The Last Odd Day

by Lynne Hinton

  “Won’t be able to manage that volunteer food drive,” I say sadly to the director of the soup kitchen. “You know,” I say with just the right pause, “I’m widowed.” And quickly I’m forgiven.

  To the person at the bank I report, “Could you please handle all this paperwork for me?” Then I sigh and stare into space like somebody close to the edge. “I’m only recently widowed.” And I don’t have to worry about unwanted phone calls from collection agencies or investment personnel.

  Maude says it’s unfair and very unattractive for a person to use her weaknesses in this way. But I say, “Power to the people!” If they want to believe women are only as smart as they are married or that they lose their ability to create order or make decisions when their husbands die, then who am I to mess with a prevailing perception? Use it, I say, because life offers very few concessions.

  It’s been almost two years since I became the dominant figure in our marriage, since I first had to decide stuff for us, figure out things. Once the strokes started O.T. was no longer very clear or helpful. Dick and Beatrice helped some, but mostly I was on my own to take care of everything. On paper and involving the matters of detail, legal and otherwise, I was organized and even prepared for his passing.

  In my more compulsive and lonesome moments when O.T. became institutionalized, I had taken the notion to get things ready. Power of attorney, safe deposit box, deeds, insurance payments—everything had been arranged and clarified. So that when he did die, there was so little to do I actually found myself bored. And especially with all the permission grief gave me to be slow and unproductive, I found that I had too much time to reflect upon the past and too much opportunity to think about the future.

  Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I was open to this young woman who had only recently made my acquaintance. Perhaps, because I enjoyed the luxury of an uncluttered mind, hours without tasks to complete, I was able to think about the possibility of letting her into my life. The other reasons, I suppose, had to do with common courtesy and understanding that she wasn’t the one to be blamed, the desire to keep O.T. alive, and the hole that his death had left me with.

  I think that if she had come at another time, appeared at a different place along my journey, I might not have made room for her, been as ready for her presence. But as soon as O.T. died, I realized that I was completely alone. I had no one to call family, no one to care for, no one to depend upon. Maybe I let her in because for the first time in such a very long time I was painfully unattached. I was lonesome; and I let her into my heart just because she arrived at the exact moment when the last one who took up space had gone.

  There is no doubting the fact that she looks just like O.T. She has his narrow lips, the smooth Witherspoon brow, the stern chin. There is the loose way she stands that reminds me of his rangy, long, poised profile when he used to stop in the field and measure how far he had to go, eager and unassuming.

  O.T., of course, was bigger, stronger than Lilly, but there was still a clumsiness about them both that made him and makes her easy to approach, comfortable to talk to. And it was more than just these physical attributes that they shared. There’s a way about them, an air of comfortable familiarity like an old pair of shoes, that in the beginning made me want to be around her, keep her near, so that my good-bye to my husband didn’t feel so final.

  Maude said that there was discussion and even a vote at her church women’s meeting about whether or not Lilly had the right to come into our lives. “It was six to five,” she said, “that she should have stayed away.” And then she added, “but you really can’t count Marcella’s vote since Janice Smith told her when to raise her hand, and because, after all,” and here she cleared her throat, “she was only recently widowed.”

  She said this without even realizing that she was talking to another one of these women whose brain everyone assumed was now missing in action. After she said it I couldn’t decide which part of Maude’s stupid report made me the angriest. But I guess it was the part about making judgments about Lilly and what she did or did not have the right to do because this is the part I would not let go.

  “And people wonder why I quit going to church.” I said, hot and fast. “If that’s all you women have to do on a Tuesday night during your so-called Bible study, then I suggest you examine the choices those in the group made.” Then I was loaded and shooting.

  “Why didn’t you take a vote as to whether or not Masie Reece should have had breast reconstruction or just used a prosthesis? Or whether Carol Ingle should have bailed her son out of jail on the third time he was arrested? Or whether Linda Masterson made the right decision to raise her sister’s child like she was her own? Maybe you should spend your time judging the choices you all have made rather than picking apart the lives of those you know nothing about.”

  She was backing out the door, but I drew her in. She had started it, and I was going to finish.

  “Did you know your daddy?” I asked, already sure of the answer because her parents lived with her until they died. She had always been close to both her mother and her father. Say what you want about Maude, she was a dutiful daughter. She nodded.

  “Did you know how he looked when you pleased him? What you did that made him laugh? Do you remember how he picked you up when you were a little girl and danced you around the kitchen table or helped you climb a tree? Do you recall how it was to be wrapped up in his arms, feeling so completely safe that you were not afraid of anything? Of anything?”

  I was not to be stopped.

  “Do you remember when you were angry how he teased you in just that silly way that made you forget why you were mad in the first place and the special name that he only had for you? Can you say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, because of all these things you alone have, things that are only yours, things that you pull out to cushion your withered heart that confirm for you what you had always suspected, that he loved you?”

  I was a streak of anger.

  “You answer me that, and then you tell me that a child doesn’t have the right to find the man who’s responsible for bringing her into this world! That she doesn’t have the right at least to see his face, learn his voice, hear him say his daughter’s name, her name. Because whether she does or doesn’t isn’t for anyone else to decide, anyone but her. She gets to make up her mind all by herself. All by herself,” I repeated.

  Maude was afraid of me, but that did not make me hush.

  “And I strongly suggest that you and those nosy, backstabbing church ladies remember that the next time you carelessly raise your hands to vote on something you know nothing about. You remember that.” And I walked out of my own house, leaving my neighbor alone to sort through what had just exploded before her eyes.

  By the day of the funeral we were friends again, and in spite of all the screaming I did to Maude about her church cronies, they all showed up at the funeral. They were fidgety around me, careful with their words, and just a little too affable toward Lilly. They probably came more out of obligation or curiosity than concern, but I appreciated the effort and was kind to a fault. I think they all mean well and that their intentions are generally honorable. It’s the meddling and the malicious appraisals rendered without thought that leave a bitter taste in my mouth.

  The church is full of self-righteous people who love to claim grace for themselves and their families but who have a hard time doling it out to those who don’t quite measure up.

  O.T. was active in his church while he was growing up, his mother took care of that. But after the war when he wasn’t convinced that he still believed in God and couldn’t sit without moving for more than ten minutes at a time, he went only for family weddings and necessary funerals, making sure he sat on the end and near the back.

  Since I was used to going to church services in a tent, a living room, or out under the trees near a creek, when I got married and moved down from the mountain, I never found a church building in which I felt comfortable. So that when O.T. came h
ome and made his religious change I was glad not to have to sit in a luxurious sanctuary pretending that the gold and the stained glass and the well-rehearsed choral music ordered things and helped me to pray.

  If I worship anywhere, I go to the A.M.E. Zion Church just up the road and situated down a long driveway in a grove of trees. The music, like the people who attend, is soulful and ardent, the sermons fiery and made plain, and the love and the pleasure are without pretense or burden.

  The pastor, the Reverend Vastine Yarborough, works full-time at a sheet metal plant an hour and a half away and is only at church the first Sunday of every month. The other three Sundays a deacon or an elder, a college student or Bible teacher, leads the service. I have found that with the humility of a lay leader fumbling with the words of Jesus and the soft, low hums of the elders help-him or her along, it feels the most like church to me I have ever known.

  The message is always simple, informal, and to the point that God is not partial to anyone. We must all, regardless of what we have or have not done, kneel at the throne of grace with only ourselves and the risen Christ, who stands ready to intercede. It is just simply a reminder to love, and I feel the same way there as I did with the church folks in the mountains. God is most impressed with us when we undo ourselves before him; and church happens when, without judgment, we allow others to do the same.

  It was because of the ease and the acceptance I have received both before and since I have become a full member of the Sharpley Grove A.M.E. Zion Church that I decided to have O.T.’s funeral there. He went with me to worship only once, but it was the only time since the war that I have seen him sit still through an entire church meeting.

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye for the entire two hours. He relaxed while he was there, sat in ease, the lines on his face softened. When we got home and were sitting at the table eating lunch, I asked him, “O.T., how did you like worship?”

  He smiled. “It felt good to be with you there,” he replied in his clear, simple way. And he reached over and touched me on my arm. “That’s a good place,” he added, giving me the clear indication that he approved of me being a part of that community. It was as if he understood why I joined, why I liked to attend.

  Even with his guard slightly lowered at Sharpley Grove, however, he still only went with me that one time. And I never pushed for him to join me. I have always thought each person has to find his or her own way, chart their own path. I suppose in O.T.’s mind because God had not yet made clear to him personally the answers to the questions that rattled him and because there had been no undoing of the recollections he continued to clutch and could not let slip away, communal worship was not the place he sought comfort, church was not the safe harbor for him to dock.

  He never spoke of his questions and memories with me, never let me know. He took them all with him to his grave and, I guess, on and beyond. I figure this because the gospel is clear that what is loosed here is loosed there and what is bound here will remain bound there. Even heaven cannot pry open the things we will not release ourselves.

  The funeral was probably noisier than most of the other guests were used to, a little too long for O.T. But I’m quite sure that he wasn’t there anyway; and I could have cared less what anybody else thought. I was pleased. There were flowers, but not so many that the church smelled like an artificial death. Words of sympathy and assurance were read by the trustees. Acknowledgments were given. Loretta Parker sang a solo. The men’s choir rendered two songs, and Pastor Yarborough preached about the sacrifice of the soldier, the qualities of a good husband, and the ultimate price that Christ paid for all.

  I think Lilly thought he was a bit too heavy with the Jesus talk, but I was satisfied. It felt just like what it was supposed to be, a service of celebration with a reminder that there is something bigger than us, something weightier than our own desires, our own heartaches. It was exactly what I needed, especially since I was now having to find ways to deal with O.T.’s infidelity and, further, the fact that he loved another woman more than he had loved me.

  Dick and Beatrice were there, from Hope Springs. Jolly came, without Sally or any explanation of where she was or where he had been; and there were more than just a few well-wishers and old friends. The reunion was sweet. I’m sure everyone went home satisfied that O.T. had a nice send-off and that his widow was doing better than they imagined. I’m sure there was lots of talk about Lilly and who she was and how unbelievably strong I appeared in the midst of such strange circumstances. I must admit, I put on a very good face the entire two-day event.

  But late that night, when the service was over and everyone went home and the house, having settled, was as quiet as a stone, I discovered that I was exhausted, tired down in my spine, up along the curve of my neck, and in my somersaulting mind. I felt yanked and pulled like a piece of old rubber. I drank some hot tea, tried to lie down and rest; but I was one long, raw, pulsing nerve. I had extended myself beyond the point of ease.

  Saying good-bye is hard enough. Doing it at the same moment, with the same breath in which one is invited to share a greeting of hello, is simply more than a body can cope with. All the information, all the secrets, all that had been hidden, put away, kept from me, suddenly filled up my room, and there wasn’t enough space to sleep. It was worse than being with the ghosts.

  I wanted my husband back. I wanted him to have to deal with what I was having to deal with by myself. I wanted him to explain what had happened, help me understand. I wanted to hear him say that what he had done was wrong and destructive and that he was sorry.

  And then I wanted my heart to quit hurting, the muscles in my spine to settle, and there to be another body, his body, curved into mine as we lay in that quiet, moonlit room. I wanted to feel his arm pulled around my waist, his breath, warm, behind my neck because what I really wanted was not to be alone. Finally, truthfully, I wanted most not to be alone.

  I waited, even hoped; but I was not visited from the other side. I was not attended to by angels. I received no spirit. I had nothing but doubts and questions and sorrow, and no one but myself with whom to lie.

  I fell upon my bed and wept. Each tear, a thought of O.T., a memory, a moment from our life together, the unexpected things we were and were not to each other. I wept for Lilly, this woman who broke open so many closed and denied truths, this child of my husband. And in spite of how unlikely it sounds, I wept for a woman I never knew, the woman my husband loved.

  For the truth is, I will never know if O.T. realized who Lilly was, why she appeared, and what her coming meant. I can never say whether or not he understood what was happening at the end of his life, if he knew how troubled I would be. But it was certain that before he died O.T. had thought of Lilly’s mother. He did remember something that they had shared together. He did still hold a place for her in his heart.

  At the time it happened, of course, I had thought nothing of it. I had deemed it only one of his random and confused moments, an episode demonstrating a lack of clarity in his thinking. But I knew later, as I lay on my bed of grief, trying to make sense of it all, wrestling with what I did and didn’t know, that it was, in fact, her name he called out the last day he was coherent.

  Clara. Clara Elizabeth Lucetti.

  Perhaps, I thought, just before I dropped into a deep but comfortless sleep, the wave of sadness having crested and fallen, if I know her, I can know him. And if I know him, maybe I can know myself.

  11

  The only child of a migrant farmer from Nicosia, Sicily, and his wife of sixty years, Clara Elizabeth Lucetti grew up and lived in love. In 1942 Vincent and Maria Lucetti and their thirteen-year-old daughter were stowaways on a boat sailing from Italy to Spain and then paid, using all the money that they had stolen or saved, to sail on a steamship headed to the port at New York City, in the United States of America.

  Vincent was more than thirty, a foot soldier under Mussolini, when he fell out of company and walked three hundred and eighty-seven mil
es to his home after he witnessed the killing of more than a hundred Jews and was ordered to dig their graves.

  Afterward, but not often, he would tell his wife how he pulled shut the eyelids of many of the victims, including a little boy who died beneath the bodies of his parents. Not killed quickly by the Italians’ bullets, he had been only wounded by the gunfire and then smothered by the weight of his dead mother and father, who had twitched and then fallen on their only son. Vincent would tell the story he had heard and memorized from a tearful old woman who had seen the atrocity. He told it as he stroked his young daughter’s hair. Easily he pulled his fingers through the dark locks while he silently imagined the painful last thought of a man tumbling after his dead wife and upon a child who would never know what it was to grow up.

  There were other things he saw and could not forget; but only this story would be discussed. It was for him a moment by which he marked his life and measured his living. It was for him the reason he left his homeland, the reason he quit speaking the language, and the reason he supported violence when it was meant to fight against tyranny and genocide like what had occurred in World War II.

  He never said so out loud, but quietly he hoped the father of the boy knew of his tenderness and saw how he shut the child’s eyes while saying a prayer for their souls. He hoped the man was able to find some peace in having seen this insignificant but sincere act of mercy. It was not enough, he knew; but maybe for the father’s spirit, he would see what Vincent had done and it would bring enough comfort for the man to turn and walk toward heaven. It was the hope of a parent’s heart.

  Because Vincent had great experience working in the vineyards, when he arrived in the States it didn’t take long for him to make himself invaluable to a the owner of a winery in New York; and for a while he seemed satisfied. After a couple of years, however, he found he could not take the bitter cold of the northeast winters or the long flat season without enough work to do. So he and his family, Maria, his wife, and Clara, their lovely teenage daughter, moved south first to Virginia and then to North Carolina. Vincent worked in tobacco and cucumbers, sweet potatoes, cotton, and any other field that did not freeze and harden by the first of November.