Unremarried Widow

by Artis Henderson

I thought for a moment that I might not want to know the inside of the Apache, that I might not want to have a memory of its tight spaces or the narrow view through the glass. But instead I said, “The back seat or the front?”

  “I usually sit in the front,” Miles said.

  I pulled myself up the side and lowered my frame into the seat. The upholstery was rough beneath my hands. I slipped the straps of the seat belt over each of my shoulders and had the feeling not so much of strapping myself in as strapping the Apache on. Through the front windows I saw the nose of the aircraft and the grass below. I took hold of the cyclic that rose between my legs and imagined what it felt like to sit in that seat, to shoot the guns, to fire the rockets. How to understand that the man I was falling in love with—a man who almost never cussed, who went to church every Sunday, who pressed his nose to the back of my neck as we slept—would kill other men? I released the cyclic and stripped off the seat belt. I stood in the open door and Miles peered up at me from the ground, smiling.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  I held out a hand so he could help me down.

  “I think this is a dangerous piece of machinery.”

  “I know,” he said as he reached up for me. “Isn’t it great?”

  1985

  3

  The aborigines say we live a spiral life, that our narratives curl around like smoke, the events of one moment rhyming with the events of previous moments so that in a single lifetime we live the same story many times. Before my father died, my family had a farm in the Appalachian foothills. We lived in northeast Georgia, red-earth country, and when my father ran a tiller auburn clods of dirt turned toward the blue sky. He had a lean frame although he carried a thickness around his waist that had come with age, and he kept his dark hair and mustache short. He drove an American-made pickup, hung a shotgun in the back, and wore a bear claw on a chain around his neck. He was funny, I’m told, and in photos his smile seems to just stifle a laugh. I’m sure his first wife had her own stories about him—about infidelity, certainly—but my mother says he was a great man. I like to think it took a particular kind of woman to catch and hold my father’s attention, and my mother was that woman. She was nine years younger than my father, born two months and a day before the first bomb fell on Japan in the summer of 1945. Her family scraped by on a farm in central Florida where she learned to ride horses bareback and scuffle with the neighborhood boys. She hated dolls and dresses, nearly failed home economics, and never made a casserole in her life.

  “I’m no lady,” she said.

  But my mother was beautiful. She was tall for a woman and her skin tanned a deep brown. She wore her dark hair long and parted down the middle like the Seminole women on her mother’s side. I imagine she created a stir at the University of Miami, where she earned her teaching degree, and afterward when she took a job at a high school in one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods. During her first year teaching she caught a student in the hallway after the bell had rung.

  “You need to get to class,” she told him.

  The boy was built tall and strong, and he stepped close to my mother with his fist cocked as if he meant to hit her in the face.

  “Go ahead,” my mother said. “I’ll give you one shot. After that, I’m going to wipe your ass all over this floor.”

  The boy froze, then dropped his fist and moved off down the hall.

  By the time my mother met my father in 1971, they each had a marriage behind them. He showed up at a mutual friend’s house for dinner carrying a pineapple.

  “Everybody brings flowers,” he said.

  To hear my mother tell it, their relationship was special from the beginning.

  “Sometimes it was like, could this really be happening?” my mother said. “Because when something feels too good, you’re sure something bad’s going to happen.”

  * * *

  Beside our house in Georgia, my father kept a runway where the hills sloped into flat land. He parked a single-engine Piper Cub in a hangar by our house. The plane had seats upholstered in red leather, cracked in places, and windows that slid open in the back. A layer of dust coated the instruments in the console. My father took my mother and me flying the way some families go for a drive, and a week after my fifth birthday he pushed the plane out of the hangar for an afternoon flight. It was mid-June and warm and the backs of my thighs stuck to the seat as my mother belted me in. She stood in the open door of the airplane and pulled the seat belt tight across the tops of my legs until the fabric pinched my skin.

  “It’s too tight,” I said.

  “Leave it.”

  “You sure you don’t want to come?” my father asked her.

  She shook her head. “No, Lamar.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Get in.”

  “I’ve got too much to do.”

  She stepped across the wheel of the plane and moved to shut the door but she stopped, turned back to me, and pulled the seat belt tighter.

  “It hurts,” I said.

  “Leave it,” she said again.

  She stepped away from the plane and closed the door, and my father cranked the engine. The propeller swung in an arc and the blades disappeared in a blur of whirling metal. The grass whipped the tires as we motored down the runway, and the frame of the plane vibrated so that my bones buzzed like hornets beneath my skin. My father pulled back on the throttle and the plane surged forward, picking up speed until we lifted into the air. He pulled higher into the summer sky and then he banked, circling the farm from above. I pressed my face to the window and looked down at the trees that parted for the creek that ran beside the house.

  “How you doing back there, A.J.?” my father asked.

  He turned his head slightly so I could see the side of his face, the metal frame of his sunglasses, his radio headset. I smiled at him and he turned back to the controls. Not long after, the engine fell silent. The buzzing stilled. My father must have said something—Oh, shit—he must have jerked the yoke, because I leaned close to him.

  “Daddy, are we going to crash?”

  “No, baby,” he said. “Sit back down.”

  My father almost brought the plane in. He angled for the open space of the runway and we nearly made the clearing, but the tail caught on a tree at the last second. The body pitched forward and the nose slammed into the ground. I have no memory of the impact, no recollection of the jolt that crushed my spine or the strike to the head that left a shallow indent on my skull. My father was thrown against his seat belt and the force separated his veins from his organs. They call this bleeding out. He was dead before anyone reached the plane.

  My mother’s parents were staying at the guesthouse on the farm for the summer and they had come out to watch us take off. They followed the plane with their eyes as it cruised across the sky. They watched as we fell. They were the first ones at the crash site and my grandfather pulled me free.

  “I know I shouldn’t have moved her,” he told my mother later, “but I smelled gasoline. I thought it was going to blow.”

  My grandfather stayed beside the plane and looked to my father while my grandmother carried me to the ambulance that was already turning down the dirt road. The freshness of morning had given over to thick afternoon heat, and as I looked back at the plane I saw everything through a film of stirred yellow dust.

  At our house my mother was in the kitchen when her mother-in-law, who lived up the mountain, called.

  “There’s been an accident,” she said.

  “What?”

  “An accident.”

  “Is it the plane?” my mother said.

  “You need to come down here.”

  My mother didn’t even put on shoes. She ran to the car barefoot and drove to the county road that traveled parallel to the farm. She followed the blacktop until she could see the crash site in the distance, threw the car in park, and dashed across the field. My grandfather met her at the plane.

  “Where’s A.J.?” she said.
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br />   “In the ambulance. They need to take her now.”

  “Where’s Lamar?”

  “In the plane.”

  “I need to see him.”

  “He’s bad,” my grandfather said. “There’s nothing you can do for him.”

  “I need to see him,” my mother insisted.

  She made her way to the plane, to where my father hung from his seat, his neck all wrong, blood on his hands. She reached out and took his wrist and searched for a pulse.

  “Come away,” my grandfather said. “You need to come away from there. You need to get in the ambulance. They’re waiting on you.”

  My mother let him lead her away and put her in the back of the ambulance, where I was strapped to a backboard but conscious.

  “Hi, Mommy,” I said.

  “Hi, baby.”

  “Mommy, I’m scared.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “I’m hurt.”

  “I know, baby,” she said. “I know.”

  At the hospital, my mother sat in the room with me as people filtered in. My grandparents. My half brother and his wife. My uncle, who brought my mother steaming cups of coffee one after the other.

  “I need to see my husband,” my mother said to anyone who would listen.

  Finally, a nurse stepped into the room.

  “He’s arrived,” she said. “I’ll escort you to the morgue.”

  My mother followed the nurse through the hospital hallways, her bare feet against the cool floor.

  “You are about the strongest person I’ve ever seen,” the nurse said as they walked together. “You’re not even crying.”

  In the morgue my father lay beneath a white sheet. There were cuts on his cheeks and stains of blood on his hands. His body had started to swell from the trauma and his skin stretched tight across his face. His eyes were open.

  “I’ll be right here,” the nurse said off to the side. “Take as long as you want.”

  My mother laid her hand on my father’s shoulder and on his arm—already he felt cold to her touch—and she looked at him. She looked and looked until she had seen enough.

  “You know you’re going to have to tell A.J.,” my grandmother said when my mother came back to the room. “You have to be the one to tell her. About Lamar.”

  “I know,” my mother said.

  Three days later, when I was fully conscious for the first time since the crash, the people who had crowded into the room made their way out, leaving my mother and me alone.

  “Do you know where you are?” she said.

  “I’m in the hospital.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Daddy crashed the plane.”

  “Yes, he did,” my mother said.

  “Daddy’s dead,” I said. “I saw him hanging upside down.”

  My mother took a long, quiet breath.

  “He lied to me,” I said. “He said we weren’t going to crash. He told me to hold on really tight and that everything would be okay.”

  My mother cried softly then, the way people will when they have been crying for a long time.

  * * *

  Doctors spent more than six weeks repairing my broken spine. They soldered a rod to my backbone, looped hooks through my vertebrae, and pinned my skeleton in place. When they finished they stitched the skin together, a neat job that left a straight scar running down the middle of my back. A doctor plastered a cast around my middle that drove me mad with itching, and for weeks afterward I had to take a bath standing up in a bucket. I often dreamed of planes crashing, reliving in the night what I could not remember during the day.

  In the months that followed, my father’s presence in our life remained untouched. My mother kept the sheets he had slept in on their bed. His toothbrush stayed by the bathroom sink. His comb and electric razor lay where he had left them. His clothes hung in the closet and his pictures stayed fixed to the wall. His chair at the head of the table remained empty, and no one—not me, not my mother, not the friends or neighbors who passed through—sat in my father’s seat while the table remained in the house.

  But two years after the plane crash my mother performed an impossible feat: she made my father disappear. She decided to move us to Florida, near what she considered home, and in coming home she erased my father from our lives. She donated his clothes to the Salvation Army and she threw out the toothbrush and the toothpaste that had sat for so long beside the bathroom sink. She sold all the furniture in the house, including the table where my father had once sat at the head, and she kept almost nothing that belonged to him but a wool winter coat, his Eastern Airlines cap, the bear claw necklace, his shotgun, and two bottles of his cologne.

  We moved first to my grandmother’s house in Clewiston, then one hundred miles west to the shrimping community where my mother had spent her summers growing up. She found a job teaching at the local elementary school and she planted papaya trees and yellow hibiscus bushes in the front yard of our house. If she missed the acres of farmland in north Georgia, she never said as much. Except for the scar on my back and the shallow dent at my hairline, little evidence of the crash remained. My mother kept my father’s pictures in the study, where she would not have to look at them every day. She stored his coat in the back of her closet and put the bear claw necklace in a safety-deposit box at the bank along with both their wedding rings. She wrapped the shotgun in a towel that she hid on the top shelf of my closet. She stored the cologne in the cabinet by her bed.

  By silent agreement, we never talked about my father. More than anything I wanted to protect my mother, and I knew that to ask about him would hurt her. So I pretended like he never existed. I let him fade from my memory until I could not remember him at all. I could not have told you if he smelled like lemon or leather or smoke, if his hair grew in thick or fine, if his hands were rough or smooth. I could not have described the sound of his voice.

  And yet, the first time I brought Miles home to meet my mother, she put her hand to her chest, shook her head, and smiled.

  “He’s so much like your father,” she said.

  2005

  4

  When Miles and I decided to move in together, I asked him if his mother, Terry, would be upset. We sat at the beat-up kitchen table in his apartment near Fort Rucker while the warm fall evening pressed against the sliding glass doors. Miles would graduate from flight school in December and the Army would be sending him to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The senator was set to retire and the office in Tallahassee would be closing around the same time. The move felt right to both of us.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. He leaned back in his wooden chair and propped a foot against the leg of the table. “She’ll probably want to send us a housewarming gift. Go ahead and think of something.”

  I thought place mats would be nice.

  While Southeast Asia reeled from the tsunami that had washed ashore Christmas Eve and Iraq prepared for its first free Parliamentary elections in almost fifty years, Miles and I left for Fort Bragg. A cold front had worked its way across lower Alabama in the night and heavy clouds hung above the cotton fields. We slipped on roads patched with ice as we headed east but the front stayed behind us as we made our way north. We pulled into the flatlands of central North Carolina and I nervously held my breath as we followed the exit to Fayetteville, wondering how I would weather Army life.

  The cold front caught up to us by the time we signed a lease on a house. We unloaded our U-Haul beneath a rain that fell without pause and my knuckles were rubbed raw in the chill and damp as we toted in our combined life: kitchen utensils and bed linens, spices in glass jars, jugs of olive oil turned cloudy in the cold. The house had yellow paneling and hardwood floors scuffed with age. The rooms filled with a heavy animal smell when we ran the gas heater, and I imagined geological strata of dog fur collected beneath the vents. My mother had given us her old washer and we stuck it in the kitchen. We paid fifty dollars for a secondhand dryer at the flea market in Dunn. At a thrif
t store in Fayetteville we bought a gold brocade couch, a battered coffee table, and a bureau with a rough paint job. By all accounts our place was shoddy—but I loved it. I loved having a house of our own, furniture that belonged to us, a backyard surrounded by trees that leaned together in the wind.

  Miles’s mother came for a visit three weeks after we moved in. She did not bring place mats. She was tense and unsettled and she refused to stay in our guest bedroom. She stayed in a hotel across town instead. In our home Terry was cordial. She cooked dinner, churning out Miles’s favorites, like burnt-steak stew, meals with a history that reached back to their hometown in Texas. She made the sugar cookies Miles liked, the kind I could never get right, and she talked about home and church and family.

  On the second day of her visit, after Miles had put on his uniform and left for the base, Terry suggested we drive to the mall in Raleigh. Spring unfolds slowly in North Carolina, and the air was cool and damp even as the first daffodils pushed through the wet earth. We climbed into her rental car and drove through Fayetteville where rhododendrons bloomed pink against the gray morning. The rain started when we reached the interstate and Terry launched into the reason for her visit.

  “You know Brad and I don’t approve of you living together,” she said, referring to Miles’s father. She called it living in sin. Her hands gripped the steering wheel and outside it poured and poured. “When Miles has sex with you, he’s disrespecting you.”

  I thought about telling her that he sometimes disrespected me on the couch. Once in the kitchen. But I said nothing.

  She talked for an hour and a half without pause, without my input, but when we reached the shopping center in Raleigh the space between us seemed somehow lighter. We spent the afternoon shopping, inspecting sales racks, and eating Chinese takeout in the food court. At the Macy’s makeup counter, Terry tried on lavender eye shadow.

  “That looks nice on you,” I said.