RUE
Written by Aurelia Blue
A story about life among crossroads, elder love, weeds, hunger and regret…
I know exactly where the sidewalk ends. My mom used to dump my sister and me out at the one red light in town and scream, “Walk, fast!” as she drove on through the green to the only high school for fifty miles in any direction. She was chronically late for work, which meant we were chronically late for school.
In the early years, the sidewalk ended at Grant School for grades K through fourth, about one city block from that light and the almighty high school and its athletic teams that beat like the heart of the community sending it’s streets out like arteries. Later, in grades five through eight, the sidewalk ended at the middle school, just at the edge of an enormous field of goldenrod that bloomed early in the southern climate and held on until the first hard freeze. If there ever happened to be one. My best friend’s parents had a nursing home just beyond it, but in our small town of less than a thousand people, it was well known you didn’t take a step off the concrete path. The Boneyard Woods was across the street, and a girl had been murdered there. So we walked the avenue that was called McLeansboro Street, both ways, practically from birth to adulthood. And never deviated.
That was 24 years ago and times have changed although not the way we thought they would. We don’t drive rocket propelled hover-cars among other things. In fact the coal train still comes through twice a day, stopping cars for 45 minutes at a stretch. I consider hopping through the slow moving cars, like I did as a kid, as I stand here waiting near the end of McLeansboro just feet from the end of the concrete that leads to the middle school. But now that I have one of my own kids, the seven month old towhead my grandfather has never seen, in hand, I decide against it. Besides, I’ve been walking hard for twenty minutes from the other end of the street, I can use the break.
As I look across the street at the Boneyard Woods and try to make out the decayed relics of the brightly colored gypsy carts and the possible bones of a horse or two, just as I did as a kid, I am keenly aware that I am walking toward certain death. Just not my own. Well, not today anyway.
The train drags by enough to clear the tracks and I walk on. I pass the school and descend into the goldenrod field. My head immediately thickens with the old familiar itch and pain. I’ve lived away from it too long and have forgotten how it just strikes you. It’s the ragweed, actually. Ragweed grows intertwined with goldenrod here, hiding from it’s natural predators and feeding on the healing herb’s medicinal properties.
At the edge of the field, I reach the little painted red brick building. I swear to all that is holy, it looks the same way it did when I was a child and my friend’s father held tent revivals out back where he preached the old Baptist gospel. She and I used to run barefoot across the lawn and into the nursing home to soak up the coveted air conditioning, a rarity in those days, the nineteen eighties at that, and visit the olds. I am time warping toward the glass and screen door now, listening to the roar of the air compressors as they pump that cool air in. I do in fact covet that cool air with all my being as I shade my baby’s head from the harsh, noon, April day sun.
I hesitate for a moment, my hand poised on the cold metal door handle, thinking of my family, three other children two city blocks away at the other end of the street. I left them there in the new senior living apartments with my grandmother. Right now they are laughing and putting globs of snowy frosting on a lamb shaped cake and sprinkling it with coconut. Shaking yet more coconut in a Cool Whip container with green dye to make grass. Later they’ll hide jelly eggs in it. I had no energy for it this Easter Sunday, so I came three hundred miles home to let her take care of my children. And my husband, who is passed out on the bed in her room, as she reads The New Yorker out loud to him, just as she did to me when I was a teenager. I am so broken, I think to myself as I pull the door open to the relief of the cold air blowing out so forcefully it makes the baby giggle.
I don’t recognize anybody at the nurse’s desk, my friend’s family sold the home long ago. The young aid who leads me down the hall, keeps glancing back over her shoulder as if she’s shocked I really said the name I said. She sweeps into a dark room, flipping the switch.
“Ed, wake up, you have company,” she drawls out cheerfully as she opens the blinds.
“What is it, goddammitt!”
This is pretty much the only sentence he ever says. The aid looks at me as if she’s trying to assess whether or not I’ll freak out and burst into tears. After all, my dad’s only been here once since he was admitted and my grandmother doesn’t ever come. She’s finally freed in a f*cked up elder divorce that I foresee becoming very popular with the advent of centenarian life spans and Medicare funded senior living apartments. Who needs a piece of paper when you can take your money and go live on your own, as you please; a liberty this generation of women is only now getting the pleasure of living. I can’t blame her. But then I know not every family is full of love and joy in each other. I smile as I tell the little aid that I’m ok, she can leave us alone. She looks both relieved and surprised.
“Hey, Paps, it’s me, how are you?”
“Enhhh,” my grandfather says from under his blanket that he has pulled up over his head. He’s looked like this the last three times I’ve seen him, which amounts to once each spring. Three years ago he recognized me immediately. Last year, he only recognized my husband for the first hour before he realized he also knew the kids. Two hours later, he put his hand on my swelling belly, and instead of giving me his usual admonishment about letting myself go and getting too fat to keep a husband, he’d laughed.
Hell, we’d all had a good laugh that day. My poor stubborn grandparents who had nearly died when I told them I was going to marry my boyfriend when we were nineteen, and had only managed wan smiles at the news of each of my three pregnancies in the following five years, had laughed long an heartily at my perceived misfortune at conceiving so near midlife. They knew we’d all have to let go someday.
“I brought you my new baby,” I say now, checking his fingernails for feces and boogers. His hands seem clean. I’m pretty sure he is naked under the white sheet. He’s been naked the last three times I’ve seen him as well. I see living in "the home" hasn’t changed him much. So I tuck the sheet around his gaunt body as tightly as I can before laying the baby in the bed beside him, who immediately screeches with delight and paws at his great grandfather’s face.
“Well, try that on,” Paps says as he nuzzles the little wet face next to his, “I think it fits pretty good.”
“Yeah,” I say, sinking to the cool floor the way I did when I was young and visiting the olds, reaching up to take his hand.
He opens the cloudy, Good Eye, and gives me a watery searching stare. I smile back sweetly. Affectionately. Trying not to think this may be the last time we come even this far. Does he know me? Will he ever know me again? I don’t care. We have this moment.
“It’s Easter Sunday, Paps. It didn’t rain Friday. Think it will rain?”
This is code for, I love you, please talk to me, let me know you love me too.
He used to say, “Not until Saint Swithin’s Day,” which meant he loved me back.
Regret pierces my heart in the dead silence that follows. I want to curl up on the cool floor in the fetal position. I am so hungry for God to give me a sign. Anything to let me know He, at least, still hears me. Isn’t this why I came home?
Say something. Say anything. Say, rain, back to me, if you can’t say, Saint Swithin.
I regret all the trouble of my childhood. I regret not taking a stand when DNR and Power of Attorney letters were being bandied about. I regret three hundred miles in the night to be with what’s left of my family on Easter Sunday when there’s a perfectly good burned ham sitting on my in-laws table and colorful eggs in their yard right now.
“Hey, handsome!” Another jolly little aid swings into the room. “Is he talking to you?” She looks at me huddled on the floor still holding my grandfather’s unnaturally soft hand that I’ve only ever known to be calloused.
“A little, yeah,” I say with my best lying smile.
“Hey, handsome?” She sings, sugary, into his ear. “You have visitors.
Suddenly, Pap’s eyes light up and he smiles and says, “Oh! Good!”
The aid winks at me and walks out of the room.
Paps returns to me with the watery stare. I stand up and pick up the now sleeping baby.
“You tired, Paps? I’ll let you sleep. We’ll talk later,” I say, acutely aware that this is probably a lie. I won’t be back for another year. Will he even still be here?
I stand over him as he lays in the bed with his eyes closed now and stare at his shrinking body with all the longing a child ever had. Tears pricking at my eyelids, I know I need to walk away.
Gently, still cradling the baby, I lean over the bed rail and kiss the side of his head, right above the ear. I know he wont like it, but I have to do it anyway. I have to say goodbye. All roads end somewhere, right? Might as well be here. I will not cry. This is how the game is played.
“I thank you for that,” Paps says the instant my lips flutter away, “Do it again.”
“Okay,” I say through the smiles and tears. And I do. Do it again, as he drifts off in a peaceful sleep.
The walk back to other end of the street is hot and scratchy. Pollens are everywhere on the breeze as I pass Grant’s playground now littered with broken shells from the morning’s egg hunt.
I choke it all back as I enter the new Senior Living Center. The Golden Girls, as I call the other residents, are all gathered around my grandmother’s table, fawning over the lambie cake she taught me how to make and now my daughter’s have made for her. They nibble on the deviled red beat pickled eggs cut in tulip shapes that my son has made in just method, she taught my young hands to do years before. My grandmother sits, the belle of the ball, surrounded by her family and the traditional homemade goodies they’ve brought from afar. She’s alone here now, she doesn’t get to be queen often.
“Well, you done good,” she says, walking me to the door of the Center. “And to think how we fought when you were a child. It comforts me now to know you are a Believer, you know?”
“Yeah?” I take the panoramic photo of her farm house, the one built from her own design, with all its flowers and hummingbirds buzzing around it, from the basket on her walker. It is her parting gift to me. So I don’t forget my home.
“Yep.”
We hold hands for a long time as my husband loads all the kids and bags of diapers and Tupperware into the van. Finally we let go and I walk away, putting on my sunglasses so the kids wont see the tears threatening to run down my face.
She’s still standing there on the patio when my husband pulls around under the portico.
“I like the tinting on the back windows,” she says pointing to the van.
“Yeah, it’s good for the kids, especially without any air.”
“Yeah, that’s good. Keep them cool until the sun sets and the night air comes in.”
“Okay.” I smile.
“Okay.” She smiles.
We each blow a kiss as the van pulls away, back out onto the street that has two ends, one life, the other death, with all the regrets, weeds, people in different ages of distress and heroines in-between.
We will travel on.
