“Mr. Stalworth, I think you’ll want to come in here now.”
The nurse’s stage whisper rouses me from one of several catnaps I’ve taken during the night. I have been privy to the rattle of her unconscious breathing since yesterday afternoon. A Sting song I’ve never heard before plays on the speakers in the hallway and I realize that, up to this point, I haven’t heard music of any kind on any of the other floors we have stayed on. Clearly, this is some kind of rebel cancer floor.
Although I feel I’m being told point-blank by the nurse to hurry, the first thing I think about in my groggy state is Tina’s admonition that we prevent our bare feet from touching the germ-ridden hospital floor. I scour the area below me in the darkness before I finally dig my toes into a pair of flip-flops, and breathe a sigh of relief.
The room is lit by only two lamps on either side of the bed, which lends an air of comfort. With a weak smile in my direction, the nurse adjusts one of the monitors over Tina’s bed and holds out a vacuuming tube. “Do you want I should do more suction, or just…”
The rattle in Tina’s throat is much more pronounced. I’m trying to think on my feet. “Of course. Well, if you think it will…”
The nurse points to a monitor. “Her heart is failing.”
I don’t know what to say. “Oh my goodness.” Without thinking, I hop on the bed next to Tina, taking one of her hands, brushing the damp hair out of her eyes. I speak close, softly, praying silently for a few extra seconds before my mother dashes off so quickly. “Hey, hey, hey…”
Although Tina doesn’t appear to be responding to the sound of my voice, I ignore the beeping monitors overhead and talk as if we’re swapping early morning pleasantries over the breakfast table. “I had dropped off just now. You know that weird place where you’re not really sure it is a dream? You and Garrett were, like, thirty years old. We were driving in the desert. You guys in the front and me and Sis in the back, in that old Falcon we had with the hole in the floorboard? And Garrett turned to you, and he said, ‘Hey, doll, remember that time you were sick and Bo Skeet came home?’”
A weak smile crosses Tina’s face, the kind you see on an infant that makes you question its authenticity.
“Okay, then,” I whisper.
Tina closes her eyes and exhales for what seems like an eternity. I call to the nurse without looking away. “Is she okay?”
The nurse briefly touches my shoulder, turns off the monitors with the flick of a switch, and leaves.
I am still holding Tina’s hand in mine, and I’m no longer whispering. Maybe it’s because we’ve been left alone, just the two of us, to chat as we wish. I’m suddenly recalling a passage I’d come across while thumbing through some highbrow arts magazine in one of our many waiting rooms. “Did you know that it is a literary cliché not to remember what your mother’s hands look like?”
I study her hand closer, holding it up to the glow of the nearby lamp. The one word above all I want my mother to hear as she leaves this earth is the one her own mother chose to never call her. “Beautiful,” I say, leaning in to make sure she hears me, as if the events of the last few seconds had been delayed due to technical difficulties. “You. Mama.”
I had heard about the unpleasant scent people carried shortly before they passed, a sort of biological tell that portends imminent death. But when I hold her hand to my face, she smells just like she always did when she kissed us good night, like lemons and lotion and pool chlorine all swirled into one.
A few minutes later, I open the big picture window on the opposite side of the room. Kneeling on the floor, my elbows on the ledge, I inhale the early morning sea breeze, looking out over the hospital lawn as the sun prepares to heave itself up over the Gulf of Mexico for one more day.
As I begin to pack up our things, I notice one of Tina’s eyes has slowly opened. Roaming the suite to collect a pair of bedroom slippers, a hand mirror, and a tube of lip balm, I watch her watching me from whatever corner of the room I’m working. Like the eyes of a prostrate Mona Lisa, they seem to follow me everywhere I go.
Thinking from some loopy place that she may have come back after all, I shake myself out of it, walk back over to her bed, and take her other hand. This time it’s cold, white, and stiff. I remember Caroline saying even if I didn’t heal my mother’s body, it would all still be okay. And even though it wasn’t okay, it’s interesting how the universe sneakily prepares you for gigantic emotional blows that would have before seemed unfathomable in their scope of destruction.
Knowing this would be the last time I would ever see Tina’s body, I think of all the things I wanted to say. How hard we tried, she tried, how random life is, how I’d never look at another beautiful thing on this earth and not think of her. But, oddly enough, the only words that come out of my mouth are: “Dress warm, play fair, and for God’s sake, run in the house if the skeeter truck comes.”
I close her eyes. “Safe journey,” I say, and I leave.
37
Someone said to me, “You jumped off the edge of the earth. You went back home and you lived for two and a half years. What did you learn?”
Well. I suppose I’m at war with my spiritual self. I still can’t manage to pray. It’s not because I don’t think God is there, it’s just my earthly needs and his way of delivering his take on them rarely match up, so why bother? The Buddhists believe we would live more peacefully if we gave up hope, and I can see their point. But there’s just something about that feeling of hope, the adrenaline rush of wanting so badly for a situation to turn out a certain way. Even that feeling you get when those hopes are dashed. Just comes with the territory.
Looking back, I suppose I lived everyone’s worst nightmare, watching something horrible happen to someone so close to me. And I guess what I would have to say is this: When faced with some dreaded path—and chances are, at some point you will be—jump valiantly, feet first, into that hot fiery hell, eyes wide open.
For me, within the awfulness lie things that will, for the rest of my days, defy description: brief snippets of light, love and terror, of ugly dogs and chemo nurses, macrobiotic gurus, bayou healers, and handsome carpenters. And hard as I try to put it all together, to create a sum out of all the parts, the most I know I will ever get is a nudge, a hunch, a phantom voice from some far-off place counting backward for all of us.
* * *
We had a memorial for Tina at the First Baptist Church in Jackson. Regardless of her ambivalent feelings about the place, Tina had many friends in the congregation, all of whom had been kind to us in those last days. After Garrett nixed the notion of anyone singing any sad old hymns, my cousin Raquel played and sang everything from Bach to Joni Mitchell and Aretha on the big pipe organ. In the receiving line outside the church, Caroline, wearing a long wool coat far too warm for the Gulf Coast in any season, pressed my hand into hers as she gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“Frances called me. I’m so sorry,” she says.
Caught between my present reality and the old one, I wonder for the briefest moment what part she played in my life. I recognize her, but almost three years have passed since I’ve seen her bright, fresh face and touched her warm, delicate hands, her fingers longer than mine.
“My God,” I say, realizing that my time gone has added a couple of crow’s feet around the edges of her big brown eyes. “When did you get here?”
“This morning,” she says, pulling me close.
“Well, you’ll stay at the house.”
“I’ve got a room, don’t be silly,” she says, proceeding to Garrett and Sis on the other side of me.
My former high school English lit teacher led the graveside service. With elegance and grace, she asked the gathered to offer up a hand of applause for my mother’s faith in Christ, hereby, I’m sure, paving Tina’s way into the next world despite the top forty rundown inside the church.
I looked out over the hills of the sprawling green grounds of the cemetery, wondering if I would one day be planted here
with Garrett, Sis, and Tina, or if I’d be burned and scattered over the Pacific or other parts unknown.
As Caroline whispers, “Why didn’t you tell me your father was so handsome?” Jewel Ann and two other bluehairs say the service was interesting. Tina would have loved that.
* * *
At the end of the longest day of my life, my father asked me to sleep with him. No fanfare, no hemming and hawing, just him showing up in the doorway of the bathroom as I’m washing my face for bed. “That’s a mighty big bed in there without your mama. I mean, if you wanted to come take up the other half of it, I suppose that’d be all right.”
Minutes later I’m lying next to him in the same spot Tina had taken for forty years, staring at the outline of the wobbly ceiling fan above us.
“I met her when she first moved to town,” Garrett says, his deep voice cutting the silence of the night like a sneeze in church.
“We were thirteen. Class? Good God, boy, she was class all the way. I’d never even seen a green salad till she came on the scene.”
As the movie of my prepubescent parents meeting cute plays in my head, my father’s voice cracks with emotion. “I took her hand. I took her hand every night before we fell asleep.”
Ten seconds pass before he reaches down and takes mine.
“You’ll never know how much I worry about you,” he says. “Neither you nor your sister can keep anybody. And I want to know there’s somebody looking out for you out there. If I had my druthers, I’d want it to be a woman. But I just want you to find somebody.”
I want so badly to turn and see what his face looks like when he says something so uncharacteristically progressive. But my eyes are frozen on the whirling blades of the ceiling fan.
“I had to take two ibuprofen for the headache,” he says. “Too much crying, I guess. They’re on the table next to you if you need ’em.”
I stayed with my father for three months after that. He took my hand every night before we fell asleep.
THE DIXIE
February 4, 2002
Crime Scene
Jeans Burned
Gwen Gaylord, 55, was arrested Friday for starting a fire in city limits without a permit. Jackson Police Officer Oscola Turner said an inebriated Gaylord had used a can of gasoline and matches to set fire to a pair of Levi’s she’d retrieved from her home on County Road 1 near Tidetown around eleven p.m. Turner quoted Gaylord as claiming she started the fire in the road in front of her residence because this particular pair of jeans would always remember. “Look, everyone has a bad day,” Turner told The Dixie, “but the law’s the law, and she broke it.” Gaylord was released on Saturday after a brief psychological interview.
38
On the day I’ve finally chosen to return to California, I turn around in the carport and there, sitting next to my suitcase, is the ugliest Yorkie mix I’ve ever laid eyes on. Reaching carefully for my bag, I avoid any sudden movements as the last thing I can possibly stand is more drama. But to my complete and utter surprise, Puffy remains motionless, blinking her one good eye, as if the idea she’d ever do anyone bodily harm was ludicrous. Calling her bluff, I move my hands this way and that. Still, no reaction. I raise my arms Frankenstein-like above my head, but Puffy just scratches her chin, looking out over the last of the summer roses in the garden.
Sis embraces me in silence, pulling me so close I think she might break me in two. Fanny walks over and gives me a big, twisty hug. Looking past her shoulder, I can see my father just over the fence, methodically scooping dead poplar leaves from the pool’s surface with the net. Fanny pats me on the arm and gently pushes me toward the rental car.
* * *
On our way to the airport, the long, dark shadows of the ancient oaks stroke our faces like playful witches’ hands as we drive through the streets of downtown Jackson. At one of the only red lights on Commerce Street, a boy around the age of ten races across the street, a clumsy sand-colored puppy on a leash charging ahead of him toward Quincey Drake’s Hardware on the corner.
Squirming down in her seat, Caroline pulls a sweater around her arms. “Mind if I sleep till we get to the airport?”
“Go ahead,” I say. I’d wondered if her coming out to retrieve me would feel like we were falling back into our routine, but the vibe was already different. We were two people who had moved on with our lives, but our bond would be forever sealed.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Sleep.”
She touches my knee and lets the seat back.
“Good grief,” I say, staring at the tall, unshaven fellow coming down the steps of Quincey’s carrying a cardboard crate under one arm and stopping to finger one of the bright crimson garden tillers out front.
“What?” Caroline says, scooching up an inch.
Joe Tucker smiles and calls a greeting to the boy as he and his puppy disappear inside the hardware store.
“Is that him?” Caroline practically presses her nose to the passenger window.
“Yes.”
Joe sets the crate down on the steps and picks up the handles of a tiller, steering the damned thing down some imaginary garden row.
“What are the odds?” she says.
“You could say the same thing about my entire trip, doll. It never ends.”
“The light’s green,” Caroline says in a hushed, reverent tone, God love her. She lets her seat back up for a better view.
Over Joe’s shoulder, I can make out the puppy sitting obediently next to the boy near the front counter just inside the store.
From behind, an impatient driver taps his horn three times in succession, but as a veteran of rush hour traffic on the worst freeways imaginable, I am not easily moved. As the car behind me honks again, this time more urgently, Joe glances in our direction, a hint of recognition as he scrutinizes the inhabitants of the car causing the fracas on the otherwise bucolic street.
“I think he sees us,” Caroline says.
Joe waves enthusiastically and motions us to pull over. I can feel my shoulders tightening up around my neck.
“Well, let’s do this,” she says, like a question.
Joe is now waving both his arms in the air.
Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, I hear a tiny voice inside me ask a childish, hypothetical question. If someone said I would have to relive every second of the past two and a half years if I could start on the day when Joe first hollered at me from the roof of his parents’ house, would I?
“Come on, you’re gonna pull over, aren’t you?”
Before I can even attempt to, Joe approaches the car with a big excited grin, knocking once on the hood on his way over to my open window.
The top of my scalp begins to tingle, and the tension in my shoulders melts.
I ignore another irksome toot as an antique truck hauling bales of hay to one of the inland farms passes us from the other lane, flecks of dust and earth suspended in its wake.
Like a good Southern boy, I close my eyes, bow my head, and make a wish.
About the Author
Phillip Irwin Cooper’s one-man-show, Counting For Thunder, ran for seven months in Los Angeles. Phillip starred in the film adaptation from Wolfe Releasing, a project he also directed, wrote, and produced. At its World Premiere at Rhode Island International Film Festival, Counting For Thunder took home the Jury Award for Best Alternative Feature. The film won Audience Awards at both Columbia Gorge International Film Festival and Fairhope Film Festival. Phillip lives in Santa Monica, California.
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
Counting for Thunder by Phillip Irwin Cooper. A struggling actor returns to the Deep South to manage a family crisis but finds love and ultimately his own voice as his mother is regaining hers for possibly the last time. (978-1-63555-450-2)
Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories by Greg Herren. Award-winning author Greg Herren’s short stories are finally pulled together into a single collection, including t
he Macavity Award–nominated title story and the first-ever Chanse MacLeod short story. (978-1-63555-413-7)
Saints + Sinners Anthology 2019, edited by Tracy Cunningham and Paul Willis. An anthology of short fiction featuring the finalist selections from the 2019 Saints + Sinners Literary Festival. (978-1-63555-447-2)
The Shape of the Earth by Gary Garth McCann. After appearing in Best Gay Love Stories, HarringtonGMFQ, Q Review, and Off the Rocks, Lenny and his partner Dave return in a hotbed of manhood and jealousy. (978-1-63555-391-8)
Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks by ’Nathan Burgoine. Cole always has a plan—especially for escaping his small-town reputation as “that kid who was kidnapped when he was four”—but when he teleports to a museum, it’s time to face facts: it’s possible he’s a total freak after all. (978-1-163555-098-6)
Death Checks In by David S. Pederson. Despite Heath’s promises to Alan to not get involved, Heath can’t resist investigating a shopkeeper’s murder in Chicago, which dashes their plans for a romantic weekend getaway. (978-1-163555-329-1)
Of Echoes Born by ’Nathan Burgoine. A collection of queer fantasy short stories set in Canada from Lambda Literary Award finalist ’Nathan Burgoine. (978-1-63555-096-2)
The Lurid Sea by Tom Cardamone. Cursed to spend eternity on his knees, Nerites is having the time of his life. (978-1-62639-911-2)
Sinister Justice by Steve Pickens. When a vigilante targets citizens of Jake Finnigan’s hometown, Jake and his partner Sam fall under suspicion themselves as they investigate the murders. (978-1-63555-094-8)
Counting for Thunder Page 19