The slick, dark, heavy tires bubbled compressed moisture out of the damp carpet of leaves. Jeanine watched through the fogged window pane as the ambulance/hearse drove through the yard to the house. The long, thick vehicle maneuvered between the thin, high white oaks dripping mist like sap. The tailgate against the door, the ambulance attendants emerged pulling up their jacket collars like children pretending to be headless. Rain beaded on their clothes, the attendants moved awkwardly with the stretcher, like no-necked frogs.
Uncle Ovey was with her. He had been with Tante Celestine all along and he never held his handkerchief to his face nor showed any terror of his wife's disease. Her little bundles in his arms and a hand on hers, he came out of the ambulance at her side and would have entered the room with her if the door had been wider.
"The room, she is very pretty. I built it especially for you, of course. For privacy. For you to rest. For you to grow strong," he said as they got her into the new little addition to the house. He said it as though it were some charm, some prayer, some ritual to ward off the frozen enevitabilities. To hold death back a while with cheerfulness.
From the window, Jeanine watched until the door to the new room closed and the drivers put back the stretcher and shut the door to the ambulance. It was a white ambulance with oak and gum leaves now stuck to it. For funerals, they pulled out the oxygen equipment and the rest of the life-saving gear and rolled in the coffin.
Uncle Ovey came out and signed some papers and the driver and attendant got back into the big vehicle. Jeanine watched them all the way through the yard. Then she felt that special, family isolation which always settled when company left. She went through the kitchen and stood with the rest of them, waiting their turn at the door.
It was an outside door for all practical purposes inside the house now. Jeanine's mother insisted on it. And there was a full outside wall, too, although there was not even the space of a finger between the house and the little room that Uncle Ovey had labored on the entire autumn. The smell of the paint was strong and new, to Jeanine the aroma of living change, as Uncle Ovey ushered in her grandmother.
Gran-mère, in a bonnet even though she was in her kitchen safe and warm and dry, did not seem moved by the visit. For the most part, she chattered to Jeanine's mother about the evening meal. It was mama's turn, though, and the old lady was left talking as they entered.
The bright paint made her aunt's face seem grayer and that made Jeanine sad. Mama was holding her handkerchief over her nose and mouth but from the anguish in her eyes it could have been from grief instead of fear. Feeling guilty doing it, but unable to resist the example of her mother, Jeanine pulled up the hem of her skirt to screen her breathing. She held it against her face, hoping that like Mama she looked sufficiently saddened.
"Chère," Tante Celestine said weakly. That was all, beloved.
"Your aunt, she is tired," Uncle Ovey said.
Jeanine obeyed. Uncle Ovey disliked even giving instructions much less orders. He would never have said, 'You have to leave. Your aunt, she is tired.' Jeanine understood. She left without having said a word, not even bienvenue.
Mama stayed longer, so they must have conversed. Sisters have a lot to say to one another. Jeanine had no sister. No brother, either. Uncle Ovey was the only male in the family. There was just Gran-mère, Mama, Jeanine, Uncle Ovey and – now again and for a little while at least – Tante Celestine.
They talked about it after dinner. Tante Celestine had long ago eaten and gone into that deep sleep of the suffering and the sick. She was not suffering, they all insisted. Uncle Ovey prepared her meals, permitting no one else to do it. Nor to wash the contaminated dishes, boil her linen, change her bed.
"The room, she complains that it is damp," he said. "She says she hears the water running."
"What she hears is the rain," Gran-mère said in that head-nodding way of hers as though each utterance of her toothless mouth were not only absolute and irrefutable but of great significance as well.
"Mama, it is not raining," Jeanine's mother said.
"When I said rain, of course I meant the wind blowing the leaves across the tin roof, the leaves knocked down by the rain."
That was the way conversations usually got all turned around over coffee after dinner. But they had Uncle Ovey there to keep them on the subject.
"This weather, it is not good for her. Not at all. The mountains, with the high, dry air, that is what she needs."
"Phoof !" Mama said, lifting the dishrag and dropping it. It would have been as impossible for them to get her to the mountains as it would have been for that dishrag to float like a bubble.
"The kitchen pipes, they are so near the wall by her head when she rests. The running water that she hears, could it be a leak in the pipe?"
"Would you not see the water?"
"To see it … perhaps if it were a tiny leak ...."
"Then she would not hear it running."
Still, Uncle Ovey got up, pulled on his boots. He took the big flashlight out of the cabinet. Everyone had bathed and were in their nightgowns and robes before he returned. The dry dirt and cobwebs from beneath the house coated his clothes.
"No leak," he said.
"Well, now, it is the rain she has to hear," Mama said. "So let us all go to bed and get some sleep."
It was the same all through the winter. She complained of water running. She complained of the humidity in the room. Uncle Ovey would not put a can of water on the room's gas heater to humidify the air, not even in the house proper. Their eyes dried during visits, lids scraping like rusty hinges. Throats rasped when they tried to swallow, dry wall against dry wall.
But outside the walls of her death chamber the winter wore on chilly, damp, longer than any of them remembered. Four times, water in the coulee submerged the bridge and they were trapped. Uncle Ovey had to take a skiff to work, returning in the dark, the skiff floating between the oak tree trunks.
He was always wet and tired, but he changed to dry clothes and brightened his appearance before he went in to see her. Then, he ate and drank his coffee and worried his allotted time before he went to bed. She kept him obsessed about the sound of running water.
"The thing to do," he said, "would be to take her to the mountains."
No one would say that death is the same in the mountains as it is in the bayou country. It was impossible, anyway. The worrying was a way of resting.
"If we could only find the gold," Gran-mère said.
"Oh, that old story," Mama said.
But Uncle Ovey leaned forward.
"Yes, but Marie," he said, "the plantation house … the great house, she was right here, right on this spot, amid those live oak trees. Of course the white oaks were not here. This was their … garden. 'Find the fountain, find the garden. Find the garden, find the gold,' the old ones said. They had to bury gold somewhere."
"They had banks," she said.
"From the Americans, they hid it, from the Northerners."
"Phoof!" Mama said, lifting the dishrag and dropping it.
But the next day, in the cold drizzle, Uncle Ovey was at work with the back scoop on the tractor. He gouged at the earth the whole long, gray day. The thick clouds that dropped the drizzle held at bay any change of sunlight that marks the passage of the day. The large, hard rubber wedges of the back tire treads slipped and rutted at the soft earth as the hard edge of the scoop ripped out roots, dug and scarred and scraped.
They sent Jeanine out bundled and swathed in plastic raingear to tell him it was time to eat. She had to dodge appendages of the tractor to get close enough to touch his foot and halt him. He was oblivious of sound. And he did not seem to understand her words.
"She's talking more and more of the fountain. The gold. We have got to find the gold."
So Jeanine came out a second time. She brought a thermos of coffee and sandwiches. He wedged the sandwiches into his mouth and practically swallowed them whole. Then he swigged the coffee, re-plugged the thermos, wedged it between his derriere and the seat. He went back to work.
All day they watched him from the windows. They watched him as the rain grew heavier and sent little rivulets of distortion across the face of the glass. Even in the dark, he dug by the lights of the tractor. Then, mercifully, the hydraulic broke and he was forced to quit. He couldn't lift the scoop, it would only drag behind.
Tante Celestine died that night. Uncle Ovey was with her. He sat with her the whole evening until she died. Uncle Ovey did not know the time she died. Her last words were now familiar ones. More ravings about the fountain, the running water.
The family was relieved. At the funeral only Uncle Ovey grieved. The others would grieve later.
They buried her in a rose coffin. The mist settled on it as they shoved it into the crypt. The moisture beaded on the rose coffin. Jeanine thought it beautiful.
Uncle Ovey put on his hat and hurried to the car. The weather was bad so the funeral guests did not stay long at the house for coffee and whiskey for the men,buttermilk and sweet cakes for the ladies. Uncle Ovey did not change clothes. He rolled up his sleeves. Then he rolled up the cuffs of his pants to keep them from the mud and went out to the tractor.
The white shirt sleeves plastered pink against his arms by the rain. His hair flattened against his forehead in wet curls. But he backed the tractor around and aimed the lame scoop at the little room. Mama hurried outside, Jeanine in tow, Gran-mere watching from the open door.
"But Ovey, what are you doing?"
"That room, I'm going to knock it down, and drag it away and burn it every bit. My sweat built it and my money. It is mine to tear down."
"Good!" Mama said stoutly. Ovey smiled for the first time in many months. He put the tractor into reverse and spun backward, the scoop scraping a shallow trench.
The wood crunched. The room tilted from the cement blocks. He went forward and reversed into it again with a great wood-metal crunch that took a jagged bite out of the room, leaving open to the hostile elements the newly painted walls, the carefully laundered linen, the accouterments of slow death.
The third thrust of the scoop sent the tractor into the center of the room. For a time it seemed the gears had jammed and he could not get it into forward. The tractor strained, wheels spinning ineffectively pulled mud and rain over treads like some ancient waterwheel. The tractor full of grime and grease and the overpowering strength of heavy, masculine labor, was a perversity in the feminine design of the room.
Then Uncle Ovey put it into neutral and slipped off the side like a man throwing a leg over a horse's head to drop both feet to the ground. He crouched to peer beneath. Then he dropped to his knees, crawled forward on his hands.
From beneath the tractor they heard him wail. The three of them rushed to him, although they were still afraid of contamination from the room. Even Gran-mere was with them, bonnet in place and shawl over her ancient shoulders, as they peered inside and saw him frantically removing with his fingers the dirt the rain was now turning into mud.
The heavy drops of rain washed it as his hands removed the dirt. There was the foundation of a fountain, a large one, large enough for the garden of a grand plantation home.