by Lee Smith
The first time Nova went up to visit Jake in the third-floor dayroom in Neurosciences, a skinny blonde woman came over and hugged him and turned to Nova and told her, “You may not know it, but this is Jesus Christ.”
“Wow,” Nova said.
“All the girls say that,” Jake said.
Jake played Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major and “Bridge over Troubled Water” for Nova on the piano they had brought into the dayroom for him. Nova started to visit him every afternoon when she got off lunch duty, and one time when she was up there, this little old black man went over and leaned against the piano and started scat-singing along when Jake was playing blues. “I was born down in Savannah,” he sang, “under a ugly star.” Nurses and aides and other patients gathered around to hear him; this little man had not said a single word since he had been admitted to the hospital months before. Nobody knew who he was or where he had come from or anything of his history. They wrote it down as he sang it, accompanied by Jake.
When Jake got out of the hospital, Nova moved out to his weird house in the country with him. Raymond Crabtree was mad at her now, so she couldn’t afford her apartment anymore, but she didn’t tell Jake that, and it didn’t matter anyway, because by then she was pregnant.
“Honey, if I was you I’d make a good thing of this,” Nova’s mother said, smoking a cigarette, when Nova went to ask her for money at the dry cleaners where she worked. “You’re crazy if you don’t.” Of course Nova’s mother didn’t have any money anyway.
And really, Jake was so happy when she told him, and so sweet, he was putty in Nova’s hands. She told him she didn’t believe in abortion. They got married at the big courthouse downtown. Nova wore a beautiful midcalf flowered dress with a low lacy neckline, while Jake wore some old army pants and a tux jacket. By then she was catching on to how rich people will wear just any old thing. The witnesses at their wedding were a courthouse secretary named Alice Robinson and a black prostitute named Shawndra Day who had been sitting out in the hall waiting to see her court-appointed attorney. Then Jake took Nova down to Richmond for a night in the Jefferson Hotel with its crocodile sculpture and its great dome of stained glass in the lobby like a cathedral, the closest Nova has ever been to one.
When they got back to Charlottesville, there was his mother, leaning up against her car parked beside the mailbox. Her car was a navy blue Mercedes with smoked windows, you couldn’t tell if she had a driver or anybody else in there with her or not. Jake’s mother has dyed red hair and anorexia nervosa even at her age, Nova could tell right off. She recognizes a mental illness when she sees one. Jake’s mother’s name is Barbara.
Jake got out of the car and Barbara ran over to fling her arms around him dramatically, like a person in a movie. “I can’t believe you would do this to me,” she sobbed. Jake patted her while extricating himself as best he could, motioning for Nova to get out of the Volvo. “Barbara,” he said, “here she is. This is Nova.” But Barbara cut loose again and would not even look at her. Well fuck this, Nova thought, standing there.
Then the drivers side door of the blue Mercedes opened and Jake’s father got out, a horsey-looking man in khaki pants and a pale blue denim shirt. He came over and took both of Nova’s hands in his, looking into her eyes in a way that made Nova trust him immediately, as well as feel sort of bad about herself. “Welcome to the family, dear,” he said.
“Won’t you come in?” Nova said.
“No,” said Barbara.
“Sure,” said Mr. Valentine.
They had ginger ale and stale cookies and strained conversation, with Barbara sniffling on the old truck seat that served as a sofa, looking all around the crazy living room. “Folk art,” Jake explained as his mother took in the old signs and homemade art on the walls, and the chain-saw angel, and the barber’s chair that Mr. Valentine was sitting in. Nova went along with Barbara on this. She could not understand why anybody wouldn’t have nice comfortable furniture if they could afford it. She hates that chain-saw angel. Nova said she wasn’t feeling well and excused herself. So they didn’t know that she was standing right there in the overgrown grape arbor when they left, that she saw Mr. Valentine poke Jake in the side and say, “Way to go!” as Jake turned to leave, or that she heard Barbara say, “I don’t like her,” when he was out of earshot. “At least he’s not gay,” Mr. Valentine said as he got in the car.
Now Jake’s parents are already in Maine, on the island, with a cook and a housekeeper and a “man” who live in little log cabins out in the piney woods and do everything for them. Nova stands at the screen door and thinks about everything she has got to do to get ready for the trip, besides getting Theron and his boys to put the Thule on top of the Volvo, that’s the least of it. Nova does not see why she can’t have decent help instead of drug addicts and and crazy people, why they can’t have a nice house, why they have to go back to the land. Nova would like to get away from the land! She doesn’t understand why they have to go to Maine instead of Hilton Head Island, which is where anybody in their right mind who could afford it would surely go.
But now Nova has got to clean out the refrigerator and wash a load of clothes and go in to town to buy more dog food and sign that little thing in the post office that will cancel their mail delivery while they are gone, though she never gets any mail anyway except stuff from the community college now that Jake has signed her up to take some courses in the fall. She has got to read The Scarlet Letter first, which looks awful. Mrs. Stevenson used to want her to go to college too, but then Nova ran off with her mother’s boyfriend’s brother, a disc jockey from Columbia, South Carolina, ending up in Myrtle Beach doing some things that did not require a degree of any kind. Nova runs her finger along the screen door, she knows she’s procrastinating. Actually procrastinating was a word on the GED that Nova just did so well on.
Then beyond the mailbox and the meadow she sees a rising plume of dust so she runs back into their bedroom and pulls on some cutoffs and puts on that red halter top and some red lipstick and ties her hair up into a high swingy ponytail on top of her head. She’s back at the screen door by the time Theron jumps out of his jeep, looking like an ad for something. Anything! Theron has gray eyes and the most beautiful legs and a café au lait complexion. He says he is Hawaiian but Nova knows he is not. Theron stands for a minute outside the door, peering in.
“Where is everybody?” Nova asks, meaning the rest of the Agape yard crew.
“Taco Bell.” Theron unbuttons his shirt.
Nova is naked by the time they hit the bedroom.
Afterward, they share a joint in the unmade bed. Since hiring Agape, Nova has had them clear the meadow and make a stone path out to the old springhouse in the woods that Jake uses for his photography studio. Now she has just decided to make a rock garden out front, on the side of that little hill by the mailbox. It will be a lot of work. Nova smiles, lying flat on her back with her feet up against the wall.
“What you call that thing you want me to put on the car?” Theron is already up, pulling on his pants.
“Thule,” she says.
“Funny name.” Theron sits back down on the side of the bed to lace up his work boots.
“I thought it was a brand name, but Jake says it means some mythical northern country,” Nova says dreamily in that dreamy way she always feels after sex, thinking Thule, Yule, Thor, Odin, all of these words that Theron does not and will never know. Thule. It sounds like a kingdom of the olden days. Still, he’s gorgeous, those big brown arms.
“Hey babe, you know something?” Now he turns to look at her, he pinches her nipple.
“What.” It’s hot in the bedroom. A bee buzzes against the screen.
“Well, I been thinking.” Now he seems hesitant, for Theron. Usually Theron is right up front. “You know, it wouldn’t be too hard for you and me to, you know, do something about Jake. If that’s what you wanted me to do, I mean.”
Suddenly the whole room goes completely still, like it has turned into
a black and white photograph. The air gets thick and hard to breathe.
Nova sits up. “What did you say?” she says.
“You and me, we could, you know.” Theron grins at her.
She looks out the window and down the meadow to the road where she sees the dust, which means that Agape is coming up the hill in that old panel truck.
“Hey now, you know, I didn’t mean nothing by it.” Theron is on his feet, ready to go, smiling at her.
Nova smiles back. “Well, that’s good, then.”
Maybe that rock garden is not such a good idea, she thinks later, watching Theron lift the Thule like it’s nothing. He and his boys attach it securely to the racks on the top of the Volvo. Then they start up their regular mowing and weed eating like crazy. Nova knows they do a lot of unnecessary work out here because they need the money. She doesn’t blame them a bit. While they work, she cleans out the refrigerator and finishes the wash and packs her own suitcase, but she knows she can’t leave the farm until Agape leaves first, because they will steal something. Of course they will. And why not? They are the underclass, a word she learned last week when she went over to the university with Jake for the opening of that photography exhibit he’s in, “The Mind’s Eye.”
The next morning Nova has to work like an animal because Jake is so disorganized. He forgot to give her the clothes he wanted her to wash, he forgot to pick up his medicine from the pharmacy or the dogs’ heartworm pills from the vet, so she has to drive into town to get all this stuff. When she gets back the clothes are dry. They fold them together and then she climbs up on the stepstool and puts them into the Thule as Jake hands them up to her, one item after another in the blazing midday sun, then his tennis racket and his wet suit and all the books and equipment he will need for his various projects — his tripod, his printer, his tape recorder, whatever. Jake makes a huge production about packing everything just so. Nova feels like hitting him, but instead she smiles brightly and says, “Ready?” and Jake reaches up to hug her and says yes, he guesses so. He whistles for the dogs who have been circling the Volvo warily, like fish. He puts Thor into the backseat and opens the back-back door for Odin who will ride behind the pet gate next to Nova’s suitcase. Odin jumps in. Jake slams the door.
“Okay, lock it,” he calls up to Nova who is getting this god-awful headache now up on this stepstool so close to the sun.
She sticks the little key into the little lock and tries to turn it, but it won’t turn. Shit. That’s the one thing she forgot to do yesterday, check the goddamn key. But what is she supposed to be anyway, a goddamn hired hand? But she’ll have to tell him, won’t she? Won’t she? Won’t they have to go get some bungee cords or something? Nova turns, shielding her eyes from the sun, but now Jake has disappeared back into the house. He comes out waving The Scarlet Letter. “Hey! You almost forgot this!” he yells. He tosses it into the front seat. Right. Like Nova is really going to readThe Scarlet Letter on this trip. Shit! She’s not a hired hand, she’s a project.
For the second time that day, Nova has the sense that time has stopped, that she is in one of Jake’s photographs. She looks out at the rolling meadow and the little stone farmhouse and the blue line of mountains beyond, where she grew up. She jumps down lightly. When Jake hugs her, she can feel all his ribs.
“Ready?” he says.
She gets in the car.
The next morning, they are on Interstate 81 outside of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, when the top of the Thule pops up and Jake’s clothes start flying out, slowly at first, like something in a dream, scattering all over the interstate behind them. Strangely enough, Nova sees the whole thing, entirely by chance, because she has pulled the passenger-side mirror down to tweeze her face a little bit, those chin hairs. So she just happens to see Jake’s red and black checkered L.L. Bean wool shirt out of the corner of her eye as it sails lazily through the air to land on the windshield of a red Chevy Blazer two cars behind them blinding the driver only momentarily but long enough to make her swerve back and forth, back and forth, in larger and larger arcs, the Blazer rocking now until it runs off the road into the median hitting one of those great big rocks like you find in Pennsylvania. Nova puts the tweezers back into her makeup case, which she puts back into her purse. She doesn’t say one word to Jake but turns in her seat to watch as his clothes fly through the air faster and faster and all the cars behind them begin to weave and then there’s a rattling sound from the top of the Volvo as his printer busts loose to land squarely on the hood of the Subaru wagon just behind them, and his tennis racket bounces off the hood of the little yellow Acura breaking the window and causing the Acura to veer into a silver pickup in the other lane, which hits a Jeep Cherokee, which explodes.
All the cars are running into each other now, out of their nice white lines, crumpling like toy cars. Smoke rises into the sunny air. The dogs start barking. The Cherokee is burning. Now a Mus-tang convertible, which has slammed into it, is burning too.
Nova knows this is all her fault.
“Oh no! Oh my God! Oh shit!” Now Jake sees it too, he drives right off the road, they are bumping along over big old rocks and then they are in the trees.
Nova never, ever told. She left Jake, who really was too sensitive for this world. She heard he’s been dead for a couple of years now. That day on I-81 has come to seem like a film to her, a DVD that she can play at will in her mind’s eye, slow or fast, more vivid than anything else in her life before or since. Nova has never made a good thing out of anything, but she’s done all right. She gets along okay. They never got to Maine, of course, after the accident, and Nova has never gotten there since. She thinks about it sometimes, though, and it seems so far away to her now, like another country, the country of Thule perhaps with its piney smell and its pointed trees and the freezing water in Blueberry Lake and they are all still there, Jake’s whole family and all their dogs and Jake himself, she can still see his swimming blue eyes right now, Lord he was sweet.
Intensive Care
Cherry Oxendine is dying now, and everybody knows it. Everybody in town except maybe her new husband, Harold Stikes, although Lord knows he ought to, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. And it’s not like he hasn’t been told either, by both Dr. Thacker and Dr. Pinckney and also that hotshot young Jew doctor from Memphis, Dr. Shapiro, who comes over here once a week. “Harold just can’t take it in,” is what the head nurse in Intensive Care, Lois Hickey, said in the Beauty Nook last week. Lois ought to know. She’s been right there during the past six weeks while Cherry Oxendine has been in Intensive Care, writing down Cherry’s blood pressure every hour on the hour, changing bags on the IV, checking the stomach tube, moving the bed up and down to prevent bedsores, monitoring the respirator — and calling Rodney Broadbent, the respiratory therapist, more and more frequently. “Her blood gases is not by twenty-eight,” Lois said in the Beauty Nook. “If we was to unhook that respirator, she’d die in a day.”
“I would go on and do it then, if I was Harold,” said Mrs. Hooker, the Presbyterian minister’s wife, who was getting a permanent. “It is the Christian thing.”
“You wouldn’t either,” Lois said, “because she still knows him. That’s the awful part. She still knows him. In fact she peps right up ever time he comes in, like they are going on a date or something. It’s the saddest thing. And ever time we open the doors, here comes Harold, regular as clockwork. Eight o’clock, one o’clock, six o’clock, eight o’clock, why shoot, he’d stay in there all day and all night if we’d let him. Well, she opens her mouth and says Hi honey, you can tell what she’s saying even if she can’t make a sound. And her eyes get real bright and her face looks pretty good too, that’s because of the Lasix, only Harold don’t know that. He just can’t take it all in,” Lois said.
“Oh, I feel so sorry for him,” said Mrs. Hooker. Her face is as round and as flat as a dime.
“Well, I don’t.” Dot Mains, owner of the Beauty Nook, started cutting Lois Hickey’s hair. Lois we
ars it too short, in Dot’s opinion. “I certainly don’t feel sorry for Harold Stikes, after what he did.” Dot snipped decisively at Lois Hickey’s frosted hair. Mrs. Hooker made a sad little sound, half sigh, half words, as Janice stuck her under the dryer, while Miss Berry, the old-maid home demonstration agent waiting for her appointment, snapped the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine one by one, blindly, filled with somewhat gratuitous rage against the behavior of Harold Stikes. Miss Berry is Harold Stikes’s ex-wife’s cousin. So she does not pity him, not one bit. He got what’s coming to him, that’s all, in Miss Berry’s opinion. Most people don’t. It’s a pleasure to see it, but Miss Berry would never say this out loud since Cherry Oxendine is of course dying. Cherry Oxendine! Like it was yesterday, Miss Berry remembers how Cherry Oxendine acted in high school, wearing her skirts too tight, popping her gum.
“The doctors can’t do a thing,” said Lois Hickey.
Silence settled like fog on the Beauty Nook, on Miss Berry and her magazine, on Dot Mains cutting Lois Hickey’s hair, on little Janice thinking about her boyfriend, Bruce, and on Mrs. Hooker crying gently under the dryer. Suddenly, Dot remembered something her old granny used to say about such moments of sudden absolute quiet: “An angel is passing over.”
After a while, Mrs. Hooker said, “It’s all in the hands of God, then.” She spread out her fingers one by one on the tray, for Janice to give her a manicure.
AND AS FOR HAROLD Stikes, he’s not even considering God. Oh, he doesn’t interfere when Mr. Hooker comes by the hospital once a day to check on him — Harold was a Presbyterian in his former life — or even when the Baptist preacher from Cherry’s mama’s church shows up and insists that everybody in the whole waiting room join hands and bow heads in prayer while he raises his big red face and curly gray head straight up to Heaven and prays in a loud voice that God will heal these loved ones who walk through the Valley of Death and comfort these others who watch, through their hour of need. This includes Mrs. Eunice Sprayberry, whose mother has had a stroke, John and Paula Ripman, whose infant son is dying of encephalitis, and different others who drift in and out of Intensive Care following surgery or wrecks. Harold is losing track. He closes his eyes and bows his head, figuring it can’t hurt, like taking out insurance. But deep down inside, he knows that if God is worth His salt, He is not impressed by the prayer of Harold Stikes, who knowingly gave up all hope of peace on earth and Heaven hereafter for the love of Cherry Oxendine.