The Problem with Murmur Lee

by Connie May Fowler

  So it was Murmur Lee who read Agatha Christie and Loren Eiseley to Katrina. Murmur Lee who fed her when she was too weak to feed herself. Murmur Lee who helped the hospice nurse change the sheets and clean my wife. Murmur Lee who rubbed potions into her drying skin.

  And it was Murmur Lee who gave me the greatest gift one could possibly ask for: a way out, and a way back in.

  She ignored my rude, boorish behavior. She came by every morning, full of positive energy and small talk. I couldn’t get out of the house early or fast enough. I ignored her, turned my back to her, told her to get the fuck out many, many mornings. All she ever did was cock her little-bird blue-eyed face and offer a blessing: “You go on now; we’ve got things covered here.”

  And I did. Her blessing carried me into the potato fields, where I treated strangers, curing their skin rashes, treating their gout, setting their bones, and easing the sore throats, infected ears, and wheezy coughs of their babies. I could heal a stranger in nothing flat.

  But for my wife? What could I do for my wife?

  This is what I will never forget about Murmur Lee: She proved to be far more stubborn than I, way more hardheaded. She put up with my anger and abandonment, waiting me out, minute by minute, hour by hour. Don’t know how she did it. Four A.M. and I’d be leaving the house? She’d be there. Eleven P.M. and I’d be just slinking home? She’d be there. There was no beating her at whatever game she was playing. So I gave up. Or maybe, like Katrina, I just got tired. All I know is that after three weeks of this baloney, I started coming home by six o’clock every evening.

  And that’s when Murmur Lee began shining the light down the path in earnest. She’d greet me as I walked through the kitchen door, shooting me through the heart with those deadly bright eyes. Anger and the fatigue it inspired had made me helpless against this woman. She’d say, “Come on, time to see your wife,” and I’d do it. Dull, dumb, but I did it. I’d follow her out onto the sleeping porch, where Katrina lay, surrounded by freshly cut lemon balm, candles, Murmur Lee’s potions, lotions, and scraps of cloth she’d dyed herself and which she claimed offered comfort. Who was I to argue? The volume on the stereo was turned low, but someone was always crooning: Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney. For some reason, Murmur Lee thought torch songs would ease my wife. Or maybe she played them for me, for us. I don’t know.

  She’d motion for me to sit, and I would. Katrina would open her morphine-clouded eyes, and recognition would flutter—in her and in me. A part of me, an old, almost-dead part, so wanted to hold my wife, comfort her, tell her how much I loved her. But any of those things would have split me in two. Anger was safer. So all I could do was stare into her once-lovely face and try to force my mind into a cold, dark, silent void.

  But then Murmur Lee would begin to ask all the questions Katrina would have if she’d had the strength. “What did you do today? Did you see Mr. Acuff? Does he still have that awful cough? And what about Mrs. Williams? Is her daughter doing any better? Did her boy get out of jail?”

  Astonishingly, I would answer. I would keep my eyes on Katrina. Sometimes hers would open and she’d smile slightly as I spoke about my day. And while I did, after being prompted enough that I started speaking on my own, Murmur Lee would slip out.

  And that’s how it happened, how—with Frank singing, “Don’t change a hair for me,” or Ella: “Walk my way and a thousand violins begin to play,” or Rosemary: “You go to my head and you linger like a haunting refrain”—I would hold my wife’s hand, touch her face, kiss her cheek. The first time I did this, I hadn’t touched my wife in three months.

  After a week of being just so with her, I tried to take one more step in. On that bleak path, crowded by dying candlelight, lost in the sound of surf and silken voices, while Katrina slept, I took off my shirt and tie and slid out of my trousers. A good husband, a real husband, a man and not a coward, would lie down with his dying wife. I pulled back the white cotton sheet. Katrina’s skin was translucent, her bones a collapsed and brittle nest. She was drying up. I could have grabbed an arm, a leg, a toe, snapped it in half. Did she need me? Had she already traveled well beyond any comfort or love I could provide? I started to stroke her cheek, when a gust rattled a shutter. The sound startled me. I jerked, knocking over a cobalt bottle of some sort of potion Murmur Lee had concocted. Katrina didn’t respond. If I woke her, would she even know I was there? Did any of this matter? I pulled the sheet back up over her. I sat down in the chair beside the bed. What idiocy. Why, for even a few seconds, had I entertained the notion of behaving like a husband? I sat there staring at my nearly comatose wife until the candles burned down and darkness swept in.

  At first light, I woke. The porch was cluttered with Murmur Lee’s junk—plants and fabric and chains made of bells. The sea wind blew hard. I leaned forward, resting my head and arms on the mattress. Katrina was wide-awake. Not dead. Still not dead.

  “Good morning, baby,” I said.

  A slow skeletal smile spread across her twisted face. “Zachary, you’re still here!”

  “Of course I am,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.” She reached over and touched my hair. We both knew it was a lie.

  Other than one’s own inefficacy to prevent death, the worst thing about watching a patient die is knowledge. As a physician, I know what happens when the body begins to shut down. I know about opportunistic infections, and fluid building in the belly to the point that an emaciated patient looks pregnant, and tumors that gather in colonies like impenetrable opaque soap bubbles atop mastectomy scars, and lungs so crowded with cancer cells that the tissue itself begins to pop open. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop! But silently, unseen.

  What I don’t know, however—indeed, what none of us knows—is what truly happens once that last breath has been inhaled. Forget the near-death experiences, when people talk about the tunnel and light. The brain plays all sorts of tricks when it’s in distress. We don’t know what’s out there. Maybe faith is nothing more than the crutch of the weak. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe you just die.

  October 3, 1998. We knew it was nearly over. Even Lucinda—the baby who would be a hard-ass—got over herself long enough to come to the house and sit in the living room with Edith while Murmur Lee, Katrina’s parents, her older sister, Opal, and I watched over what proved to be Katrina’s final day.

  Howard, Katrina’s father, kept pacing and looking out at the Atlantic and uttering totally idiotic, inappropriate things, such as: “You need to check out that new steak place in town. They serve a filet that puts Bonanza to shame.”

  And her mother kept picking at a spot on her sweater sleeve until she’d successfully created a small hole. When she wasn’t picking, she was fussing with her daughter’s bedcovers and saying worriedly, “Where’s that ice? She needs more ice.” Or: “Don’t you think it’s time we gave her a sponge bath? I’m sure she’d feel better cleaned up.”

  As for Murmur Lee, she rubbed my wife’s feet with eucalyptus oil. She rubbed calendula oil through Katrina’s thin, brittle hair, which had slowly begun to grow back. She placed strips of soft raw silk in my wife’s palms.

  I sat in the chair next to Katrina’s bed and monitored her vitals. The objective measurements would see me through. The oils and lotions and silk would see Katrina through. I took a washcloth out of a bowl of ice water, wrung it out, placed it gently on her forehead. When I did, her lips moved. She was trying to speak. Her parents did not notice. But Murmur Lee did. We looked at each other, both of us beyond tears, both of us sensing that we had reached the edge of a high cliff and one of us would have to leap. I did. I stepped into the void, leaned over, placed my ear near my wife’s lips. “What is it, Katrina? What can I get you?”

  It took a long time. I am not a good man. But I am patient. And I admit that her faint respirations against my ear felt like salvation, which is a lot for a Jew to say. Howard was talking, her mom was jiggling the water pitcher, Murmur was warming oil between her hands, and Opal was staring with r
aw eyes at the floor. Katrina opened her mouth, a bald little baby bird, searching for a breath.

  I stroked her head, kept my ear to her lips.

  “Katrina, I’m here. Whatever you need, you let me know.” Something had happened. When I jumped off that cliff, I landed in her world. We were on the same path now. Yes, we were struggling along, but we were together. I felt a trot rising.

  She rasped so softly, I could barely hear her say, “Zachary.”

  “What?” I already knew. “Tell me.”

  Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

  “Katrina. Tell me.”

  She breathed out as hard as she could, I think, and then said, “Let . . . me . . . go.”

  I rubbed her cheek and finally did what had been threatened: I split in two. “You sure? Katrina, are you sure? Be really, really sure.”

  She squeezed my hand, opened her drug-hazed eyes, and saw me. I’m sure she saw me. “Please. Zach. Please.”

  “Oh, baby.” Suddenly, there was no oxygen in the room. There was no way to breathe. And no way out. Whatever anger and confusion and denial had sutured me together those past five months snapped wide open. My two cracked halves splintered. I was useless. A pile of thorns. “Okay, sweetheart. All right.” I rubbed her forehead and I rubbed her hands. I could hear our feet pounding down that path.

  Murmur leaned in close and asked, “Is it time?”

  I said yes, automatically, as if I were a zombie. I goddamned said yes. I took the eucalyptus oil from Murmur Lee. I stroked Katrina’s head, stared into her, deep down into her. She closed her eyes again. Murmur Lee shuttled my wife’s family off the porch. “Zachary and Katrina need some time together.” That’s what she told them.

  In those few irreversible minutes, I did it, goddamn it. I became a husband again. I removed the bedcovers and anointed my wife head to toe. As I rubbed the oil into her translucent skin, I whispered over and over, “I love you, Katrina. I love you. You are my life. I love you.” I massaged her twig neck and twig arms and twig legs and twig toes and twig fingers. Someone, I don’t know who, it must have been Murmur Lee, slammed in Sinatra and there he was, crooning that old saccharine tune “It Had to Be You.” Without thinking, I started singing along, softly at first and then fully, without shame, every single word. Yes, in the final moments of my wife’s life, I serenaded her.

  I sang and sang, and when finally there was not a patch of skin I hadn’t tried to soothe, I walked over to the stereo, restarted the song, turned up the volume, and sang some more. I filled the syringe with just enough morphine to help her leave this wasteland, this carnival built of pain. Beneath the song’s sweet façade, I heard our feet—Katrina’s and mine—barreling down the path. I pumped the drug into the portal taped to her leg—the veins in her hands had long ago collapsed. My hands—healthy, strong ones—shook. I recapped the needle, set it on the side table, crawled into bed beside my wife. I rested my head against her chest and counted. One. Two. Three. Four.

  Yes, four respirations. No doubt.

  Frank and I were about to launch into a new verse when the music was suddenly sucked from the room. And when the music ended, so too did the sound of our feet—beating, beating—down life’s path. I held my hand above Katrina’s mouth. Nothing, not one puff of air, shallow, scraping, or otherwise. I reached for her wrist, searched for a pulse. Even then, I pressed my face against her lips, praying a miracle would grace us, since science had failed us.

  There we stayed, a married couple in love, me holding her while from time to time I checked for a pulse, a respiration, anything.

  I did not hear Murmur Lee enter the room. All I heard was her voice: “Z, you gotta let go. It’s time. Z, it’s time.”

  No, it was not time. It would never be time.

  Even as I eased out of my wife’s bed and lifted the sheet—let it fall over her still face—I was fully aware that I could not take a single step down the other path, the one she would never grace.

  Murmur Lee Harp Reflects on Her Life as a Catholic, a Witch, a Parent of a Dead Child, the Wife of a Bad Man, and the Friend of a Tragic Couple

  I guess I’d better admit it: I was never a very good witch. Look at the evidence. Despite the fact that I sewed a lizard—which, as far as I could tell, had died of natural causes—into the pocket of my husband’s favorite pair of trousers, he still gave in to his bleakest tendency—that of an emotionally dead asshole—when Blossom got sick. I couldn’t rustle up one decent cure or potent prayer for my own daughter. And as for Zachary and Katrina? No amount of me dancing naked under a full moon eased either one of them.

  Also, I guess I should admit this: Maybe my talents as a witch were forever undermined by the fact that once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic. That’s bitter knowledge. But I think it’s the only thing that can explain my inefficacy as an earth mother and my holy bent to die in the months after Blossom’s death.

  Those were razor-wire days. I had to remind myself to breathe. That’s how deep my grief ran. If I could stop breathing for long enough, I, too, would take up the ghost and, thereby, be reunited with my baby. I performed this oddly voluntary act of inhaling and exhaling out of habit—not conviction—and I hated myself for not having the courage to stop the intake of breath altogether.

  So I resorted to courting death, but in the most Catholic of fashions. Suicide by accident. I drove too fast, under the guise of trying not to be late to wherever I was hurtling off to. I took fistfuls of sleeping pills chased with Wild Turkey, because surely I needed a good night’s sleep. I stood under trees in lightning storms.

  Oh, yes, lightning. I placed lots of faith in it. I did all the things that Florida natives know not to do in electric storms. I talked on the phone, stood on an aluminum ladder and pretended to be cleaning out my house gutters (yes, in a jaw-rattling thunderstorm), took showers, went swimming, ran over to the golf course with an umbrella and club in hand.

  Death by lightning was particularly handsome, since it conjured connotations of being struck by the hand of God. And truly no one, no one, could ever possibly connect a lightning strike with suicide.

  Nothing worked, of course. But there was an upside to my constant suicide-by-accident attempts. It kept me busy. I could—at any time of the day or night—slip into the garage, unearth the chain saw, and try to teach myself to use it as I cut down a perfectly fine kumquat tree. You should have seen me wander across Avenida Menendez at rush hour.

  What was the other thing I did? Oh, yes, I walked. I wandered the shore, just like Oster Harp, and I collected every manner of trinket the sea gave up: shells, polished bits of satiny glass, dead creatures. I prayed over them. They became my rosary, my idols, my reminders to breathe.

  I don’t know how long I tried to die. Or why I stopped. I guess the walking, walking, walking simply delivered me beyond a place where death seemed like a rational answer.

  This was the day. I woke predawn, to find myself smack-dab in the middle of one doozy of a lightning storm. The darkness pulsed as if it were being zapped with a cattle prod. What a good time to take a walk! I pulled on shorts and a tee and headed down to the water. Rain slashed my face. I couldn’t keep my eyes open because the wind was pushing the rain horizontally. The blowing sand scoured and stung my bare legs. I tripped over a coquina rock, fell, hit my head. When I hit, nothing gave. My skull took the entire force of the blow. There was no reason to get up. I lay there, the cold, salty surf rushing over me. I knew I was bleeding, because there is nothing quite like salt water lapping at a fresh wound. Maybe now I would finally die. And while I waited, I listened to all the world. The ocean’s jazz. The wind’s howling blues. The thunder’s insistent, surprising tympani. The silent phrasing of the rain.

  We’re not talking epiphany here. We’re simply talking about me lying in that zone where the earth doesn’t know if it wants to be the sea and the sea doesn’t know if it wants to be the earth, and I let their flux and confusion and want fill me up.

  As st
orms tend to do, it moved on. And the sun slit open the darkness. And I was better.

  That’s all that happened.

  And then Katrina got ill. By then, I had regained my faith in folkways. So I fed her secret soups, and slathered her with lotions and oils I’d conjured from rosemary and lemon balm and aloe, and stood over my stove for hours at a time, dying natural cloth with bloodroot, broomsedge, black oak, bayberry, blackberry, bracken, coreopsis, guava, grape, goldenrod, dandelion, elderberry, mulberry, sumac, horsetail, hibiscus, holly, onion, indigo, privet, palm, madder, marigold, camellia, nettle, nandina, juniper, gardenia, sorrel, Saint-John’s-wort, rush, Spanish moss, pomegranate, persimmon, tansy, zinnia, fig, peach leaf, tupelo, willow. I used many a mordant agent: alum, chrome, iron, caustic soda, even my own urine. As I did with Blossom, I cut the cloth with shears I’d blessed with basil water. I cut long strips, short strips, ovals, rectangles, hearts, zigzags. I tried to squeeze from growing things their essence, tried to transfer each of them from one living thing to another. It took Katrina nearly two years to die. Maybe if there had been no cloth, she would have only lasted a year. Maybe Blossom wouldn’t have seen the pink moon.

  But this is my point: Zachary was angry at me. That was good. I was more than happy to take that on, to deflect his bitterness and rage from Katrina, or whomever else he might land on.

  After Katrina’s memorial service, Z and I sat on his dock, drank beer, watched the sunset. I was dressed all in white—I never wore black when death lingered. He was gaunt and skinny. I don’t believe the man had eaten a good meal in six months.

  “Z, I’m taking some of your trousers home and hemming them. You’ve lost so much weight, your pants are dragging in the dirt.”

  He glared at the chaotic light of the setting sun and said, “Why’d you do it? Why were you so good to me? I’ve been such a rat bastard.”