me get away. “You’ve got a life too,” I was surprised to hear him say.

* * *

ON MAY 25, after thirty-nine days in the hospital, Ronnie’s hour of release was set for 11:00 a.m. As he awaited his discharge, he was giddy as a kid heading to Disney World. “Eleven o’clock,” he intoned, watching the second hand creep toward the hour on his wall clock. “Let the sun shine on this poor old country boy one more time.”

I pulled my Honda Civic hatchback around to the hospital entrance. Ronnie scrunched down to fit into the squat car. When we pulled up to Max’s house, his weakness suddenly made itself known. Walking thirty feet from the car to the front porch was the most work Ronnie had done in almost two months. The rubber tips of his crutches dragged with each step.

Dear, chipper Max stood on the front porch waiting for us. We settled Ronnie into a chair out there and went upstairs to case out his room. My heart sank as Max pulled back the blankets on his bed. His only sheet, a fitted bottom one, was the color of long-steeped tea. It hadn’t been changed in years, maybe never.

He lacked the strength to make it up the stairs. Max brought him a pillow and a blanket so he could sleep downstairs on the couch that Friday night. When I drove up the next morning, Max was out in the sunny backyard, cheerfully hanging Ronnie’s pillows and blankets on the clothesline. She’d thrown out the sheet. Upstairs, she’d been wrestling to pin a clean white cloth onto Ronnie’s filthy mattress.

I’d foolishly thought that once Ronnie was home, everything would get easier. But he was an invalid. He was a terminally ill man recovering from two GI tract surgeries. An army of doctors, nurses, aides, physical therapists, and dietitians had tended to him for five weeks. He’d gotten used to that level of care.

Max was seventy-one years old. How much should she be expected to do for Ronnie? I still wasn’t sure how close the two of them really were, or how natural it would be for her to look after him. All the daily services of the hospital suddenly popped into my mind—the baths, the meals, the carefully organized prescriptions, the clean sheets, the towels, the adjustable bed. We had none of that.

I left the two of them that Saturday afternoon to go to a festival with a friend. The next morning, Max’s sister, Thelma, called, extremely upset. Ronnie had told me about Thelma. He called her Delma because his thick tongue couldn’t position itself for th sounds. Thelma thought Max had suffered a ministroke sometime after I’d left on Saturday. When Thelma called the house that evening, Max sounded confused and momentarily wasn’t even aware that Ronnie was back home. Thelma rushed there and spotted a bruise on Max’s forehead. She thought Max had fallen.

I went straight over. Max looked okay, but I needed to go to the store for her and to help out however I could. I called one of Ronnie’s doctors and explained that Ronnie’s housemate wasn’t up to caring for him. A home nurse was scheduled to start coming twice a week soon; the doctor would try to make that a daily service.

Ronnie and I went over his medical bills at the dining room table that evening. He had trouble comprehending the paperwork. He was grouchy, impatient. He couldn’t concentrate. He was annoyed with everything. I’d bought butter when he wanted margarine. I’d bought store-brand cheddar when he wanted fontina. “Hell, woman, I may be a hillbilly, but I’m a hillbilly who peeked over the fence.”

That night, Max and I helped him up the stairs, through his door, and by the piles of stinking shoes to his clean bed. Once we got him there, Max hurried off toward her room.

“I don’t mean to be cross with you, baby,” Ronnie told me.

“I know, I know.”

“It’s just that I get so flustrated. I’m just scared to death.

“Hey, Max,” Ronnie hollered down the hall. “Get on back in here.”

Sitting on the edge of his bed, he took our hands and looked up at us tenderly. “A man shouldn’t fuss at the only two buddies he’s got. I love you two.” He squeezed our hands, and he hugged Max. She told me later it was the first time he’d ever hugged her.

* * *

RONNIE, MAX, AND I watched that summer go by in warm evenings on their front porch. Max kicked her short legs up and down from her tall chair like a little girl. She asked me to tell her stories about the places I’d been and the people I’d met. I dusted off my travels around Europe and my long ramble around Colorado from a few years earlier. I entertained her with verbal travelogues about small Virginia towns she’d never seen, just a few hours from her house. Meanwhile, my separate life of friends, mountain hikes, parties, dancing, and quiet evenings on my own front porch was slipping away again. I was into my seventh intense week of one-on-one with Ronnie. That weekend, Max and I crawled inside his old cars, his 1974 Mercury Marquis Brougham sedan and his 1978 Dodge Ramcharger sport utility vehicle, to replace his outdated county decals.

I bought him an electric shaver. Otherwise I’d have to use an old-style bladed razor on those precipitous facial features and baggy skin. I bathed the upper half of him. As the washcloth slid over his face, the acute ridges of those overgrown bones jolted me—such great cliffs and crags on one long face. I hoped he didn’t catch the momentary hesitation of my fingers as they encountered the bones’ sharp edges through the warm, soapy cloth. I imagined his bones being dug up one day and somebody asking, What kind of man was this?

* * *

I WAS GETTING no exercise. I was putting on weight. Every time I was at their house, however, Ronnie and Max were ordering me, “Eat!” I’d go to the store for cherry-vanilla ice cream for them. “Eat!” he’d bellow. I’d bring them greasy fried fish from Libby Hill Seafood. “Eat!” I wanted to get in shape again and maybe meet a man. “If she meets a man,” Ronnie said, sotto voce, to Max, “she won’t have so much time for me.”

One night Ronnie, Max, and I were watching CBS Evening News when a foreign correspondent appeared on-screen. He’d been a classmate of mine at Columbia. Ronnie didn’t even know I’d gone to Columbia. He didn’t know that I’d earned a master’s degree there or that I’d ever lived in New York. When he visited the folks in the old days, they didn’t mention me, and he didn’t dare ask.

As I left that Sunday night, Ronnie proclaimed that getting sick had changed his life in a good way. Before, he asserted, somewhat emotionally, “I was scared of people.” He wouldn’t have much to do with them. I replied, “Well, maybe you thought they’d let you down.” He winked at me and nodded.

Ronnie and I spent Memorial Day at his house. Max and Thelma were with their mother in the country. We rambled around throughout the big, airy house the Booth family had built in the thirties. Every few feet Ronnie leaned on his crutches and told me a story. At a living room window, he spotted a detail that made him chuckle. Years before, a squirrel came down the chimney, and before Ronnie and Max knew that it was inside, it gnawed on a windowsill trying to get out. Its tooth marks, now painted over, were still there.

Ronnie captured the squirrel in a humane trap. At first he was going to shoot it. But then he’d have to fire into the metal trap, and that would mangle it. “I thought, well, I’ll knife the son of a bitch. But he’d bleed all over the goddamned place. I thought, maybe I’ll drown you. But I don’t have the heart for that.”

The squirrel was shivering in the trap. “That could have been me,” remembered Ronnie, so often an unwanted intruder himself. So he put newspaper under the trap and took the squirrel to his car. “Come on,” he told it. “We’re going to take a little drive.” Ronnie found a deserted mansion out in the country, with a big yard and plenty of oaks and other nut trees. He opened the trap and out popped the squirrel. It peed on the tip of his shoe, chirped twice, and headed straight for the oaks. Ronnie thought to himself, Well, maybe I did something that day. He told me he tried not to bully people or any creatures, at least not those less powerful than him. He knew how they felt. A primitive gospel, Ronnie-style, all decked out with “goddamns” and “sons-a-bitches.”

* * *

EVERY DAY AT my newsroom desk, I was calling Ronnie’s creditors to explain that he couldn’t pay his bills in full but that he was working on them. Then I’d go see him after work, and he’d bark orders at me. I took him takeout dinners from the Kroger deli and chain restaurants. Lots of mac ’n cheese, coleslaw, and fried fish. As we ate at Maxine’s dining room table, if Ronnie wanted more of a dish, he wouldn’t ask me to hand it to him. He’d point to it and grunt. What did I expect? He hadn’t really been part of a family since he left Polly and Roy’s house at age six. How could he know how to conduct himself at a meal?

A friend of mine reminded me how different Ronnie and I were—in life experience, in education, in social class, in every way. I’d imagined him becoming my congenial dinner companion. That wasn’t going to happen. He was a lip-smacking diner, a rude, roaring, cursing giant.

Even with his new electric razor, Ronnie wouldn’t shave himself; he waited for me to come over and do it. Many days he was nothing but a bullheaded weight on me. Max, meanwhile, denied him nothing. She served up meals of a dozen dishes. She even cleaned out his scummy refrigerator.

* * *

HIS SIXTH DAY home, I took a break. Ronnie was blue all day. He sat on the porch and watched for my Honda. Late in the day, he told Max, “I don’t guess Mary Carter’s coming.” I was sorry about that, but I needed to do my own laundry, mow my own yard, and dump weeks’ worth of garbage on my compost pile.

The hospital was asking Ronnie for one hundred dollars a month on his bill of $72,541. If he agreed, the hospital would drag its feet going after his savings. That was generous. But to Ronnie, who charged only up to five dollars a haircut, a hundred bucks was a king’s ransom. He’d pay twenty-five dollars and not a penny more. Then there were the ten or more other doctors and companies demanding payment. All told at that point, he owed upwards of $84,000. I located a lawyer who specialized in medical indebtedness. Ronnie refused to see her.

“Where you been?” he’d greet me when I arrived at the house, time after time. “Get me some Kleenex! Go get me some sinus medicine!” I asked him to soften his machine-gun orders, but I knew he only did it because he was scared. He was sorry he ordered me around. “I miss you when you’re not here,” he said. Every time I’d leave, he’d sadly say, “I hate to see you go.”

What was I going to do? I’d created all these expectations. But could I keep this up? I was already dreading each arrival at his house and his daily demands. But Maxine shouldn’t be burdened with them. Should I?

* * *

THELMA TOOK MAX on another day trip. Max left the fridge loaded with food and instructed Ronnie to eat it before it went bad. He was wasting food. Still, Ronnie pined for a fresh tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken, so I went to the nearest KFC. “You better take the leftovers home, or Max will give me hell for buying more.”

A bit later, Maxine walked in and caught us, mid-chicken. We looked sheepish, and we all laughed. She knew Ronnie was making up for weeks of misery. Maybe years of it. He was slowly becoming a useful member of her household again. That morning, near the back door, he’d killed a black snake with his crutch.

* * *

THAT JUNE OF 1990, Ronnie was still refusing surgery. He had some rat poison up in his room. If he lost his sight, he’d poison himself, he said. I let that pass for now and focused on our good times together. “Bring some pictures of Bridlespur,” he asked, “so Max can see what it looks like.”

I dug out a little album of photos Mom had put together for my last birthday. Mom, Daddy, the granddaddies. Mary Carter at three in front of our house. Mary Carter on the first day of school. Ronnie in the back in a group shot, towering over me and a bunch of other little kids. Ronnie grinned affectionately at the pictures. I might still be absorbing the fact of his exclusion, but it was old news to him. Right then, right there, with my head nudging Ronnie’s and Max’s as they viewed the little book, I knew that though he envied me, he also loved me.

* * *

I CALLED A pituitary specialist who’d offered to help Ronnie and told her I hadn’t been able to talk him into surgery. She warned that he might already have lost vision. He might be keeping it to himself. I needed to get him to the University of Virginia Medical Center as soon as possible. I knew his bad hip and long legs would be cramped in my small car for the two-hour ride. I looked into renting a bigger car. Still, Ronnie wouldn’t go.

His airways were giving him fits. When his right nostril clamped shut, he wanted to take a knife and cut it open. His self-contempt was horrifying. Whenever he couldn’t recall a word, he’d curse himself and clobber whatever furniture he was near. “You big, old, ignorant hillbilly.” He often pointed an imaginary gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

* * *

IT WAS TIME for Ronnie’s talking trach to be removed, and he asked me to take him to the ear, nose, and throat specialist in downtown Roanoke. He’d been in Vinton thirty years, and Roanoke, not exactly a metropolis, had come to seem like one to Ronnie. He feared he’d have trouble finding a parking space.

In the waiting room, a young boy’s bored, restless eyes landed on Ronnie. The kid silently snickered. Ronnie lowered his giant head into his chest and kept his eyes down. Seeing that the boy’s father wasn’t going to stop the kid, Ronnie limped around the corner and waited in the hall by the elevator, and I followed. I watched this silent drama but didn’t say anything. That would have made it worse for Ronnie. Instead, I stared at the boy, still leering from the doorway, and I wouldn’t quit. It took him a while to notice me, and when he did, I wordlessly drilled every bit of my fury into his eyeballs and wouldn’t let up. Time after time he’d look away, then look back at me. See? See how it feels? He stopped looking.

* * *

WITH RONNIE STILL denying he had acromegaly, I tried another tack. I brought a medical textbook with pictures of other men with the disease. If he saw the similarities between him and them, maybe he’d accept his diagnosis. But he couldn’t see what they had in common. Through one of his doctors, I contacted a local man around Ronnie’s age who had acromegaly and had recovered from tumor removal. The man and his wife, middle-aged like Ronnie and extremely friendly, came by to see Ronnie. He barely listened to their story of how much better the man felt.

No, Ronnie told me after they’d gone, doctors were just trying to trap him. They wanted to keep him from going back to the barbershop. Maybe Ronnie was nuts after all. Why would anybody not move to prevent blindness and death? Pale, thin, coughing, he looked dreadful. Bloody mucus gathered at the scab where his trach had been. I warned him that rat poison probably wouldn’t kill him. It would just tear up his gut and send him back to the OR. He wouldn’t budge. “No, it’s cyanide. It’ll work.”

Ronnie was sophisticated about a few things—Virginia history, wild turkeys, barbering, the culture and geology of the central Appalachians. But when it came to physiology and finances and medical bureaucracies and human relations, he was in the dark. Education at its best illumines all the workings of humanity. Ronnie, a recluse, had only seen a sliver’s glimpse of them. “Good night, Mr. O.,” I called out as I left that evening. “O for obstinate.”

* * *

BY JULY, ALMOST six weeks after Ronnie returned home, he and Max were quarreling. She called me very upset on a Saturday. His food hoarding had overstuffed her fridge. Before, they’d lived fairly independent lives. Now he was demanding that she cook him big meals. That day, she’d helped him don elasticized socks to reduce blood clots. It took serious muscle to pull those stockings on. I’d had trouble doing it for him, and I was a foot taller and thirty years younger than Max. As she struggled, Ronnie cursed her. She slammed his bedroom door behind her and refused to do any more. I went right over.

I stuffed him into my car and drove him over to see my house, across the valley from Vinton. Up my front walk, Ronnie hauled his crutches along but didn’t use them. He held them flaring out from under each arm, like some giant-winged, bony bird galumphing along, hunched forward to compensate for his bad right hip and leg. He looked up admiringly at my 1920s brick Tudor, with Boston ivy climbing up its front.

He sat in my kitchen nook and gazed contentedly out the bay window at my charming old brick garage and my wooded backyard. He petted my cats, Virginia and Rural Earl. I showed him around the upstairs and the attic room where I watched TV. He seemed to get a kick out of seeing where I lived. He called my Tudor a “two door,” as though it were a sedan.

That summer, I drove him along the Blue Ridge Parkway. We cruised slowly by grazing cows, old barns, and split-rail fences. We stopped at overlooks and glanced way off at West Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains, where Ronnie had once explored so freely. In my car, at home, even at work, I smelled Ronnie. I smelled his bitterness on my own skin. I tried to scrub it off. I changed shampoos. I tried cologne, deodorant, and perfumed body lotion. I dumped carpet-cleaning powder on my car seats. The acrid smell of him remained. I was having trouble with my blood tie to my sick, deeply embittered brother. Smelling like him seemed awfully close to being him.

* * *

MY INCLINATION WAS always to write about poor people; all my favorite stories were about them. Ronnie and Max reveled in my newspaper tales and agreed that I was a modern-day Mary Worth, a sob-sister comic strip character wrapped up in other people’s problems. I found poor people generally more interesting than better-off people. They often were wiser and more compassionate. They had a handle on how power elevates some and squashes others. But confronting deprivation and the lack of education in my own brother, being around the results of his alienation and his poverty of spirit every day, was impoverishing me. I wanted to rise above my aversion to him, but he was dragging me down. He was keeping me from my healthy life. And yet I couldn’t pull myself away.

I was his audience. We all long for someone to sit and listen to the stories of our pasts. Ronnie believed I was the one to do that for him. He was his customers’ ear; I was his. He was sucking me dry, and I was weary of him portraying everybody as a son of a bitch. He saw selfish motives everywhere. Susan, his caring, conscientious home health nurse, drove to the pharmacy for one of his prescriptions, but Ronnie didn’t appreciate it. She was just a drone, a “dumb broad,” he grumbled to me. His young doctor, Will Truslow, spent one of his rare free hours driving across the valley to check on Ronnie, yet Ronnie didn’t recognize his visit as an act of benevolence. Ronnie didn’t seem to believe people did things out of kindness. It hadn’t happened much to him.

* * *

BACK AT THE hospital, I’d encouraged his talk of us traveling together up in the mountains. Now, when he proposed doing just that, I froze and didn’t say anything. I felt ungenerous, but the thought of being stuck alone with him in the wilderness filled me with dread. I felt I should be trying to help my brother have whatever fun he could, but he was a burden. Now I doubted I’d ever write about him. I’d have to confess to all this, and I was too ashamed.

He saved me from the mountain camping trips because in late July, after he’d been home two months, Ronnie began to smile again. He’d just reopened the barbershop.