Cat, feeling for something in her purse, says, “I knew she had cancer when I saw her after she came back from Florida. I could see it in her face.”
Later, in the lounge, Spence spins through all the TV channels, but there are no ball games on today. The Cards are having a good season, especially with Joe Magrane, a Kentucky boy, pitching. Spence settles on a game show, but in his mind he sees her garden, with the corn growing full, and he sees her coming to the house early in the morning with buckets of vegetables. Her straw hat is set cockeyed on her head, and her blouse is damp. She bends over in the shade of the big oak and sorts through handfuls of shell beans, picking out some dried ones to save for seed. The cat twines himself around her ankles and she talks to him softly and sweetly, praising him for his morning’s exploits. Behind her, the soybeans stretch out like a dusty green rug. The soybeans have been invaded by grasshoppers, and Spence is afraid of losing the crop. He never had a problem with grasshoppers before he switched to one-crop farming. His neighbor, Bill Belton, promised to spray the beans soon. Bill has a little cropduster plane and won’t charge Spence much. He has been kidding Spence about going up in the plane with him, but Lila won’t hear of Spence going up. Spence has thought about it, though, imagining what it would be like to see the fields from up high, with the pond like a glass eye and the buildings like dollhouses. He has never been up in an airplane.
He goes to the rest room and washes his teeth. Some of the potato is under the upper plate and starting to irritate the roof of his mouth. Earlier, he was in such a hurry to get back to Lila’s room he didn’t wash his teeth. On the commode, he smokes half a cigarette. For the last several years, he has limited himself to two cigarettes a day. But he can’t stop Lila. She puffs away like the smokestack in the industrial park beyond the soybean fields. Sometimes he watches her puffing and sees the smokestack puffing simultaneously, and they are like coordinated events in his life, events he has no control over. He runs water at the sink over the cigarette butt and drops it in the waste can.
In the hall, he runs into Guy Samson, a man he sees often at the feed mill. Spence used to rent Guy’s bulls.
“Spence, have you got somebody here?” Guy asks.
“My wife,” Spence says, feeling himself tremble. “She’s being operated on. Breast cancer.”
“That’s tough, Spence,” Guy says, shaking his head worriedly. “My mother-in-law’s here now with cancer, and she’s real bad. She’s hooked up to them machines in intensive care.”
“They’re hooking everybody up these days.”
“Ain’t that the truth. Does your wife have to have cobalt?”
Spence shudders. “They haven’t said.” He knows that with cancer they will give her cobalt treatments, and he has tried to put this out of his mind.
“That cobalt is what I’d be afraid of,” Guy says, nodding his head sympathetically.
Spence is shivering in the cold.
“Take it easy, Spence,” says Guy as they part.
The word “cobalt” stung Spence to the quick. He has known people who had cobalt. Claudine Turrell lost her hair and was sick from radiation poisoning, like the Japanese after the bomb. Claudine finally died, after suffering for weeks. The same thing happened to Bob Miller and Clancy Stone. And Lila’s friend Reba died only last year, after several rounds of cobalt treatments. It occurs to Spence now that Lila has not even mentioned Reba, as if it would be bad luck to say her name. Lila visited Reba in the hospital and came home describing Reba’s bald head and skinny neck—a picked chicken, Lila said sadly.
The doctors would say, “These cobalt treatments might give her a little time.” There is no choice about it, really. There are no significant choices most of the time. You always have to do what has to be done. It’s like milking cows. When their bags are full, they have to be milked.
6
Lila feels a twitching on the back of her hand, like a fly that has landed, but she is unable to swat at it. Then she feels the tube hanging out of her hand. She eases open her eyes, sees blurred faces and machines with hoses—like the electric milkers they used to have for the cows. Her eyes close and she sees green beans setting on blooms again and okra poking up like hitchhikers’ thumbs. A volunteer sunflower has sprung up amidst the peppers. There is a burning in her chest, a smoldering fire in a woodstove. Something bulky is there, a heavy weight holding her down. She is too weak to bring her hand up to touch it. A TV set, somewhere near, seems to be playing a story about a woman’s best friend dying of cancer. The friend’s name is Reba, and they play cards and go fishing together. Reba is smart and has a giggle like a little girl. One day Reba finds a lump the size of a golf ball in her breast. She claims it came there overnight, but she is lying. Reba kept it a secret, hadn’t wanted to admit it was there. She had such tiny breasts, not like Lila’s large, knotty breasts. A golf ball could hide in Lila’s unnoticed. Reba’s hair falls out and she wastes away to nothing and disappears beyond the garden.
Someone wheels a cart into the room. Lila hears tinkling glass, the sucking of rubber soles, voices bubbling. The sound of the TV story has faded away. Outlines of people grow sharper, faces peering quizzically at her. Lila does not want them staring at her. She must look awful.
7
All the way to the hospital the next day, Spence listens to tapes of the Blasters and Fleetwood Mac that Nancy brought for him. The Fleetwood Mac tape doesn’t even sound like Fleetwood Mac. He wouldn’t have recognized the group. The Blasters remind him of Jerry Lee Lewis. Spence saw Jerry Lee Lewis on a special recently. He looked bad—old and worn out.
He dreads seeing Lila, so he has fooled around half the morning, delaying the trip to Paducah. In Paducah, before going to the hospital, he looks for a gallon of windshield-washer fluid and has to go to a couple of places to compare prices. He pays four dollars for it. Later, in the Wal-Mart, where he stops to look for that wiper-blade replacement, he spots the same brand of washer fluid on sale for two dollars. He has blown two bucks. It makes him mad. All the coffee makers and video games and electric ice-cream parlors in the Wal-Mart are depressing. People are buying so much junk, thinking it will make them happy. And then when they can’t even make a path across the floor through their possessions, they have a yard sale. Spence can’t stand to waste anything. His parents never wasted a scrap. “Always be saving,” Pap told his grandchildren. “Hard times might come.” Cat fought him, pitching a fit once over two shelly beans left on her plate. These days, with all the new money, everyone has gone wild. Around here, there is nowhere to go, so people either get drunk or go crazy—sometimes both. Spence knows a guy whose wife left him and ran off to Biloxi, Mississippi, with a prefab-home builder whom she later shot dead. After that, the guy had a nervous breakdown and was sent off to the asylum. The children went to foster homes. Spence can’t imagine what the world is coming to. Yesterday, the newspaper reported two burglaries in town—a holdup at an all-night food store and a break-in at an old widow’s house.
In the Wal-Mart parking lot, he has a sudden queasy feeling. He can’t remember where he is. He sees rows and rows of cars. His brain reels. He must have a car here, but he can’t remember what car. He sees a Camaro, an Oldsmobile, rows of shiny silver and white cars, lined up like teeth. The vertical lines of street lamps tower in the landscape like defoliated trees. The parking lot seems slightly familiar, but he can’t place it. He may be thinking of one he has seen on TV. He stumbles onward and suddenly spots his car—the Rabbit that needs a tune-up. The little car seems to have aged ten years overnight. It is parked next to a black van with round windows and a pink-and-blue mural of an angel and a Jesus with a halo. Spence wonders what loony drives such a vehicle. Spence has never been comfortable in church. He is suspicious of most preachers and believes all the evangelists on the radio and TV are con artists. The night before, when Lila came out of the recovery room and was wheeled back into Room 301, she said to him, “Did you pray for me?” Her question startled him. They never spok
e of prayer, or heaven, but Spence knew she prayed for him, frequently, because she went to church and was afraid that because he didn’t they wouldn’t end up in heaven together. When he answered her, he felt a chill up his spine. “Sure,” he said, joking. “You know how good I am at saying grace.” She got tickled at him then but had to stop laughing because she hurt. “I’ve got a long row to hoe,” she said. She wasn’t fully awake.
8
Lila feels as though she has been left out in a field for the buzzards. The nurses are in at all hours, making no special effort to be quiet— a nurse who checks dressings, another one who changes dressings, a nurse with blood-thinner shots three times a day, a nurse with breathing-machine treatments, various nurse’s aides who check temperature and blood pressure, the cleaning woman, the mail lady, the priest and nuns from the hospital, the girls who fill the water jugs, the woman who brings the meal trays, the candy stripers selling toiletries and candy and magazines from a cart. Lila can’t keep track of all the nurses who come to check her drainage tube—squirting the murky fluid out of the plastic collection bottle, measuring the fluid intake and output, writing on charts. The nurses walk her around the entire third floor twice a day, accompanied by her I.V. bag, wheeling on a stand. Spence is nervous, bursting in anxiously, unable to stick around. And the girls are in and out, bringing her little things—a basket of flowers from the gift shop downstairs and some perfume. Lee and Joy brought a rose in a milk-glass bud vase. The church sent pink daisies. The old woman in the other bed has no flowers.
The surgeon told Lila she could live without a breast. “You couldn’t live without a head, or a liver, or a heart,” he said when he informed her in the recovery room that he had removed her breast. “But you can live without a breast. You’ll be surprised.”
“It would be like living without balls,” Lila replied. “You’d find that surprising too, but you could probably get along without them.”
Lila is not sure she said that aloud, and remembering it now, she is embarrassed that she might have, under the influence of the drugs. She’s surprised Nancy hasn’t said the same thing to the doctor’s face.
Lila hears the old woman in the other bed grunting and complaining. “I’ll not leave here alive!” she shouted when a nurse gave her a bath. “You’re wasting your time fooling with me.”
By the second day after her surgery, Lila is no longer hooked to the I.V. She plucks at the hospital gown in front where her bandage itches. The drainage tubes irritate her skin. She feels weak, but restless. “I’m afraid my blood’s too thin already,” she tells the nurse who comes with the blood-thinner shot.
“No, this is what the doctor wanted,” the nurse says.
“I’m getting poked so full of holes I’m like a sifter bottom.”
Besides the shots, there are the tests. They have wheeled her into the cold basement three times to run her through their machines. They have scanned her bones, her liver, her whole body, looking for loose cancer cells. Now the cancer doctor comes in to tell Lila the results of the tests: The cancer has spread to two out of the seventeen lymph nodes that were removed. Spence isn’t there yet, but Cat and Nancy fire questions at him. Lila’s head spins as the doctor explains that once the cancer has reached the lymph nodes, it has gone into the bloodstream, and then it can end up anywhere. The news doesn’t quite register.
“I’m recommending chemotherapy,” the doctor says.
“Is that cobalt?” Lila asks weakly. The doctor is young and reminds her of the odd-looking preacher who led the revival at church last year. The preacher had a long nose and wore a gold shiny suit.
The doctor says, “No. This will be a combination of three drugs— Cytoxan, methotrexate and 5FU.” He explains that she will have a chart showing two weeks of treatments, then a three-week rest period, then two weeks of treatments, and so on. She will get both pills and shots. Like dogs teaming up on a rabbit, Cat and Nancy jump on him about side effects.
“This particular treatment is tolerated very well,” he says. “That’s not to say there won’t be side effects. A little hair loss, a little nausea. Some people react more adversely than others.”
Lila can’t keep her mind on what he’s saying. “I’ve got plenty of hair,” she says, tugging at her curls. “And it’s coarse, like horse hair.” The last permanent she got didn’t take on top.
“You’re going to have to lay off the smoking too,” the doctor says, consulting his clipboard.
“They won’t let me smoke here,” Lila says. She bummed a cigarette from a visitor in the lounge the night before, but it burned her lungs and tasted bitter. She couldn’t finish it.
The cancer doctor says now, “Cigarettes will interfere with the chemotherapy.”
“See!” Nancy says triumphantly. “Doctor’s orders. And you wouldn’t listen to us.”
“These girls snitched my cigarettes,” Lila says to the doctor. “Is that any way to treat an old woman that’s stove up in the hospital?”
“Best thing for you,” the doctor says with a slight grin.
“And they’re telling me I can’t eat what I’m used to,” Lila goes on.
“She eats a high-fat diet,” Nancy says.
“Don’t listen to them,” the doctor says to Lila. “You eat anything you want to. If I was your age, I’d eat anything I wanted to.”
Lila sees Nancy bristle. Nancy says, “She’s eaten bacon and eggs every morning of her life and she has clogged arteries. What are you saying?”
“It’s too late for her to do anything about her diet. Cutting back on cholesterol won’t help at all. It’s simply too late. And it’s too late for you too,” he says. “How old are you?”
“Forty-two.”
“Too late.” He nods at Cat. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.”
“It might help you a little, but not much. They did autopsies on the soldiers who died in Vietnam, and those young boys—nineteen years old—already had plaque in their arteries.”
“Not all doctors agree with you about cholesterol,” Nancy says, shooting him a mean look.
As he scribbles on his chart, the doctor tells a complicated story about some experiments on Italian women conducted with the drugs he is prescribing. Nancy and Cat follow him out into the hall. Lila suspects they are keeping something from her. She doesn’t know what to think. The doctor didn’t say if she would be cured, and she was afraid to ask.
She can feel the wound draining, little drips that tickle. The nurses don’t use any kind of ointment on it. When she was a child, she had an infected place where she had stuck a stob in her shin. Her aunt Dove bought some Rosebud salve from a peddler and it healed the sore. Lila remembers when they used to rub dirt in wounds; dirt was pure, what grew things. Good dirt was precious.
In the other bed, the old woman yells at the nurse bringing her lunch tray.
“You can just take that right back, because I don’t want it.”
“If you don’t start eating for us, we’ll have to put you back on the I.V., Mrs. Wright,” the nurse says in a tone one would use to a child.
The nurse disappears into the hall and comes back with Lila’s dinner.
“Oh, no, not more food,” Lila says.
Spence, looking tired and cold, comes in a little later. She is still picking at her dinner.
“The doctor said it spread to two out of seventeen lymp’ nodes,” Lila tells him. Before she can respond to Spence’s shocked expression, Cat and Nancy return and tell him what the doctor said.
“He’s going to try chemotherapy,” Cat says.
“Cobalt?”
“No.”
Spence grins, the worry on his face lifting. “I was afraid they were going to do cobalt. I couldn’t sleep none all night, thinking about it.”
“No. Just shots and pills.”
Spence says, “What’ll it do?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“He was optimistic,” Nancy assures Spence.
&nbs
p; Cat repeats what the doctor said about the treatment. Lila, amazed that anyone can remember all that, notices that Cat doesn’t go into detail about the discussion on fat. Spence listens without comment.
Lila shoves her tray at Spence. “Here, does anybody want some of this turkey? I can’t go another bite.”
“That mess looks awful.” He turns up his nose.
“We’re going to the cafeteria,” Nancy says. “Why don’t you come with us, Daddy?”
He shakes his head. “I found this place with baked taters four for a dollar.”
“Four baked potatoes?” Cat asks.
“I just get two,” he says. “And a Coke and some peanuts.”
“You better go down to the cafeteria,” Lila says to him, “and get you some meat and vegetables. I can’t say much for their cooking, though.”
“You can say that again,” Mrs. Wright in the other bed says, her voice calling through the curtain partition. “They call this turkey and dressing? It ain’t even Thanksgiving. We had better grub at the poor-house when I used to work in the kitchen.”
Lila says, “You better eat it, though, to keep body and soul together.”
“I told ’em I wasn’t eating a bite and I won’t. I’ll not leave this hospital alive anyway.”
Spence and Cat and Nancy grin at each other. Cat whispers to Spence, “She’s been going on like that all morning.”
A nurse says, “I’ll be back to check your drainage when you’re done eating.”
“They never leave you alone,” says Lila. “All night long they come in. ‘Mrs. Culpepper? Time to take your temperature.’ ‘Mrs. Culpepper? Time to check the drainage.’ They come in here and wake me up just to refill the water jug.”
“They go by their rules,” Nancy says. “They don’t care about you as a person.”
“There’s one nurse that’s cute as a bug’s ear,” Lila says. “She tickles me. She’s got a cute disposition and the littlest feet.”
“Isn’t Mom doing great?” Cat says to Spence with a grin.
Nancy Culpepper Page 9
