Almost Heaven

by Chris Fabry

  After most left for the reception, the bride and groom remained for pictures. They stood in an arch surrounded by roses, a bridesmaid and the best man with them. Smiling, always smiling for the camera, and then hurrying back to a waiting limousine.

  After they were gone, Billy made his way down the hill through the thick birches and scattered maples. He crossed the asphalt road and walked through the rose garden, where three men wearing ties folded chairs. It was the bride’s father and her brothers. Billy started at the back and began folding until the older man stopped and recognized him.

  “Didn’t see you at the ceremony, Billy,” he called. “What did you think?”

  Billy kept his head down while folding. “It was real nice, Mr. Blanch. Perfect day for a wedding.”

  “It was hotter than blazes,” a brother said.

  “Yeah, you’re lucky you didn’t have to get dressed up in this monkey suit,” the other said.

  The father came back to Billy. “You don’t have to do this, son. We’ve got it.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to help. I’d feel like I was doing something for her.”

  The man smiled. “All right. We appreciate it.” He went back to folding the next row, making small talk. He suggested Billy would one day conduct weddings, as “religious” as he was.

  “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a pastor,” Billy said.

  “Why not? You seem to know the Word just as well or better than most reverends.”

  Billy smiled. “Now how would you know that?”

  “My sister-in-law has kids who attend your Sunday school class. They say you could teach a mule the Romans Road.”

  “Teaching kids and teaching adults are two different things.”

  “I expect they are, but they both spring from the same well.”

  Billy nodded. “I expect so.”

  The father stopped his work and looked at Billy. “I’m real sorry about this. I know you did the best you could for her. And if I had any say in it, I would have told her to give you a chance. But you know daughters don’t listen to their fathers in matters of the heart.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Blanch. The truth is, I was just a friend—and not a very good one.”

  The man shook his head. “I don’t think so. You were the best friend she ever had.”

  Billy pulled something from his back pocket and handed it to him. “I’d be obliged if you’d give this to the bride and groom for me.”

  “Why don’t you come to the reception? I know she’d be happy to see you.”

  Billy went on folding the chairs. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. But you fellows go on. I’ll finish up here.”

  “We couldn’t let you do that.”

  “No, I insist.”

  The man sighed. “Well, all the chairs go in that hauler over there. You can just lock it up and leave it. We’ll come back later and take them to the church.”

  “Thanks, Billy,” one of the brothers said, grabbing his jacket from the back of a chair.

  Mr. Blanch shook Billy’s hand. “I’ll make sure she gets your card. You’re a good man, Billy.”

  Billy nodded and returned to the chairs as the three drove away.

  I had not thought it important to look at what Billy was writing when he filled out the card in the parking lot of a Walmart. He had spent an eternity looking through them, choosing just the right one, and then made some mistake in what he had written and returned to buy an identical one. I knew I should have paid closer attention when tears flowed as he licked the envelope closed.

  On the outside he wrote, “To the Bride and Groom.”

  As Billy drove home afterward, I moved to the reception and found the mound of gifts and cards. Mr. Blanch placed Billy’s on the stack and it remained there. I returned to Billy and found him alone in his living room listening to one of his favorite albums and eating a fish dinner he had ordered from Long John Silver’s. If he only knew what that food did to his arteries.

  Two months later, Billy got a small white envelope in the mail. He seemed to recognize the handwriting that did not include a name, just the return address from North Carolina. He walked slowly back to the house and dropped the ads and bills on the kitchen table, then made his way to his shop. Billy worked on electronics and woodworking there, things he used his hands to craft. He did not enjoy fishing as much as his friends at the local diner, but when they showed him the artificial lures that drove the bass crazy, Billy took the broken lure he was given and brought them an even better one the next morning. The men around the table, friends from his church, marveled at his ability and asked for more.

  In the midst of the dust, wood chips, and solder, Billy sat in his squeaky chair, surrounded by old equipment, half-started projects, schematics, and letters from the FCC, and stared at the small card before him as if it were some talisman that could bring back the past.

  His mother knocked on the door lightly, in her right mind on this day. “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine, Mama.”

  “All right, now don’t work in here all night. I’ll have supper ready directly.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  When she closed the door, he carefully tore open the envelope, holding it close enough to sniff at the lingering scent. He pulled out the small note. Her familiar handwriting was there, only a few sentences with flowery script that filled up the space easily.

  Billy,

  Thank you for your note. Your friendship means a lot. Thanks for being there through some hard days. We’re going to go out to dinner and use your gift!

  Sincerely,

  Heather

  Billy held the card close to his chest and looked out the small window at the front of the house. “‘Fare thee well, my own true love,’” he sang. “‘And farewell for a while.’”

  He picked up the mandolin and strummed a few chords and sang along, picking out the bluegrass melody he had apportioned to it. At the end, with tears falling, he smiled and put the instrument away. He placed the note in the envelope and opened the top drawer of the old military desk he had bought at auction. The drawer was cluttered with all kinds of gadgets and used electronics, switches and diodes and circuit boards, as well as paper clips, rubber bands, loose change, and grease pencils. He stashed the note deep underneath the junk and pushed the drawer closed.

  When he stood, it was like a weight had fallen from his back. And this ended another sad chapter of the life of Billy Allman. But the sadness would not end, of course. Neither would the longing or the searching and striving.

  9

  Floods leave gaps in the wake, fissures and clefts of memory that songs cannot reach. And so it is with my life. There are things I cannot revisit. I find it easier to edit these scenes and shove them away and pray they will not haunt me. Sometimes you have to just shovel away the locusts that have eaten your life and move on the best you can.

  My diabetes diagnosis is one of these. I choose not to remember the darkness of those days, my inability to deal with the reality of the disease, and the many consequences of my decisions. But there are other events that have no diagnosis, no name to hang on them in my limited lexicon. Forgive me for jumping over these. It is not because I am trying to be dishonest.

  I feel like just about everything I touch in life goes bad. If there is a syndrome for people who pick up bruised fruit, I have it. That may sound like a pity party, but I don’t mean it to be. It’s just the truth. And there are worse things that can happen in life than to watch your mother die, but not many. To see the one who gave you life, who suckled you at her breast, wither away both in mind and body is terrible. But it is even more terrible to think of her in some other place than the home she kept for thirty years.

  Mama’s health had been declining for years. She had to quit work at the beauty shop because most days they had her coming in, she couldn’t make it, and when she did, she chased business away because of her attitude. I don’t know if the death
of my father triggered it or if it was going to happen all along, but somewhere in the long trail of her DNA, something came loose like laundry from the clothesline. And once a sheet gets caught by the wind, there is no telling where you will find it.

  I woke up one winter day and found her outside in the snow in her slippers. Her feet were red from the cold and she was walking along the edge of the hill I’d finally made a down payment on, moving from one tree to another calling for a childhood dog. I hollered but she said not to come closer, that no dogcatcher would take her beloved Sugar away. By then I knew better than to try and convince her that I wasn’t the dogcatcher.

  She was crying when I caught up. “I can’t find him anywhere. And he gets so cold. I’m afraid I’m going to lose him. I’m afraid he’s not going to make it.”

  She scratched the living daylights out of me when I picked her up and carried her back to the house. Her nightgown was wet—and not just from the snow. It is one thing to drive your mother to the doctor. It is quite another to clean the mess when her bowels let loose.

  In the steady decline that seemed to accelerate after that, I knew some hard decisions had to be made. I asked Macel Preston to come by one day the next November. She was the wife of the local sheriff, and my mother and I had known her from church for years. She spoke to my mother kindly and sat in the rocking chair, listening to her carry both sides of the nonsensical conversation.

  “You remember back before we moved to the creek, how hard it was to get persimmons off those trees over at the Fizers’,” my mother said.

  “No, Arlene, I don’t remember,” Macel said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  And she would. She’d just take off on a thought and turn a corner and pretty soon she was on politics or something she’d seen in the newspaper or something about spaying and neutering Bob Barker’s cats. Macel listened until Callie Reynolds drove up.

  Callie worked at the post office and delivered our mail. Every now and then she’d bring us dinner. We went to the same church, but since Mama had gotten so bad, it was hard for me to do anything but get to work and back every day. I usually spent Saturdays and Sundays at home.

  Callie lived in a trailer on the other side of the Dogwood County line. Because of that we had gone to different schools, but I’d gotten to know her a little. We were about the same age, and she had taken an interest in Mama and helping out. She was a tall woman with a wide nose and teeth that had a mind of their own. One eye wasn’t set right and she had a way of looking at you but not looking at you at the same time. It was a bit unnerving to have a face-to-face conversation because when she stared right at you, it was as if she was looking at something behind you and you always wondered what was so interesting back there. She wasn’t heavy, but she walked without a lot of grace, as if her arms were tree limbs. She was just a common, good woman.

  I tried to pay her for her time with Mama, but every time I’d shove a twenty-dollar bill in her hand, she would get offended and say she wasn’t doing it for money. People from the hills are like that. I think it springs from a heart that believes a good turn deserves another. If you have felt that kind of love from God in your life, you want to pass the grace along.

  She came in and put a casserole dish in the oven and fussed over Mama. I told her I was going to walk Macel to her car and run an errand or two, and Callie said that was fine; she’d take care of things.

  Macel stood in silence by her car and just stared at the hillside. It reminded me of all those years ago when my daddy died and how people just seemed to stand and stare off.

  “Billy, you’re going to have to do something hard one of these days,” she said.

  “She’s not going to leave that house,” I said.

  “She can’t stay here by herself. It’s not safe. She’s going to hurt herself by trying to make a fire on that stove, or she’ll go out and climb that tree on the hill thinking she’s making a deposit at the First National Bank.”

  “Callie is helping me out as much as she can, and I stay with her full-time on the weekend.”

  “Callie told me you tried to pay her and that she wished you’d stop doing that.”

  “She’s been a big help.”

  “Unless they’re paying you more than I think down at the radio station, you don’t have that kind of money. You’re still working for the local station, aren’t you?”

  “I work part-time at WDGW, but my full-time work is down in Huntington.”

  “From what I’ve heard of the owner here, he’s more tightfisted than a monkey with a banana in a jar. I hope they pay you well at the other one. You chief engineer now?”

  “Makes it sound like I’m a train conductor, doesn’t it?”

  She chuckled. “You always had a knack with electronics. I used to love hearing you play that mandolin, too. Do you ever pick it up anymore?”

  “Sometimes when it’s bad with Mama. It’s just about the only thing that will soothe her. It’s like David playing for King Saul, only King Saul didn’t wear a nightgown from Walmart.”

  She opened her car door and threw her purse in. “Billy, sometimes love looks a lot different than we think it should.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You have the idea that to love your mother well, you have to do everything for her like she did for you when you were a baby, and if you don’t, you’re a failure as a son. And I’m here to release you from that prison you’re building.”

  “Bible says if you don’t take care of your family—”

  “You’re worse than an infidel; that’s true. We’re to take care of those who took care of us. But there is not a person on the face of this planet who has cared more for their family than you, Billy. I don’t know who has been accusing you, probably some voices you ought to shut out. You do not have to listen to them. You have been a model son. You have taken care of your mama and added to her years. You’ve sacrificed your own happiness.”

  “I didn’t sacrifice anything. It was my pleasure, my duty to take care of her. I’m all she has left.”

  Macel looked at me. “What happened, Billy? Why haven’t you gotten married? Isn’t there anyone you’re sweet on?”

  I looked at the mailbox, then at the ditch. “Women aren’t knocking down the door to get to my place, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But there was someone, am I right?”

  I nodded. “Long time ago.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Some things don’t work out like you plan. Like you want them to.”

  “You care to elaborate?”

  “I wasn’t exactly her type, Mrs. Preston. I think it’s kind of hard to find my type.”

  She jingled the keys and got ready to go. “I don’t know what God did with the mold after he made you, but I’d like to find it again.”

  I smiled. “You’ve been a good friend to us. You and your husband both.”

  She put a hand on my arm. “When it comes time, you call me. I’ll be here. And don’t ever think that you’re a bad son just because there’s this hard thing you have to do. Your daddy would be proud of you.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

  I went to the store to pick up a few things but wandered around looking at the shelves and thinking. It’s funny how aimless a person can feel at times, even when they know God is in control.

  When I finally pulled into the driveway of the house, it was dark and Callie’s car was gone. Not unusual, but I thought she would have stayed. The sun reached the edge of the hills earlier and earlier in those November days.

  I couldn’t get out of the car. The past can come up over me like that flood, surprising me with the power and force of time and experience. Images floated by, people and things and situations that were pulled by memory’s current. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of my daddy, those people back on the creek, that girl who sat by me on the bus, the smell of her hair, the chances squandered. I suppose we are all a collection of such surges and hopes and dreams. There
are probably some people who don’t have any of that stuff haunting them, but I halfway think that those people are heavily medicated.

  There was no movement in the house, so I got up the nerve to go inside. I flicked on the light when I came in the back door, and bugs scurried across the kitchen countertop. There was a pile of dishes in the sink and the casserole dish that Callie had brought was in the middle of the table, half-eaten and left like the Rapture had come.

  I called out for Mama and listened. No response.

  “Mama, I’m home. You doing all right?”

  She wasn’t in the bathroom or the bedroom to the left. But I noticed the gun cabinet was open and my .22 was missing. I breathed a little prayer and kept going. The living room was pitch-black, and as I reached for the light, a voice startled me.

  “Stay right where you are, you ugly thing.” She didn’t say thing; she used a much uglier word.

  I flicked on the light and saw my mother, naked, huddled in the corner and holding the rifle on me. It would have been a shock to anyone else, but to me it was as normal as coming home to see your mother eating oatmeal and watching Wheel of Fortune.

  “Mama, put the gun down.”

  She cursed at me with words so foul I could only close my eyes and take a deep breath.

  “I know what you’re up to,” she said. “I called the bank about my savings account. You took everything, didn’t you!”