Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  He woke up thinking he was glad she was gone. She was too bossy for him and too moody and unpredictable. Adam had gone to college for three years. He had a good job. He had a new Jeep Cherokee and an apartment with a new bed and a sofa and three good chairs. He had fifteen hundred dollars his father’s insurance had sent him when his father died. He had a brother in law school and a mother who didn’t bother him too often. He had a future in the health care provider world. He didn’t have to sit around and wait for Janisa to decide to get in a good mood or have a dream come true of being a television anchorwoman. He had a life and he was going to live it. One thing about working for Hospice. You learned to appreciate your life.

  I really liked that old man, Adam thought, as he eased his legs out of the bed and down onto the floor and walked naked into the bathroom and began to run the water in the shower. He was a strong old man and he held on. She’s strong too, even if she is as scared as a bird. He stepped into the shower and felt the soft warm water caress his skin. Like her skin, so soft. She holds on like she is scared to death. There is danger in this. I won’t even think about it.

  He got out of the shower and thought about the old man’s death instead. One of the old man’s grandsons was a ship’s captain on the Gulf of Mexico. He was the strongest of the men who had sat by the bed. He was as strong and quiet as the old man. The old man was quiet because his throat was paralyzed but the grandson was quiet because he had lived so long on the water and seen so much weather and such strange skies and many whales. The grandson took Adam’s side of the bed and held the old man’s hand. He did not ask questions and make the old man squeeze his hand to say yes or no. He just held his hand and was quiet and still.

  About six in the afternoon the old man’s second son came into the room and sat on the other side of the bed. He was the tallest of all the men. He was quiet too. He removed the bandages from the hand the old man had skinned the last time he stood up and tried to walk across the room. The son took the bandages off the hand and turned on the lights and examined the wound. “Goddamn it all to hell,” he said. “This is getting infected. Get me some hydrogen peroxide, Jake. In there, in the bathroom.” The grandson got up and brought the hydrogen peroxide. The old man’s daughter came into the room and stood by the bed and watched. “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “Treat this goddamn wound,” the son said. He opened the hydrogen peroxide and poured it over the wound. The old man winced and shuddered. The daughter shook her head and moved back two paces. The grandson didn’t move. The son opened a jar of aloe vera salve the oldest son had brought in from Texas the day before and began to spread it over the wound. “This will fix you up, Dad,” the son said. “Goddammit, they’re letting the goddamn thing fester.”

  Adam looked at the daughter. She returned his look and just kept shaking her head. Adam filled the syringe with water and put a few drops in the old man’s mouth. Then he opened one of the glycerin swabs and began to gently swab the old man’s lips. The son bandaged the hand with clean bandages. The grandson sat back down and took the old man’s good hand. The daughter stood by the door.

  “Turn the goddamn light off, Sister,” the son said. “It’s in his eyes.”

  She turned off the light. Adam pushed the button on the record player the oldest son had set up by the bed. They had been playing old Eddy Arnold albums and a three-record set of Christian hymns. “I come to the garden alone,” Christy Lane started singing. “While the dew is still on the roses. And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the son of God discloses. . . .”

  When the old man could still talk a little and respond he had liked that song the most of anything Adam played for him.

  The daughter came back into the room. She lay down on the bed beside her father and started saying something under her breath. It was the only thing she said when she was in the room the last three days. It was some sort of Tibetan chant. She had told Adam what it was but he had not understood what she was talking about.

  Juliet had gone back to her house in Pascagoula to get ready for the funeral. She had washed her hair and rolled it up on heated rollers. She had put on makeup. Liquid foundation and powder and rouge and eyebrow pencil and eyelash thickener and blue eye shadow and lipstick liner and peach lipstick. She had put on her best dark blue suit and the pearls her grandmother had given her for her birthday. She put on black silk stockings and her highest black leather heels. She found a pair of black gloves to wear. She screwed small pearl earrings into her ears. Then she took them out and put in some amethyst earrings her husband had bought her once in New Orleans.

  He came into the room. He wouldn’t look at her. He hadn’t looked at her since he started screwing his secretary. He had married Juliet when she was eighteen and he was nineteen. They had been allowed to get married because Juliet was pregnant with their oldest son. His father had been the mayor of Pascagoula. He was embarrassed by what his son had done. He had always been embarrassed by his children. He had died thinking they were failures because none of them had grown up to be governor of the state of Mississippi. Juliet’s husband was not a failure. He had made a lot of money running dry cleaning establishments all up and down the Gulf Coast. He was fucking his secretary because he was a workaholic and she was the only person who would listen to him talk about his business. Juliet had lost interest in the business. She made her own money running a catering business. He wanted to look at her. He wanted to get rid of his secretary who wasn’t even very pretty and make a fresh start with Juliet but he couldn’t figure out where to start. “You ready to go?” he said. “The boys are in the car.”

  “Just let me turn off the lights,” she answered. She didn’t look at him. She walked around the room turning off the lights. He went out of the room and down the stairs. He was waiting by the car to open the door for her but she wouldn’t let him open it. She moved around him and opened it herself and got in and put on her seat belt. The boys were in the backseat in their suits. She was proud of them. They were going to be pallbearers. There were going to be eight pallbearers. The old man’s three sons, his three grandsons, and her two boys. The other great-grandsons were too young to carry a coffin.

  Her husband got into the driver’s seat. They pulled out of the driveway and began to drive to the old man’s funeral.

  The old man was being buried in a country cemetery five miles outside of Mobile. He had moved his headstone three times trying to make sure he was buried in an all-white cemetery. Now it sat beneath two live oak trees on a rise of land that had been a farm only four years before. It was a brand-new cemetery. There were scarcely twenty graves on the barren rise. The huge granite slab the old man had mined out of the Kentucky hills sat squarely in the center of a forty-plot area he had purchased for twelve thousand dollars.

  To the right of the plot and down half a mile on the main road was the new funeral parlor where the old man had arranged to be pumped full of formaldehyde and laid out for viewing.

  Juliet arrived after all the other cousins. Her husband had gotten lost trying to find the cemetery and funeral parlor. He was in a sweet mood, however, and did not seem irritated about having to miss a whole day’s work in the middle of the week. He held her arm as they walked into the funeral parlor. He stood by her side as she embraced her cousins and her sisters and her brothers and her aunts and uncles. He was kind and sweet to her grandmother. He patted men on the back and embraced women. He was a part of the family. Secretary or no secretary there was not going to be a divorce in this family as long as he could help it. He loved his family. His family meant as much to him as his business. On this day, staring down into the coffin holding his powerful old grandfather-in-law, he thought that his family meant more to him than his business. He was proud of his sons as they took their places beside their great-uncles and cousins and closed the casket and picked it up to carry it to the waiting Cadillac. They were crying as they lifted it. He was proud of them for crying. He took Juliet’s arm and led her to the car. T
his time she let him open the door for her. She let her skirt slide up her legs as she settled herself in the seat and she let him look and keep on looking. She opened her legs slightly instead of crossing them. She let him wonder.

  The old man’s brothers were there. One was a physician and the other was a general in the air force. The old man’s first cousins were there. The one who had been a federal judge. The one who had been a naval commander. The one who was a newspaper editor. The cousin who had gone crazy and tried to kill his mother was dead. So was the one who had been the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives. So was the girl cousin who had been a civil rights activist before there was a word for such a thing. All his first cousins who could walk were there and two who were in wheelchairs.

  His second cousin who had given away his land and gone to a seminary when he was forty years old read the sparse, cold, Presbyterian burial service. The only music was a song played on a guitar by one of the old man’s granddaughters’ husbands.

  Juliet stood behind her grandmother’s chair. While the song was being played she looked around and behind herself. There was a sea of suits with some women among them. The old man had been a man’s man. The men he had led and organized and lectured and set an example for were gathered on the hill as if in regiments. Juliet had not known so many people would come to the service. She had not known that many men could find their way to the obscure funeral parlor the old man had chosen for his laying out and burial. As she looked she saw Adam move to the side of one group of men. He stood alone on a small rise, wearing a beautiful dark blue suit with a white shirt and a tie. He looked like a movie star in the midst of a field of bankers. He looked right at her and nodded his head but he did not smile.

  When the service was over and the people began to leave, Juliet left her family and walked over to Adam and took his arm. They walked off together toward a rise of land where a yellow Caterpillar tractor stood waiting to shovel the pile of waiting dirt upon the old man’s grave. A young black man sat on the tractor seat reading a newspaper folded into an inconspicuous size. He had taken off his cap and sat with his face and head bathed in sunlight. He was the only other black person at the funeral.

  “I didn’t know you’d come,” Juliet said, still holding on to Adam’s arm. It was very strange to be with him like this, in sunlight, dressed up, after all the nights they had sat beside the bed. After the strange afternoon, which already seemed like a dream, bathed in unreality.

  “I loved Mr. Manning,” Adam said. “I thought a lot of that old man. I’ve never been so sad when someone died. Someone I’d taken care of.”

  “How many have you taken care of?” she asked. She kept on holding on to his arm. She had not expected to see him again.

  “Too many,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”

  “Come over to Pascagoula and work for us,” she said. “We have three businesses down there. I could find a lot of things for you to do.” She felt in her pocket for a packet of business cards she had for her catering business. She knew it was there because the last time she had worn the suit was when she catered a party where she had to get dressed up. She extracted a card and handed it to him. He moved away from her and opened his billfold and found one of his own cards and handed it to her. They stood like that, holding each other’s cards. The boy on the tractor started up the motor. He began to drive very slowly and respectfully toward the open grave. Not many people were left by the grave. The old man’s daughter and her sons and her grandchild were there. The old man’s sons were there and some of the grandsons. Juliet’s sons had walked toward the car with their father. He stopped on the road and watched his wife and Adam walk to the grave and join the ones who were going to stay until the dirt was shoveled on the grave. He felt a stirring, as of some terrible unease or something he could not understand. He took a deep breath and began to walk back toward the grave.

  Juliet and Adam each took a handful of dirt and dropped it carefully on the coffin. They took in deep breaths of the clean country air. They waited for the tractor to finish the job.

  “Oh, mani, padme hum, oh, mani, padme hum,” the daughter was saying under her breath as the tractor pushed the dirt into the hole. Then she stopped saying it and followed her grandchild over to the huge granite stone. It said MANNING in large letters. On the lip of the slab were chiseled other names. They were the names of the old man’s male ancestors in a line going back to 1750 when the first ancestors had left Scotland and come to the United States.

  Juliet’s husband came to her side and took her arm. “We better go,” he said. “Someone’s got to be at your uncle’s to greet people when they come.”

  “There are plenty of people there,” she answered. “Grandmother’s there. They’re coming to see her.”

  “Your wife was the mainstay,” Adam said. “She was a champ. I guess she needs some rest now.”

  “Adam’s coming over and see about applying to my business,” Juliet said. “You know I’ve been needing an overseer for the out-of-town trips.”

  “Good,” her husband said. “I’m sure that will be fine.”

  The old man had had a saying in the fifties and sixties when the civil rights battles were going on. “Turn the niggers loose and the women will be right behind them,” he had said. He would laugh uproariously when he said it. Many people who had heard him say that remembered it when it happened.

  II

  It was several weeks before Adam drove over to Pascagoula to talk to Juliet about the job. First he was sent by Hospice to watch a man who was dying of skin cancer. It had started with an untreated patch over the man’s ear, which his children had begged him to have treated. They kept saying that. “I told him to go to a doctor about it,” the youngest daughter kept saying. “We told him a thousand times not to let that go.”

  Now it had spread everywhere. The man smelled terrible. It was all Adam could do to stay in the room with him. Everyone in the family hated to stay with him. They also seemed to hate each other.

  After the third night Adam went to see his boss and told him he couldn’t stay with the man another night. “It smells so bad,” he said. “I think I’m going to faint.”

  “There’s no one else to go,” the boss said.

  “I won’t go back,” Adam said. “I need some time off. I’m burned out. I can’t do it anymore.”

  “Take a week.” The boss had seen this before. There was no good in arguing with it. “How long do you think it will be before he dies?”

  “A long time. He’s not near to death.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have gone in. I’ll reevaluate it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Take a week. Call me when you’re ready.”

  That afternoon Adam went to his bank and found a young man his age and talked to him. He wore his suit and looked the man in the eye and kept insisting. Finally he got a promise that he liked. He stood up and shook the man’s hand and went home and called Juliet.

  “I want to buy part of a business,” he said. “I don’t want to work for anyone.”

  “Then come on over. We’ll talk about it.”

  She told her husband about it that night. “The guy who nursed Granddaddy’s coming to see about my business,” she told him. “I might let him come in and help me run it. I need some help now that the boys won’t do it. He may want to buy into it. Maybe I’ll sell it to him.”

  “You don’t need to go getting into any business with black guys.”

  “The girls who work for me are black. They’d like a black man for a boss. I might sell it to him if he wants it.”

  “You don’t need to have a business, Juliet. We have plenty of money. Come back and help me with the stores.”

  “I want my own money. I don’t want to work for you.” She left the room and went out into the yard and lit a cigarette, thinking about having to work with his secretary-whore. Fuck you, she was thinking. Fuck your business and your money and your dick
.

  She was waiting on the porch of her house when Adam drove up in his Jeep Cherokee. She was sitting on the steps in a long flowered skirt. The azaleas were in full bloom all around the porch and the trees were green with splendor. So he came to her.

  They went downtown to the building where she had her kitchen. Three young women prepared the food and a young man made the deliveries. Their main business was delivering lunches to businesses in the area. Also, they catered parties. When there was a party, Juliet went with them to the house and directed things and sometimes worked as a waiter.

  “So that’s it,” she said, when she had shown him the operation. “It’s pretty simple really. Let’s take some sandwiches and go look at the water. Do you like turkey? That turkey looked good, didn’t it?”

  “Turkey’s fine.” He waited at her desk while she packed a lunch in a cardboard box. Then they got back into his car and drove to a deserted pier outside of town and walked out on it and sat down and began to eat the lunch.

  “So what would you want me to do?” he asked.

  “Help me expand the business. I need a salesman. Someone to go around and tell people what we’re doing. Help out at the parties. Dress up and be a waiter. I don’t know. Come in. Be my partner. Help me make some money. My boys used to help me but now they’re busy with their music.”