by Lee Smith
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since they caught me. It does seem like the more you do for somebody, the more they will turn on you in the end. Miss Manners said this once in the newspaper — if you act like a rug, somebody will walk on you. I’m coming to think this is true.
It seems like only yesterday that I used to braid Sissy’s hair the same way I braid my own Debbi’s hair now. Both of them the kind of little girls that you just naturally love to take care of. I hate to think that Billy’s sister Sue is taking care of Debbi right now. Sue will not know to lay down with her on the bed and sing Itsy Bitsy Spider and then say “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep” every night, or that Debbi has to have those little ponies lined up in a row on her pillow. Also I can’t stand to think about Debbi breathing all of Sue’s passive smoke. But Lord knows, Sue owes me — she stayed with us between husbands when she was so nervous. I had to wait on her hand and foot.
I’ve always been the dependable one, like furniture, like chairs. Like a La-Z-Boy recliner, and I guess you might say Billy was the original La-Z-Boy himself. I don’t mean to say that he was lazy, Billy, I mean to say that things have not worked out as he planned. He couldn’t help getting his leg hurt, he couldn’t help it that Tennessee Power and Light laid him off, or that drinking is genetic in his family, and I know he didn’t mean all those ugly things he said to me either. Billy is sweet, sweet. And handsome — Lord! I never could believe he really married me in the first place, with all the girls he had to choose from. He had the whole county to choose from.
Many is the time that I have woke up in the middle of the night with my heart just pounding, to think of it! And then I’d look over at him laying on his back with his hands folded on his belly like a dead man and that little nasal strip over his nose, which he has to use for his sleep apnea, and I’d hear his snuffly breathing, and I’d think, I am the only one who ever sees Billy Sims with his nasal strip on. Then I’d think, Billy Sims is still here in the bed with me! After eight years of marriage! It must be a mistake. But it is not.
Was not. It was not. I’d lay there and look at him for hours, listen to him breathing, watch him sleep.
For some reason this reminds me of one time when I was a kid and we were living in that old cabin way out in the woods and I woke up real early for no good reason and walked out on the porch, it was years ago and yet I can remember it like it was yesterday. Mama and Daddy were gone. It was early, early spring and rainy, a little white mist in the trees, sarvis and dogwood in bloom. The cabin was so old that the silvery boards on the porch felt smooth and almost soft to my feet. I walked out real quiet, and there he was. A twelve-point buck standing like a statue just beyond the treeline. He stared straight at me. I stopped dead still and stared back. I felt like he had been watching for me, waiting for me to come out that door. It was like he knew me. And then Sissy called “Dee Ann?” in her little baby voice from inside, and I turned my head for one split second, and when I looked back he was gone. Gone without a trace. Yet I knew he had been there, and for days afterward I felt warm inside, and special, because of it.
I DON’T KNOW WHY I’m telling you all this. “Just go on,” Lois Rubin says.
I WENT OFF TO work every morning after the accident feeling this same way, feeling special, leaving Billy asleep in the bed behind me. He got his nights and days all turned around after he got hurt. First he couldn’t get to sleep for the pain, he couldn’t get comfortable in spite of the pills. Then he got to where he was sleeping all day and staying up all night long, he’d watch videos, and why not? Poor thing. It killed me to watch him hobbling around the kitchen like a hundred-year old-man with all those pins sticking out of his leg. He was drinking too. It broke my heart.
I could never forget the way he looked running zigzag down the field at the homecoming game senior year, carrying the ball like it was a baby and then throwing it up so high in the end zone, it spun right up out of the light and was lost for good in the sky. That was the winning run.
I saw the whole thing from the student government concession stand where I was making hamburgers and sloppy joes, serving a man who got so excited by Billy’s run that he took off toward the field forgetting his change and his fries. Football is real big here. It always has been. And now that they’ve closed the Piney Creek mine as well as the Resolute No. 4, it’s the main thing going on. Everybody in town comes to the games — old people, teen agers, little kids, women holding tiny wrapped-up babies in their arms. We took Debbi to her first game when she was not but four months old, wearing a little purple outfit that Mrs. Francine Butler had knitted for her. People bring whistles and cow-bells, streamers to throw, and balloons to let loose at the right moment. Purple and gold. Those are the colors for the Gretna Golden Wave. But it’s the men that get into it most, all these men that either used to play football themselves or don’t have enough to do since they got laid off. Billy said they even used to come to all the practices, walking up and down the field real serious in their windbreakers, following every play. I guess it made them remember when they were young too, and strong, and ran down the field like the wind. But Billy said they just about drove the coach crazy, giving him so much advice. Then of course they’d go to all the away games too, following the bus.
Anyway, I stood there holding that man’s change, looking out at the field where Billy was jumping all around and high-fiving everybody, and he seemed to me like more than a person, like a different kind of thing entirely, like one of those gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. Billy was larger than life. I halfway expected him to leap up off the earth and take his place among the constellations too.
Well, he didn’t of course. He graduated and started driving a coal truck for Parker Mining Company right away. He had to. He had to take care of his mother, who had asthma, since his daddy’d got killed in the mine years before, when Billy was a little kid. He can’t hardly remember his daddy at all. All he can remember is that his daddy had red hair and whistled. He could whistle any song in the world. Then he’d say, “Why, just a minute there, son! What’s that I see?” and pluck a quarter right out of the air behind your ear. Nobody ever figured out how he did it. Billy doesn’t really remember him being drunk, though that’s all his mother remembered. She was sour as a persimmon by the time she died. Warned Billy off of liquor every day.
For a while, that took, and it might of took for good if Anne Patrick Poe hadn’t broke his heart. Everybody knew she would. Anne Patrick Poe was the most stuck-up girl in our school, probably the most stuck-up girl in the state. You had to call her by all three names, Anne Patrick Poe. She was Miss Gretna High, Homecoming Queen, and Miss Claytor Lake. She had college written all over her. That is until Billy got her pregnant.
I remember seeing her in the littlest red two-piece bathing suit at the class picnic out at the lake right before graduation. She stood knee deep in the water squealing while Billy splashed her, stomach as flat as a board. I sat up under a canopy with Miss Parsons, the home ec teacher, and Becky Brannon, my best friend, and watched them. Becky sighed. “Aren’t they the cutest couple?” she asked, and I said yes. Obviously they were, they’d even been voted Cutest Couple for the yearbook, though secretly I didn’t think she was good enough for Billy Sims. I thought she was too self-centered, which was true. I saw how she’d tease him, and toss that ponytail over her shoulder and flirt with other boys such as Coy Eubanks, toying with Billy’s affections. I had never spoken to her, not once. I spoke to Billy eight times that year, though he didn’t know my name. Why should he? It’s a big consolidated high school. Five of those times, he was buying hot dogs from me after games. He always got chili and mustard. The other times were in math, where I got an A and he got a D. Luckily he didn’t remember that later, when we got together.
Billy was not a student. But he was a charmer, and the teachers loved him in spite of his grades. Everybody loved him. He has this happy-go-lucky wide-open face with freckles thrown acros
s it like stars, and a way of shuffling just a little when he walks. I saved a paper cup he threw down at the concession stand one time, and a potato chip bag. I flattened them out and put them in my scrap-book, and when Becky Brannon pointed at the page and said, “Now what’s that all about?” I wouldn’t tell her.
But it never crossed my mind that we would ever get together, me and him, not even in my wildest dreams.
Then came Thanksgiving, and Anne Patrick Poe came home from college putting on airs, and then came Christmas vacation and they ran off to South Carolina in her convertible and got married. The Poes almost died. First, Mr. Poe declared he would disown her and shouted out in public that Billy was nothing but trash. Then he calmed down and got Billy a job as a lineman at Tennessee Power and Light. Then he made the down payment for them on a new brick home in Sunnyside subdivision. Then, in April, she lost the baby. What did Mr. Poe think then? I reckon he was ready to eat nails, don’t you? But they were already married, Billy and Anne Patrick, so there was nothing he could do. She got a job at Susie’s Smart Shoppe in the mall, and Billy stayed on at the Power and Light. I’d see them around from time to time, such as at the Kiwanis pancake breakfast. “They look like they ought to be on TV, don’t they?” Becky said to me at the time, as we were getting some more pancakes. “Like Luke and Laura on General Hospital.” I had to agree. Furthermore, Becky was not that far off when she mentioned the soap opera. I’ll get to that.
But now, I am coming into the picture!
All through high school, as I believe I mentioned, I lived with old Mrs. Hawthorne. I had that little room on the third floor with a slanted ceiling. It was the first room I had ever had all to myself, so I loved it. Not that I didn’t appreciate my years at the mission school, but Mrs. Hawthorne’s house had pictures on the walls, and flowered rugs, and real silver. She said I could do whatever I wanted to in my room, so I painted it yellow myself, sunshine yellow with white woodwork, and Becky’s mother made a yellow flowered spread for my bed. “Oh, Dee Ann,” she used to say, brushing my hair, whenever I’d be over there visiting Becky, “whatever will become of you?” She said I had beautiful hair. Becky’s mother was real good to me. So was Miss Parsons, who bought me a sewing machine junior year, which sat on its own little table in my room at Mrs. Hawthorne’s house. Miss Parsons acted like she won that sewing machine in a contest, so I wouldn’t think she had gone out and bought it for me, but of course I knew better all along. She’s the one that recommended me to Home Health, which is how I started taking care of Billy’s mother. Social services paid for it.
But first, Mrs. Hawthorne died. I will never forget it. I’d been there six years. There is somebody like me in every town, that is good at staying with old people. Just as soon as Mrs. Hawthorne started failing, people started coming up to me in the Food Lion to say that if I ever needed another job, well, their mother would be needing some help, too, before long. I could see that the rest of my life was all laid out before me like the flagstone path that went straight from the street to Mrs. Hawthorne’s front door. I’d live with first one, then another. I’d take care of everybody.
Mrs. Hawthorne slipped away by degrees until finally there was nothing left in the bed but a little cornhusk doll. She quit talking. She quit eating too. I’d fix boiled custard, tapioca pudding, milk toast, all her favorites. I’d feed her myself with a spoon. Oh, I was desperate! Finally I called her family up long distance, and everybody came. But Mrs. Hawthorne wouldn’t talk to them either. She didn’t have time to talk. She didn’t have time to eat. She didn’t have time to sleep, hardly — when I’d go in there at night to check on her, there she’d be with her eyes wide open, clutching her blanket up to her chin, staring fiercely into the dark. Finally she motioned me over with her little clawlike hand. The light from the hall fell across her bed. Her lips were moving. I bent down to hear. “Dee Ann,” she said. “Oh, Dee Ann . . .” Her nails bit into my hand. “You must . . .” But I never knew what I must do, for just then a gurgling noise came up in her throat, and when I jerked back to look at her, she was dead. Dead with her eyes and her mouth wide open, teeth in the jar by the bed, cheeks sunk down in her face. I could not quit looking. Her eyes got darker and darker in death, and her mouth got bigger and bigger until I felt that she would swallow the whole world, me included. Yet I couldn’t move. I could feel myself going down, down. But just at the last minute I screamed “No,” or thought I screamed, and then I was scrambling out, phoning the doctor and the relatives, making coffee for all the folks who’d be coming over. I was just as efficient and dependable as always. Folks marveled at me.
But inside, I was different. For now I realized that I was going to die too, something that had not occurred to me before, in spite of being an orphan and all. Even as I was cutting my pound cake and getting out the folding chairs, I thought about it. I would have given anything to know what she was going to tell me. Anything! And what was I supposed to do? I kept wondering about this, it made me feel wild and crazy. I felt I had a destiny though I didn’t know what it was. When I finally got to bed that night, my heart was beating so fast I could hear it in my ears and feel it all through my body.
The very next morning, Home Health called and asked me if I would stay with Mrs. Sims, and I said yes immediately. I knew it was meant to be. But she was a bitter woman, as I said. She’d always had asthma, and now she had congestive heart failure. The house was a wreck. I was cleaning out the kitchen cupboards when Billy showed up the first time. I’d been there three days. It was May, nice and warm. I had opened all the doors and thrown up all the windows. Never mind that Mrs. Sims didn’t like this one bit — it was good for her. I was working so hard, banging pots and pans around in the cabinet under the stove, I didn’t hear Billy coming — didn’t hear his truck, or his step on the squeaky board by the kitchen door, a sound that I grew to love.
“Hey now,” he said.
I whirled around.
He stood just outside the screen door. His gold-red hair fell almost down to his shoulders under his TP&L hat. The sun was all in his hair. “I’m Billy, her son,” he said.
“I know,” I said. I had to sit back on the floor, I thought I was having a heart attack.
He stepped inside the door and squatted down beside me on the floor which I had just washed, thank goodness! “Do I know you?” he asked. Close up, his eyes were greener than ever.
“No,” I blurted out, “but I know you.” Then I got so embarrassed I liked to have died on the spot, but Billy just grinned, rocking back and forth on his cowboy boots.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “High school, am I right?” He snapped his fingers. “Hot dogs,” he said. “You used to sell the hot dogs at the games.”
I nodded. I couldn’t believe he remembered me after all that time.
Then he stood up. “Well, it’s a small world, ain’t it?” he said, stomping his feet a little bit to get the kinks out of his legs. I couldn’t of stood up if I had to. I felt weak all over.
“Now what did you say your name was?” he said, and I told him, and then he said, “Well, me and Anne Patrick, that’s my wife, are real glad that you’re over here taking care of Mama now. She’s been needing somebody full time for a while, and we just can’t do it, we both work, and my sisters live away.”
Of course I knew that Anne Patrick didn’t have to work, that it was just a little play job. But I nodded, acting sympathetic.
“How’s Mama today?” he called from the hall on his way in there to see her.
“She’s doing a lot better now since she’s on oxygen all the time,” I hollered back. “When she was trying to do for herself, she didn’t turn it on enough.”
“Well,” Billy said from the hall. Men never know what to say in the face of illness. Then I heard him say, “Hey, Mama.”
While she was taking her nap that afternoon, I couldn’t do a thing but go through every drawer and cubbyhole in that whole house, looking for pictures of Billy. And I found them at every ag
e, school pictures and snapshots, stuck here and there. If it was my son, I’d of had them all put together in a nice album. But she wasn’t much of a mother, Ruth Sims. I got the idea that she’d spent most of her life laying up in the bed whining and acting sick until she really got sick, and of course by then she was good at it. Secretly I didn’t blame Sue and Darlene for going wild and taking off. Besides, if they’d stuck around and took care of her, I never would have got to step one foot inside the door.
And I was so glad to be in that kitchen with Billy Sims, it seemed like a miracle.
After that, Billy always stopped by about once a week, then twice a week when she started doing poorly, then three times a week when she got real bad. I got used to him coming by any time of the day and on up into the evening, sometimes he’d be as late as 10 p.m. When you work for the power company, you never know when you’ll get called out on a job. I kept beer in the refrigerator, coffee on the stove. I made sure I had something good cooked up all the time — chicken and dumplings, beans and ham, vegetable soup. Billy was always hungry, I don’t think Anne Patrick ever fixed him a thing. He’d sit right down at the kitchen table and eat, and then he’d lean back and smoke a cigarette and talk to me. Now I was not used to talking to men, so at first this made me nervous. But you can’t stay nervous long around Billy. He squints those green eyes and looks right at you as if you’ve got something to say. And so sure enough I’d find myself just blabbing on and on about everything under the sun, kind of like I’m doing right now. I told Billy Sims things I had never told anybody — all about living at the mission school, and with Miss Hawthorne, and the time I went out West on a driving trip with Becky Brannon and her family in a van, and the time I went to Disney World with the church.