The white sheets sent a shiver through me. Billy had lain under one with the same stillness, a lifeless arm dangling toward the floor until I’d finally placed it on his chest, then drawn the sheet back over him again.
“I guess Dora covered everything up,” Ruth said. Then she led me up the stairs to the room Dora had occupied during the few weeks she’d worked for Mr. Dillard.
It was plain but tidy, its single window overlooking the broad front lawn of the house, a chair drawn up beside it. Lace curtains hung over the window, and there was a beige paper shade with a string pull that jumped slightly, like the pendulum of an edgy, disordered clock, each time I took a step.
While Ruth watched, I looked in the closet where Dora had hung her dresses, then went through the drawers of the bureau beside the bed that had been hers. I even searched behind it for some clue to where she might have gone. Finally, I sat down in the chair by the window.
“She didn’t seem to care what the room looked like,” Ruth said. “I don’t think it mattered to her. The accommodations, I mean. Probably glad to get a room of her own. She’d been living at the hotel, you know.”
She’d come early the very next morning, Ruth told me.
I imagined it as a typical autumn day in Port Alma, brilliantly clear and windy, with gusts sweeping waves of crimson leaves across the lawn.
“She come on foot,” Ruth said. “Nobody brought her. She was toting a suitcase. All she had, I guess.”
I parted the curtains and peered at the grounds below.
“I was getting this room ready when she came back to take the job,” Ruth added. “Mr. Dillard was sleeping in his wheelchair. He always took a nap in the afternoon.”
The snow now obscured the lawn, but as I continued to peer out the window, the seasons reversed themselves. Fall returned, blustery and windswept.
“I just looked out that window, and there she was.”
I imagined a woman striding resolutely toward the house.
“That’s when Mr. Dillard woke up all of a sudden.”
Wearing a long cloth coat, her emerald eyes fixed straight ahead.
“And started squirming around, all upset and panicky.”
Dora sailing toward me.
“Like he did when the pain hit him.”
On a river of red leaves.
I
looked in on my mother the next morning, something my brother had done each day on his way to his desk at the
Sentinel.
His loyalty to her had been heartfelt, an ardent affection she had in every way returned. I was a poor substitute for Billy, of course, merely the surviving son, as she no doubt regarded me, tied to obligations she assumed I did not feel.
She no longer lived in her beloved cottage by Fox Creek. The stroke had made that impossible. And so Billy and I had moved her into a house not far from Main Street. We’d done most of the work, getting the house ready for her ourselves, enlarging rooms and putting in windows so that she would get the light that brightened both the space around her and her spirits. We’d hung bird feeders outside each window as well, hoping to occupy her eyes, the one part of her body, other than her mind, that the stroke had not damaged.
Her daily needs were taken care of by Emma Fields, an old woman who’d recently lost her husband, and with him, her rented home and livelihood. Emma was a
short, round woman with white hair and watery blue eyes.
“Snow’s gone, looks like,” she said when she opened the door.
“Not for long,” I told her. “Another storm’s coming in.”
Emma looked at me, alarmed. “Soon? I need to get to Madison’s.”
“You have a couple of hours,” I assured her. “But you can go now if you want. I’ll look after Mother.”
“Guess I better do that,” Emma said. She snatched her coat and scarf. “I’ll try and be quick about it.”
My mother lay in her bed, propped up against the headboard, her eyes bright, fully aware, her speech remarkably clear despite the fact that the left side of her face was drawn down sharply. It was a miracle, Doc Bradshaw had told Billy and me, that she could talk at all.
If so, it was the only miracle. For in every other way, she was dreadfully weakened. Her hands trembled uncontrollably, making it impossible for her to hold a cup or a book, and she could not walk at all.
But for all her physical suffering, I knew that her inner anguish was now deeper still, knew too well that she lived within a cloud of grief, continually remembering Billy at every stage of life, the gleaming boy, the sterling man. For that grief, there was no relief. Long ago, she had abandoned the consolations of her Catholic faith with the same commanding resolve and self-confidence with which she’d replaced it with ideas of social improvement, deism, and the high romance she had bequeathed to her now-dead son.
I’d known Billy was her favorite long before he was given the
Sentinel.
It had been clear from the time he was a little boy. She loved his energy and his unruliness.
The great mess in which he kept his room filled her heart with hope. During the long New England winters, when my father and I hunkered in his study, gravely discussing the works of ancient Greece and Rome, Billy and my mother would curl beside the fire, chatting quietly or playing board games, while outside, Maine slowly sank beneath its yearly pall of snow.
She believed that Billy illuminated everything, and in doing that, illuminated her, offered living proof of the ideas she had in her own youth so fiercely embraced and never since abandoned. Passion. Freedom. Love. The fact that he took no academic prizes, graduated without honors, chose not to go to college, a circumstance that deeply aggrieved my father, did not in the least disturb her. “I’m sure Billy’s a disappointment to you, Mrs. Chase,” I once heard a teacher say to my mother. I’d never forgotten the force of her swift reply: “I would be disappointed in my son,” she answered, “only if he did not know his heart.”
Now she had only me.
“How are you?” I asked as I drew my chair up to her bed.
She dipped her head, then glanced toward the window, bright sunlight on the glistening untouched snow. Since Billy’s death, she’d sunk into a grave silence, rarely initiating conversation, replying to questions in short, clipped sentences, hardly ever asking any of her own. It was as if the inner light that had glowed from her had been rudely snuffed out, leaving her in shadows.
“The weather’s cleared up a little,” I said.
Her eyes followed a flock of Canada geese as they glided across her glimpse of sky, smooth and sure, like skaters on an ice-blue pond.
“Dad seems to be doing all right,” I told her.
In fact, of course, he was not doing well at all, drink his only consolation. The few times I’d suggested that he visit my mother, he’d waved his hand in abrupt refusal, adding only, “She’s got trouble enough without seeing me.”
“He’s eating well,” I added.
She watched me silently for a moment, then, “And you, Cal?”
“I’m getting along,” I assured her.
Her head trembled as she drew her attention to the nightstand beside her bed, the gold ring that lay in a velvet box beside the lamp, resting on a month-old edition of the
Sentinel.
Her eyes returned to me.
“Dora?”
“There’s still no sign of her.”
She released a defeated breath, her body shriveling before my eyes, life seeping from her inexorably, like air from a punctured tire.
In her present state, it was hard to think of her as the woman she’d once been, the beautiful, lively, infinitely rebellious daughter of a prominent Catholic family. She’d been taught music and manners in the hope of making her ever more desirable to the many quite suitable young men who’d waited for her in the curtained drawing room of her father’s gracious house. Various finishing schools had been offered, but she’d turned any such “finishing” aside, and had enrolled in a nursing school instead, a lowly profession her father had regarded as only a small step removed from domestic service. Upon graduation, she’d taken a job with a Dr. Benjamin Putnam, a Port Alma physician whose modest small-town practice catered mostly to the hardscrabble farmers, trappers, and cannery workers, the wretched of the earth to which she had intended to devote her life.
She’d been twenty-four when she met my father, an established newspaper editor twelve years her senior. In a world of loggers and fishermen, where people ate clams from brine-soaked newspaper, washed down with a frothy ale, he’d no doubt shone like a comet. “He’d read a lot,” my mother always answered crisply when Billy pestered her about what had attracted her to a man so clearly different from herself. Then, with a peal of laughter, she’d added, “But only the old stuff. Greeks and Romans. Nothing
A.D.”
They’d met when my father turned up at Dr. Putnam’s clinic. He’d gotten his hand caught in a printing press. Dr. Putnam had been injured in a hunting accident two days before, however, so it was my mother who treated my father’s wounded hand. “There were younger men, of course,” she’d tell Billy, “but I preferred the bread to the yeast.” They were married eight months later, lived together for the next twenty-five years.
I’d been at work in the district attorney’s office for four years when she left my father in order to “be with her thoughts,” as she put it.
She’d chosen to live in a tiny cottage on Fox Creek, only a stone’s throw from the old bridge that spanned it, and from which I’d watched my brother guide his raft across the water. She’d furnished the cottage sparsely. A bed, a few chairs, books, almost nothing else. She wanted to “pare things down,” she said, the only explanation she ever gave. But the little cottage, spare as it seemed, was always flooded with light and music, the quick step of my mother’s feet when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, some bit of verse struck her and she rushed to her books, searching for the reference.
In the years before her stroke I’d visited her often at
Fox Creek, usually in company with Billy. On occasion we’d find her inside the cabin, humming as she swept the floor or washed the dishes. At other times she’d be sitting along the bank of Fox Creek, an old cane fishing pole stuck in the ground beside her, her eyes fixed on the little red bob that floated idly in the stream, a book of poetry always in her lap.
My brother worshiped her, of course, referred to her teasingly as “The Great Example,” as in, “The Great Example came by the paper this morning.” Or “I had a talk with The Great Example last night.” He adored her for her joy and energy, the way her laughter rang like bells, but more than anything for the one great lesson he said she’d taught him, that you’re alive only when you feel you’re alive, all else “a breathing death.”
We’d last been together at Fox Creek on a bright day in early summer. Billy brought a blanket for Mother and spread it on the ground beside the creek. After picking a cluster of mountain laurel, she lowered herself gracefully onto the blanket and sat Indian-style, her back propped against a tree. She had been living at Fox Creek for four years by then, and during that time her hair had turned completely white, though her skin remained remarkably smooth, with only a few telltale wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She seemed to know that something was coming for her, something she could only wait for, see like a dark horse in the distance. Her own mother had died at forty-three, her father at forty-six, both, she said, of poor hearts. Even so, she wanted to continue as The Great Example. And so she worked at being cheerful, discussed her gardening with me, bantered merrily with Billy. But after a time, her mood seemed to alter. She looked out over the creek, the lush green meadows beyond it. “How perfect it all is,” she murmured.
“You’ve never regretted it?” I asked. “Leaving Dad? Moving here? Living alone? No doubts that…”
Billy touched her hand. “Mother has never doubted anything,” he said.
She looked at me as if I’d challenged her. “Not anything basic, Cal,” she said.
I could see how certain she remained, how convinced of her wisdom, assured that she’d never deluded herself nor misled anyone, that by following her heart she had arrived at the small paradise she now occupied along the banks of Fox Creek.
The stroke came three days later.
I found her. Lying faceup beside her bed, her eyes open, staring, her mouth pulled down on the left side, fixing her face in a terrible scowl. She’d soiled herself, and a dull yellow stain spread across her nightdress. That she had lain for many hours in such indignity sent a fire through my brain.
“She shouldn’t have been out there by herself,” I told Billy as we paced the hospital corridor the following night. “She could have lived with me. Or with you. Maybe even moved back in with Dad. At least, that way, she wouldn’t have laid there, all alone, helpless…”
A nurse swept past, pushing a metal cart.
“She wanted to be alone,” Billy said, defending her to the last, no less convinced than she’d always been of the decision she’d made, the path she’d followed. “That’s why she moved out there in the first place.”
I shook my head at how extreme her action had been, how unnecessary that our mother had so isolated herself.
“She wanted freedom, Cal,” Billy said emphatically.
“Freedom?” I mocked. “And what did she hope to get from that?”
“Wisdom,” Billy answered.
He clearly admired her for it. And since his death, I’ve often wondered if, had he lived, my brother might have done the same.
It was a thought that occurred to me again as I sat with my mother that morning—months later—doing the best I could to show her that she still had one son left, though the one who’d most believed in her was gone. I thought of all my brother might have learned. All he might have given. And in that instant, I saw him as an elderly man, sitting beside Fox Creek, feeling the sun’s warmth, letting it all fall into place, his eyes beginning to sparkle as he closed in upon a final wisdom. I saw a smile form on his lips, heard his voice in the air around me,
Now I know, Cal. Now I know.
“Cal?”
My mother’s voice drew me back to the present. “Yes?”
“Cal … I?”
A dreadful unease seized her eyes, as if she’d glimpsed something terrible in her own mind, something she couldn’t say but which I took to be yet another expression of her loss, her grief, the fact that the one who’d most nearly shared her vision of the world, taken most to heart her wild instruction, believed in her as much as she’d believed in herself, her one true son, was dead.