Don't You Ever
Page 17
First I had to get him to go meet the surgeon. If by any chance Ronnie hit it off with the man, the rest might follow. The doctor was busy. He was impatient when I explained Ronnie’s distrust of authority figures like him. But this surgery was our only hope. Ronnie wasn’t budging. “Aw, we’ll get there one of these days,” he told me wearily. He couldn’t serve two masters at once—the doctors he owed money to and the ones who wanted to operate on him again.
On February 9, I took the NIH consent form by the barbershop in hopes Ronnie would sign it. He wouldn’t even look at it. He threw it in the trash. I retrieved it.
His belly was in an uproar. He was nauseated. Bottles of Pepto-Bismol and Mylanta sat all around the barbershop. He was rising in the middle of the night to gobble bowls of cereal to calm his storming gut. He had so little energy that it took fifteen to twenty minutes to work up the steam at day’s end to close the barbershop and walk a few short yards around the corner to his Ramcharger. I left for Charlottesville. I had to start my fellowship. I’d be back often, I promised Ronnie.
* * *
I SPENT THE next few days in a courthouse, gathering names of people sent decades earlier to one of Virginia’s mental hospitals with plans to sterilize them. The next weekend, I went home, sorted mail, took care of my cats, and saw friends. Monday afternoon, February 18, I went by the barbershop on my way back to Charlottesville. The lights were out. The door was locked. Through the window I saw the gray hair of Ronnie’s aging clientele covering the floor. Ronnie must have felt too rotten to sweep it up. I had to leave. I didn’t go by his house.
Late the next morning, that Tuesday, Thelma came by Ronnie’s house to check on something. His cars were out back. She hollered up the stairs. When she got no answer, she went next door. Alpha came over and peeked in Ronnie’s door and knew right away he was dead. Ronnie had been fully dressed and ready to go to work that Monday when I’d gone to the shop looking for him.
Medics estimated he’d been dead at least twelve to eighteen hours. He’d lain close to death most of Monday. Alpha called the newspaper. My editor reached me at the humanities center. I rushed across town in Charlottesville to tell Mom, who looked stricken, then sped the two hours to Vinton. The one time I should have gone by his house, I hadn’t.
* * *
HE’D BLED TO death from the rectum. The official cause of death was an arrhythmia brought on by gastrointestinal bleeding. He was sitting up in bed with a bulb still burning in a reading lamp clamped to the vertical supports of his headboard. Medics found thick rubber-banded rolls of cash, $6,400 all told, scattered around his body and peeking from within blankets. His mattress was soaked with blood.
If I’d gone to the house the day before, I might have gotten him to the emergency room in time. I’ll never know. He might have begged off medical attention the way he had with Max in April, but I would have called 911 anyway. Still he was much weaker. Another abdominal surgery might have killed him. But I should have been there. I should have tried.
* * *
TO RONNIE, PREACHERS were nothing but deceivers and scoundrels. When my friend Bob, a United Methodist minister, came to Max’s funeral, Ronnie scolded me later: “Why’d you send that preacher around here?” Ronnie didn’t know that for years Bob and his wife had listened to me agonize over Ronnie. A progressive sort of minister, Bob wanted only to comfort Ronnie, not slap his name on some list of saved souls. After Max’s service, Ronnie noticed Bob about to drive off and told Bob he admired his “unit,” his car. Bob had chuckled ever since about Ronnie’s fifties talk. He offered to do Ronnie’s service.
That mild, sunny Thursday morning, a dozen or more of Ronnie’s customers came with their wives to stand by his grave, a few paces from the cemetery road where Ronnie used to walk in the evenings. At least one of the women he’d cursed at his favorite restaurant was there. She and her coworkers sent flowers and a card signed “The Girls.” Four of Mom’s cousins came, three members of the Hicks family who’d been her friends all her life, and ten of my newspaper colleagues. As we settled into the service, my eyes took in the far-off peaks of the Allegheny and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
In his eulogy, Bob pointed to the gravestones around us. Ronnie knew hundreds of those people. “He listened to their stories, their problems, their jokes, their woes. And likewise he touched their lives with his replies—replies filled with depth, character, meaning, and experience.” Ronnie might have thought of himself as a loner, but for three decades he served the people of his town as faithfully as anyone.
I thought that day that if I hadn’t procured a copy of my birth certificate, if I hadn’t read every word of it, and if Mom hadn’t come clean with me about whom the numeral “1” on that form referred to, I might never have known Ronnie was my brother. If I hadn’t sought him out in 1987 and gotten to know him, if I hadn’t been with him in the hospital—if none of those ifs had happened and Mom had told me my “cousin” Ronnie had died—I might not have even gone to the funeral of this relative I barely knew. Then the lies would have been compounded, and Mom would have lived out the rest of her life knowing that not only had she failed to ease Ronnie’s anguish over his childhood, but she’d also cheated me out of the truth. She would have withheld an essential part of herself from the people she held most dear.
Part VI
Learning Still
17
Unearthing Ronnie
Ronnie’s Sportsman Barber Shop was a fixture of downtown Vinton, Virginia, for thirty years.
Photo courtesy of Don Petersen
I thought I’d be able to pack Ronnie away now, mentally and otherwise. But his landlord at the barbershop was pushing me to clean it out so he could rent it to a new barber. Research on other people would have to wait. Ronnie’s belongings, bearing clues to his story, were irresistible. I used the landlord’s pressure as an excuse to dig in.
I started sifting through it the day after the funeral. Practically everything Ronnie touched wound up on the floors of his bedroom, his kitchen, his cars, his barbershop, and its back room. Signs of what he cared most about rested among the fast-food wrappers and the antihistamine bottles. Wooden turkey calls with chalk to create friction on the lids and fine sandpaper to abrade them when the lids no longer took chalk. Flashlights by the score. Car registrations from the sixties. Hundreds of black-and-white photographs of snakes, bears, and paw prints. The dust of thirty years rose up and coated my throat.
As miserable as he was toward the end, Ronnie was still reading about history and about turkey hunting. I knew that for sure because he used recent medical bills as bookmarks. I found a young woman’s diary with the locking clasp broken off. I found tiny, torn bits of paper throughout the piles bearing Max’s name and phone number written in Ronnie’s hand, always askew and always without capitals or hyphens: “home max 242 1754.” Wherever he went, if something went wrong, whoever found him would know where he belonged.
I counted two hundred pairs of chukkas, Hush Puppies, and other shoes in several sizes for his growing feet. Almost as many pairs of slacks, many brand-new. Countless jockey shorts and brown socks, also new. In his sickest years Ronnie kept buying more rather than do laundry. A green duffel bag, three feet long and stuffed with clean but age-yellowed jockeys, sat at the bottom of a wardrobe. Weary, I almost pitched the whole bag, but from within the fiber popped two handguns and, rolled up in plaid boxers, a plastic rye bread bag containing three rubber-banded money rolls, $1,000 each. Here and there in the bedroom—between the medics first, then me—we found $12,000.
His illness left behind six or more blood pressure cuffs, books on diabetes and hypertension, and, stuffed in the pockets of every garment, tissues, napkins, and paper towels. I discovered a Ronnie-style order to his bedroom—down vests here, khakis there. Behind a dusty armchair heaped high with stuff was a tall cluster of brown paper bags, each marked by year, and within, white envelopes containing notes of a day’s earnings: “August 1985, $56, $30, $38, $42, $39, $69,
$22 . . .” I could see him heading to his taxman every spring with the previous year’s brown bag under his arm. Ronnie was trying to be a good boy.
But the barbershop was vile from his sickened neglect. The sterilizer in which he plunged his shears and combs in alcohol was rusting and hadn’t been changed in a very long time. The first aid cabinet coughed up a three-pack of Trojan rubbers, one missing. Along shelves furry with hair clippings was a stack of Playboys from the eighties.
I brought home a videocassette and played it, hoping it might be a home movie. It was a bootleg porn flick.
I found a Rolex engraved in 1984 as a birthday gift to an unknown man. A jeweler confirmed it was counterfeit. Deep in the piles, I unearthed JOB rolling papers, matches, and a stainless steel hemostat, the surgical forceps people use as a roach clip. I didn’t find any pot, but Ronnie must have tried it. He left behind no tobacco or alcohol. I never saw him drink beer, wine, or anything alcoholic.
In his bedroom, I discovered guns, lots and lots of guns. Receipts showed that Ronnie had been buying and trading firearms for decades. But the day I had come to his bedroom to pick up Ronnie’s funeral outfit, as I searched for clean socks, I’d noticed a fancy bone-handled handgun in the masses of clothes. I never saw that gun again. Someone knew it was there and by the time I arrived to process his stuff, they’d come for it and only it. Max’s family reported no break-ins. I never learned who took it, but knowing someone had been there spooked me as I labored.
Ronnie’s kitchen was a mycology lab. Fresh-ground Kroger peanut butter from long ago had molded, dried, and cracked within its plastic tubs like desiccated lake beds. Cans of beans had sat in his corner cabinet for so many years that they exploded, rotted, molded, and turned to dust. Didn’t he and Max hear those cans popping and wonder what the heck it was?
The year before, when I came for his identification cards, I’d noticed two brown stains between vertical supports of the headboard of his iron bed. I figured an overheated bulb in his clip-on reading lamp had scorched the wall. But on closer inspection, I now saw that scalp oil, probably mixed with hair tonic, had built up over many years at two side-by-side spots where he rested his head. A piece of the rust-colored accumulation had become so thick it fell away, exposing a bit of the wall’s underlying plaster. These very rooms had given up hope.
* * *
RONNIE LEFT NO will. Over the next year and a half, I gathered his savings and cash, sold his cars, his remaining fourteen guns, and his barber chairs, and paid off $52,000 of his $84,000 in medical bills. I wrenched my back carrying a sixty-five-pound metal bucket of change out of his bedroom. Filtering out the tiny brown buttons from his khaki pants pockets and the ever-present bits of hair, I wrapped thousands of coins in paper sleeves at home in the evenings and deposited every single penny into Ronnie’s estate account. Dumb ass, I could hear him say, grab some of that for yourself. Don’t give it all to The Man. I took what I cared about—a Flattopper comb, two old razor strops, his books, his turkey calls, and his bags of pictures and papers, with battalions of tiny light-brown roaches streaming beneath it all.
As I drove back and forth between Vinton and Roanoke, I began to see Ronnie-like figures everywhere—tall, dejected-looking men, often sitting stoically behind the steering wheel of an old car or walking down the street, their long soles slapping the sidewalk. The reporter in me was running down, and the sister was kicking in. Our common smell was stronger than ever—so many of his things were at my house now—but I didn’t mind anymore. His scent meant he was still with me and he still had things to show me.
* * *
THE SALVATION ARMY hauled away a pickup load of Ronnie’s best suede coats, barely worn tweed jackets, and other high-quality clothes. For Ronnie and for our mama, clothes were prosperity markers, attainable when fancy cars and houses were beyond their reach. Mom equated a sharp dresser with respectability, cleanliness, and morality. Ronnie may have picked that up from her. Within his mounds, I found a navy-blue V-neck wool sweater she’d mailed him one Christmas, still store-folded in white tissue paper and in its shallow gift box.
Some of his cash probably went away in the pocket of one of those donated jackets. I couldn’t search through every one of thousands of garments. It seemed right, anyway, that some man looking for a warm coat might reach into a pocket and come out with a hundred-dollar bill, like Ronnie winning it big with that racehorse. The most heartbreaking sight as I dumped debris at a landfill from a friend’s truck was Ronnie’s bloody mattress lying lonely on the ground.
That spring, my folks came to visit. Daddy had watched as I labored on Ronnie’s behalf. He’d cashed one of his $450 paychecks from two weeks of work at the farm supply. “Here, Pie. Take this.” He bit his quivering lip. The money came in handy as the estate lawyer filed for refunds for landfill fees and other expenses.
Without examining much of Ronnie’s materials, I packed away what I hadn’t sold and schlepped boxes to the attic. Someday I’d study it all. Right then, I had research deadlines to make and aging parents to watch over.
18
Our Family Shrivels
My favorite picture of my parents, which I took on their sixtieth anniversary at their home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
I long felt bad I hadn’t given my parents grandchildren. But a few years after Ronnie died, I did the next best thing: I married Dan Crawford, a man they loved like a son.
Simple happiness was not ours for long. In 2003, after a difficult, protracted battle with emphysema, my father passed away. Mom’s anxieties skittered higher after that, and her faith in the world plunged beneath her aching knees. She was frightened of spoiled food, any criticisms, poverty, car accidents, falling, my death, curvy roads, strong winds, snakes, making mistakes, looking shabby, snow, ice, strangers, fire, losing control of herself, embarrassment, cheese (causes constipation), green vegetables (interfere with blood thinner), salt (raises blood pressure), and surprises (even pleasant ones).
One of my rewards for washing her back and scrubbing her toilet was clarification of family history. When I was little, she’d storm red-faced around the house, angry about Daddy’s friendships with the Keswick postmistress and with the church pianist. Now I could ask, Had he fooled around with those women? “No, he was just being friendly. He was nice to everybody. I thought they misunderstood. He could be a flirt.”
Even in our saddest months, Mom made me laugh. At the annual service that honored deceased patients of Daddy’s hospice, an aged clarinetist played a series of doleful classical pieces in a random, modern pattern. When he was done, Mom blurted out for all to hear, “I’m glad they cut that noise off.” Don’t know what she thought it was, but it wasn’t music.
In a talk about heaven, Mom declared the idea of life after death to be “bullshit.” As a young girl, she’d taken the invitational walk of salvation down the aisle at Bethlehem Church. A woman pressured her to, promising she’d see her mother again. Even then, Mom said, still bitter, “I knew that was baloney.”
* * *
WITH MY HAND at her waist as she rose the two painful steps to her back door, I felt the grinding of Mom’s knee bones telegraphing up her frame. Getting in and out of her Buick Century was agony and sometimes impossible. New drugs interfered with her blood thinner, and she injured a leg vein. Blood pooled inside and all around her ankle. She could barely stand. My longtime doctor had gently ushered Daddy through death and would do the same for Mom. As he knelt by her red, swollen ankle in his examining room, Mom assured him, “You can take my shoe off. I washed my feet.” She still believed she stunk.
* * *
HER FORMERLY COIFFED hair now Einstein wild, Mom was as adamantly anti-science as Ronnie. We couldn’t convince her that her thermal pane windows would keep out the cold. On a Christmas card–like day, with blue-white snow draping the trees, kids on sleds, and cardinals darting to feeders Dan had erected for her, we opened her curtains to reveal the cheery scene. She insisted on closing them.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT thirteen months, Mom and I rode the troughs and swells of old age. She brought to it all her many fears, a deep loathing of her body, her residual shame from her youthful pregnancy, and a cognitive disconnect that made her a dangerous patient. While in the hospital recovering from hip surgery, she insisted she could stand and walk without assistance. I had to keep an eye on her or she’d take off down the hall and dislodge the new metal ball in her hip socket. I begged her to relax, to which she aptly replied, “I’m not made that way.”
She went into a nursing home, where imagery of her country upbringing emerged poetically as she recovered from the anesthesia. She hallucinated scenes of lambs playing in fields. The bellowing of a female patient was a calf hollering for its mama. The trilling of the phone at the nurses’ station was the whirring of a screech owl. When she had diarrhea, she asked for a slop jar, which is what old-timers called a bedpan.
* * *
DAY AFTER DAY, as she steadily declined, she lay in bed grieving for herself.