CHAPTER 25

Fletcher did not show the next day, just as the Missus had hoped. Still, the Missus was not as cheerful as one might expect when she appeared downstairs, as she had suffered a seizure during her sleep that was brought about by that three-day period of her madness when she refused to eat large-enough portions and never took a single pill. She had stayed awake the entire night following the episode, afraid to close her eyes again in fear that another attack might strike during her sleep, that most vulnerable time when her faculties were not with her even if she could somehow fight the monster. The Missus had suffered several more of these episodes by the time I’d returned and indeed lay helpless in her bed when I’d found her, her hair in loose shrivels that fell over her forehead, wet sheets that clung to her body like children fresh out the pool, in her eyes a wildness that I’d never seen from her, although in this state she was susceptible to anything.

“The medicine’s just gotta build up in her,” Silva insisted.

“How many has she had?” I asked.

“Maybe three but not big ones,” Silva replied. “I’ve seen her have worse. Missus just nervous they’ll happen again. She’ll be fine.”

And with this Silva left the room calmly, her mind a steady focus on circumstances that did not involve the Missus or her health, her tone a return to business as usual. Given Silva’s disinterest, I took charge of Miss Lula’s care alone, easing that sad creature’s concerns of slipping into another episode with constant taps of my hand on her shoulder, assuaging that fear that swore to her the end was near. For during that time the Missus swallowed whatever pill I gave her, no longer a fighting bone in her body.

That evening I ventured downstairs for more water and the Missus’s supper as she lay asleep in her bed. I would wake her upon my return with whatever food Silva had prepared as I did each night and force the meal down her throat, which she feared would seize up before she could have a chance to swallow. Then I would end with that pill as I always did, and she would close her eyes and drift to sleep, leaving the room silent and dim as nightfall arrived.

The kitchen was empty when I entered and no dinner upon the stove. I prepared a glass of water then checked the back shed for Silva, but she was nowhere in sight. When I’d returned to the kitchen, the water was still cold and so I carried it upstairs to the Missus’s quarters. The room was dark as I entered, yet just as I slipped past the doorway I saw her there, the shadow of Silva near the window as she pulled an unopened bottle from the top drawer of the Missus’s wardrobe. Silva then removed another bottle from her apron and placed that new bottle atop the dresser. With great precision, Silva emptied the unopened bottle of pills into her apron and refilled the bottle with pills from the new bottle she’d brought with her. She then closed the bottle and returned it to the drawer of the wardrobe and left the room just as quietly as she’d skirted in, as I slid into the corner and away from her sight.

The Missus still lay asleep in bed when I brought her water. I quickly placed the glass onto the dresser and retrieved the pill bottle from the drawer. There were only a handful of pills that remained in the Missus’s current bottle and matched those same pills now in the unused bottle, useless things I’d been feeding the Missus for days while wondering why she was not improving. There was indeed no chance for the Missus to ever get well, as it was now Silva’s hand that controlled the wheel.

While it was true that servants often bore a heavier load than others, at no other time did that weight feel so burdensome than when I watched the Missus suffer and slowly die in that room alone as I wondered to myself exactly where my loyalties resided. For truly, there had been lots of suffering in that home, too much to consider in one night’s ramblings as I sat beside the Missus’s bed and attempted to add up all the harrowing accounts that now extended to include me. When the count reached numbers my two hands could no longer tally, and these thoughts turned to nightmares that no sight nor sound could ever resolve, I finally quit my state and sought out Silva in the downstairs area where she stood gathering her purse to leave.

“Silva, you’ll kill her,” I said when I entered.

“Bernice,” Silva replied calmly, “God and you both know no man or woman can take a life. Only Him.”

“Yet you’re trying,” I said.

“Maybe she deserve to die,” Silva admitted. “You ever think of that?”

“In God’s time and not ours,” I warned.

“If He allows it …” Silva said.

“He allows many things that aren’t His will,” I admonished. “And you know it.”

“Then I pray He allow this,” she said, leaving the kitchen. “Our prayers are only suggestions to His ears, Bernice. I only pray this suggestion He hears as clearly as any other. It’s all I got left.”

Silva hummed a gospel as she walked.

“God help her,” she swore staunchly before she closed the door.

“God help us all,” I whispered.

I found Mr. Kern alone in his parlor, his eyes a mix of tragedy and yearning.

“The Missus’s condition is worse, sir,” I told him. “Seems we might have to take her in.”

He nodded yet remained quiet, leaving those decisions to me, as convulsions begot hysteria and suddenly we lost her, not to the grave but to the mania that persisted. It happened quickly and within a week’s time the Missus slipped into a period of uncontrolled seizures the doctors labeled some fancy term: Status Epilepticus, a condition which left the Missus bedridden and saw her hospitalized for several weeks at Greenwood Leflore Hospital, some ways from the plantation. The Missus did show some strength as we drove to that desolate place, although feebly, her will allowing her to open her eyes long enough to see that plantation fade and that building where Elizabeth had also lain until the time of her death now emerge at the horizon where the crop was just beginning to grow.

Good news walks slowly, whereas bad news travels at a gallop, as within a day of the Missus’s hospital stay those Arkansas relatives had already arrived in Greenwood and descended upon that hospital. Along with the usual crew also came an uncle, whom I’d heard stories of from his days in the war and of those coyote fighters who’d nearly wiped out his entire troop on that journey home along the French countryside. With them also came a cousin I’d never met who felt a certain connection to my obligated kindness and was compelled to talk more than any stranger looking to acquaint himself with a fellow wanderer. Every word from his mouth was an uninstigated tale of his life in Little Rock and that job he had at the chicken factory just outside of town. Everyone else had given up on his stories a long time ago, which left him with only my company.

“The fence around it is more like a prison than a factory,” he said to me as we sat inside the hospital room for the first time. “You get vertigo from just looking up at the barbed wire top. That first day it made my legs and stomach go weak and nearly landed me flat on my face from the disorientation. Two guards at the security booth had to stand me up, both angry men that I had to wait for to finish their cigarettes, playing a game of who could look the meanest the longest before they showed me where to go. ‘You new?’ the losing guard said. ‘Yea,’ I told him.

“And you know what, I must have stared down that clock on the wall because it was close to eight. And so they got a clipboard from beneath it and flipped through the pages before stopping at a part with color printouts near the middle. ‘Packaging or prep?’ he said. ‘Prep,’ I told him. ‘Name?’ he asked me. ‘Jackson,’ I said. Then he looks at me for a minute, as if there’s a right or wrong answer to his question. ‘Take it to Sector Three,’ he says, so I guess I had passed.”

“Jack, you leave that poor girl alone,” the mother of those three boys said. “Nobody cares about those damn chickens.”

Jackson waved his hand at her chiding, later finding me in the hallway to continue, telling of how the third sector was located at the far end of the parking lot near the highway and how I wouldn’t believe its size. How the door buzzed loudly and a tomboyish woman met him on the other side. How she was pretty and reminded him of one of those female athletes who were clearly too tall for anything other than sports and whose high heels gave them away each time they attempted anything professional as they stumbled around clumsily. He spoke of her handshake being firm and her painted fingernails slightly out of place on her wide hands and long fingers. He said a man named Mr. Way who had a skillet face and arms like nubs and a wide neck like those wrestlers you’d see on television programs showed him the ropes. He remarked how the man had pudgy fingers and a roll of skin that had folded over the man’s wedding band and locked it into place. He commented that the man’s wife must have been some former cheerleader who was sadly unaware that marrying the wrestling team captain would come at such a hefty cost. But that maybe she had let herself go too, he considered, her face most likely caked with cheap makeup and her wearing way too much perfume. Then his thoughts drifted to the chickens, telling me how there were four long rows where, at the beginning of each one, suited workers would grab hold of the chickens as they neared the belt, gripping the chickens’ necks as those workers then wrung and beheaded each one before passing the bodies along the line of workers who then removed the feathers before tossing them aside as they then reached for another. He told of the chickens’ passage through that huge magnet that pulled any metals to the surface and how that son of a bitch was the loudest machine you’d ever hear and how it left the chickens’ skins red from the tearing of metals from their flesh. The chickens then came to him, where his job was simple, to divorce the chickens, which amounted to nothing more than separating each chicken that had become conjoined with another during the process. That was all. Every day.

Inside the room, the Missus sat in bed as helpless as before. There was no cheering her up, although the presence of her family did place her in a slightly more agreeable mood than when they were absent. Jackson finished another story and, if only for a few seconds, seemingly the entire room became alive again with hesitant laughter that trickled from the lips of each person inside as we personally resolved that it was okay to have laughter once more. Embracing this foreign concept, our breaths circulated the room like games of tag where one must wait for another to be touched before he or she can stop or go. Although brief and not in the slightest bit awe inspiring, this momentary glimpse of normality was imperative to our fragile states, and without it we would have surely imploded from the pressures of looking so stern for so long.

Yet just as quickly as it came it left, back into the vortex that stole most joy, leaving us with only the dismal reality we knew seconds before that moment arrived. We sank like splits inside the cushioned plastic chairs, not really moving until a twitch stirred inside and someone either scratched or stretched or yawned. We remained as still as possible, settling into the space like roots inside the ground. It wasn’t until this game was over and no one else felt the need to call out further, not even those last abrupt chuckles that often finish off a good laugh, that we each fell silent once more beneath the humming and beeping of hospital machines. Like anything other than the stillness that sometimes lasted for hours inside the room and the uncomfortable glances at the Missus in the bed who did not move, this beeping of machines was more than welcomed.

The Missus’s brother held his head in his hands. His palms nearly bled from the prick of his own nails pressing the insides of his clenched fists, as the idea of death and its finality reemerged inside the room just as quickly as it left, ushering away that levity so discretely beneath the heavy air that swallowed the room in thirsty gulps like a monster.

Mr. Kern left for the night, as did the rest of the family, leaving only me at the Missus’s side to care for her needs until morning. The room was a dark abyss around midnight when she woke, the last of the evening having faded in brilliant arrays and fiery bursts that once invaded the room with light but now left it void. The Missus hadn’t suffered a seizure the entire afternoon and seemed in better spirits, although far short of a full recovery. She glanced around the darkness, expecting that pit of silent stares and halted breaths to await her. Yet once she’d felt certain that only I sat there did she finally speak her heart.

“Bernie,” she whispered, her voice a soft crackle that lurched from her throat, “you know he would’ve given him the world if I’d let him.”

I looked into her weak eyes.

“Ain’t never seen a hair in five years and soon as he does he melts,” she said. She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”

“It’s in their nature,” I said. “Boys and their fathers.”

She shook her head.

“Fathers and their bastards!” she shouted. “I’ve never knowed a sight so horrible in all my life that a man would give up his own wife and daughter for a bastard he never knowed. Sure, at first I just wanted that boy gone so we could forget him and move on. But when I saw that look in George’s eyes all those years ago in that kitchen, loving that boy like his own, more than he did any of us, I wanted that boy here so he could pay for what he did, showing his face here again and causing this family so much pain. But I never wanted to hurt George with all of it, I swear, not until I saw that last look in his eyes when he watched that boy out in those fields. He still loved him, and so I vowed I would make that boy hate him. And George would never feel the love of Silva or his bastard ever again.”

“But you can never stop Mr. Kern from loving him,” I said.

She looked at me viciously.

“But I can stop that boy from ever loving him,” she said. “And that’s a misery George could never take. It’ll kill him.”

The Missus trembled so violently that I feared she’d returned to one of those miserable states. However a fit did not ensue as she merely lay back with her eyes open and her mouth wide. She still feared resting during those times, worried an attack would come during her sleep. And so instead I entertained her with stories of my trip to Virginia and the different people I’d met there. I spoke briefly about Clinton and the loveliness of that place in spring when the earth appeared as it must have during the days of Eden as children played around the fountains at the town center.

“From wilderness to Eden,” she said.

She lay with a smile on her face as she pictured those sites, and we remained this way until morning with neither of us closing our eyes for even a minute. We’d been at it for hours by the time our stories finally ended.

It was midafternoon when the family returned. The sun poked through the holes in the blinds, dotting the floor with light. Throughout the morning there had been calls for nurses over the loudspeaker; however, they were meant for other rooms, not this one. The constant motion outside the door now seemed so distant, as if, in this stillness, our lives had been transfixed by some dreamlike state where we no longer engaged in this world but instead watched helplessly as scenes unfolded around us. In this state, we each watched with tired eyes as life continued in rooms just next door, as this dementia robbed the lives of each person inside and not just the Missus in the bed.

Frightfully, we looked at each other for the next step. No one moved more than they already had, for monotony seemed somehow more consoling than the unknown pressures of ending a person’s life and being the first to suggest it. I can replay it a hundred times, and it still feels like some kind of nightmare, and maybe it was. Maybe the seizures had not worsened that day and caused the Missus such shallow breaths that oxygen could no longer reach her brain. Maybe Silva had not replaced the Missus’s medication all those days or even weeks inside the house and precipitated this bad event. Maybe I had not gone along with Silva’s plan and said not a word of her deceit in order to protect that servant’s secrets, and by some twisted logic of my own compromise also protect Fletcher from the onslaught of more pain.

Notwithstanding, the Missus died just after noon on that day, no gasps, no jolts, for she was already dead long before that time. The Missus’s brother appeared panicked, his knuckles red and his fingers wrestling a paleness that pushed back the frustration that swelled like nausea at the pit of his stomach, for indeed how he cried faint tears when he thought no one was listening, how he seeped out heavy sighs that each person in the room felt as clearly as the next yet made no mention of.

With her eyes locked on the tasks at hand, his pudgy wife folded more blankets, more newly knitted scarves by the Missus that still needed recipients, more mittens for the boys (not that they ever wore them). Once this was done, she turned from the door with more pillows and sheets that needed folding as she placed them in a well-structured order beside the window. She packed the duffels and arranged the sheets from largest to smallest, along with the Missus’s socks, shirts, pants, and toiletries on top in the largest bag, because as everyone knew you didn’t leave a hospital or hotel room a wreck. John and Simon stood at the door with one foot inside the room and the other foot out, both boys turning nervously to face their mother once she had finished her chores and everything was packed away. With these tasks now completed, the room was static. Mr. Kern looked up from his seated position bedside Floyd and for once seemed the most uncertain of us all. The Missus’s brother took a step closer to her bedside and squeezed Miss Lula’s hand, fooling no one but himself into believing that this grip was anything other than a last-ditch attempt at keeping her there.

“I’ll get the bags,” John said.

“Let’s pray,” his father interrupted.

And so with our heads bowed and our eyes closed or facing our shoes or those cracks along the floor, the Missus’s brother in a low voice paid homage to a God who had taken his mother, father, and now his only sister, whom he loved more than the world. In between his huffy breaths the room sat silent, a suspenseful emptiness that made our eyes sting and our noses run. It caused our hands to shake and that sad man’s voice to quiver until he finally let go and sobbed as John patted his back like a good son would do and Simon nibbled at some piece of candy he’d found inside his pockets, lifting my hand to his mouth in the process, as our fingers were interlocked in prayer.

“Brave faces, everyone,” the boys’ mother said in the awkward silence that followed as we each departed the room one after the other.

The Missus’s brother was still tearful, although he had managed to wipe most of his tears onto his shirtsleeve and collar, tears that seemed impossibly heavy as they crashed to the floor and created craters upon their impact with the ground.

The house was unchanged, tiny daffodils and decorative rocks lining the front path to the door. There were still roses surrounding the oak tree in the yard as well as those long limbs that always ruined the paint on that side of the house. I’d climbed the last step to the welcome mat when Silva approached bearing a smile that no amount of bad news could erase, her presence stopping me from moving any farther.

“It’s finally over,” she said with an expression that was more tired than relieved.

“It ain’t over until we in the ground,” I warned.

“I know, but deliverance is deliverance, Bernice,” she swore, a look in her eyes that showed concern not for the living but for the dead, wanting to know for sure that it was true and that the Missus had not somehow survived, as was that woman’s tendency to bounce back from these types of conditions.

“She went with the Lord, Silva,” I confirmed, “but we’re just beginning to see the trees in front of us. Even with the Missus gone, ain’t no clearing for miles. That forest is as far as the eye can see.”

“Bernice, you don’t get it,” she said. “That season is finally over.”

“Tell that to the May flowers, dear. Even after the April rain, the storms still come.”

She sat with these words then said defiantly, “Our blessings can finally begin, Bernice. It only takes one person to stop those generational curses, one person bold enough to say it ends here. Never again. God goin’ bless us. You’ll see. He only lets us endure so much for so long. He knows all our hearts can take. I believe it, Bernice. God goin’ see this through.”

Still, Silva looked at me strangely, somehow aware as I was of the difficulties that could lay ahead, even with the Missus gone. She paused for a minute longer, allowing that glint of hope to slowly burn away. She then leaned her head onto my shoulder and wept, exuding all that was left inside her in mournful stares and uncomfortable bites of her bottom lip. That warmth she once possessed was seemingly no more, that fire somehow extinguished, as even her hands were now cold and in her voice was a weakness that mirrored the Missus’s own decline. Inching along the porch, she walked with that strained limp that everyone dismissed as being typical of older age, yet only she knew better and could define that pain as something quite different, something that existed on the inside, beyond flesh and bone.