In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  She must have. And she fell in the river while doing it. That’s why she’s soaked. In this temperature, that could have been the end of her.

  “None of your business.” Delaney glowers at Dr. Goins defiantly.

  “It is actually my business as Mr. Pruitt’s doctor. It’s my responsibility to keep people from introducing potentially harmful contaminants into his IV. We’re using tried-and-true, FDA-approved medical-grade interventions. And we’re hoping for the best.”

  “Fentanyl is some medical-grade FDA-approved shit too. Ever seen anyone die from that?” Delaney says.

  “Many times,” Dr. Goins says softly.

  Nurse One returns with some bandages and hydrogen peroxide and hands them to Dr. Goins.

  “He’ll die if you don’t let me give him this,” Delaney says.

  “Not if I can help it. And I know you’re smart enough to understand that you don’t just scrape something off a cave wall and inject it raw into someone’s system and expect a good outcome.”

  “You don’t know how smart I am. I’m a genius.”

  Dr. Goins absorbs Delaney’s fury calmly. “I don’t doubt that. But I’m right about this.”

  “Khrystal Goins. I can tell from your name you’re hillbilly trash from here. Pep needs a real doctor.”

  “I am from here,” Dr. Goins says quietly. “I worked my way through Walters State Community College as a gas station cashier. Then ETSU, where I worked nights at a Waffle House. Then I went to Emory Medical School, which is where I learned—with all due respect—more about medicine than you currently know.”

  “You must suck at it if you ended up back here.”

  Dr. Goins’s eyes reflect that Delaney’s finally gotten to her. “Or I am good at it and I came home to lift up a community I love that’s hurting and needs my help. Maybe you’ll consider doing the same someday.”

  Delaney snorts. “Oh, livin’ the dream, working in this shitty hospital, getting to smell Deputy Dogshit’s fish breath every day.” She nods at Billy. He sneers back.

  “You’re welcome to visit Mr. Pruitt without abusing my staff and interfering with his treatment after you’ve changed into dry clothes and we’ve treated your thumbs.” Dr. Goins holds up the bandages and the bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  “Ask Pep what he wants,” Delaney says. “I promised him I’d make him better.”

  “I’ve made myself clear.”

  “He could sign something. A release or whatever. Let’s ask Cash. His grandson.”

  I step into the hall. “Red…I don’t think…”

  Delaney hurls me a look that’s simultaneously reproachful, enraged, and beseeching.

  “Maybe we should let the doctor do her thing,” I continue.

  Delaney makes a choked sound—half sob and half cry of rage. Her eyes sear into mine, saying, Traitor. She makes another break for it. She pushes me aside like she outweighs me by seventy pounds, instead of vice versa. She skids into Papaw’s room, sliding on the water she dripped everywhere.

  Billy barges past me, followed by the nurses and Dr. Goins. He grabs Delaney from behind, pinning her arms at her sides. He lifts her off the floor. She thrashes frantically, pedaling her feet in the air. “Stop. Don’t you fuckin’—I hate you, piece of shit. Hands off me! Stop! No no no no no!”

  He backs out of the room with her. She kicks the edge of Papaw’s bed in her frenzy. He’s too out of it to notice.

  “Let her go, man,” I say to Billy. “Come on, just—” But he pays me no heed. I follow them into the hall.

  Billy turns and starts hauling Delaney toward the hospital entrance, tilting back to keep her feet off the floor.

  “Nooooooo! Pep, I love you,” she yells over her shoulder, flailing. “I tried to keep my promise. I love you. I tried.” Her voice is torn at the edges. People line the hall to rubberneck and murmur.

  Delaney finally connects her heel with Billy’s shin and the back of her head with his nose, and he drops her, cursing fervently (I guess he’s allowed to cuss in the hospital) and cupping his nose. She sprints ahead a few steps as he limps after her. She turns back and flips him two bloodstained middle fingers. Tears streak her face.

  “Delaney.” I bolt past the limping Billy, who’s now holding his head back with his nostrils pinched shut.

  She flees from me.

  “Red!” I yell after her, giving chase. I catch up with her just outside the sliding hospital doors.

  She spins to face me. “He’s going to die. Do you not see that? This is his only chance and you won’t even get my fucking back?”

  “She’s a doctor. She’s been to med school. She has experience. You can’t think it’s a good idea to stick cave slime in his IV. He’ll die for sure.”

  Delaney is on the verge of sobs. “You sound like his redneck doctor. Here.” She raises on her tiptoes, lifts the mason jar high above her head, and hurls it at my feet.

  I jump back, broken glass and muck splattering against my shins.

  She turns and walks quickly away. “Chickenshit,” she hisses over her shoulder. I watch numbly as she stumbles off, her face buried in her hands. I’m too completely exhausted to feel anything.

  I kneel and pick up the shattered glass smeared with green-black goo. I throw each piece in the garbage. I get to the last chunk, part of the bottom of the jar. It still has a healthy dollop of the gunk. What do you have to lose? Delaney’s right—he’s going to die without a miracle. Maybe that miracle is that your mama got hooked on Oxys and fentanyl, which led you to Narateen, where you met Delaney Doyle, which led to your becoming friends and showing her all the things you love—including canoeing and exploring caves. Which resulted in her discovering the one thing that would save Papaw when that day arrived, and you’re holding that one thing in your hand.

  I stand there for several minutes, shivering and staring at the chunk of broken glass in the failing light.

  I throw it away and return inside.

  When I get back to Papaw’s bedside, he whispers that he dreamed Tess had come to visit him.

  * * *

  I stay with Papaw until Mamaw comes from work. I tell her what happened with Delaney and that I need to go find her.

  I call and text her a few times. Not that I expect her to answer, even if she still has a working phone, which her waterlogged condition makes me doubt. I set out, trying every spot she might have gone. My house. Her half brothers’ house. Her mama’s old trailer. Our old high school. I finally find her in Sawyer’s dilapidated downtown park—pale; huddled, hugging her knees; and near catatonic—on the peeling steps of the bandstand. She squints her bloodshot and tear-swollen eyes against my headlights. She looks too fatigued to even shiver.

  I get out. Delaney stands and walks in silent surrender to my truck. She gets in. I turn up the heater, and she warms her hands. Her thumbs are ravaged.

  I don’t start driving immediately. She still won’t speak.

  “We should get you into dry clothes,” I say after a while, touching the dampness of her shoulder.

  She shrinks from me. “Only brought these.”

  “We’ll throw them in the wash, and you can wear my clothes.” I pause. “Unless you’d prefer Mamaw’s clothes.”

  Delaney doesn’t smile.

  “Get you a nice sweatshirt with geese on it.”

  But I can’t really sell a joke in my current state, and Delaney still doesn’t smile.

  “Geese holding baskets. Wearing hats.”

  Still no smile. “You should have had my back,” Delaney murmurs.

  “You think it would have worked?” I ask after a moment.

  But she says nothing and stares off into the heavy winter dark.

  Once warm and clean, she falls asleep almost immediately. I leave her on my bed under two quilts, hair still damp from a hot show
er, clothed in an old pair of my jeans and a flannel shirt. Punkin curls up at her side. I put her clothes in the wash.

  I return to the hospital and sit vigil at Papaw’s side. Mamaw asks me if I’m good to stay with him for a bit while she goes home to change clothes and shower and get a few things. I say I am.

  I sit, working on a poem to little avail, listening to Papaw’s labored respiration, the muted beeps of his monitors, the ambient mechanical speech of the hospital’s intercom system.

  He stirs.

  I grab his hand. “Hey. I’m here.”

  He licks his lips. I give him a sip of water. He coughs.

  “Not doing so hot, Mickey Mouse,” he croak-whispers.

  “You’ll be good as new in a couple days,” I say, hoping it isn’t obvious how little I believe it.

  He beckons me in and strokes my hair. I nestle up to him awkwardly on the few inches of space at the edge of his bed. He smells like antimicrobial chemicals and medicines. Lurking below that is some pungent, animalic smell of decline. All of it alien for him.

  Dignity dies as the body does.

  He pulls off his oxygen mask, and it makes a rushing sound, like the advance of wind before a storm. “Tell you a story,” Papaw says in his pale whisper, barely audible above the noise of his mask, as he visibly summons himself from the gloaming. “You was just born. Your mama’s trailer weren’t fit for a baby, so we brought you both home from the hospital. Your mama slept in her old room. Your room.” He pauses to muster his strength and continues. “Your mamaw was wore out too. It was springtime, so I took you out on the porch and sat, just you and me, in the rocker. Had you wrapped up so tight you weren’t but a head poking out of a blanket.” He stops and gathers himself. “Watched you feel the breeze on your face for the first time. Watched you open your little gray eyes and squint out at the trees swaying in the wind. And I says to you, ‘That wind you feel on your face is called wind. Them trees you see are called trees.’ Holiest thing I ever witnessed—you feeling the wind for the first time. Seeing a tree for the first time. Speaking their names to you. Saw the face of God in you that day. Ever’ time you tell a story, it becomes a little more ordinary. So I swore I’d only tell this one the once.” He pauses once more, and with what remains of himself, says, “There was a last time I held you in my arms, and I didn’t even know it.”

  He finishes, spent by this effort. He murmurs something else, but I can’t make it out. Something Mickey Mouse.

  I wriggle closer to him and pull his arm over me. Let this be the last time you hold me in your arms.

  I slip his oxygen mask back on him. He drifts off, and I hold his hand until it goes limp and heavy.

  “I love you. I’ll always love you,” I whisper again and again to his unconscious ear, hoping he absorbs it somehow.

  Hoping he takes it with him to whatever unmapped land he’s journeying to.

  Hoping he returns.

  If only once more.

  While I sleep, he passes into the night of nights, drawing his final breath with no more ceremony than a leaf falling.

  My heart howls.

  I don’t know how to live under the sun of a God whose harvest is everyone I love.

  I don’t know.

  First there was nothing. A vacuum. A great desolation of sound and thought.

  My ears refused to pass the information on to my brain because that would make it real.

  Then the message broke through of its own accord, but my brain would not accept it, and so I continued to sit there, numb and paralyzed.

  Then the truth burned through my stupor and there was the searing, fresh agony of a new and grievous fracture.

  I cried until I was empty—not of feeling but of tears.

  I can’t bear being in the hospital anymore, and I stumble outside, as if maybe all this will turn out to be a huge cruel joke and Papaw will be out there waiting for me.

  The sky is the color of wood ash, the light pale. The morning air smells like diesel fuel and frozen stone. The raw wind is a blade on my cheeks. I’ve been outside for a while when I see a small figure quickly approaching. It’s Delaney. As she nears, her pace slows while her eyes search mine pleadingly. I can only shake my head as new tears blur my vision. She halts, dropping her hands to her sides, and her face crumples soundlessly—like a hurt child’s does before the wailing begins. She stomps a couple of times and collapses to the pavement, her palms pressed to her temples like she’s trying to hold her skull together. Then she sobs with abandon, rocking forward and back.

  I make my way to her, and we hold each other and weep together. People walk past us in the parking lot, averting their eyes, embarrassed by the nakedness of our grief.

  We continue like that for a while. Each time we think we’ve collected ourselves, we slip again, as if trying to scale a steep and icy slope.

  Finally, we reach the bottom of some chasm and we stare, dazed and bleary-eyed, at the cars passing on the street abutting the hospital.

  “Did he hear me tell him I loved him?” Delaney asks.

  “Yes,” I say, even though I don’t know.

  Delaney is quiet for a long time and then says, “There was never a better person.”

  We don’t say much else. There’s nothing to say.

  We cremate his body and keep his ashes in a simple urn.

  He didn’t want a funeral. Aunt Betsy has an idea for what to do instead. Something called a Goodbye Day. We spend a day doing all of Papaw’s favorite things. The things we would have done with him if he’d been healthy enough to do them on his last day.

  Mamaw, Delaney, Aunt Betsy, Mitzi, and I get breakfast at Cracker Barrel, at his favorite spot near the fireplace, and share memories of him. We laugh and cry.

  We walk in the woods. I lag behind the group, and Aunt Betsy waits for me. She tells me, “Sometimes God has to take a life apart before he can put it back together.” And I think how God’s been hard at work taking my life apart for all my life. I’m still waiting for the putting-back-together part.

  We go home and watch an episode of Longmire. We listen to his favorite Steve Earle album, Copperhead Road.

  “I draw the line at trying to carve something out of a tree stump with a chain saw,” Aunt Betsy says, and we laugh.

  Laid out like this, Papaw’s existence was quiet and small, but it was a life defined by the love he gave and got.

  It was the life he wanted.

  * * *

  The afternoon is cold and overcast and misty. With our dwindling hours of daylight, we go to the river. Aunt Betsy and Mitzi kiss the urn goodbye before we load it into the canoe. Mamaw is afraid to go out on the water, with it being so cold, but she does. Delaney comes too. I paddle us to where I promised Papaw that I would lay him to rest.

  We surrender him to the dark water like we’re loosing a flight of doves into the dusk. No elegy but our tears.

  I wish our love was enough to keep whole the people we love.

  This memory is a ghost.

  I was twelve. It was late November. A hard rain had come two days prior and brought the biting cold, low pewter skies, and piercing, insistent wind that whistled through the naked branches and drove the leaves hissing across the ground, rattling plastic bags impaled on barbwire fences. The air smelled like wood smoke, damp soil, and the sweet rot of fallen apples. We drove far from town and hunted all day, talking only a little. Mostly basking silently in each other’s company.

  The light faded as the day wore on, and the sky darkened from the color of a new quarter to the color of a tarnished one. The crows called out in the twilight. My legs ached and my fingers and toes had long gone stiff and numb with cold, but it was delicious to be in this pure and clean place, temporarily liberated from the chaos and filth of my home and my mama’s sickness. While we waited, a six-point buck wandered into the clearing, oblivi
ous to us, pausing to nibble at the ground.

  I felt Papaw’s fingers on my forearm, signaling me to be still. I was good at it. My mama’s crueler boyfriends had taught me this art of invisibility.

  “Yours,” Papaw said below a whisper.

  I lifted my rifle—it was too large for me—awkwardly to my shoulder and sighted in like he’d taught me. I centered the crosshairs on the buck’s chest. I remembered not to jerk the trigger but to squeeze until it broke. I waited for the space between my breaths. I squeezed until the break. The bullet jumped from the barrel with a crack, and its recoil made the stock punch me in the shoulder. In the movies, when people are shot, they go flying backward. The deer just flinched, as if stung by a wasp, crouched, and then tried to bound away. But his body failed him. He crashed through the underbrush clumsily, catching his crown of antlers on a low branch. He only made it a short distance before he stopped and collapsed on the ground, tried to rise, and fell under his useless legs.

  He was still breathing roughly when we caught up to him. I watched him take his last breaths, a fine spray of blood on the ground in front of his mouth, the silver threads of his final exhalations winding upward. Then he died, the life in his eyes dimming to an ember and expiring.

  Papaw clapped me on the back. “Heck of a shot.”

  Such praise should’ve made my heart dance. But I was filled instead with a gray and somber silence in every reach of myself. The sort that feels like the last leaf clinging to an autumn-stripped branch looks as it flutters in the wind, waiting to fall. There was nothing for me in stealing another creature’s breath.

  We dragged the fallen deer back to our pickup and loaded him in the bed.

  We drove home in silence, passing through the dark hills and hollers, the radio a low mumble. Here and there a house was lit up like a tiny city. I felt like the ink-smudged and starless dusk sky. I wanted to cry.