All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  We entered the condo, which was nice and big. Two-bedroom, two-bath—Larry really did do a good job. “Now, see how it feels to live here,” I said. “It’s not a museum.”

  She walked out on the balcony to look at the lake, closing the glass door behind her to keep in the air-conditioning. He sat on the couch and turned on the TV to find a ball game. This is how a lot of people want to live. Alone together.

  “It’s the life,” he said to me, but more to himself. She turned back to look at him through the glass, and I busied myself straightening a pillow. I caught her nodding.

  “Sold,” he said.

  I had the windows open the whole drive home in my little gray Toyota Celica. I’d never bought a new car, but I kept this one shiny enough that it passed. This was the first time I had four take-offs that were the same brand of tire, so I knew I had made it. I pulled into the driveway of my house, a buff-brick ranch, a thousand and change square feet.

  I was doing all right on my own. Sandy was right though: I did want a husband. Just because you don’t really need something doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like to have it.

  I could hear the phone ringing as I got out of the car.

  “Is this Ruth?” It was a stern voice.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “This is Sister Angela Mayer.”

  “Oh,” I said, starting to straighten the kitchen counter as if this stranger could see me. “Hello, Sister.”

  “I’m an administrator at St. Joseph’s Regional,” she said. “I was given your name.”

  St. Joe’s was the Catholic hospital in Hot Springs. “Yes?” I said, drawing it out.

  “We have a patient that we need removed,” she said. “We cannot care for him here.”

  “Do I know him?” I said.

  “I don’t know who you know,” she said. “This hospital is not equipped to handle people with AIDS. It is not safe. And we don’t want the reputation.”

  “Well, I don’t see what I . . .”

  “You’ll come tonight?”

  “Uh, let me . . .”

  She hung up. I realized I hadn’t asked his name.

  I sat in the kitchen. The room was already darkening from the sun setting. I’d rushed in to answer the phone and hadn’t turned on the light. Allison would be away until her daddy brought her back in time for me to take her to Sunday services.

  I cradled my head in my hands for a minute. And then I picked up my keys.

  “Well, shoot,” I said to no one.

  Chapter Three

  Sister Angela Mayer met me by the giant cross in the lobby of St. Joe’s. She wasn’t in a habit, but she had the look of a nun to her, so I went up to her right away.

  “Are you Ruth?”

  “Yes,” I said, extending my hand. She didn’t even look at it. Pretended it wasn’t happening. The Sisters of Mercy had founded this hospital a hundred years before. I wondered if she’d been around then.

  “Come with me,” she said, already moving to the elevator. She didn’t say a word until the elevator doors closed and we were alone. “As I said on the phone, this hospital is not equipped to handle this case. We need to transport the patient elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  She looked at me, and her true voice glinted through her administrator voice. “I don’t care what you do with him.”

  The doors opened. I wanted to press the L button. To get out. She must have known, because she moved her arm as if to touch my back to usher me out, but stopped just short of actually touching me.

  The nurses were waiting but made no move to greet me, just stared at me.

  “Can I see him?” I asked.

  Sister Angela led me down a hall, and a nurse handed me a pile of protective clothing. It felt like I was getting ready to go into space. The sister stared at me, nodding, as I put on the booties, the gown, balloon-cloth pants, a hat, and a mask. Just like with Jimmy, the hallway had trays of food lined up on the floor.

  Before I put on the mask, I turned to the sister. “What’s his name?”

  She looked at me. “It’s on the chart,” she said. “He was dumped at the ER doors.”

  She said it like it was an excuse. I don’t think she even wanted to touch the chart, which said he was Ronald Watkins. I didn’t know any Watkins people, and I knew a lot of people.

  I walked in alone, and he was so far gone, I could tell death was a matter of hours. I could just tell, and if anyone had actually gone in his room they would know too. He was a skeleton. I walked out quickly to tell Sister Angela there wouldn’t even be time to move him, but she was gone.

  So I went back in.

  “Ronald, I’m here for you.” I sat down.

  I held his hand, and it just felt wrong to do it with a glove. I took it off. I left the stupid space suit on, but I took off the mask and the silly cap. My hair wasn’t going to get AIDS.

  I sat and talked softly to him. I was talking to a body, he was that close to death, but it felt wrong to just sit in silence. Like Jimmy, Ronald simply stopped breathing, but this time I was less scared. I watched the artery in his neck pulse a few more times, slower and slower, until it too stopped. Seeing how long his soul would stay.

  More calls started coming.

  I guess the nurses and doctors all went to the same places to drink and unwind, because I later found out they got to talking.

  “Oh my God, we had this insane woman come in, and she went right in the AIDS patient’s room.”

  “Wait, you had someone come in to take care of him for you? What’s her name? What’s her phone number?”

  They all wanted to get rid of them. I had two calls that first month, which I thought was crazy. Then three the second. Little Rock had the Med Center, a Baptist hospital, a Catholic hospital, and Doctors Hospital. Hot Springs had AMI Medical Center and St. Joe’s. Those were the big hospitals. Then there are all these little towns around Hot Springs that had little clinic hospitals. If it was bad—and with AIDS, by the time the patient got help, it always was—those little clinics sent patients to a hospital in Hot Springs.

  As the months wore on, they had more and more of these gay guys coming into the hospital emaciated, alone or left at the ER. They were all my age or younger, twenty-three or twenty-four. They’d been afraid to get help, or maybe just didn’t know what was happening. It was a six-week thing from the first sign of symptoms. The diarrhea, a fever that wouldn’t go away, night sweats, and what I saw most then, pneumonia. They wasted away, their bowels evacuating so much they were down to sixty or seventy pounds. By the time I was brought in, they were at death’s door.

  My work schedule selling time-shares was flexible, so I could work around that in emergencies. I imagined the commissions I was missing out on but put it out of my mind. Allison had turned four in May, and I had her in a KinderCare preschool day care five days a week. She spent weekends with her father, which helped. But when she wasn’t with him or at school, she was right there alongside me at the hospitals. She often ate her meals there and already had her preferences. Allison thought the food at St. Joe’s was the best, especially the pancakes. But the people at AMI were nicer.

  Every single nurse and doctor thought they were the first person to tell me it was wrong to have a little kid there, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I asked a nurse, who wouldn’t even go in the room, “If we go home, will you take better care of this man?” She nodded her head at me but walked away. Helping these men changed how I interacted with my daughter—I was constantly checking her for fever.

  When I had to go to a hospital at night, I would wait until she was asleep and then put her on a pallet in the back seat and drive her to Bonnie’s. Bonnie was the only person who knew what I was doing. I’d bring in Allison, still sleeping like a little sack of potatoes, and lay her on Bonnie’s couch with her blankie until morning.
r />   The hospitals were already mad they had to let them die there, so they needed the bodies out immediately. They’d heard I’d done it once, so they decided that was my job. I’d ask if there was insurance or next of kin, and they’d laugh. I learned that I had to have the person declared indigent by the county judge. Indigent burial or cremations are paid for by the county, as the funeral home has a responsibility to society to bury the person for only the actual cost. Hot Springs had long been a place where people had come to be healed by the waters, and so many indigent people had come here and died—whether of TB or whatever—that the county had set up a fund to pay for these burials long ago.

  I started spending a lot of time at the courthouse, clicking my heels on the black-and-white tiles the size of nickels. I’d climb the stairs to the county judge’s office, wearing something flowy in case I needed to distract someone. The goal was to get in and get out. Judges would all be excited when they saw me show up in a dress, and then their faces would fall when I explained what I needed. They weren’t going to be making any time with me.

  “They’re indigent, and there’s nothing we can do, and we’ve got to get them buried,” I’d say. The judge is supposed to make sure there’s been a diligent search for a family member with the means to pay or a church that would be willing to help with the costs. All I had to say was that this person had died of AIDS—there was no wasting time thinking that there might be someone to help.

  I’d get the judges to sign off, then head back downstairs, slower now. An unfinished portrait of George Washington hung over a water fountain at the end of the hall, and we’d eye each other as I walked toward him and then turned right to leave.

  Nobody once asked what I was going to do with the ashes.

  Allison trailed behind me in Files Cemetery, still dressed for church. Her little white shoes crunched hard on the brown pine needles.

  “We’re just tending to the graves, sweetie,” I said. Allison brought her little kids’ sand shovel, and if we weren’t dressed so nicely it might have looked like we were heading to the beach.

  I was holding a tote that had two cookie jars in it. There had been two deaths that week. I’d been back to my friend Kimbo at Dryden Pottery a few times, but I never bought more than I needed. Superstition, I guess. I lied and told him I’d taken to giving the cookie jars as birthday gifts.

  What’s funny is that everyone’s ashes are a different color. You might think the ash is powder, but it’s tougher stuff. You see the fragments of bone, proof that this was a real person.

  Today would be my grandmother’s turn to take in two souls. “You’ll like her,” I said, taking the jars out of the bag and setting them on the ground next to her grave site. “She’ll take good care of you.”

  I always brought a little plant with us in case somebody came along and wondered what we were up to. Even though nothing grew here, no matter how hard I tried to pretty it up with rosebushes.

  “Ruth?” I said under my breath. “She’s just planting flowers. Why in the world would you think she’s burying AIDS patients? That would be crazy.”

  Allison knelt beside me, and I smoothed her reddish curls. “You are just the most beautiful angel,” I said. “Now, help Mama dig a little.”

  I dug the two holes as deep as I could, piling the red dirt in a neat mound. Allison lost interest and started trying to do somersaults.

  “Not in the cemetery, honey,” I said, placing the jars of ashes gently into the ground. “And not in that dress. Keep that dress nice.”

  I smoothed the tote on the ground, and she knelt on it. I took her little hands and clasped them in front of her face so she knew that this was a prayer.

  “Close your eyes and think about love,” I said. “And we’ll send it right here so the grass and flowers grow, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “God, I don’t know these men but You do,” I said. “Whatever their religion, we ask that You take them into Your care. Bless anyone who cared for them on this earth, and to anyone who has been kind to them who is now in Heaven, please greet them with love and mercy.”

  I opened my eyes and saw Allison’s big green eyes looking at me. “Well, I think these plants are safe and sound and ready to grow,” I said.

  She looked down at the grave. “Good job, plants!” she said. “I love you.” And she was off, skipping through the gravestones.

  By the end of summer, I’d buried eight men from all the hospitals. It seemed like so many then. I had no idea.

  They were always right at death’s door, so there really wasn’t a lot I could do. Except offer comfort. I had to make that clear as soon as I walked in, because I knew they could still hear me. Yes, I was another stranger coming in, but I wasn’t going to be mean to them like everybody else had been. I just couldn’t imagine being that sick and vulnerable and having people be nasty to you. I would sit with them, hold their hands, tell them they were okay now. Some would die quickly, but some would die over hours. I would tell stories to comfort them and me.

  Sitting with them, I saw a river. I felt like I was taking these young men in my arms and carrying them across the river to the other side. And there were all the friends and family, people who wouldn’t judge them, waiting to take them. I took them over that river and handed them safely to those who would love them.

  And then I turned around and I was back on land, standing alone at the water’s edge. I would get up, close their eyes and close their mouths, brush their hair, and straighten them up in the bed. Give them dignity.

  A young man at St. Joe’s changed everything. Howard.

  He had pneumonia and what looked like bad thrush in his mouth when I got to him. I knew his doctor could see it, even if he was just standing in the doorway. The doctor was all done up in his space suit standing there, and he scolded me for not wearing a mask. He was a cancer doctor. They were sticking the patients with cancer doctors, because they still thought it was gay cancer. The doctors sure resented it, and they always let me know it, like it was my fault. Here, they’d just gotten into this moneymaking field, and now AIDS was gonna ruin their practice, and no straight people were gonna come anymore. I heard all that.

  I went down to the cafeteria and got some buttermilk. Yuck, but I knew it would kill the thrush. I got this from my grandmother on my father’s side. She and my grandfather helped settle the Florida Keys. They ran a fish camp down there, but she was the go-to person for medical stuff and could cure anything. She could diagnose things. I don’t know if it was magic or voodoo or what she had. Maybe just plain common sense. But whatever it was, I’ve got it too—a lot of it.

  My daddy would take me down there in the winters before he died. He taught me all that stuff, like how to make a poultice and put it on to draw out the infection. “Well, go pick this from that tree and pick that from this plant.” There weren’t doctors around them, and our family didn’t have money to go to doctors anyway. So this is what you did.

  I visited Howard three days straight, missing out on work while Allison was at her preschool. The buttermilk worked on him, and I tried to spoon-feed him yogurt, but he couldn’t eat. He was in and out of it, but we could have snatches of conversation here and there. He had made it all the way to New York, right out of high school.

  “If you have fifty cents and you’re gay, you get on a bus out of Arkansas,” he said. “Pick a coast and head for it.” He got work assisting a bookkeeper. “It was off-the-books,” he whispered, “which I always found funny.”

  “My rule is that I will take any job as long as it’s legal and vertical,” I said.

  “Smart rule.”

  “I’m no dummy,” I said. “I may be blond, but my roots are dark.”

  He started to laugh, and I felt so guilty because it started a coughing fit.

  “Did you have someone in New York?”

  “Ken,” he said. “The most hands
ome man. That is what it would be like to be with him—you would walk around and see people react like, ‘That is the most handsome man.’ He got sick. I kept missing work, so my boss fired me. I think he knew. They hate us. Everybody hates us.”

  “I know, honey,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “He died at St. Vincent’s. July 11. There were crosses on the wall, just like here.”

  We both looked at Jesus, as if he might join the conversation.

  “Is it better there in New York?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Nobody knows what to do.”

  “Are people doing anything?” I asked. They had to be doing something about this in New York.

  “No.”

  “Why did you come back here?” I asked.

  “I started to get sick, and I thought my parents—” He stopped and swallowed. “I didn’t have anyone. I had friends, but they started to disappear when Ken got sick. People are afraid to breathe the same air as me, so . . . We had a dog. A King Charles spaniel—our baby, Clementine. Clem. I snuck him in a bag the whole way down here. Mama said Clem could stay. She said, ‘I pity this poor dog.’ Dad stayed in his shed. Wouldn’t come out.” He took a long pause, then gave up on whatever he was going to say.

  “Well, you were right to come here after all. There is nothing more beautiful than Hot Springs in the fall, right?”

  “I loved the lakes in fall,” he said dreamily. “They cool off, and the people are all gone.”

  “You can go out lake fishing and never see another person,” I said.

  “My daddy would take me and my brother out on the weekends,” he said. “I just wanted to see the leaves change again.”

  I started to cry too and looked around. There wasn’t even a box of tissues in here. He started to fade again. “Well, if we are going to act like this, we need tissues,” I said. “I will be right back, I swear.”

  He looked scared. “I promise,” I said. I got up to go outside, and after I closed the door, I stepped on one of the trays of food they left by the door. I looked down at this pitiful baloney sandwich lying in spilled apple juice. Some dam in me broke.