“I’m going as fast as I can,” I whispered. I took the white towels and I wiped him. Then I threw them in the trash. Then I took the dry towels and wiped him some more. I picked up his fresh pair of boxer shorts and put them on him. They were all bunched under his hip because of the cold floor. Then I took his sweatpants and socks and shoes and put them on too. I helped him sit back up. Then I turned to lift him. My arms were too tired.
Ughh
, Nathan said.
I stood up and tried to catch my breath. “Okay, just give me a second.” Then I put my arms underneath his armpits and heaved him up into the wheelchair.
In the end I just stood there and caught my breath. I threw away the rest of the paper towels. I patted Nathan on the back, but his head bowed.
“You ready?”
I twisted his nose like I always did, but he didn’t smile.
He took his finger and pointed it to himself and then pointed it to me.
“What did you say?”
So he took his finger again and pointed it at himself and pulled the trigger.
I knew what he was saying.
“You’re wanting me to shoot you?” I said.
He nodded his head yes.
He was wanting me to shoot him.
I giggled but then I stopped.
He wasn’t joking.
So I pushed him out of the bathroom.
His eyes were saying,
You should be staring at me
.
I’m beautiful
.
His eyes were saying—
Life is not short. Life is way way way way way way way way way way too long
.
SO
I was over at Little Bill’s when the phone rang. It was my Uncle Stanley. He said they had to rush Nathan to the emergency room.
I borrowed Little Bill’s car and I drove all the way back through the dark mountains until I came to the interstate, and then I turned my high beams on and sped towards the hospital, thinking to myself,
Please don’t let him die yet.
I flipped my high beams off because there was a tractor trailer passing in the other lane.
He passed, so I flipped them back on again and whispered, “Please don’t let him die until I get there.”
I wanted to see him die.
But he wasn’t dead yet. He was on the 3rd floor of Appalachian Regional Hospital and my Uncle Stanley was standing in the corner of his room. So I walked over to his bed and stood beside Stanley. Nathan was just there in the bed. His eyes were closed. There were tubes coming out of his nose and tubes coming out of his mouth. There was a shit smell in the room because the nurse had just changed his pants from where he shit himself. His breath was heavy. Every time he breathed—
huh
—it sounded like somebody was knocking the wind out of him—
huh
—every time he breathed.
It scared me—
huh
—the way he breathed like that.
HUH
. So I just stood and listened to Nathan breathe his booming breaths—
huh
. I thought that everything I thought about death was wrong.
I shook my head and followed Stanley into the waiting room where we sat and waited for something to happen.
And then we went back and forth, back and forth. At the end of the hallway there was a crazy old woman who didn’t even know where she was at and she kept shouting, “Louise. Louise.”
The nurse came over and said, “There’s no Louise here, honey.”
Then the nurse said: “Why don’t you help fold these quilts for your babies.”
The old woman picked up these hospital towels and started folding them.
The nurse said: “Yeah, you’re doing a good job folding these quilts for your babies.”
I thought,
This world is crazy.
We walked around for another three or four hours going back and forth to Nathan’s room every fifteen minutes or so.
And then the last time I went into his room before we left, Aunt Mary was leaning overtop him crying and telling him, “You just fight, Nathan. You just fight.”
She left.
I stood at the foot of the bed and told him inside my head,
No, Nathan. You go ahead and die.
Nathan just kept breathing his booming breaths,
HUH HUH
.
Then Stanley said: “Well we might as well go.” So about 4:00 that morning we left the hospital and drove all the way back to Danese.
I drove behind my uncle’s truck and saw a dead deer on the side of the road. At the bottom of Sandstone Mountain I saw an old guy walking through the darkness with a backpack. He turned towards me and lowered his thumb and it looked like Nathan, traveling somewhere. I shook my head and drove all the way back home trying to stay awake. When we finally got home we hadn’t so much walked through the door and the phone rang.
My uncle picked it up and said, “He did. Okay. Thank you.”
Then he hung up and his voice was all choked up and full of tears. “That was the hospital. He died. I’ll have to tell mother.”
I went “Oh” and my Uncle Stanley walked outside.
So that morning I started planning for Nathan’s wake. I asked Ruby what she wanted him buried in. She told me she wanted him buried in sweatpants and a sweatshirt just like he always wore.
She said, “He never liked those suits and ties—awful things.”
So I went over to Wal-Mart and bought him a white sweatshirt and a pair of white sweatpants.
And then I took them up to the cashier who said, “Did you find everything?” thinking I was just a guy buying a sweatshirt and sweatpants.
She didn’t know I was a guy who was shopping for clothes to bury his uncle. That afternoon when I took the clothes down to Bob Wallace, I said, “I need to get him a t-shirt too so that he won’t get cold.” The funeral home guy just looked at me.
Then I laughed because he was just a dead body now and it didn’t matter if he was cold or not.
So all of the children and all of the grandchildren and all of the great grandchildren and all of the mothers and all of the uncles’ uncles and all the cousins and all of the cousins’ cousins—they all came in and we had a wake. That night we walked into the wake where the casket was.
And then I walked up to the coffin too and looked down at Nathan. I whispered, “What are you now?”
The coffin was so full of stuffed animals that my Uncle Stanley said: “Need to tell people to quit putting stuffed animals in there. It’s gonna be so full of stuffed animals they’re not gonna be able to see the body.”
I giggled and looked at Nathan. I looked at his plastic-looking skin, and I looked at his lipstick red lips, and I looked at his cheeks painted rouge red.
“They’ve turned you into a cross dresser, Nathan. They put lipstick on you.”
I thought,
You’re the deadest-looking body I’ve ever seen.
So everybody passed the body and said goodbye. Ruby balanced herself on her wheelchair and stooped to kiss his face. There were people in the corner sharing recipes and there were people telling jokes. There were people crying in the corner. There were people saying that God has a plan for all of us. I said, “People are meant to have cancer or find out that their child is a serial killer? That’s a pretty shitty plan.”
People gave me dirty looks.
There was this little girl who was taking violin lessons. She stood up and was going to play us a song.
One of the old women said: “Oh look at that little girl. She’s so cute. And she’s gonna play us a pretty little song.”
So the little girl took out her bow and her violin and everybody listened as she drew back her bow across the strings—
eek
—
squeak
. Then she brought it back
eeek
—
squeak
. And she was playing the worst sound you’ve ever heard. It made your stomach hurt, it sounded so bad. It made you want to die.
Then just a few minutes before the wake was supposed to end, my Uncle Terry came in. He’d flown in all the way from San Francisco. His wife was pregnant and she was getting ready to have a baby. He was upset because he wanted Nathan to be able to hold his first child. So he came in at the end of the wake holding something in his hands. He walked up to the coffin and put something in Nathan’s hand. Then he patted the dead hand and walked away. It was an ultrasound picture of his baby who wouldn’t be born for another four months. But Nathan was holding his baby now. Nathan was buried with a baby in his hands.
The next day at the funeral they put Nathan into the ground. It was cold and rainy and the ambulance brought Ruby out on a stretcher. She was all covered in quilts and her head was wrapped in blankets so she wouldn’t get cold. She was back away from the coffin, propped up on the stretcher, and the preacher stood at the grave shouting loud so she could hear. I stood, watching and listening to it all. Before long I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I was looking out over the graves and watching my cousin Bonnie walking with her little boy Paul and showing him all the graves. This was his great grandmother. This was Paul’s great grandfather. This was the one thing we shared with everyone. This was the story of generations and they begat and begat and begat. Death.
And so the preacher prayed and preached and prayed some more. Then after the preaching was done Wallace and Wallace brought over this white box full of doves and the preacher said: “We’ll now release this white dove which is a symbol of the dearly departed’s soul.”
The preacher pulled off the top of the box and the white dove shot out and over all of us and then high up into the cold gray sky and then even over the old home place, where it circled twice before flying away.
Then Preacher Steve raised his arms and shouted: “He’s flying home to heaven, Ruby. His soul is flying home to heaven.”
Ruby said: “Oh lordie, yes. Little Nathan is flying home to heaven.”
Preacher Steve shouted: “Hallelujah, Ruby.”
Ruby raised her arms too and shouted “Hallelujah” as the white dove disappeared into the sky.
And then everybody started walking back towards the trucks to go home. I looked in front and saw the little girl from the night before with her evil violin. She was putting her violin beneath her chin and getting ready to play us one of her monster songs. So we rolled our eyes and shrugged our shoulders like,
Oh god, not again.
I imagined myself choking the little girl to death, beating her to death with her violin.
Then Stanley bent over and put a five dollar bill into her case like he was hoping that would stop her. But it didn’t. She just took her bow and started moving it across the strings until it squeaked—
eeek
. And then
eeked squeak
. And then squeaked
eeek
. And we covered our ears. But then she slowly moved the bow once more and suddenly she wasn’t the horrible little girl playing her horrible violin, but the greatest musician you’ve ever heard, playing the most beautiful song in the world.
Then I shut the book and looked at the dark mountains. It wasn’t my blood or face or nerves. It was dirt and rocks and the smells of skin. I looked out into the purple mountaintops and laughed because I stood on these mountaintops, but then I felt the meanness. I felt myself hating because I had been in the darkness of what was between the mountains. I saw the crazy ass god of the old book people who made his story. They made him the way they made him because they lived next to a crazy river. I saw the people of the desert smile because of the Nile. Then I saw these mountains and chunks of mountains smile and I knew one thing.
I felt darkness because I had been deep in the hollers, and I knew glory because I had stood on top of the beautiful mountaintops. More mountaintops please. More mountaintops.
This is a lie I was told as a child, but it’s still true. The New River is one of the only two rivers that flows directly north. The other one is a river called the Nile. Those rivers are inside of me. I have a river inside my heart. You have a river inside your heart. There are diamonds inside of both of us. We are all flowing north.
I understand that Nathan was gone now. And I knew that this was a different part of my life now. This is where the hero goes out into the world and encounters the people he meets along the way. This is the part that comes after the first part. This is a part called…
THE SECOND PART
So time passed. After Nathan died, Grandma went to live with my Uncle Stanley and I needed a place to stay nearby so I could keep going to the same school. My friend Little Bill agreed that I could stay with him at his mom’s apartment. He told me she was never around anyway. He told me not to call him Little Bill anymore though. He told me his name was just Bill now.
BILL
I soon learned one good thing about having a roommate with obsessive compulsive disorder is that they always keep the room clean.
I didn’t even know Bill had OCD until the day I moved in and he pulled out this container of Lysol and a rag and started spraying shit down. I guess having lice made him worry about things being clean. His head wasn’t shaved now. His hair was thick and red. He sprayed down the door and then he sprayed down the floor and then he sprayed down the place I was going to sleep—
SSSSS
. Then he took a rag and wiped it all down. He did this all over the walls. Then he sprayed the desk, the dresser, the closet door, the bed rails, and then the bed.
I told him I thought it was okay.
Bill just shook his head no. He wasn’t listening to me.
He walked over to the side of the room and pulled out this giant plastic bag.
“What’s that?” I said. Then he pulled out an orange pill bottle and sat it on the counter. Then he took out another orange pill bottle and sat it on the counter. Then he took out another orange pill bottle and put it up on the counter too. He took another and another and then he took out another five and put them one by one by one by one on the table until they were all lined up on the shelf like little soldiers. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11.