34

THE DEATH OF WALTER SELBY

Here comes Nurse Linen, with her pinned-up hair and her cool strong hands, come to roll him over and change his sheets, just like he was an infant. Are you ready? she asked, her mouth fixed, the drawstring on her smock tied tight. Are you ready? Here we go. He was never ready, really, but he did what she told him to do: his body went limp, and he let her push him onto his side while she tugged at the bedclothes beneath him—a poor bit of jostling that sent him on a long long journey through a cloud of pain, inside him or outside him, who could tell the difference? He tried not to make any sound, but a cry came, and it took him two or three minutes to get his breath back again. I’m sorry, said Nurse Linen. We’ll be done here in just a moment. Swiftly, and with a confidence and dexterity that never failed to impress him, she pulled the worn sheets from under him and replaced them with freshly cleaned ones. Then, as always, he was struck by her strength and her health. She had a kindness that wasn’t so kind, but it had been more than thirty years since he’d touched another human being with love in his heart, and this was close enough. Her almost caring questions: How are you feeling today? Have you eaten? Have you eaten everything they gave you? Have you had a look out the window? It’s a beautiful day. He was seldom able to answer her, but he was comforted by her asking.

He began reeling in time, closing generations. He said hello to his own mother, a woman he hardly remembered but who was now so close that Walter could smell her, could brush his fingers across her features. She was a young woman, she wore a lacy dress and black ankle-high shoes, and her eyes were a penetrating brown. I put you in this world, she said, and maybe I’ll be waiting for you when you leave it. And maybe I won’t.

Now, as he slept morphine sleep in his hospital bed, the strains of waltz time made their way into his dreams, as if it was the rhythm that would lead him all the way down to the end, wherever the end might be. He remembered watching the Governor gently feeding a sugar cube to a beautiful brown and grey stallion during a review of the state cavalry. He remembered Nicole, drawing circles on his back with her index finger while he lay half awake on a Sunday morning.

Are you going to heaven or are you going to hell? asked Nurse Linen.

—Is that right? Is that what she said? Impossible. What a question. He really wanted to laugh, but laughter was well beyond his powers. Instead a red orchid bloomed inside of him, the petals unfolding and expanding, opening outward in a glorious stop motion. He was astonished, and all he could do was lie back and wonder at it. Slowly, the flower faded and he came back to his senses; Nurse Linen was gone, and he was alone again.

He stirred and opened his eyes. Gazing down the length of his sheet-wrapped body he could see his hands, spotted where the pigment had collected, the sediment of age. There were spots, too, in his vision, dull, milky bits that floated in one direction or another. In each lived a memory that was eluding him. His veins were plastic, sweet and old, and they ran with salt. He couldn’t divide his life; it had been one container, one measure, a unit of being, perfectly circumscribed. One woman, one act, one sentence.

Nicole came to him, sneaking through the tangle of drip lines and monitor wires to hover above his bed and sweetly sing:

When it’s peach-picking time in Georgia . . .

He was a four-year-old boy in a backyard, a summer home his mother had taken up near Newport. Behind the edge of the lawn there was a line of towering trees. It was a Saturday morning, just after breakfast, and his mother was inside the house, talking to a man he’d never seen before and would never see again. The back door was open, but the screen door was still closed; he could smell the metallic flavor of the screening and feel the rough surface on his fingertips. Now he was wandering, tiny through the great yard, tiny under the sun. He noticed every feature of the ground, where there was a depression, a dandelion, where, at the base of the single tree that stood about fifty yards from the house, the grass was growing long because the mower hadn’t been able to reach between the roots. Maybe he was four years old, maybe he was only three. The big house behind him was noiseless, and so was the sun. Only the atmosphere made a sound, and that was just the hush of heat in the morning. He could see his feet, and that was about all he could see. Then he was in the trees.

The floor was soft and the needles smelled sweet, and the air was cool and damp. He felt a kind of dizziness, nothing unpleasant, he enjoyed it. He walked along, turning one way and then the other, as something caught his eye—a stalk of tiny blue flowers growing in the half darkness, the breeze through a patch of ivy, the warm glittering gold of sap appearing on the side of a tree. He craned his head back and looked up through the branches to the sky, which appeared here and there, neither blue nor grey, but a strange sort of milky white that came from the clouds being illuminated from behind. He couldn’t say that he was afraid, not at all; he liked the feeling of being lost very much, with no place to be and everything to see. Here was a mossy log, flaking pieces of itself off in the gloom. Here was a little brook, visible only because of the soft sheen of water that it left among the rocks. Then at last he came to a small meadow, with grass almost up to his waist. On the other side the trees began again. It was there that he sat, watching the clouds pass by overhead, on their way from where to where, so slowly. It was there that his mother found him, three hours later, the woman taking him by the arm and lifting him to his feet, at first roughly, so that the boy wondered what was wrong, and then gently, with a look of fear and tenderness which he had never before seen on her face.

Well, how long ago was that? And in a boyhood he had left so far behind, lost in the noise of years. He wondered if that was what dying was, still more what living was: endlessly remembering the boy you were, the adult you wanted to be, the old man you became. And then there were the other children, the ones he’d made: Frank and Gail. He hadn’t been a good father. He hadn’t been a father at all, except to make them; and here on the edge of always, he wanted very badly to know how they were faring, the two tiny lumina he had cast into the world.