Bad Faith

by Theodore Wheeler

  Rodney angles his body to the window so the kid will stop talking.

  The train is due to arrive at two a.m. and as far as Rodney knows it’s on time. This must be Hastings, he thinks, the train slowing into town. Even though his mother grew up here and had been living at the Medicaid home for years, Rodney has never been to Hastings before. Neither had his father, who died years ago. There isn’t much for Rodney to see out the window. Some houses and rectangular brick buildings, long lonely streets with cars parked here and there, faintly lit plastic signs marking off businesses that are closed for the night. It’s mid-summer and even in the bluish darkness of early morning things look yellow and dry.

  Rodney waits on a bench after getting off the train because he doesn’t know where to go. A few others deboard with him, but they have people waiting for them, folks they blearily embrace, somnambulists who help load luggage into the back of a car and then drive off. By the time the train chugs off toward its next stop the station is quiet again, save for the shuffling of Rodney’s feet and the young man he sat by earlier talking on a cell phone.

  When the young man closes his phone and slides it into his pocket, Rodney approaches him, slowly, because he doesn’t want to risk scaring the kid. “Do you know how to find this place?” He hands the young man a slip of paper with the nursing home’s address on it. It was his girl who told him about his mother, because her place was Rodney’s last known address. There was a message from his girl in the office at the Kellogg one day, after Rodney went back to the rooming house, telling about his mother’s passing.

  “That’s easy to find,” the young man says and he explains how to get there. “If you want a ride, you can have one,” he adds. “My dad’s coming for me.”

  “I don’t need a ride.”

  “Let us take you,” the young man insists. But Rodney shakes his head no and walks off.

  He likes to stroll along city streets when they’re empty. And he’s only thirty-seven, his legs are strong and elastic, more than capable of moving from place to place on their own power.

  A few nurses are chatting at a kiosk when Rodney walks in. One of them says she can take him to where his mother’s body is being held. The nursing home looked like a warehouse to Rodney when he approached it, but there was a sign in front that told him it was the right place.

  The nurse talks as she shepherds Rodney down long white hallways. “Your mom had good friends here,” she says. She’s a big woman, the nurse, in her early thirties. There’s a door every eight feet or so, most of them closed, pumping sounds working inside, but occasionally a door is left open, the room beyond it silent and empty, the equipment unplugged.

  “Her body was moved to our chapel. The old-timers get nervous for a few days after one of them passes. You understand.”

  She continues to gabber. Rodney smiles if she tries to reassure him or nods thoughtfully if she’s describing something that sounds technical. Rodney doesn’t pay attention to her. He thinks about his mother. It’s been five years since he saw her last. Even before then, when he was away in the army, Rodney didn’t see her all that often, and that was fine by him. He prefers a quiet, lonesome kind of life. It’s no great stretch to say that. The bustle and prying of family makes him nervous. His mother’s parents didn’t like coming to Omaha when they were alive, them the only other people he knew from Hastings, and they insisted on meeting at a restaurant outside the city when they visited, near the suburban hotel they stayed in. They were all embarrassed, having to do it like that. Being around family is a big embarrassment for everyone. Rodney understands this.

  When he and the night nurse get to the chapel, Rodney is surprised to find that most of the chairs are filled with residents, ten to fifteen of them. The old folks face the casket, but they turn to look at Rodney as he nears the room, waiting to see if he’ll enter or walk past.

  “Who are they?” Rodney asks.

  “We hold a vigil when one of them dies,” the nurse explains. She shows Rodney to an empty seat and settles in next to him. “It helps. These people will miss your mother. Some of her friends.” Then she whispers, “A few of them just like to come and sit. Busybodies. You understand.”

  The chapel is bright, spotlessly clean, and beside the chairs there’s a bier draped with blankets on which the casket rests. A Chicana nurse sits beside the door and wears a pink smock and a white cap that tilts atop her hair. At the front, one of the old ladies cries, a large woman in a loose dress who leans against the casket, her chair pulled close. It’s a strange thing to Rodney, this woman’s weeping, because none of the other residents cry with her. He wants her to stop carrying on and gets the feeling that the rest of the people in the room do too.

  “I’ll leave you to your thoughts,” the nurse who brought him says. “If you need anything, I’ll be at the kiosk. The funeral is tomorrow morning. That’s today, I guess. In five hours or so, when the pastor gets here. That gives you some time with the coffin, as you’ll want to do.” And then, “I hope you knew a pastor was coming. It was her wish to receive final rites.”

  “Of course,” Rodney says.

  “The lid is closed, but we can open it. I’ll do that,” the nurse says, standing up, “so you can see her.”

  She starts toward the casket but Rodney stops her. She halts and looks at the blotch on her arm where he touched her. “You don’t want me to?”

  “No,” Rodney says.

  “You don’t want to see her one last time?”

  They stare at each other for a moment, Rodney and the nurse from the kiosk, both of them embarrassed as the old folks murmur about what’s happening.

  “I understand,” the nurse says, although it’s clear she doesn’t. She leaves the room without saying another word.

  No one speaks in the chapel. They slump in the chairs, stare at the crucifix on the wall or down at their slippers, or play with something in the pockets of their robes, or readjust a walking stick if one lies across their lap. Most of the residents are in pajamas and Rodney wonders if they’ve been here all night. It’s nearly four a.m., he notices, looking at a clock on the wall.

  He closes his eyes after a while but catches himself before he nods off. He doesn’t want to fall asleep in this room, with these people, and for a while his nerves keep him awake. The residents look at Rodney then nod to each other. They know who he is. One of the old men along the wall rests his chin on his hands, clasped over the end of his cane, and stares hard at Rodney, at the sun-baked surface of Rodney’s face, at his hands crooked and shaky from holding the vibrating controls of heavy machinery for what feels like many years. They eye Rodney, like they’re here for the sole purpose of sitting in judgment of him, this son of a woman who’s passed. All the while, the woman at the front weeps, quiet yet persistent. None of the others move to comfort her. It’s this that makes Rodney think they’re here just to see him, to see what he looks like, to bear witness to his being here. If any of them would offer condolences to the crying woman he’d feel different about it, or if they shed tears themselves or lay hands on the pine casket. Sitting in the chapel, having these old folks watch him, it makes him feel like he too is dying, or that he should be.

  Another of the women leans over eventually and says something into the crying woman’s ear. It doesn’t make a difference, she still weeps. The nurse tells Rodney that the crying woman was his mother’s friend. “Very devoted,” she says. “Her only friend in the world.”

  Over the next two hours the residents nod off, wake up a few minutes later, then go to their rooms in clusters of two or three. Even the nurse in the pink smock leaves, her shift over, so that by sunrise it’s only the old lady at the front and Rodney stiff in his chair at the back. The old lady has quit weeping and sits farther away from the casket, blotting her face with a tissue.

  An administrator comes into the room soon after the shift change and sits next to Rodney. “You’re the son?” she asks, resting her hand on the seat next to his. “I want to let you know
that the pastor has called and she’ll be here in an hour or so. That’s when the service will begin and there’s no stopping it then. Nurse Haskell told me about last night. If you want to have a final glimpse of your mother, now’s the time.”

  All Rodney says is, “No.” He’s silent until the administrator excuses herself.

  It isn’t until then that the old woman at the front rises and walks to Rodney. She moves haltingly, rests her droopy weight on an aluminum walker. A paling redhead, her thin hair hangs loose over her ears, a few strands still in curls.

  “I tend not to need this,” she says, indicating the walker, “but it’s a long night to be here for these vigils.”

  “You’re my mother’s friend.” Rodney’s voice cracks, this the first real thing he’s said in hours. “The nurse told me you were.”

  The old woman closes her eyes and smiles when Rodney says this, her red face creasing, becoming even redder.

  “Come with me, Rodney,” the woman says. A twinge of a brogue sneaks out when she says his name. “Follow me.”

  She takes Rodney to her room so he can wash his face in the sink of her bathroom. She gives him a towel and a fresh bar of soap, then closes the door behind him. Rodney lingers a long time in the bathroom, running cold water over his hands, examining the chair in her shower as he stands at the sink. When he’s finished she’s leaned against the doorframe without her walker. She’s crying again and waiting to embrace him. Her body engulfs his skinny limbs. He kind of lifts under her arms as he hugs her because he’s taller and stronger. It’s strange to him how he lingers to comfort her. Rodney feels a surge of contentment rush through his body, holding this old woman.

  “There,” she says. She touches his face, still damp with lather at his sideburns. “Now you look presentable.”

  They sit together at the front of the chapel as the pastor performs the rites then Rodney allows the old woman to stand at his elbow during the burial at a cemetery outside of town. They are the only two at the plot, besides the pastor and the gravedigger, to witness the patter of soil falling on his mother’s wooden box, bits of white root showing in the dirt. When the pastor takes them back to the home the old woman asks Rodney if he would like to come to her room and rest a while. “If you have nowhere else to be,” she says, “you’re welcome to stay.”

  “I took the train,” Rodney explains. He remembers that his return doesn’t leave until nearly three a.m. His plans are vague, at this point of the day, as to how he will pass the more than fourteen hours before the train takes him back to Omaha. It occurs to him that he might not be welcome here, if he tries catching a nap in the park, if he wanders too close to an elementary school playground. He doesn’t know what the cops are like in Hastings, if they will judge him at first sight like the old folks at the vigil had, or if they will leave him alone like the police at home often do. Being here without anything to do could mean trouble for a man like him.

  When the old woman asks again if he’ll stay with her for the rest of the day, when she says that there’s coffee in her room, Rodney feels lucky to have found her.

  He wakes up later after napping in a chair beside the old woman’s bed. She gives him the TV remote and tells him to watch what he wants. A Cubs’ matinee is on. He doesn’t care much for the Cubs, but bad baseball is better than none.

  Rodney gets comfortable in the room after a while, talking to the old woman between pitches. It makes him feel like a nice person. Even though he never came to visit his mother, he’s not a bad man. He didn’t deserve the looks those old folks gave him, how the pastor locked his car the instant Rodney closed the door after himself. Rodney was used to these things, whether he deserved them or not. And his never coming to visit, that’s just the way he was with his mother. If she ever felt differently about their arrangement she never said anything to him.

  She was middle-aged when Rodney was born, his mother, accustomed to privacy and calmness. She didn’t like doing for other people what they could do for themselves. There was no waiting on hand and foot to serve the men in her house, so Rodney knew the value of keeping quiet and taking care of his own business. But it wouldn’t be fair to say that things were bad with his mother, like the cold stares at the vigil implied. It had been five years since he’d seen her, but Rodney loved his mother, that’s safe to say, as much as he’s loved anything.

  The old woman understands this, Rodney thinks, because she loved his mother too.

  After there’s the singing for the seventh-inning stretch, the old woman opens a drawer and pulls out a store-bought cake under a plastic dome. She takes the cake, German chocolate, with both hands and gives it to Rodney, then shuffles back to the drawer for a spatula, a paper plate, a plastic fork, all of which looks like it’s been lifted from the cafeteria.

  “Please stay off the bed,” the old woman says, “while you’re eating.”

  “They let you run out for cake?” Rodney asks.

  “They’ll take us to the store if we ask. There’s a shuttle van.”

  “I guess that’s right.” Rodney remembers seeing those vans around the city before, old folks in the back. He stands from the bed with the plastic dome and moves to the chair.

  Rodney cuts himself a piece of cake as the old woman tells about herself, how her kids, the ones who are still alive, are wicked like their father was. “They wish I was dead. I don’t mind knowing that. I turn a hundred this winter.” She nods her head to confirm it. “It isn’t like I planned on living this long.”

  The old woman says she moved here from Ireland, a long time ago, because her brother claimed there was a man in America who would marry her. “It was a load of bunk. There was a man looking to marry, but he wasn’t like Tom said.” She tells Rodney how everyone in her family insisted she was an ugly girl and should be happy to have a husband at all, even if he did mistreat her. Her husband died forty years ago, so it worked out in the end.

  “Tell me about yourself,” the old woman says. “Your mother never said much.” Rodney sits up in his chair and looks at the old woman. “Tell me,” she says. “What do you do for a living?”

  Rodney looks back at the television for a time, pretending to watch the game. “I’d rather not tell you,” he says.

  “Don’t worry. There isn’t much that surprises me anymore, if it makes you feel better to know that.”

  “I don’t bother no one,” he says. “I live alone.”

  Rodney watches the old women pop the plastic dome back on the cake and set it near his jacket so he’ll take it home. He senses the warm feeling surge through him again as he watches her fuss over cleaning the spatula and the plastic fork.

  It’s then that Rodney tells the old woman he’s a gospel singer.

  “Is that right?” she asks, her voice rising with surprise. “A singer?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rodney mutters. “It’s for a bunch of churches in Omaha. I do the solos.”

  “I don’t believe it,” the woman says.

  Rodney flinches, half-smiling to cover his nerves. “It’s true,” he says.

  “Did your mother know?”

  Rodney hesitates and looks to the ceiling, his shoulders dropping. “I couldn’t say. We didn’t talk about it. Not about work. She did love to hear me sing, I know that.”

  “She never mentioned it to me,” the old woman says. For a long time she looks at Rodney, her head crooked, staring at his mouth, his neck, as if imaging what he’d look like standing at the front of a church straining to belt out some high-arcing gospel. “Would you sing for me?” she asks.

  “Now?”

  “You could sing a hymn. What do you know?” she asks, pinching a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Have you ever sung ‘All is Well with My Soul’? Of course you have, that’s a standard.”

  Rodney pauses, looks back at the TV. “I’m not sure,” he says.

  “Well, don’t you know that one?”

  Rodney nods his head—and it’s true, he knows the hymn. That was one thing hi
s mother always liked to do. On Sundays, even if they didn’t go to church, they would sit in the front room at the piano and sing. Rodney learned many hymns this way, his hand on his mother’s back as she sat at the piano to play the accompaniment.

  “Well, if you know it.” The old woman touches his arm with her long fingers. “Will wonders never cease,” she says. “A gospel singer.”

  Rodney looks away from her before he starts singing the hymn. It’s the warm feeling that makes him think he can do it—even though it’s been a long time since he’s tried to sing—and because the old woman asked him to.

  His voice croaks when he begins, falling into a lower register, and then higher, unable to find or hold a note, until he stops to clear his throat.

  “Try again,” the woman says. She closes the door then returns to the edge of the bed.

  “When peace flows like a river, attending my way. When sorrows like the ocean roil below. I will say to my Lord, it is well.”

  Rodney thinks he remembers the hymn, the lyrics are mostly right, but his voice falters again. His tone is off, flat then sharp, then he’s not really singing at all, but only humming the tune to himself, a word popping out now and then, until his noise peters off. He stares at the corner of the room, his whole body trembling to keep from letting out his regret.

  Rodney hears the old woman. She’s weeping. Rodney looks and sees her eyes water.

  “I’m sorry I made you cry,” he says. “This was the wrong thing to do.”

  “No, no. It’s a beautiful hymn!”

  Rodney moves to the woman and puts a hand on her back. “I shouldn’t have said anything about being a singer.”

  “It was beautiful,” the old woman repeats. She shudders when Rodney embraces her, they both do, his arms under hers again, his face on her shoulder.

  “I’m glad you sung it. You’ve done all right.”

  It’s six a.m. when his train pulls into Omaha. As he walks to the Kellogg Rooming House, the plastic bubble with the cake held in front, Rodney thinks about how he’ll never see the old woman again. It doesn’t upset him that he lied to her about being a gospel singer. He wanted to make her feel better. It was his mother’s funeral, after all, the funeral of this old woman’s best friend.