Fiery Rivers

by Daefyd Williams

  He never regained consciousness after the operation. He was intubated and placed on a respirator because he could no longer breathe on his own. Before Devon left to return to California, he felt compelled to apologize to Adam, although he was unconscious, about once mocking him in the car by affecting a Kentucky accent when Marie had asked him where he was from and he had replied, “Born an’ raised in Hazard, Kentucky,” where his father had been born. Devon hoped that his father had heard him because he had felt guilty about mocking him for years. Adam died three days after he left. He was seventy-five.

  When Marie went through his clothes, she found nitroglycerine pills in every pocket. He had been ingesting them like candy to alleviate his angina and not told anyone that he was in continual pain.

  Devon was surprised at how much younger his mother looked dead. She had been dead for thirty minutes. He had stepped outside on the hospice patio to inform his brothers and sister on his cell phone that she was gone after the nurses had confirmed that she was dead, and when he stepped back inside, he thought she looked peaceful and younger. The lines were gone from her face. She was no longer in pain. He walked up beside her and smoothed her forehead and cheeks with his fingers. “It’s all over now, Mom. You’re with Dad and Gloryann now. The pain is gone. We’ll miss you. We love you.”

  Marie had been in hospice care for three days. She had been moved there from Miami Valley Hospital, where she had been in the intensive care unit for four days. She had been admitted to the hospital the day after he and Del had played Scrabble with her in her room at the assisted living home in which she was living in Enon. She had mentioned offhandedly during the game that she felt a pain in her chest, but neither he nor Del had taken much notice of it, as she was always in pain. When she was examined by her doctor the next day, she sent her immediately to the hospital by ambulance, where she was diagnosed with having suffered a heart attack.

  All of the family had come back to Ohio to attend Jerry’s wedding. Jerry was Gina and Rob’s son. Gina had met Rob at Ohio University. All of Devon’s siblings had followed in his pioneering footsteps and gone to Ohio University, from which they had all graduated.

  At the hospital, Del and Devon informed the doctors that Marie had a Do Not Resuscitate order. They requested to see it, and Devon went back to the assisted living home and returned with it to the hospital. After seeing it, they placed monitors on her and provided an intravenous drip, but did nothing else.

  After four days, they began to administer morphine to alleviate the pain. The night before, when Devon was alone with her, she had complained, “Oh, Dev, it hurts way deep down inside.” The next day, because she could not get comfortable and upon the recommendation of Tia, a registered nurse and Gina and Rob’s daughter, the staff began to administer the drug.

  The biggest surprise for Devon when he first walked into her room at the hospice facility was that unlike her hospital room, there were no monitors attached to her body to track her blood pressure or other vital signs, and no intravenous drip to keep her hydrated. She lay unconscious on the bed from the morphine she had been given at the hospital. She breathed with her mouth wide open. The hospital staff explained that their sole objective was to keep patients as comfortable as possible.

  On the third night of her hospice stay, Devon suspected that this would be her last night, as she had had no food or water for three days. When Del and Katy, his wife, left at nine p.m., he began to read the book of Psalms to her. He did not realize when he began how long Psalms is, so when he got tired of reading, he would sing “Amazing Grace’” and “This Little Light of Mine,” believing that these songs would comfort her. At least he sang the lyrics that he could remember. It had been forty-seven years since he had last attended a Pentecostal service.

  As he was reading early in the morning, he noticed that she was making small whimpering noises. He summoned the nurses to the room via the intercom. When they arrived, he said, “She keeps moaning.”

  One of the nurses said, “That means she’s in pain.”

  “What should we do?” Devon asked.

  “Give her another morphine shot.”

  “Really?” he asked. He knew that it had only been three hours since her last shot.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if that’s what you think is best, go ahead.” He doubted the wisdom of giving her another shot so close to the last one, but they were the professionals.

  She slept well after the second shot and even began to snore. There were no more whimpering noises. He stopped reading and positioned his chair next to the left side of her bed. He dozed off himself.

  A guttural noise awakened him. He opened his eyes just in time to see her swallow four times. She never breathed again. He summoned the nurses to the room.

  After he had informed his siblings that she was gone, he went back into the room and continued to read the book of Psalms to her. At seven a.m. there was a knock on the door. Devon opened it. A handsome man in a suit said, “Hi, I’m the undertaker. I’ve come for your mother.”

  “Can you wait just a minute?” Devon asked. He went back and looked at Psalms. Only three pages left. He told the undertaker, “I’ve been reading Psalms to her, and I wanta finish it. I only have a few more pages.”

  “OK,” the undertaker said. “Take your time.”

  Devon closed the door and finished reading. Then he opened the door and the undertaker entered.

  “We’re going to put her into a body bag now. Would you like to leave?”

  Devon shook his head. “No, I’ll stay.”

  He wheeled in a gurney and unzipped a black plastic bag. He and a nurse laid Marie on the bag, and he zipped it up. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Devon replied. He went outside into a light rain. He walked all the way around the hospice and discovered a small pond at the southeast corner. A mother duck and seven ducklings paddled towards him. “And life goes on,’” he thought. “New life to replace the old.” He got into his car and drove away.

  Angela’s heart was humming to a dulcet, ethereal melody only she could hear. She looked at Bob and the tune soared even higher. She was sixteen and this was her first date. Bob was driving his father’s Chevrolet and they were on their way to the Preble County Fair in Eaton. Bob was her best friend’s brother. He had learned sign language to be able to talk to his sister, Yvonne. Yvonne and Angela attended the High School for the Deaf in Dayton.

  Angela had blossomed into a beautiful young lady. She had a retroussé nose, long blond hair, and blue eyes. She was wearing white shorts, a pink top with a blue cat embroidered on the pocket, and flip flops. She tapped Bob on the shoulder, smiled, and signed, “I like you.”

  Bob still couldn’t believe that Angela had agreed to go out with him when he had asked her. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Just looking at her gorgeous face and body thrilled him. He signed, “I like you,” and smiled at her. He returned his gaze to the road and saw a car right in front of the windshield.

  The cars collided head-on. There was a horrific bang as the two cars crumpled into each other, shattering glass and buckling metal. The twisted mass was pushed fifty feet in the direction from which the Chevrolet had been traveling and came to rest in the grassy median.

  Darkness. Oblivion. Then Bob slowly began to open his eyes. He struggled to surface from a deep well of unconsciousness. Suddenly, he was awake and realized what had happened. There was a throbbing in his head and something warm flowing down into his eyes. He looked at Angie and saw that the car’s engine had been thrust into the car and had her pinned to the seat. “Angie!” he shouted. He pulled up his door handle, but the door would not open. He crawled out the broken window, heedless of the jagged glass scraping his flesh. He rushed to her door and jerked on it, but it was jammed.

  She began to moan. He saw that the engine was lodged against her left side and atop her left thigh. She opened her eyes and looked at him wanly. He reached for her right a
rm through the broken window with both hands and tried to pull her from the car. She did not budge. Suddenly, she was wide awake and looking at him with terror in her eyes. “Miwah!” she shouted. “Miwah!” He placed his left foot against the rear door and pulled on the front door with both hands as hard as he could. It was jammed shut. Red and orange flames began to sprout from the back seat and from the rear floorboard. Smoke began to fill the interior. He feverishly pulled, kicked, and pounded on the door. “MIWAH!! MIWAH!!!” Angela screamed.

  Suddenly, another pair of arms was there trying to pull the door open with Bob. “Lemme try to pull her out, son,” a voice said. Bob stepped aside and a black, muscular man in a white tee shirt and blue jeans leaned into the car and put his left arm behind her back and the other beneath her right thigh and pulled with all his might, Angela screaming “MIWAH!! MIWAH!!” all the while. He could not extract her. The flames now filled the back of the car to the windows and were right behind her head. The man shook his head. “We’re gonna haf to step back, son. The gas tank’s gonna blow.”

  “What?! We can’t just let her die!!” Bob shouted, incredulous.

  The man shook his head again. “Ain’t nothin’ more we can do.” He grabbed Bob’s upper right arm roughly and pulled him west along the median, towards a man lying face down in the grass.

  “MMMMMMIIIIIIIIIIWWWWWWAAAAAAHHHHH!!” Angela screamed as loudly as she could, desperately thrusting her arms out the window and waving her hands rapidly while she simultaneously kicked against the floorboard with her right foot as hard as she could. Abject terror filled her eyes. “MMMMMIIIII—” A tremendous explosion rocked the car, spewing flames from the windows and rocking the vehicle as though a grenade had been detonated from within. Heavy black smoke roiled skyward.

  “ANGIE!!! ANGIE!!!” Bob shouted. He fell to his knees and sobbed and repeated, softer now, “Angie. Angie.” The black man patted the top of his head with a gnarled hand and wept, tears streaming down his face. Sirens were approaching from a distance.

  The man on the ground stirred and then staggered to his feet. “Whad’jou do to muh car? You wreck it?” He blinked and scratched his head. “You wreck muh car!” he said accusingly.

  Bob turned and venomously screamed, “You hit US head-on! An’ you’re DRUNK!! An’ Angie’s dead! You killed her!”

  The man stood with his mouth open and blinked again. “Nah. Wudden me. I jush woke up. Wudden me.”

  The man, Doff Wooten, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for vehicular manslaughter and given an additional five years for driving while under the influence. He died in prison.

  Rennie sank into a deep depression after Angela died, only five years after his father. He could not seem to shake it off and spent every day in his bedroom with the blinds drawn reading adventure novels. Leona tried to coax him out of it by encouraging him to accompany her to Sunday school and church functions, but he always begged off, telling her that he was only a few pages away from finishing the chapter.

  Finally, a year after Angela’s death, he made the decision to leave Ohio, a place which had brought so much pain and sorrow into his life, and move to a sunnier clime. He decided on Phoenix, Arizona.

  On the way there, as he crossed the Great Plains, the dark, heavy feeling lifted. By the time he reached Phoenix, he was humming along to Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” on the radio. He was eagerly looking forward to forever putting behind him the overcast skies and bad memories of Ohio and starting a new life.

  He enrolled in the Arizona Law Enforcement Academy and became a highway patrolman, with a keen interest in arresting and jailing drunk drivers. Eventually, he married and had two children. He only returned to Ohio once, to attend his mother’s funeral.

  And the fiery rivers of belief and concupiscence churn tumultuously side by side through the narrow arroyos of the human heart, battering, gouging, and eroding the walls, tormenting and torturing us all until the walls collapse, and we drown within the flames.

  About the Author

  Daefyd Williams has been a gardener, a dishwasher, a factory worker, a chauffeur, a warehouse worker, a security officer, an actor, a poet, a special education teacher, and an English instructor at a community college. This is his first novel.