TWELVE

The wind blew down the last of the colorful autumn leaves in the Eden country. The temperatures dropped below freezing every night and rose into the fifties during the day. Yet the storms of winter didn’t come; the skies remained clear. Autumn seemed reluctant to leave.

One day Anne Harris went to visit Ed’s mother. She was now in a nursing home, had been for over a year. After her husband died, Ed found someone to stay with her, cook her meals, keep her clean, clean the house. As her condition deteriorated, her needs became too great for one helper to handle, so she was moved to a nursing home. By that time she didn’t seem to care.

On the day they packed her clothes she had sat in the living room of the old house humming vacantly, lost in a world no one else could enter.

She was like that this afternoon, sitting in her room with a blanket arranged around her legs, facing the window, humming tunelessly, mindlessly. Anne sat in the visitor’s chair and studied the older woman’s face, watching how the sun smoothed the wrinkled skin and made her look younger. It was an illusion, of course, minimizing the irreversible damage done by that insidious, merciless villain, Time.

Ah, Time, you great deceiver, with your sweet, extravagant, shameless promises…then you pillage youth, ravage innocence, murder passion, corrupt health, and finally steal life itself, sneak silently and stealthily away with that tarnished bauble in the dead of night after destroying everything that makes it precious.

Ed’s father, Lane, had fought Time, fought with all his strength against the inevitable, until near the end. Near the end he surrendered. He hadn’t surrendered that first day that Ed went up on the mountain after the deer, though.

Oh, no. She went into his bedroom with the soup and medicine that evening, just after dark, before Ed returned.

“He back yet?” the old man asked.

“No.”

She had placed the soup on the stand, helped him with the pills, put pillows behind him so he could eat. Then he couldn’t hold the spoon. She helped him with several bites. He refused more.

“Enough.”

“You must eat.”

“Food is another appetite that I’ve lost.”

She moved the bowl away, straightened the bed. In a few minutes there was nothing else to do, but still she lingered. The old man had no wants, no little requests.

“Is there anything else I can do?” she asked finally, distractedly, her mind on her husband.

“Stop judging me, lady. But perhaps you can’t do that.”

“I’m not judging you, Father Harris.”

“You can’t lie worth a damn, either.”

“Don’t you think perhaps it’s time to make your peace with me? With those of us you are soon to leave behind?”

The old man was in pain, obvious pain. He waited for a spasm to pass, then said, “How should I do that?”

“I don’t know exactly,” she retorted. “It does seem that you must be thinking of many things as you lie there. Thinking back, perhaps.”

“The past is over, finished, dead,” he shot back. “This minute I’m still alive. Hurting like hell, but by God, still alive. Without a future, with a dead past, with just this moment to live in.”

“Is that all there is?”

“Fight it out with the preachers. Somewhere else. You go into the other room now and get on with living. Let me lie here.”

As she was going out the door with the soup bowl, he said, “Send Eddie in when he gets back.”

Ed came in a half hour later, long after the last of the twilight had faded. Snow covered his coat and hat and melted as he stood in the kitchen entry-way warming up. He leaned the rifle in a corner and slowly peeled off his wet outer clothes. He sat down to take off his boots.

“Your father wants to see you.”

“How is he?”

“Alert. Nasty.”

“Did the doctor come today?”

“No. I talked to him by telephone. He’ll be by in the morning after he finishes his hospital rounds.”

“Mom?”

“I don’t think she understands what’s happening.”

“Sis?”

“Sat in a bedroom upstairs and sobbed all day.”

“I’ll go see them in a bit. How about something to eat? Something hot. And a drink of whiskey.”

He went to his father’s bedroom carrying his drink in his hand, still wearing his hunting pants, his face still flushed with cold. Anne put the pot of soup on the stove to warm. The refrigerator held the remains of a roast, so she warmed up some of that, too.

Ed spent almost a half hour with the old man. He was still with him when the night nurse arrived, muttering about slick roads. Anne briefed the nurse, who went in to see the patient while Ed was still there. When the nurse returned she took dinner to Mrs. Harris and Ed’s sister, Sarah.

Finally Ed returned to the kitchen. “He wanted a minute-by-minute account,” he told Anne as he sat down to eat.

“He’s crazy,” she said curtly.

Ed drank another slug of whiskey and attacked the food.

“You’re crazy, too, to go along with this. Hunting, for Christ’s sake.”

Ed ate in silence as she busied herself cleaning pots and pans; then he went upstairs to see his mother and sister. When he came back downstairs, Ed put his boots on the hearth to dry and stretched out in his father’s easy chair. By the time Anne and the nurse finished preparing another round of medication for the old man, Ed was asleep.

She put a blanket over him finally, then sat staring into the fire. The wind rattled the single-pane windows and howled around the chimney. Once she crossed the room and spent a few minutes watching snow falling into the tiny circle of light that escaped the window. Occasionally she added logs to the fire.

She was exhausted, but she didn’t think she could get to sleep. She was wound too tightly.

If life is a journey, and it seems to be, why does it have to end here, like this? Answer me that, God.

After all the twisty parts and dry stretches and long hills, you get to the end of the road and find a senile wife, a worthless daughter, and a son who scampers into the forest so he won’t have to watch.

She pitied Lane. And she hated him.

This mess was partly his fault. He raised an incompetent, incapable daughter, he sent Ed away today, and he chose to do his dying here, in this ramshackle old farmhouse on the ragged edge of nowhere, when he should have had the common decency to die in a damned hospital like everyone else.

The old man was going to be a selfish, chauvinistic curmudgeon right to the bitter end.

Finally Anne poured herself a drink and tossed it off. She stretched out on the couch so the night nurse could wake her if she needed help, pulled a blanket around herself, and went to sleep listening to the wind.

When she awoke, the night nurse was washing dishes in the kitchen.

“Where’s Ed?”

“He went out fifteen minutes ago. I fixed him some eggs and toast, and he put some sandwiches in his pocket.”

“What time is it?”

“Six-thirty. Almost dawn. There’s fresh coffee in the pot.”

Although she knew the answer, Anne asked anyway. “Did Ed wear his hunting clothes?”

“Yes.”

She went to the kitchen door and threw it open. She stepped out onto the porch, reeling from the bite of the cold wind. Ed wasn’t in sight. Tracks in the snow led off into the gloom. Damn him!

She went back into the kitchen, closed the door against the cold and stood with her back against it.

“Mr. Harris is sleeping just now,” the nurse said.

“How is he?”

“A day or two. Three, perhaps—I don’t know. Not long, though, I think.”

Anne was in the kitchen washing dishes when the doctor came. He was a big man, in his fifties, with an honest, cheerful face. Half the people in the county called him their doctor, and they called him every time they got the sniffles.

She was still there when he came out of the patient’s bedroom. “I’ll take a little shot of that coffee,” he said.

As he leaned against the counter sipping the beverage, he asked, “So how are you holding up?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Feel like hell?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Ed?”

“Hunting.”

The doctor nodded and met her eyes, and his features softened. “Lane’s got a lot of pain,” he said, “and we’re medicating all we can. If he wants whiskey in the evening, give him a couple of ounces.”

“He asked for it last night.”

“The danger is that the booze will react with his medication and kill him.” He shrugged. “If he wants it, let him have it.” The doctor finished the coffee and set the cup in the dishwater. “When I get to the office I’ll see about getting a nurse out here in the daytime, too. I think you’ve had enough.”

“Thank you.”

Going out the door he told her, “You know my number. Call me anytime. I can be here in half an hour.”

The contrast between the doctor’s comment and Ed’s blithe odyssey in pursuit of a deer hit her hard. Her stomach felt as if it contained a rock. A large, cold rock.

Ed’s sister, Sarah, came downstairs around ten o’clock and helped herself to toast and coffee. Although she had been named after her grandmother, Anne mused, never were two women more unlike.

Sarah sat next to the fire nibbling on the toast. “Oh, this weather,” she said at last, to break the silence.

Anne grunted.

“You must think me a terrible daughter.”

The temptation to say something polite tripped across Anne’s synapses, which irritated her. Sarah was a miserable human being; everything she did and said rubbed Anne the wrong way. Here she was now, pleading for sympathy! Well, she would get not the tiniest smidgen from her sister-in-law.

Sarah sighed audibly.

Anne got a firm grip on her lower lip with her teeth.

“Oh, I do wish William were here.” William was her husband. Sarah always called him by his Christian name, although everyone else who knew him more than ten minutes called him Bill. “He wanted desperately to come but couldn’t get away.”

“Umm,” Anne managed. She had met Bill on only two occasions, both mercifully short. He was a lost-in-cyberspace technoid, a chubby, bald man with sweaty palms and a florid complexion that hinted at a future of heart disease who had created and sold several computer games to a major manufacturer. He was reputedly rich, about ten million dollars’ worth. Anne idly wondered what grotesque flaw in Bill’s character made Sarah attractive to him. If she was. Perhaps he was having a wild fling in California just now, celebrating a few days’ reprieve from Sarah’s limpid company.

After a while Sarah said, “I suppose I should go to see Father.” She glanced at Anne, who bit so hard on her lower lip that it hurt.

“It’s so difficult,” Sarah explained. “I want to remember Dad as he was, not sick and helpless and—”

“Dying?”

“Dad certainly wouldn’t want us to remember him—”

“You make me want to puke,” Anne snarled. She marched into the kitchen, then decided she had had all of this house she could stand. She threw open the kitchen door and went out into the snow.

Her tears felt like icicles as they slid down her cheeks. She swabbed at them angrily.

The snow had stopped. Patches of blue were visible between dark, ragged clouds. Every now and then a sunbeam hit the snow with a brilliant light that hurt the eyes. The wind was still strong, and cold.

Shivering, her tears stanched, Anne went back inside. Sarah wasn’t in the living room, she noted with relief.

The old man’s voice came through the open bedroom door. “I do not want to talk to a minister. If you get that windbag out here I won’t see him.”

“You are a nasty old man,” Sarah said belligerently.

“Daughter, I do believe that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me. Certainly the truest.”

“You should have stayed in the hospital.”

“Perhaps,” Lane Harris said gently. “How is your mother taking all this?”

“She’s very upset.”

“And you?”

“Oh, Daddy, it’s very hard seeing you like this.” The sound of sobs came through the doorway. Anne stepped into the bedroom to catch the performance.

Lane put a stop to it. “I’m tired,” he said. “Take care of your mother, Sarah. And let me get some rest, please.” He closed his eyes.

Sarah went upstairs, still sobbing. Anne checked the patient, then closed the door behind her.

An hour later when she returned to the bedroom with more pills, Lane was awake. His eyes followed her around the room. “Want to tell me what’s on your mind, too?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’d better get it said. There isn’t much time left.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Very few things do. If we only talked about things that mattered, we wouldn’t ever say much.”

“Okay,” she said, making up her mind. “Okay, I’ll say it. You sent Ed to hunt that deer. To shoot it. To kill it. That deer must die because you’re dying. God, that is foul.”

“You don’t understand anyone but yourself, Anne. You never did.”

That comment cut her to the quick.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to hurt you. No call for that.”

She struggled to maintain her composure. “I certainly don’t understand you,” she murmured finally.

“The problem is that you’re too smart. I told Ed you were too smart before he married you. He did it anyway. Guess I knew he would.”

“Thanks for trying,” she said acidly.

“Only two kinds of men marry women smarter than they are: damn fools and men with so much money they don’t give a rat’s patootie. Ed didn’t have that much money, and I never really thought he was a damn fool.”

He fell silent. She said, “If you expect me to comment on that crack, you can forget it.”

“A man in my condition can’t afford expectations.”

“This is a silly conversation,” Anne said starchily. “Your son loves me. Just because you wouldn’t have picked me to marry doesn’t make Ed a mystery.”

“Made him happy, have you?”

“Twenty years of marriage is certainly not a weekend fling or a passing fancy.”

“Statistics don’t impress me, lady. Hell, lots of people stay married until the day they croak because they’re too lazy to get a divorce. Or too scared. Too something.” He paused for a bit, then added, “Too many people settle for less than love.”

“Ed and I haven’t.”

Lane Harris seemed not to have heard. His gaze went from the ceiling to a picture on the wall, then to a framed photo of his wife taken years ago. “Life’s a gift,” he said finally, “like a sunset, a butterfly, a drop of rain. It doesn’t mean anything. But it has to be lived, every hour.”

After some thought he added, “Life is what you don’t understand, woman. By all that’s holy, I’ve lived mine. Lived it to the hilt. Loved a good woman, had some kids, built something to leave behind…savored all of it. And I’m going to live every minute I have left. Right to the end.”

He tried to turn so that he could see her face, but the pain got him bad. When it passed he said, “If I could get out of this damned bed I’d be up there on that mountain, feeling the cold, the snow, the wind, looking for that big buck. But I can’t. I do the next best thing. I lie here thinking about it.”

The speech was a huge effort, so he closed his eyes and rested. When he opened them again, Anne was still there.

“Don’t expect you to understand. Women never do. Not even the smart ones. That’s been my experience. Don’t know why. But they never do.”

He took three deep breaths, then whispered, “Leave me now. Please. Let me think about the mountain.”

Anne went.

That had been almost two years ago. Today, sitting beside Ed’s mother, basking in the sunlight streaming though a large exterior window of the nursing home, Anne thought about Lane Harris’ comment that life is like a sunset. What else did he add? A butterfly and a drop of rain.

She could remember every word she and Lane had said to one another that week, which was one of the benefits of having a terrific memory. Or one of the drawbacks.

She recalled with a flash of discomfort her statement to the dying man that she and Ed were happy. The implication that Ed was merely enduring marriage to a smarter woman had infuriated Anne, caused her to make an assertion that she would never have made if left unprovoked. Her relationship with Ed was certainly none of Lane Harris’ business. Nor anyone else’s, for that matter.

But was it true?

What is happiness, anyway? The young think it is joyous ecstasy, every day like Christmas morning—nothing less will do. Lane Harris knew better, and so did Anne.

She was thinking about happiness, about Ed, about the raindrops and sunsets they had spent together, when she felt a caress on her cheek. It was Mrs. Harris, wiping away a tear with a fingertip. She wore the gentlest smile.

“Oh, Mother Harris, God bless you,” Anne said, and reached to hug the lady. It was then that she understood why Lane Harris had loved his wife.