“Your timing is perfect,” Ned says. “Ol’ Lila.” When he finishes drinking, the room is silent. Everyone is sitting down around the bed. Ned looks up and grips his gown as if he were holding the lapels of a jacket, about to speak from a stump. “This meeting will be called to order.”
“What are you going to tell us?” Mom smiles.
“I love you all,” Uncle Ned says. I see a sadness in his eyes for the first time.
“I’ve got to run out for a few minutes,” Lila says.
“Please leave,” her father says. “You need a break from this. I need a break from this.”
“Be back,” Lila says.
“Okay, darling.” He smiles. “Come back when the people who really care about me come in.”
“I’m going to take a shower. I didn’t have a chance this morning,” I say. “See you later, Uncle Ned.”
“Okay, son.”
I pick up my suitcase and follow Lila out of the room, thinking that you cry not for the one who is dying, but for your own loss. I put my arm around Lila’s shoulder.
“I heard Mama say things that I thought would never come out of her mouth,” Lila says. “She told him that he was a good husband and a good father.”
“Wow,” I say. “How long does he have?”
Lila’s face is dry and calm. “No telling. A few hours. A few days. ”
When I come back to the hospital, Uncle Ned is asleep, leaning against the headboard. Mom and Dad are sitting quietly. Zoe is sleeping on Aunt Rhonda’s lap. I kiss Lila and she tells me, “They’re letting us take him home.”
“That’s good,” is all I can say.
“He’s just as cheerful as ever,” Dad says.
I glance at Uncle Ned.
“He’s not listening,” Dad says.
“Yes, I am.” Uncle Ned opens one eye.
“I took a nap and a shower,” I say.
“Now you feel good like me,” Uncle Ned says. “So you’re a programming whiz?”
“Uncle Ned was a big shot with IBM in the sixties,” Dad says.
“You know what IBM stands for?” Uncle Ned says. “
I
’ve
b
een
m
oved.”
Everyone laughs.
“Like the job?” he asks me.
“Yeah. The wages are good.”
“Let’s do it,” Uncle Ned says.
“What?” I ask.
“Let’s do it. Let’s put it together, man. I think this will really fly,” Uncle Ned crows, sealing a deal with clients over cocktails in an imaginary bar. A nurse comes in and checks the level of the IV bags. Uncle Ned asks her, “You in the designer business or the accounting business?”
“A little of both,” she says, laughing on her way out.
I watch my father, whose eyes are puffy and nose red from a cold, take a handkerchief from his breast pocket.
“Don’t get so emotional, Frank,” Uncle Ned says. “You’ve been through this many times before.” He looks at his grandchild, Zoe, who is now awake and quietly straddling her grandmother’s hip, and says, “Hey, gal.” The toddler smiles and plants her head in her grandmother’s neck. He tells Aunt Rhonda, “Zoe’s wild about you, honey.” He smiles, masking pain, leans back against the headboard, and shuts his eyes. Suddenly, without opening his eyes, looking almost asleep, his breathing becomes labored and then, a half minute later, there’s a low gurgling in his chest, the sound of air mixing with the fluid rising in his lungs. Everyone gathers close to the bed.
“I think he’s going,” Lila says.
Everyone is leaning over the bed, touching him, clasping his arms and legs.
“We love you, Uncle Ned,” I say. “We love you, Uncle Ned.”
“I love you, Neddy,” Aunt Rhonda says, crying.
Uncle Ned opens his eyes and glances at Aunt Rhonda and says, “I’m not dying.”
Denial or a declaration of immortality?
“I know,” Aunt Rhonda says.
“Hey, Ned,” Dad says.
“Yeah, brother?” Ned is staring past all of us.
“We’re going to make it,” Dad says.
Ned doesn’t answer. There is no sound of breathing anymore, just gurgling.
“Are you in pain?” Lila says.
“Yes,” Ned says through his teeth.
“Where’s the morphine pump?” Lila, holding Zoe in one arm, pats the sheets with her free hand.
Uncle Ned, with a lost look in his eyes, says weakly, “Don’t pump it.”
Lila squeezes the pump once anyway. With her small hands Zoe brushes tears off her mother’s face.
Staring into the distance, Ned says with force, “Good night! Good night!”
“Good night, Ned,” Mama says.
“Oh please,” Uncle Ned says. “Oh golly. Oh golly.” His arms begin to shake violently.
A nurse rushes in and Lila tells her, “He doesn’t want any heroic measures.”
Dad begins the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” and everyone joins in, weeping as they recite. Then Dad recites the Twenty-third Psalm, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”
“O God, oh please, oh please,” Ned is saying, his arms still shaking.
“I love you,” everyone is saying. “I love you. I love you.”
For a moment Ned’s eyes focus in from the distance onto Lila’s face. “I love you, Lila.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“O God.” The pain seems to block his vision as if his open eyes can see nothing.
“Let go, Dad.” Lila hands Zoe to her mother and tries to smooth Ned’s eyes shut. “Let’s close your eyes.”
Aunt Rhonda, with Zoe on one hip, sponges his face. “Does that feel good?”
“O God.” Ned opens his eyes again and looks at nothing. “O God.”
“Close your eyes, honey,” Aunt Rhonda says, “and let go.”
“We love you, Uncle Ned,” Mama and I are yelling.
“We love you,” everyone is saying into the gaps of silence.
Lila shuts his eyes but they pop back open.
“Tell Mama hello and Dad,” Dad says.
“And Nick,” Mama says. “Tell Nick hello.”
“We love you, Uncle Ned.”
The gurgling rises into his throat and Edmund Henley Rutledge closes his eyes. His body shudders and stops and is suddenly quiet.
“Seven o’clock straight up,” Lila says.
The toddler Zoe looks around the room and back at Ned with the same expectant expression in her eyes, as if he is still alive. I notice her rosy cheeks and Ned’s dead skin and think, She is his only immortality.
“Gosh, he’s beginning to get cold already.” Dad lays his hand on his brother’s forehead.
“I’m sorry, Harper,” Mama says. “We just have to cherish each other the years we have left.”
Aunt Rhonda fixes her eyes on my face. “I’d gone home to wash the sheets to get ready for him.”
Staring at the corpse, Lila is hit by another round of weeping. “Oh, Dad, I love you so much.”
Aunt Rhonda puts her arm around her. “He was proud of you, you and Bob and Zoe. He was proud of Frank’s boys, too.”
The undertaker, a crew-cut man wearing a bright brown suit and a silver tie, knocks on the open door of the room. Mama says, “Let’s leave while they cover him up.” I keep studying Uncle Ned’s face and its expression of peace or the absence of expression, while everyone leaves the room. The undertaker pulls off the blankets, exposing the pale white legs below the hospital gown, then covers him with a sheet. He and an orderly pick up the corpse and load it on a gurney and push it out of the room. The undertaker works for an old Nashville funeral home, the last independent in town, Cage, Taylor and Williams, which Granddad sold when Cage and Nick were in college to help put all three of us through.
The family is standing in front of the elevators. Aunt Rhonda says, “He never once complained about pain.”
“He showed us how,” Mom says. “He was carrying a banner all the way with a big grin on his face.”
I think that he looked terrified in the very last moments when he was saying, Oh golly, O God. “That’s the way I want to go,” I say. “With my family all around me.”
“We were all with him in the very end,” Mom says. “Or should we say, the beginning. The older I get, the more convinced I am. Remember Ned said, ‘I’m not dying.’”
“A lesson in dying,” I say. “I keep thinking of that. A gallant way to die.”
“He died with real dignity,” Dad says. “I ought to know. I’ve seen a lot of people go.”
“About an hour ago,” Aunt Rhonda says, “Dr. Finch told Ned, ‘You’ve been a good patient and a good friend,’ and Ned said, ‘I’ve certainly seen enough of you.’”
“He was a joker to the very last,” I say as the elevator door opens.
A plague of cicadas fills the woods with an alien screeching, a sound effect from a Hitchcock movie. Millions of locusts, risen from the ground after seven years and doomed to live for a single cycle of the moon, cover the trees, the house, the drive, all of middle Tennessee. Legions of males screech over and over, screaming to mate, their drumlike abdominal organs pulsing ceaselessly. I sit on the front porch of Cage’s Bend listening to the demonic orchestra invisible in the twilight. Closing my eyes, I see Dad with his arm raised in a blessing and Lila putting Uncle Ned’s ashes under a tree in her front yard. Something lands on my sleeve. I open my eyes and see a locust crawling down my arm. “Get back to your insect orgy,” I say, thumping it into the air with my forefinger. How many generations of locusts have lived so briefly in the front yard? I think, looking out at the lawn, the four huge oak species, white, yellow, red, and pin, planted by Cherokees for some reason—a lacrosse field, a religious site, a curse on the white man?—in a perfect square long before Morgan Cage came here in the 1820s and planted the oak alley along the drive.
The first Cage built a log cabin which grew into a rambling warren of added rooms, floors, and porches. In 1838 his fellow Nashville attorney and horse racing buddy President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the Cherokee Nation when Georgia started throwing them out after gold was discovered, and Morgan Cage rode with the federal troops evicting the natives, fourteen thousand of them, herding them along the Cumberland River toward Oklahoma, the tribe sold out by its leaders for six million bucks and the promise of some much less impressive real estate in the prairie. The Trail of Tears passed between the log cabin and the river. Four thousand died, mainly women and children, on the forced march of eight hundred miles. Morgan Cage must have felt some guilt, for he adopted an orphaned Cherokee.
Mom thinks that we have some Cherokee blood. She insists Nick looked like an Indian, his dark eyes, hair, and skin and his hawk-shaped nose. Her theory is that while Morgan was off gambling away his fortune, the young brave comforted his lonely wife, injected the genes of the conquered natives into the bloodline. I think some black blood made it as well because of the full lips and Bantu noses of some of the Cage women. Be interesting to do some DNA testing. I’d welcome some color in the family gene pool. I remember a Pueblo chief who said, How cruel the whites look! Their lips are thin. Their eyes have a staring expression. They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? They are always uneasy and restless. They don’t know what they want. We think they are mad.
Cage is mad right now, wandering the streets of San Francisco, playing his guitar on the sidewalks, begging for change, his speech as rapid-fire as an auctioneer’s, his mind in overdrive, completely lost in the moment in a world of endless excitement on a five-month manic run that started around Christmas. A shooting star about to burn up in the atmosphere. I cannot ignore Uncle Ned’s deathbed command but I truly believe that there is nothing I can do.
I tried so many times over the last ten years. It’s hard to keep the chronology straight. After he first went manic on Nantucket and then six months later fell into a deep, dark, delusional depression, he pulled out of it and started making a life in Memphis. He was working as a construction manager and living with a very nice girl and her little boy. For about a year he was stable. The whole family thought he might go back for his last semester and finish off his joint degree. Then when the recession in the early nineties hit and he lost the job, he started gradually, so slowly that no one really saw it coming, going manic. Sometime in that year he went off his lithium, or maybe he didn’t even go off it, maybe the dosage needed to be increased but Dr. Fielding didn’t catch it. Probably he was still on his lithium but it wasn’t enough to hold off the high spirits, a warm wind after a long winter that presaged the coming shit storm.
Think about it: You’ve felt so bad for so long, even when you were stable, haunted by the humiliating memories of your manic behavior, all the destruction, and then you finally start to feel good. You wake up singing in the morning. You’re hopeful again for the first time in years. Life spreads out before you like a land of dreams. What you should do is run to your shrink and say, Emergency, Doc. I’m feeling
too good
. Better give me something to take me down before I spin out of control.
But you don’t. You tell yourself that the lithium is working. You’re productive. You’re happy. You’re fun to be around. What could possibly be wrong? The little fire smoldering in one part of your brain catches flame. There is not enough lithium to put it out. It inflames one hemisphere of your mind, then jumps across the ditch to the other side. In a couple of months your skull is an inferno. All restraint, your very conscience, goes up in smoke.
Cage broke up with Samantha, said good-bye to little Ray, moved into an apartment in midtown, where he entertained different women—older divorcées, young waitresses, college girls—every night. He was working with his carpenter buddies and dabbling in real estate. He talked our stepuncle Jack into signing a contract that gave him six months to renovate and sell the split-level twenties “airplane bungalow” where Granddad Rutledge’s second wife had lived. Granddad had spent most of his time at the lumber mill in Arkansas away from his second wife, though he came back to die in that house when I was a kid. Jack had just moved his sister, Granddad’s childless wife, who was still beautiful in her eighties, into a nursing home, and agreed to sell the house to Cage for a song. Cage could’ve doubled his money, could’ve pocketed forty grand or more if he pulled it off.
By the time I came up from Tulane for the summer, Mom and Dad were stressed to the breaking point. Families are powerless now. It’s impossible to put someone away anymore unless you can prove that he is a danger to himself or to other people. Cage was clearly gone, replaced by a fast-talking con man who was bouncing checks all over town, getting in fights in bars, exploding at Mom and Dad whenever they tried to talk sense to him, up all night, jumping up onstage with his guitar. He had stopped making payments on the Jeep, so Dad was covering them. At the house on Carr he had torn out walls and ceilings but hadn’t begun the renovation. There were only a few weeks left on the contract. I tried to help him get the house presentable enough to sell, Sheetrock the walls and the raised cathedral ceilings, get it painted. Cage would work for a couple of hours, say that he was going to the lumber store, and never come back. Turned out that he was tripping on acid while I was slaving away for free, trying to help him salvage the house.