CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive
D.E. Steward
Her hair had become too sparse to hold a pin
Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge
She died in her sleep at one-ten, an hour and ten minutes into the far half of her ninety-first year
The first afternoon, an Astros-Marlins spring training game
A carefully precise nurse phone in the night
Florida fluff-cumulus spring skies. Scrub jays, grackles
A half hour after she died, helped an aid wrap her in a shroud, kissed her forehead, covered her face, lifted her from bed to gurney, pushed her down long halls to the nursing home morgue for the cremator in the morning
Ospreys nesting in the light stanchions far out in left-center
Two days later - left for the mourning trip that afternoon - went back to clear out her alcove, family pictures, the sweater her sister knitted her, her watch, shoes, the rest for the home's common pool. Many old people have no idea what clothes they have on
Behind and above the quick slashing symmetry of major league ball
Almost all are women, many in wheelchairs, all want more than anything else to leave. Forgetful of time, their possessions, the day of the week, the seasons, even their families
Thousands of coots that second day fussing around in tight rafts
Five months after her stroke able to eat minced food but her speech diminished, unable to stand, one hand useless. Incontinent. Happier to be nursed and cosseted than she allowed
More than a dozen basking alligators that afternoon
Her mind far out beyond her capabilities, although like a child she smiled at attention given her, waved and grinned to all while coming in the lobby and down the hall as her gurney was pushed into the home from the hospital
Pied-billed grebes, blue-winged teals, small rafts of lesser scaups
Her voice incrementally slurred, a good bit of what she said in her last weeks tacitly not understood and toward the very end even unremarked
The gantries off to the southeast on the across the Banana River
Toward the very end communication seemed not to matter to her at all
A shuttle in place for launch
The ultimate isolation, to talk and not be understood, to demand and not be heard, what alternative except to scorn and die
Double-crested cormorants, a common moorhen, a few white pelicans
"Who would have imagined my life would end like this?" to an old friend visiting her three days before the end. Her next sentence, "I wish I had gotten to know you better"
Brown pelicans, the usual three species of gulls, mallards
Often took her in an elevator to the unoccupied upper floor where we sat knee-to-knee in the quiet and tried to talk
Fleeing the familiar, time away, a mourning trip
Sometimes she would wave bravely as I left, often gave the same hesitant gesture when she watched me arriving. Often she would be in her wheelchair in the hallway by the nurses' station
Relief away from the usual
One nurse, a Chinese Jamaican woman of authority and calm, scolded her as she was beseeching me to take her out of there, "This is your home now, you are staying with us and we will always take care of you"
Awe at what has been launched from Cape Canaveral in a single generation
She answered, "You're right, thank you." They liked her there. She thanked them when the did things for her
The big barrier island so empty just up the coast, sawgrass swamp lagoon
But often loudly enough for many to hear but to no one in particular, of the clearest things she would annunciated, "I have a house, my own house. That is where I want to go"
Great blue herons, little herons, tricolored herons
Find her light two-pronged hack with her tools there, its prongs worn down to stubs, the left shorter than the right. She was unnaturally right-handed, switched violently by the nuns when she was six
Yellow-crowned night heron, green-backed heron, reddish and great egrets
Gardening was one of her persuasions after she was widowed in 1944. Except for an iris bed she did not cultivate flowers
Wood storks, sandhill cranes, glossy and white ibises
Coming home, in from college or a trip or to visit, typically she would be standing rigid in her vegetable garden or asparagus bed with that hack
Roseate spoonbills, flamingos, gorgeous black-necked stilts
Alert and looking full face at me the instant I appeared. It was extremely rare to catch her unguarded or unawares
People who walked here next walked on the moon and nobody cares
With those crazy, accusatory eyes, without smile or gesture, her hands atop the handle of that hack
Florida's banal urbanity, motels, food joints, the beach
After her breakdown the summer of her husband's April suicide, her bouts of paranoia were a constant
Florida highways, Florida skies
My brother and I could always see it in her eyes
Ruddy turnstones, semi-palmated plovers, willits, lesser yellowlegs
Her insanity lurking, there in her Strindbergian attacks on our father, but as child I rarely saw her that way because I would be shuttled out of the room by somebody or sent upstairs
Swash wonder, in and out, the empty Canaveral beaches
The two voices from under my bedroom door, around the corner and down the stairs. His beery pleas
Single spotted sandpipers now and then while driving north
Hectoring my brother and me after her chief object of control was no more
Northern harriers, red-shouldered hawks, one short-tailed hawk
Childhood years of arguing, justifying, and watching her eyes go button-round and crazed, that when her paranoia had passed hours on, lashed and lidded again, intelligent and calm
In the top of the citrus country, a woman from Sorrento's groves
Her awful accusations most difficult to handle in the loneliness of coming home from school. Fleeing to school to get away, my brother would curl up and plead stomach aches
A daughter of Campanian citrus warbrided to Florida citrus
Suiting whatever was her immediate design, sometimes she would apologize, most of the time obdurately held her ground
A grove through the pines off State 11 north of De Land
She always tried and she sometimes had a wonderful way of laughing at futility
Not far north of where it forks from US17
Between bouts with bitter resentments and angry flash-outs
17 was a fifties north-south road slower than 301
If she'd only been honest, if she'd shared
There in Volusia County, a darting pair of swallow-tailed kites
Easier if I'd been a trusted son instead of always a player, entering on cure, from stage left
Running out of northeast Florida through St. Augustine
She tried, and in much of her mothering, like any mother, in the sum of things she was most positive than not
Coming up on Jacksonville's startling skyline
Complained tiresomely about loneliness in her forties, her hair and teeth in her fifties, her liver spots in her sixties, her rheumatoid aches in her seventies, her eyes in her eighties. After she turned ninety, one say she sobbed, "What a miserable being I am"
Florida's blankness stuns
In her mothering, hypersolicitous about dry feet, colds, warm clothes, propriety, swimming safety, and jobs, but she let me go early, probably to get me out of the house, to hitchhike to Ft. Lauderdale at fifteen and spring breaks from then on, to hitch west at sixteen when I got no farther than the westslope of the Sierras and back
Condo culture, golf, cars, trash
Hitched to LA at seventeen and stood frozen at first site of the Pacific, stood for half an hour on the bluff at the top of the ramp from Ocean Boulevard to the Coast Highway
Golf's nirvana, the negation of the other
Gerry Mulligan in a club in Pacific Palisades one night of that trip. Bar outside, the ocean horizon behind under the moon, Mulligan's quartet close-up close-in, cigarette smoke coloring his sax to copper swirls
History and place unimportant, no politesse, nothing nontopical
Out of the house to avoid countering her sometimes sadistic goads with my own vitriol
Savannah
On and on and on each time as far away as possible, but would always come back
Up SC170, rural a few years ago, now it's just more Hilton Head
She often seemed perplexed and angry and who I was and what I was about
In Beaufort across the estuary from Parris Island
Her last afternoon alive, a man with a dead black wig was about to entertain with what he announced as "big band songs." When I began to wheel her out of the recreation room to go off somewhere to talk, she said she wanted to stay to hear him and we said goodbye
Red-breasted mergansers on Beaufort's tide in direct morning light
Her strange stiff wave, but without looking at me as I parked her wheelchair toward the singer with the wig
Cedar waxwings in a high pecan a few yards on
She apparently had no inkling, but then who knows, generally she was never taken unawares
A clapper rail for an instant on the marsh, tide already out
The nurse's precise phone call in the middle of the night
Bluebirds nesting around a large marshside grassy square
It wasn't the Chinese Jamaican nurse. There were many, most congenial, most harried from overwork. The American ones almost all mightily overweight
Live oaks, Spanish moss
Many of the nurses would go outside by the loading dock to smoke, where her body was pushed on a gurney the morning after she died
Beaufort was a Huguenot colony in the early fifteen hundreds
The nurses' aids, many West Africans and Haitians, and a Pole, an Ethiopian, were the most compassionate
Self-contained Episcopalian serenity
The summer of her husband's suicide my mother tried to kill my brother and me but didn't manage it
In a Southern Baptist world before Charlston
He was barely four. We were almost unscathed, some minor cuts and burns. When she gave up she collapsed
Black vultures and turkey vultures wheeling over swamp forests
In our teens she told us that she had planned to kill herself too that night, that she was going to burn the house down with herself inside
Kingfishers, red-bellied woodpeckers, mockingbirds and fish crows
She told me in her later years that she would never, never be a suicide
The sheer splendor of the esturarial coast
If I'd been older than seven when she tried to kill my brother and me, now I realize now that I would have attacked her in order to survive
Charleston, not New York, could have become the metropolis
She put us to sleep in the same bed together than night. It was confusing, we didn't know why
Charleston lacked a Hudson Valley but it's hinterland was plantation rich
We woke with the mattress burning. When we got up and ran she came after us with a kitchen knife
But for slavery. So many things but for slavery
A long, thin carving knife with a black-bone handle. We ran from her. She'd torn out the phone before she started to kill us
The forebears of almost half of black America landed in Charleston
When we ran, she went in and out of her resolve, broke off into screams and wails. It went on so long into the night that I remember when hiding with my brother in the back of a closet the snug scratchy hanging darkness of wool in the closet even made me want to sleep
Who arrived enchained treated like valuable animals
Deeper in the night between hiding from her and pleading with her, left my brother hidden well between a wall and the coal bin's boards and made it outside and away across fields and through an orchard in the moonlight to a neighbor's farm
Generations of Americans sanctioned slavery
She tried, often ineffectually falling short
Generation after generation, black men beaten and black girls and women fucked
She was locked in a room at another neighbor's. Glimpsed her crazy eyes through a tall and narrow four-paned window next day, didn't see her face again for a year
The boys in slavery whipped and buggered
She was in an asylum for a year and a half as a "depressive indigent"
Soft spring evening into dusk at the ferry slip for Cape Romain
Indescribably fortunate that no criminal charges were filed. Either the neighbors got together to keep it from the police or she was coherent enough to cover up what had really happened from the neighbors, or both. I told them the truth, but I was seven years old
A marbled godwit, semipalmated plovers, three oystercatchers
Sometimes lucky and often ineffectual, common qualities among those who moved to the country from New York in that generation. The stalled artists, the writers who didn't write, the aspiring chicken and beef-cattle farmers, the clumsy fixer-uppers of old houses who liked antiques
A long way up the coast to get out of the South
They would visit one another's houses in post-Prohibition silliness to drink a lot and talk about drinking, "the locals," and "fixed incomes"
Crying very little, very infrequently, considering that she is gone
Smoked, gossiped, discussed wartime rationing. It was the people who had always lived there who were sturdy, resourceful, consequential
Bereaved relief that the wicked witch is dead
Depression Americans lived something like Europeans, passive about what came at them down the line
A single wild turkey low over the interstate, Halifax County, NC
The Depression was the best excuse to fail that Americans have ever had
On the lawn downslope from Jefferson's Capitol in Richmond
Now it's this century-hinge era of peculiarly fatalistic and ruthless opportunism
She arrived in Virginia fifty years ago to reclaim her sons
Perhaps it's the middle generation, mine, that's been unusual
She came back to claim us with stubborn dedication
In her late eighties, when it first came to her that she could no longer live alone, she said that it was "only the beginning," and that she would "be a great deal more trouble before it's all over"
She made it up to us with the rest of her life
Which she was
It's all over. Her ashes are at home
She was put to bed the night she died, in the dusk that vernal equinox evening, by one of the gentle nurses' aids, with whom she talked a bit before the aid turned off the light and left the room