by John Farrow
The visitor goes straight on through to Alfred Royce Orrock’s bedroom.
Why anyone would need a space this massive just to sleep in baffles him always. Now, a space to die in. But Lescavage rejects that bit about death’s door being ajar. Just another Orrock ploy. A way to get something nobody wants to give him. Another craven extortion. Probably, anyway.
And yet, Lescavage admits, seeing the man under the fluffy duvet, partially propped up by pillows and sleeping rather peacefully, he looks barely alive. He observes the man in his slumber and finishes the last scone. Slaps his hands together to rid himself of the crumbs, then pulls up the bedside chair put there for the convenience of visitors like him, or only for him, and sits down.
The tyrant does seem sound asleep.
An occasional splutter indicates that he remains among the living.
“Alfred,” the pastor says gently, quietly, “it’s me. Simon.” Orrock does not stir. Yet Lescavage remains unconvinced by this evidence of nocturnal bliss. “Don’t invite me over here to tell me you’re asleep.”
The man’s eyelids flicker, the lips move, and for a moment the minister accepts that the other man is indeed frail. When he speaks, the voice is dry, a scratchiness in the tone, but the attitude, the attitude, remains pure Orrock.
“It wasn’t a goddamned invitation,” the ailing man decrees.
He seems to be waking up to his visitor’s presence, his eyes straining to stay open, and he adjusts his weight and straightens his back. By her own claim, Ora Matheson is his housekeeper and not a nurse, but Lescavage gives credit where it’s due—she’s done a fine job looking after the old geezer. One minor stain on the lapel of his pajamas, but otherwise he looks tidy. His thin gray hair has been combed. He’s clean-shaven. The spaces around him are in order and the bed is neat except for where he’s lying under the covers. Even at that he doesn’t disturb the duvet very much, having gone thin. Suddenly, the old patriarch winces and holds his eyes shut, waiting for a marauding affliction to pass.
“You told Ora to ask me here,” Lescavage points out to him.
“A command,” the man qualifies. “I ordered you to get your ass up here. On the double. Obedient puppy that you are, you obeyed. As you should.” He swallows, and moistens his lips with his tongue. “I’m reasonably satisfied, but you could have been quicker about it. You wouldn’t have had to wake me then.”
Lescavage stares at him awhile, noticing the scalloped cheeks, the desiccated skin around his eyes, nose, and mouth, the exaggerated wrinkling at the base of his neck. Ironic, the dismissive, autocratic words mated to the scratchy, failing voice. He gazes upon him long enough that he’s able to get the man’s attention, and Orrock fully opens his eyes to look back at him.
“What?” Orrock asks.
“Fuck you,” the minister says.
“Excuse me? Is that any way for my spiritual adviser to talk? Especially now.”
“What’s so special about now?”
“I’m on the brink of fucking death. I’m about to meet your goddamned saints. Do you want me to put in a good word for you or what?”
Lescavage stretches in his chair, then clasps a wrist and rests his head back against his hands. He’s willing to warm to this joust. “Your spiritual adviser is the devil himself. Doesn’t he swear?”
“Not like a sailor, no,” Orrock maintains, “and never at me. Give him half a chance, you’ll find out he has the soul of a poet. As do I.”
The pastor isn’t certain, but detects the hint of a smile on the faded, drawn visage. “Right. Poet. How are you anyway?”
On a dime, Orrock turns on him again. “Ah, you sweet bitch, how do you think I am? I’m dying. Just because you’re too scrawny to squeeze out a decent turd, Lescavage, doesn’t mean you’re not pure shit on a stick to me.”
The minister looks away in anger a moment. “Then why ask me over, Alf? Or command me? How can I help? Do I look like some sort of grave digger to you?”
“You stink. You’re putrid,” Orrock mutters aimlessly, adding, “I need a drink.”
“Ora could’ve made you a drink.”
“Or you can,” the old man asserts.
Lescavage is up for this battle. “Or not.”
Alfred Orrock gathers his energy. He indicates his water glass with a jut of his chin, a request Lescavage is willing to entertain. He helps hold the glass for him as the old man quenches his thirst.
“Whiskey,” he demands when finished, “with a dash of water and one cube.”
“Fuck you, Alfred.”
“Stop with the language. I’m not saying you can’t serve yourself.”
“I’m good, thanks.” Lescavage, though, does not sound convinced.
“All right.” The old man paces himself, the words emerging slowly. Perhaps affected by that rhythm, they gain a measure of gravity. “Truth is, there’s more to it.”
“That’s always the case with you.”
“I need more than a drink. I need one righteous piss.”
“Ora could’ve passed you the bedpan. You don’t need to drag me out here on a night like this so you can take a flying leak.”
“And—” He coughs, then uses the back of his hand to clean off a dab of spittle. “I’m not walking too good today, Simon. Feet like lead. My back’s in a vise. I need you to escort me to the can, then pull my pants down so I can take a crap. How do you like that?” He wipes some nastiness from his lips with the back of his hand. “I can’t ask that young thing with the cute titties to help me shit twice on the same day. It’s not dignified. As she reminds me so bloody often, she’s not a nurse.” He might be smiling, although it’s hard to tell as his facial muscles haven’t so much as twitched while holding his visitor’s steady gaze. One frail finger points at the minister, an implied accusation. “You, Simon,” he says, “will help me with that.”
Lescavage blows air from his lungs, looks away, and crosses his arms as though to indicate defiance. But he doesn’t find much of an argument for mutiny. “This has nothing to do with your dignity or your despicable bowels. All you care about is humiliating the other person.”
Orrock’s smile is quite evident now. “Not the other person, Lescavage. In my prime, maybe. Maybe. Now? I only have it in for you.”
The minister thinks the matter through. In so many elderly people, he’s noticed that their gentle failings—frights, regrets, grievances, revolving patterns—all come home to roost in their dotage and grow exaggerated as the person’s capabilities and faculties fade. Orrock is a mean man at heart, who is not about to reform at this stage of his life, not unless a few ghosts from decades and centuries past and future suddenly elect to haunt him.
“Seriously? Alfred? You can’t shit on your own?”
“I would if I could. Too long a hike across this floor. It’s a goddamn expedition. I refuse to use a bedpan for that, or shit where I sleep. I don’t own a walker. Here’s the kicker. I need assistance to squat down.”
Standing, the visitor peels back the duvet and reveals the skeletal form of the island patriarch. He looks shockingly frail in his too-large pajamas. At least two sizes too big for him now. A hip bone juts out, lacking flesh. Over the last couple of months, including just two days ago, Lescavage has seen the man only in street clothes, which apparently camouflaged his deterioration.
“I don’t know,” the minister remarks quietly, “if you’ve heard about a novel idea. It’s called a hospital?”
“Yeah, where at my age they force you to wear diapers. They never come when you call. Then bill you a mint. When they know you’re rich, they bill for all the poor who can’t pay. And don’t talk to me about nurses. Pack of thieves, the lot.”
“We have health care now. We’ve had it for your entire adult life.”
“I’ll die at home, thanks.”
“Yeah,” Lescavage murmurs, “about that. Dying. Promises, promises.”
Any such discussion will have to wait, as the men fall to the logistics of their procedure.
The minister criticizes the ailing patient for not buying a wheelchair. “Lord knows you can afford one.”
“I never foresaw the need. Anyway, when I die, it ends up in a junkyard.”
“Donate it to the needy.”
“Socialism. Forget it.”
“Actually, it’s called charity.”
“Same difference.”
“Bullshit,” the minister sums up.
“Wash out. Your mouth. With soap.”
They must coordinate their movements. Orrock shows determination, but he also wails when a leg or a hip twists. Lescavage is shocked by the man’s weightlessness. He’s probably dipped below 150 pounds, when not so long ago he was at least forty more than that. Even his remaining weight somehow feels as though it’s composed of air. Or of dust.
“Up,” Lescavage instructs him.
The old man still has drive. With one arm slung over the pastor’s shoulders, Orrock hobbles off across the carpeted floor to the bathroom. Entwined in that embrace, he intones, “Sweetheart, after I piss and shit and you make me a drink—if you’re lucky, my last—I shall grant you the honor of hearing my confession.”
Lescavage shortens his gait to suit the other’s man’s ministeps. “We’ve been through this. I’m not Catholic, neither are you. I don’t do confession.”
“You’re not even a believer! So don’t tell me what you do or don’t do. You’re a fraud. But you will hear my confession.”
In the past, he’s advised him to call in a Roman Catholic priest if he’s so hell-bent on confessing before his death, but he lost that debate then and presumes he’ll lose it again. Still, he insists, grumbling, “I don’t hear confessions.”
“You’ll hear mine,” Orrock tells him, a tone that sounds like a warning. “By the way, Ora wanted out tonight. That’s why you’re here. I’ve been working her too hard. The poor girl needs to get laid. Not that you don’t, but for her it’s an option.”
The bathroom, the minister once remarked, is as large as his own living room, and he might not be wrong. Perhaps this is where the idea of a swimming pool comes from, as there’s nearly enough room for one, and the spa tub is huge. The reverend assists the man to the toilet and gets him turned around. They both work to aim his bum above the bowl. Lescavage tugs the pajama bottoms down, exposing his skinny legs. With his arms wrapped around his nurse for the evening, Orrock lowers himself. A difficult descent. His legs provide only wobbly scaffolding. Seated, he bends forward, which strikes the minister as an act of modesty as the pajama shirt flops over his privates. He’s not surprised when the old man retaliates, for this is humiliating to him, and he will not go through it without inflicting damage on his only witness.
“First, sniff my poop, Simon Lescavage. Then wipe my ass. Don’t forget to flush. Next, fix me a drink. After that, have the decency to hear my confession.”
Neither man speaks as they listen to the tinkle of urine.
“I’ll fix that drink now. While I’m waiting.”
“Sure. Go ahead. Pour a stiff one for yourself. You’re going to need it.”
Suddenly, Orrock is interrupted by a pain across his belly. He jerks forward and cries out, an involuntarily reflex as he clutches his helper and hangs on.
“You all right?” Lescavage immediately regrets his words. He expects Orrock to lash back at him for the inane comment. Of course he’s not all right. But the man is in too much agony to ridicule him just yet.
“Christ, that hurt,” he whispers.
His skin color seems more pale now, washed out. Lescavage observes him as the man releases his grip and eases back down on the toilet seat. “At least it doesn’t stink so bad,” the minister says.
Orrock accepts the kindness. “Small mercies, hey. Small mercies.”
He needs a minute to recover.
Toilet paper is stacked on a portable stake. People in town would probably say it’s pure silver, but it’s polished aluminum, standard fare. Orrock removes the top roll from the column, then holds it out to his helper. He gazes up at him.
“Now wipe,” he says.
The two men have locked eyes. Neither moves.
“I can’t bend around,” Orrock explains.
Still, Lescavage stands still. He feels like a man being tested who does not understand the rules of engagement, or the possible outcome or the repercussions.
“I can’t reach,” the man on his humble throne stipulates.
Lescavage looks away, across the marble floor, over the spa tub to the window, where the wind and rain fiercely pound, then back at him.
That peculiar smile appears again, the one for which there is no evidence. He’s not pleading, Alfred Orrock is only being contemptuous, when he adds, “Please.”
The minister takes the paper roll in hand. Unwinds a section. He has a sudden desire to tell this man that he’s done this before. He suffers a need to share that experience, but at the same moment he knows he won’t, for that would be breaking an unspoken pact, so he stifles the impulse. Still, he wants to explain that he’s not mortified, because once he wiped his own mother’s bottom when she was at a similar stage in her life and the nurse was absent. Like Orrock, she had every speck of her wits about her, but unlike him, she worked to mollify his trepidation.
“After what I’ve been through, dear,” she said, “with physicians and the nurses—some of them look like mere kids to me—all their awful tests, oh, after those intrusions, these silly indignities don’t matter much anymore.”
What he wanted to share, and oddly, with Orrock, was that the intimacy of the act, of wiping his mother’s bottom as she had done endlessly for him as a babe, invoked such tenderness in both of them, such a sense of love and sadness, that the act itself didn’t vex him and never stuck with him. He’s forgotten about it until now. In a way, mother and son recognized that these failing bodies did not constitute their lives. The act was a mere trifling, and did not prove to be an indignity for either of them, certainly not a humiliation. Perhaps the contrary. He was not anticipating a similar reaction in this instance, except that in invoking the previous experience he discovered himself inoculated against Orrock’s contempt and his effort to mock him, so that he could deny the pleasure the other man derived from his intended insult.
He finishes with a last full swipe, flushes, and shows Orrock no glimmer of distress.
The man grunts. Lescavage waits to be told what to do next.
“Don’t just stand there, you gutless jellyfish,” the old man gripes, by way of thanks, but his voice reflects his defeat. “Haul me up.”
They manage the slow shuffle across the floor, although pain accompanies Orrock’s repositioning upon the bed. Sweat breaks out across his brow and he succumbs to a dry wheeze and hacking.
“That drink,” he commands. “You know where I keep my liquor. You’ve raided the shelf often enough, with and without my permission.”
That’s something townsfolk never think to exaggerate. They’d be impressed with the extravagance of his bar. Enough to make the entire island tipsy.
“I don’t mind if I do help myself,” Lescavage remarks.
“Make mine a double. Then you’ll hear my bloody confession.”
Lescavage looks at him. At the skin pulled across the old man’s cheekbones and jaw, at the slack mouth. The dull pallor of impending death. He supposes that his reluctance to hear this man’s confession derives less from his pastoral tradition than from his interest in what the vile man might have to say. He actually wants to know what’s on Orrock’s mind at the hour of his death, if this is that hour, after a lifetime of subterfuge and villainy. What really counts, now that nothing is left in this world to be gained? For the clergyman, the prurient impulse is not something he welcomes in himself. Clearly unprofessional, not in the least ministerial. He feels himself a helpless gossip about to hang on to each syllable of a red-hot rumor. He’s hopelessly and, he concludes, morbidly curious. For that reason alone, he feels ashamed. He does not want to hear this man�
�s confession precisely because he so very much desires to absorb every detail.
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” Orrock says, as if reading his mind. “I know you’re a fraud. That’s not news to me. Just remember, we’re not hearing your confession tonight, simple Simon. Only mine.”
Lescavage lowers his head, then shakes it slowly. He whispers, “You’re the devil himself, Alfred. Incarnate. I’m about to hear the devil’s own confession.”
“Whatever,” murmurs Orrock. His eyelids flutter. He licks his chapped lips. “Something like that anyway. If you’re lucky. Fetch the whiskey, you wormy slime bucket. You shit wiper, you. Loosen my tongue.”
As always, Lescavage yields ground. “Sure. I’ll make mine a double as well.”
TWO
Falling off the shoulder of the road, the sleek gray Porsche skims across a rapid series of shallow potholes, causing the undercarriage—the shocks in need of repair—to sound like an old-fashioned Gatling gun. Then the car bucks out of a deeper puddle sending a whole other cascade of water up and over the vehicle. Barely hanging on, the driver steers back onto the road, or what she thinks is the road, and taps the brakes gently. Wipers fight against the wet but the windshield takes its own sweet time to clear. When she can peer through the opaque smudges again, she sees lights. She’s arriving in a town, the only one left before the land drops into the Bay of Fundy and the sea.
The town’s name is Blacks Harbour, commonly referred to as Blacks. Any apostrophe has been lost to time or never existed.
Crossing the border from Maine into New Brunswick, she stopped for a pee, but otherwise it’s been straight through from Portland, where she gassed up and grabbed a coffee and doughnut, and before that, Boston, where she took the call from her father’s maid. Or whatever she is. Whore, perhaps. With him, you never knew. In a bout of honesty one time (who could tell if that’s what it was or if he was ever close to speaking the truth), or if not honesty, then at a moment when he appeared to have no particular agenda and no special grudge, her father mentioned in passing that he never found himself interested in women who were, in his words, difficult. He said, “When the nitty gets down to the gritty, everybody has their thing. My thing is, I’m only attracted to promiscuous women. If they’re not sleeping around, they’re not sleeping with me.” He was explaining why he’d never remarried. At the time, she didn’t know what to make of his thing. The peccadillo seemed unique, she’d give him that, but it also kept him safe from marriage, for what man married a woman with that proclivity? If real, his preference dovetailed with his nature—was he not being cruel? Did he not just call every woman he ever slept with a whore, by virtue of his thing? And didn’t that include her own mother? And wasn’t that just the cat’s meow?