Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  “Well doc. What can I say? We are all innocent until others know better,” he said. I took to seeing Lee during lunch visiting hour, giving him his shot of diuretic then sitting with him for a while. I was aware of those new cardiac operations just available in Boston which could save this patient or at least delay the inevitable but I did not really keep up with new trends. Cardiac treatment has moved on even the last five years—wars are generally good for medical advances. When I was taught cardiology at Northwestern it was all about seeing the heart as a pump. If the pump was damaged then it needed to be rested. The old man’s pump had taken him a long way. The digoxin would make it work a bit better but not for long.

  I also found myself reflecting on the ambitions I once had to be a great doctor, a specialist. But I seemed not to be really been good at anything in particular. I thought perhaps I should retrain, find a new interest. Hard to do anything with such sadness dogging me.

  Lee kept watching me. He seemed keen to check on the progress of a kid from next door and kept telling his wife to give him some money. He once asked, “Have you got chillern, doctor? It’s important, that there is another to carry a piece of you on.”

  “A son?” I answered absently, “Yes, I have a son… well,” I corrected myself, “no, I had a son.” Lee nodded. It was if he knew, and his vivid gaze softened as he said, “Ess, doctor. I also had a son…once.”

  Lee’s wife started to bring me sandwiches and coffee as I sat up there with him. Sometimes, I could hear the radio downstairs. It was strangely soothing to hear the ordinary world going on. Quite often I could hear Mrs Lee singing along to a tune on the radio:

  ‘There’ll be joy and laughter and peace ever after,

  Tomorrow, when the world is free.

  There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover,

  Tomorrow, just you wait and see.’

  That corny song. Seemed like I had been hearing it for the whole damned war. Still, it somehow hit the spot. When there was no meaning to the cruelty of the world maybe a childish hopefulness was all that could be left. At some stage then I’d brought my new Webster with me and told Lee he could say something into it if he liked. I sat up with Lee for hours as he murmured into the machine. I might seem to be listening to my patient but mainly I was just replaying Clyde dying again in my mind, the bursting of that perfect skin, a Pacific noon chipping out the light, the breakers coming in perfect and straight.

  I watched Lee as he poured out his strange stories. Even though the man was dying his body’s cells still worked to renew themselves. Skin is with us for a fortnight before being replaced entirely, gut cells for a mere five days. Intercostal muscles linger for fifteen years and bone for ten. But the brain cells, they are with you from birth. They remain within the vaults, slowly hardening like a reef.

  Lee seemed unsurprised to find me by his bedside. He’d wake and say, “You again, doc. Thought you were the old man.”

  “The old man?”

  “I have seen him before, doctor,” he said, “I have seen his face and he spoke to me.”

  “Who is he, Mr Lee. Who did you see?”

  “He comes to collect you and hear what you have to say. I saw him before, you know, when Granfer died. I also saw him years ago when I thought it was finish for me. In that cellar room in Exeter.”

  I mentioned the conversations later to Lee’s wife.

  “I think he is becoming confused, Mrs Lee. It can happen, you know, with renal impairment.”

  She smiled.

  “Oh no, doctor. He means it literally. You see, he still has beliefs. Not the same as yours and mine, village beliefs that he holds to, though he laughs about them to your face.”

  Another time Lee waking and saying, “I didn’t do anything, doctor, did I?”

  “Do anything?”

  “Ess, in my sleep. All my life I’ve been afraid of doing something at night. I used to walk in my sleep as a lad and feared flailing about and causing hurt, all unknowing-like.”

  “There is no need to fear now,” I said. “You have not harmed me.”

  “Ah well, that depends on what happens when we go finally.”

  “In what way, Mr Lee?”

  “You wouldn’t want me to be a-haunting you and a-dragging my chains around your bedroom of a night?”

  “Now, we know that’s not going to happen.”

  “It depends what happens when we go through that door. It might be like going to sleep or just winking out sudden, like a trapdoor going bang. Or you could be all restless, like a lost dog without a home. Addie now, she believes we get the chance to join the company of saints, if we are good enough or if we are forgiven. Heh! Heh! That rules me out then, doc, don’t it?”

  I smiled along with my patient although I was always thinking of those telegrams being sent out about Clyde with his brothers-in-arms, their faces like petals floating on the Pacific tides, all those young men.

  I had been looking after Lee for two weeks in March and he seemed to be bumping along on a plateau. I’d begun to pay more attention to my patient’s stories of the past, playing them over at night to myself on the Webster. There seemed to be real history in his tales. Then came a sudden change and there was no more recording. Lee became sweaty and fevered and he refused even the thinnest of soups that his wife could bring. His blood pressure dropped and he struggled for breath.

  “I’m on fire today, doc but it’s ice tomorrow, oh, ess,” he muttered. “I wants to tell you something, doc. Something no one else knows. It wasn’t just the Missis there that night in the Glen. The bloody 15th. Oh no, I’ve not told everything, not even on that there recorder thingummy of yourn. You see there was not only Miss Keyse that died there that night. There was that Fey girl also, Mary Ann, ess, mad as a loon she were.”

  I told him to go on. Lee spoke of how that night, after Miss Keyse was dead and after the fire had really got a hold, Mary Ann had come flittering up seemingly out of nowhere. He had encountered her on the narrow strip of garden between the sea and the Glen, that bit of lawn which kept being burned by the salt spray. Mary Ann was staring in through the shattered dining room windows at Miss Keyse’s body all lit by the flames and she had begun to scream, “Murder! Murder!” Lee said he had to shut her up, Lizzie was upstairs pretending to fight the fire with the Necks but someone was bound to hear the mad witch. He ended up struggling with her and she clawed at his wounded arms. Lee said he pushed her away in desperation and she just sort of spun away and went right over the sea wall and into the waves. He hadn’t meant to do it but maybe he was so desperate he didn’t care what happened to her. He looked over the wall afterwards but could not see her. The wind was shrieking and the waves heaved and thundered. Nothing could live in there. She had been there and as real as a stone and then she was gone. Lee told me that he had imagined later that it was all a dream and sometimes he doubted it had even happened and his attention was overtaken anyway by all the other hellish carry-ons in the Glen. Lawyer Templer informed him later that Mary Ann had been found washed up way over in Portland. Everyone else thought she had drowned herself because her sister had died of gut fever and besides you had to remember she was out of her mind. But Lee always knew different.

  Lee reached out and tried to hold my hand but I moved away. I didn’t know what my patient would come out with next. Lee moaned hoarsely that Mary Ann kept coming back to him at night, all sea-washed.

  He suddenly became weaker after that and had to be helped to turn over in bed. I stopped the treatment. There didn’t seem much point in going on. Lee suddenly tried to pull at my hand again. He said, “Can I ask you—don’t let my wife bring a priest. Can’t stand ’em. I know she wants to.”

  “Well, no, of course, your wishes should be met, but I’m not sure if I can promise,” I replied.

  “A man can promise and stand by it,” said Lee with a glimmer of the steely man he once was. “Sometimes he stands by his word and by what he is chosen for, whether he likes it or not.”r />
  After that his thoughts became more muddled, and he began muttering something over and over again. I tried to catch it. I thought Lee was saying some nonsense words. They sounded like, “Gone a plowin’ with your slippers on,” repeated over and over. And once I thought I heard him say, “Lizzie! Where are you?” At one stage he sat up and said he’d seen his mother moving about his room.

  Then came a stupor out of which he sometimes surfaced a little to toss around and pick at his blankets. I interpreted that as a sign of distress and gave him a shot of morphine. As I took the syringe out of its case and swabbed the needle I heard Lee mutter something. He said the word, “naphtha” quite clearly. It was the last thing that Lee said as far as I know. I knew that the morphine would soon see him off by depressing the breathing. I warned Lee’s wife that he would not last long and arranged for Mrs Mulholland to sit up with him in the night. Lee fell into a sleep from which he didn’t wake although he lasted into the next day, the 19th. Mrs Mulholland told me later that Mrs Lee had disobeyed her husband and called in a priest from the Anglican church on Juneau Avenue. He came and said the prayer for the dying. When he pronounced, “deliver your servant from all evil and set him free from every bond,” Lee gave out a strange cry and raised his hands then he lapsed back into stillness. Apparently the priest said, “They always do that.”

  Next day I came to certificate the death. I entered the still room, lifted the sheet and introduced the stethoscope to listen to nothing. Lee was lying on one side, the purple hands melded together as if praying. One eye still open and going milky. Mrs Lee made me do a strange thing. She brought up a glass of beer and slice of cake as I was packing away my medical bag. I tried to refuse but she insisted and so I politely sipped a little of the beer and ate the cake there in the room next to the deathbed.

  “My husband would have wanted it,” was all she said about it. As I turned to go I noticed distinctly for the first time that the elm tree outside was covered in tiny green buds in the sparkling March sunshine.

  “You must send me your bill at once, doctor,” said Mrs Lee, “You have been very good to us.” She also told me to fill in the death certificate properly. “Not James Lee, Doctor Kaiser. That’s a name he went by. Let’s use his real name—John Henry Lee. John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee actually.”

  I did not attend the funeral although I felt strangely drawn to go. Lee was buried at Forest Home Cemetery. He was a man who had two graves dug for him though he occupied only one.

  His wife joined my list as a patient and in time I got to know her much better. She told me soon after, “Strange how still the house is with him gone. I was half-expecting objects to move and dance about like he described happening in his parent’s house the night he was due for hanging.” Old man Lee’s strange story stayed on with me. I moved into a new career and became a professional healer of trauma. But I could not throw Lee off even if I wanted.

  I arranged for Clyde’s body to be brought back home. Family could elect for that from the war graves people. Clyde was buried in the Forest Home annex for servicemen not far from where John Lee and his daughter lay.

  What’s in a life? I say, ‘to each his own’, it’s not a matter of holding all the best cards, you play your poor hand the best you can.

  A Killing

  It’s weird how life gives you a jog to remind you what it’s all about. I’m ghost-less for now. Kaiser seems to have faded away once I let him out the box. That news that Lee had offed Mary Ann Fey as well hardly surprised me.

  It had been getting colder here. Snow dusting the bluffs above the Wisconsin River. It had been nearly a year since I first found that box of wire recorder spools in Cudahy. With the cold weather the birds were getting hungry and I liked to feed them. It’s something Ma used to do and I feel I’ve got a connection with her when I do it in turn. The trouble was that a pesky squirrel had kept on turning up and stealing from the feeders. I think he came from Memorial Park across the way. Wherever he was from that glossy carefree robber was a darn nuisance. He hung there emptying the feeders while I raged and yelled. He gauged the limits to my interventions and bounced away at the last moment whenever I rushed outside. His flicking tail seemed to be giving me the bird. He really riled me when he pulled some of the feeders down completely. I thought if that went on then pretty soon I wouldn’t be able feed the birds at all. I spent a good while hanging everything on thin wires to deter him but he leaped onto them and ransacked the feeders within the hour and that is when I began fixing on murder. I couldn’t use the .45 of course so I went to Dicks Sporting Goods instead and selected a Black Widow catapult with quarter inch steel balls.

  “Got a critter problem?” said the clerk.

  “Sure have,” I replied grimly. I held the clerk’s gaze a good while. I don’t usually manage that with folks.

  My first shot went high. It put him on the alert though and he stood up on his hind legs to look around him like a prairie dog. My second shot just skimmed him and he got alarmed, shinned down to the ground and was beginning to hop away. My third shot caught him in the head with an audible smack and spun him around. I could see he was in trouble and jerking about on the ground. I approached. The beast had lost all coordination. I could see it staring up at me and the whole of its eye seemed to be flickering and winking in agonized spasms. I relented then and felt ashamed of my cruelty. I leaned forward and tried to pick up the animal. The squirrel convulsed and tried to crawl away as my shadow fell over it and I could see that the thing was mortally hurt so I hit it hard with a piece of old lumber I found lying in the yard. It still was quivering so I gave it two more whacks. All was quiet then. I looked around to see if my neighbors were watching then went inside. The mailman came with a parcel of more nootropics. He did not seem to notice my blood guilt,

  “Cold day, snow we might have, huh?” he said. I had a shower, ate lunch, even walked with a little swagger. Killer, diller, that’s me. I could see how murderers quickly become detached from what they have done. I put off getting rid of the corpse for a while though I could see the mute silky tail sticking out of the fall-bleached grasses. In the end I wrapped it in plastic and dumped it in the trash. It all became business- like then. There’s nothing like a dose of death to wipe away solipsism. That night I typed in my Evernote journal, “only as creators can we destroy”. Next day another squirrel was on the feeder. I eyed it coldly and muttered, “You next, buddy.”

  Adelina Gibb

  That leaves Addie. Women seem always to be living with the crud their men leave behind. She stayed in that house at East Holt Avenue, Milwaukee for more than twenty years after Lee died. It is so incredible that she lived on through the Kennedy era to the cusp of the moon landings and Woodstock. Lee had hidden his traces well and no one seems to have come back from the past to confront her. She seems not to have wanted to return to England. She sent food parcels to her sister, Grace, during the war but most of her family thought of her as good as dead since disappearing with that criminal in 1910. It seems that Kaiser kept contact with her for a while and she certainly gave him some of Lee’s documents. Addie never said anything publicly about her notorious “husband”, but perhaps she never really did know much about him. I like to think that he just told her that he was asleep on that night in the Glen and woke to find himself covered in blood and with Lizzie calling him, that’s all, he couldn’t account for any more of it. Adelina spent her last few years at Elm Lodge Nursing Home in Wauwatosa. She was buried on January 20th 1969. She had actually died on January 9th but they had to wait for a thaw. The hymn, ‘Stars in My Crown’ was sung at the service at All Saints on Juneau at her request. The heirs of the Rosaleks had been keeping her gravestone all that time since Lee first bought it after Evelyn’s death. Then all three were laid together at Forest Home.

  Sin Eater

  How can I put it? Semper idem, it’s always the same thing. We know we are going to get popped one day. We humans are the walking dead. We scope it early but we don’t fully
realize it. We usually figure it out as kids unless we are special dumb. We understand in some way that we are historical beings and we begin to construct our lives as stories. If we are lucky we get to have beginnings, middles and ends. It doesn’t worry us too much when we’re young because we think the end is a long way off. Or we choose to forget about it. ‘How quickly we forget’, yeah, too right my Roman friend. We are transgressors against the laws of life. We have all gone to the afterlife and had a good look. Now, the sin eater is like the poet. He is more ready than most to go to the zone and live with the dead. I keep looking on YouTube at those Mount Everest climbers. They call it the death zone up there. Some come back and some don’t. The top is littered with those dead climber dudes, preserved forever. They have a sort of immortality. I understand now the sin eater deals with guilt, that’s the thing that fouls everything up. The dead walk because they have too much crap to deal with. I want to be a poet to inhabit the death zone and the life zone both. I want to free myself up and tell you what really happened to my parents but still I can’t put it into words somehow. I have to find a way to eat my own sin. As a first step I went back to our old house on Summit Avenue in Waukesha. I left some flowers on the roadside there. I can’t tell you about it yet. I don’t know how to. I’m keeping the Colt though. That’s insurance in case I flub this.

  Three

  A Travel Journal

  November 10th

  I’ve been looking at the ‘amenity kit’. You get given it in a blue bag. There are some socks, an eye shade and strange plastic gizmo. It took me a while to work out that it was the handle for a dinky toothbrush. When did I last brush my teeth? My body clock has all gone to hell. Was it 12 hours ago that I left my little place? I could sense the accusing silence already building up there as I moved with my bag to the door. Kept saying to myself, “Crap knows why I’m doing this anyway.” I thought maybe the journey would explain itself to me. All I had in my mind was that I wanted to confront John Lee in his own backyard and that meant going through a certain amount of turmoil. Feel the fear and do it anyway—they used to say that in my anxiety management classes. Well, I’m sure crapping myself now at thirty-two thousand feet. It’s night over the Atlantic. I have a pounding headache. It could be excess adrenalin or maybe something to do with the three straight Bourbons I had before I got on this thing. Can’t remember the last time I drank booze before that. There is the low thunder of the engines, the sound of curtains being switched back and forth by the cabin staff. The lights are low and no one else looks the slightest bit worried and certainly not as scared as I am. Couldn’t eat my seared beef dinner. Keep thinking of those jets like the Pan Am 103, that TWA out of New York or those Malaysian planes just exploding and dropping us all to vortex down. Four minutes to flail in the air like that. Those poor fallers. The engines are changing tone again. Time for more Bacopa pills and some Gaba for good measure.