by Pete Altieri
He also realized that today was Saturday and the cleaning woman would be by on Thursday to do her weekly top to bottom treatment of the house. When Miriam got sick, Carson hired a cleaning lady to come by and clean to take that burden off Miriam and because he did like a clean house. She also fixed some simple meals that Carson could freeze and re-heat later for himself. He hired Jessa Carthage, an attractive 25-year-old college student, on a referral from a friend of theirs. He just enjoyed the company of a vibrant young woman so full of life that provided him a convenient distraction from reality. The fact she really did a great job cleaning the house top to bottom was a bonus. Even the beautiful Jessa had her own cross to bear, though to look at her you would never know. She had grown up with an alcoholic mother who ran out on her and her two younger brothers, leaving them with a father who struggled to make ends meet.
Carson knew he had to do something with Miriam. He decided that getting rid of her was risky business, so Carson decided the best thing to do was to hide her somewhere in the house. He decided on the perfect place. Carson figured stashing her somewhere obvious was probably the least likely place anyone would decide to look.
2
Almost two weeks had passed since Miriam died. Carson survived his weekly visit from Jessa without her noticing anything was different about the house. Carson told her that Miriam was feeling better and went to visit some family for a couple weeks. Jessa didn’t seem to think that was strange, and so she went about her usual cleaning and cooking before leaving. Carson felt cocky about things – like he had come up with the perfect murder and was going to get away with it. Miriam had family all over the US and he figured that would buy him quite a bit of time before he needed to worry about what to tell people that asked about his wife.
The following day he started to hear strange noises. The noises were faint at first, but as the days went by, they got louder. It was difficult for him to pinpoint what the noises were, but to him it sounded almost like white noise. It was as if someone had a radio on very low volume, and it wasn’t tuned to a station that came in. As he sat in his recliner reading, the white noise continued. It went on day and night, and it got to the point that he was unable to sleep at all. As he lay in bed, the sound was coming from all directions. It was in the ceiling. It was in the walls and coming up from the floors. He ran about the house with a flashlight in the small hours, desperately trying to figure out what the noise was. He used a small hammer to tap on the walls to see if maybe he could find a mouse or some sort of animal that was making the noise, but it droned on.
After almost a week of the noise, it changed from a soft white noise to the sound of a slurping or sucking sound. He couldn’t place the sound, and it was driving him mad. It didn’t make any sense. Carson even went to the main electrical panel in the house and turned everything off, and still he heard the white noise and the strange slurping sounds. No matter what he did, he was not able to find the source of the noises that kept him from reading or sleeping. Something had to be done!
Carson decided the best thing to do was to go next door to talk to his neighbor who was a maintenance man at the high school in town. Surely he would be able to figure it out. Carson patiently waited until 4pm, when the neighbor said he would stop by after work and see if he could find the source of the noise.
3
Almost a year had passed and now Carson Dillon found himself in very different surroundings. He was quietly sitting by a window reading a book. He seemed very content to look at him absent his new living arrangement. Two doctors were standing on the other side of the room, talking amongst themselves about his status. They were both psychiatrists at the Benton Harbor Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The wing of the hospital they were in was very secure, despite the heavily medicated patients walking around in pajamas and playing checkers, reading books, or watching TV in the day room. There were bars on the windows and locked doors to not allow them to leave, but inside this special wing, you would really have no idea of the various disturbing reasons why these patients were now calling this home.
For Carson it was a rather sad story. He was suffering from dementia. He had been for the last eight years. His wife Miriam had passed away nearly 20 years before after a battle with lung cancer, and he had a very hard time dealing with life on his own. There were dozens of pictures of her on the walls. When the dementia set in, family members got him housed at a special nursing home where he was able to live in an apartment, with staff checking on him often. As the dementia got worse, the staff would check on him daily until eventually he would be placed in the medical wing of the home and be under constant care.
A year before, Carson was found pounding on the door of the elderly couple next door to his apartment, raving about something in his walls making a strange noise. The couple was concerned and alerted the security staff who promptly showed up to try and alleviate the situation. Upon arrival at his apartment, the security guards were taken aback by an overwhelming odor and the fact the apartment was in complete disarray. There were dishes piled high in the sink, furniture tipped over and various other things strewn about the small one-bedroom unit. Carson was raving about a noise he had been experiencing, but the security guards could not hear it. When they tried to subdue Carson, he resisted – punching one of the guards in the face and then reaching for a knife on the kitchen counter before being thrown down and handcuffed.
Police were called and took Carson into custody. The medical staff at the home medicated him and allowed the police to take him to jail for the assault. The smell in the apartment was overpowering and upon further investigation, the police found the source of the odor coming from inside the wall behind the recliner that Carson enjoyed sitting in. They promptly cut into the drywall and pulled it out as a putrid smell poured from the gaping hole in the wall, causing one of the officers to run into the bathroom to throw up.
What they found in the wall was the decomposing body of Jessa Carthage, a nurse at the home that had recently gone missing. Jessa was making daily visits to Carson and many residents at the home, and her husband filed a missing person report when she didn’t come home after work. Her body was wedged between two studs in the wall and covered in maggots that, when the room was silent, could be heard eating at her flesh – it was a slurping and sucking noise. Upon closer examination, the drywall had been cut away, her body set inside the wall and the drywall put back. With all the clutter in his apartment and the recliner wedged up to the wall, it was difficult to see in low lighting.
Now Carson’s cross to bear was not his wife, but a life sentence at the Benton Harbor Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In an odd way he didn’t seem to mind much at all. His advanced dementia allowed him to forget killing the young nurse and stuffing her in the wall. He also forgot about his wife and her painful battle with cancer 20 years ago. He kept a picture of Miriam next to his bed and gave her a kiss every night. He wondered why she never came by to visit him. He did have his books and plenty of time to read in the stifling silence of the hospital.
Hand of the Dying
Staring death in the face was not something that Roland Wilson was ready to do that day. He had a typical, relaxing Sunday afternoon planned: watching the Cardinals on television with his neighbor and grilling steaks when it cooled down. Things changed with a phone call. Roland was dozing off on the couch when it rang.
“Roland, can you come over to my Dad’s right away?”
It was the neighbor’s daughter, April, who lived across the street. Roland was wide awake now at the urgency in her voice. He knew something was really wrong.
She was hyperventilating. “Please hurry. It’s Dad. I think he’s had a heart attack!”
Roland was already up and heading for the door when April starting crying on the phone.
“I’ll be there in less than a minute.”
In his mid-50’s, Roland’s mind was racing as he ran across the yard. The August afternoon sun was intense. He was squinting due to the har
sh adjustment from his dimly-lit finished basement to the bright glare of the day. He knew that Big John’s heart was living on borrowed time after a long life filled with eating whatever he wanted, to excess, and washing it down with plenty of ice-cold beer. Sometimes after a stressful day, John would enjoy bourbon with one ice cube after dinner. There were very few people who could go drink-for-drink with him, without ending up passed out or slobbering drunk. Big John appeared unaffected by alcohol, and his many great stories only improved when the drinks flowed. His bigger-than-life persona was without compare.
Big John was a hulk of a man, and even in his early 70’s, the gentle giant was an imposing figure. Back in his college days, at the University of Missouri, Big John was a star left tackle on the football team and held down a 4.0 grade point average in the classroom. He stunned many of his friends and family when he turned down an offer to play professional football, for the fledgling San Diego Chargers of the American Football League. Big John loved football but he wanted to teach even more, and at the time, professional football players didn’t make very much money. Especially offensive lineman! So he stayed in school to get his master’s degree in education and moved back to his home state of Illinois, to begin a storied career in education. His tremendous abilities would impact an untold number of lives as he rose through the ranks as a teacher and then into administration.
Roland reached the front door and entered the house. He could see April pacing back and forth in the living room and Big John unresponsive, lying on the couch. He was still in his bathrobe and a pair of sweat pants. He could see that Big John was breathing, but it appeared very shallow. His body was sweaty, and his face was flushed.
“Thank God you’re here, Roland!” April was crying, her eyes swollen and bloodshot.
“Did you call 911?”
April seemed stunned, like she hadn’t been able to process what he just asked her.
“What was that?”
Roland turned April slightly so he could look her in the face.
“Have you called the ambulance yet?” he asked, holding her shoulders square.
“My God, no I haven’t. Can you call them, please? I think I’m going to lose it.”
Roland pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911. He knelt down next to Big John, holding his hand, while he stared at his chest, watching it rise and fall, waiting for the operator to pick up. He noticed it was 2:10 pm.
“Hang on big man. Hang on for a minute,” he said to Big John, his throat tightening at the thought of losing someone so close to him. He loved the man like a father. He gripped John’s hand tight, and it seemed as if John’s hand squeezed back just a little bit. There wasn’t much time.
It seemed like an eternity, even though it was only five seconds, before the operator answered the call.
“911, what is your emergency?” she asked, her voice sounding almost robotic to Roland, who was doing his best to hold it together. April was now sitting down with her head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. He realized he was on his own with Big John until the ambulance arrived. Death always scared him, and now that he was watching John slip slowly away, the idea sent chills up his spine. Going to visitations or funerals always upset Roland, and at his age, he had only been to a few. Seeing a dead body really bothered him, more now than ever, as some of his classmates had passed on, along with older family members. There was something about the unknown that terrified him.
Roland suddenly realized his mouth was so dry he could barely speak. “It’s my neighbor, John Sampson. He’s not responding. I think it’s a heart attack. He takes medicine for it and had a mild heart attack a few years ago.”
“When was the patient last responsive sir?” the operator asked.
Roland looked over at April to ask her, but he knew she wasn’t going to be of any help in the state she was in. “I don’t know. His daughter found him, but she’s almost hysterical.”
Roland almost felt like he was detached from what was going on. He could hear himself on the phone and could hear April crying, but the noises sounded like they were coming through a transistor radio speaker. The operator’s voice was mechanical.
Hearing her voice made him think of a great day he spent with Big John, shortly after his wife Agnes died. Big John seemed depressed, adjusting to living alone after more than 40 years of marriage. Roland had divorced his wife two years before, after the last of their kids moved out. He could relate to what it was like to live alone, after years of marriage. Roland took him out on Lake Shelbyville, where they loved to go, especially after getting the new boat. Fishing and hunting were second only to eating and drinking when it came to Big John. Usually if you could manage to do all of the above, Big John would have called that “one of the great days”. He could hear that voice now, as the boat rocked listlessly on the calm lake waters. He knew how much Big John hated cell phones or anything resembling modern technology that forced people not to talk to each other face-to-face. Hearing her monotone voice made Roland think of Big John lecturing him about the dumbing down of the country, at the hand of technology.
“You only get a handful of the great ones. Only a handful of them, Roland. So you gotta soak up every drop when they come around, my boy,” Big John said, smiling ear-to-ear for the first time in a month since Agnes died.
Roland smiled back and cast his line out, enjoying the day just as much as his huge companion. They packed some ham and cheese sandwiches, homemade pickles, some deer jerky, and ice-cold beer in the cooler. The weather could not have been better. There was a slight breeze coming from the west, as if on cue, to make it a moment that Roland would put down as “one of the great ones”.
Big John would continue, in between bites of the large sandwich, “You just never know Roland, you never know when it’s your time. When it is – well, then it is. Only the big man upstairs knows when that is. So you gotta enjoy everything – no matter how small.”
“I hear you, John,” I replied.
He let out a large belch, followed by a hearty laugh. “Hand me another beer or two would you?”
Since Roland lost his father ten years before from a heart attack, Big John was like a surrogate dad. He was about the same age as Roland’s real father, but the two couldn’t have been any more different. While he was close to his father, Roland didn’t talk to him about anything more than small talk. His father wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to open up and was a loner most of the time. He was the postmaster for the post office in Pittsfield, Illinois. In his free time, William Wilson enjoyed keeping his lawn the best on the block and was an avid gardener. He did enjoy doing those things alone. Big John, on the other hand, was the opposite when it came to socializing, and he wasn’t able to go anywhere without running into someone he knew. Everyone who met Big John loved him. Roland never heard anyone say a bad word about the man. Even former students were excited to see him, no matter how many years they were separated from the classroom. Former teachers looked up to him, and their adoration was unmistakable.
Big John taught at three different school districts in Illinois before becoming a principal in Franklin, and then five years later, he was promoted to superintendent. He was admired by all, and he genuinely loved them back. Agnes was a teacher at the school where he was the principal, and soon after they met, they began a relationship, and they married the following year. She continued to teach middle school English, and they had two children. Their son, James, moved to Texas upon graduating college, and was a salesman for a Dallas pharmaceutical company, while April stayed in town and moved across the street, still unmarried in her 40’s. She worked at a local K-Mart. She did help Agnes and John as they got older, and now that John was having some difficulty getting around, she was doing much more. She knew how close Big John and Roland had become and welcomed seeing her father happy again.
Just then, he realized the operator had asked him a question.
“1910 North Old Pine Road.”
“OK, sir, an ambulance is on th
e way. Please stay on the line until they arrive.”
Roland continued to stare at Big John’s chest as it rose and fell. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, worrying about what would happen if John’s breathing stopped. What would he do? They had annual CPR and first aid training at the General Electric plant that he managed in nearby Quincy. It was one thing to sit in a classroom and practice on dummies, but it was another to be looking death in the face, as a man he idolized hung on to life by a thread. In the distance, he heard the first whine of the ambulance siren. Roland held his hand tighter. It looked like Big John’s breathing was slowing down, but he couldn’t be sure. He noted that it was 2:19 pm.
He remembered that soon after meeting him, Big John had invited him to a wild game feed that he put on for all his friends who loved to hunt, or who at least enjoyed eating all the food he prepared. Big John and Agnes put on one hell of a spread in the back yard, and it usually was held on the first Saturday in October. His friends made sure they put it down on the calendar each year, because no one wanted to miss it. John would cook a variety of game, typically venison, wild turkey, pheasant, rabbit and quail. Some years, he would surprise everyone with something different. The first feed Roland attended featured a whole hog that Big John roasted over an open pit all day. Between the fantastic food and the kegs of beer that Big John changed out like a member of a seasoned pit crew, everyone had a great time. When it got dark, Big John would start telling some of his classic stories that the little ones shouldn’t be hearing. Even if you heard the stories countless times, his knack for telling them kept the laughs rolling well into the night. No matter what, Big John would always manage to tell one that Roland hadn’t heard before. The first time hearing one of his stories was special.