Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  Stand here on a hot sunny day and the shade-trees above your head, the breeze and the cool stream comprise a kind of natural air-conditioning.

  The smells are wonderful.

  Wet rock and sediment. Grass and trees.

  And roses.

  From up out of the grasslands on the eastern side wild roses creep the rock. I don’t know how they got there. You see them more often along the roadsides here.

  But roses are hardy. They’ll grow practically anywhere. And they’ll keep growing. They’re hellish to unroot.

  These are not the kind of roses you’d be likely to send your mom on Valentine’s Day. They’re prickly as porcupines for starters. The flowers are much smaller than the ones you see in the florist shops and many fail to open. But as I say, roses are a hardy species and these always seemed to want my ledge, my rock. Maybe it’s the scent of water that draws them. Maybe they want over the rock to the waterfall and the stream. I don’t know. But the smell that drifts back and forth on the breeze up here puts most store-bought varieties to shame.

  Roses were Aphrodite’s flowers.

  When Rita started to fail on me I came here quite a lot.

  Bed sores bloom too. They open from the center outwards. Pressure ulcers the doctors call them. Across the bony areas of the body especially—the spine, pelvis, heels—they appear first as abrasions and then blister up white and then slowly become shallow and then deep craters that need to be drained and packed and peel back healthy skin along with the dead and dying, opening across the flesh like wet red flowers. Their scent is foul. You clean them with saline, moisturize them with corn starch and try to keep the ulcer moist and the surrounding skin dry. And still they spread.

  Bone-cancer patients like Rita see a lot of them.

  People like me who suddenly find themselves caregivers see a lot of gauze pads and disposable rubber gloves and wet-to-dry dressings and foam wedge mattresses—trying to fight off the twin enemies of bacteria and the sheer press of gravity. Sometimes we win. Sometimes the patient goes into remission, can get out of bed and walk around again and if the ulcers aren’t too bad and have been carefully attended-to they disappear with time. The bloom fades, shrivels into scarred puckered flesh.

  That first time I mostly remember turning her every two hours, even at night, even in her sleep and I remember waiting for the nurse to arrive in the morning so I could get some sleep myself. I remember changing her bedclothes and dressing the wounds which weren’t too bad this time and washing her with warm water and collecting her dry fallen hair off the pillow when she wasn’t looking.

  Days into weeks. Weeks into months. Scoring dope for her in Plymouth against the nausea, feeling slightly old to be buying pot but determined. Riding with her in the ambulance for her chemo treatments in the city until finally they took and I had some semblance of my Rita back again, a brave pale wife who could walk with the aid of a walker and then later with a cane and who insisted on doing the cooking and light housekeeping even though I’d gotten pretty good at both by then.

  I’d be writing in the study—the spare bedroom, never used except by the occasional guest—working on yet another of the Jack Pace mystery novels which were our sole bread and butter now that Rita wasn’t up to teaching a mob of third-graders anymore, writing yet one more slim paperback which would earn us fifteen grand if we were lucky, maybe another fifteen abroad and I’d hear her out in the living room, the Electrolux roaring, knowing she was vacuuming the damn rug with one hand while she clung to the walker with the other. I couldn’t stop her. The only time we’d fight was when I’d try to stop her.

  I lived in dread of her falling. I dreaded it constantly.

  But she didn’t fall. And I suppose the excercise and the familiar feeling of usefulness were good for her because she got better. Once she switched to the cane we started going for walks together, ranging farther and farther afield until one bright hot August morning she asked me to take her up to the rocks on the Kaltsas property. You remember the place, she said. Of course I did. I’d come there so often during her illness I’d practically worn a track there. The ledge always seemed to comfort me.

  “You sure you’re up to the climb?”

  “No.” She smiled. “But I’m pretty sure I can make it along the stream. Even just a wade in the pool would be nice. Come on. Let’s see what I’m up to.”

  She was wearing jeans and a faded denim workshirt and a red scarf wrapped and tied around her head. Her hair hadn’t come back the way we’d hoped it would. Her face was still drawn and the lines around her mouth and eyes cut deep. I thought she was beautiful. My hippie-chick at forty-seven.

  “Lead the way,” I told her.

  She was right. She made it upstream slowly but without much difficulty and about an hour later, around ten or so, we were standing by the pool.

  “I’m beat,” she said. “Let’s sit a while.”

  “Still want to go up top there?”

  “Sure. In a while.”

  We sat down at the edge of the pool and she slipped off her canvas U.S. Keds—no Nikes or Adidas for us—rolled up her jeans and slid her feet into the water. She smiled.

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Cold?”

  “A little. Feels good, though.”

  I did the same. The water was icy at first but you got used to it. We splashed our feet a little and leaned back on our elbows into the dappling morning sunlight and watched it play over the water and talked about my latest book. I was having plot-points problems and Rita was always fine at helping. Once we were satisfied that we’d gotten Jack Pace out of his latest jam somewhat realistically she sat up and said, know what? I’m going in.

  “You are?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’ll freeze to death.”

  She smiled and started unbuttoning her shirt. “No I won’t.”

  She slipped it off her shoulders. Old habits die hard. She still refused to wear a bra. She unzipped the jeans.

  “Well hell, if you can I can.”

  “There you go.”

  She got hold of the cane and stood and used it for balance while she slid one leg and then the other out of the jeans and then pulled her panties down over her hips which were still bony from weight-loss. You could count her ribs and along her backbone were a few pink scars. I got out of my own clothes and she stepped into the water cane and all and turned to me smiling and then glanced up and said hey.

  “What?”

  “Look at that.”

  I turned to where she was pointing, to the ledge above—my ledge—and saw a small white cat looking down at us. Wide-eyed, curious. Two naked humans about to purposely freeze themselves half to death in cold water. What’s that all about? I laughed.

  “That’s Lily,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Lily. Liz Jackson’s cat. Liz had her along the day she stopped by with that casserole for us, remember?”

  “I don’t. . . .”

  “Yeah, I guess you were pretty out of it. She jumped up onto the bed with you. You petted her for a while. Got her purring. Then you fell asleep.”

  “I did?”

  “You did.”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “She’s just your basic mutt. Liz got her from the shelter. But you’re right, she is.”

  And perched there high on the lip of rock like some animate Egyptian stone statue, a small white shorthair, poised and slim, she was beautiful. Utterly still except for her eyes moving over us, alert to whatever the hell it was we were doing down there.

  I stepped into the water. Rita went into a crouch, the waterline sliding up over her breastbone so I did too. We laughed and shivered and then did the only thing reasonable in that sudden cold—held onto one another for dear life, passing body-heat back and forth until finally the temperature was tolerable. I kissed her and stroked her back and she stroked mine and we listened to the stream tumble down off the rocks.

  “Love me?” she said.

&nb
sp; “Uh-huh. You?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  We kissed again. She tasted the way she’d always tasted. Cancer and chemo had changed that for awhile.

  “What a gorgeous day,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “You think she’ll stick around?”

  “Who? Lily? I don’t know. Might.”

  “Be nice to really meet her. Conscious, that is.”

  She turned and I looped my arms around her waist and we bobbed together in the water. I glanced up at Lily, who had settled down into a crouch and seemed to be gazing at something overhead.

  “You still want to live forever?” I said.

  I don’t know why I remembered that just then. I said it very softly. I think I may have said it as a kind of prayer.

  She nodded. “Today I do.”

  We let ourselves dry in the sun and then dressed and climbed to the ledge. I only had to help her twice. When we arrived at the top Lily was gone, vanished.

  We sat and smelled the roses.

  I had her back for about five months before it started again. The nurses, the treatments, the bedsores blooming far more fiercely than before. The enemy now was the Stage Four ulcer, where the sore blazes through skin and subcutaneous tissue to the underlying fascia, a fibrous network between the tissue and the underlying structure of muscle, bone and tendon, burns like a self-made acid. And finally to the bones, the muscles and tendons themselves. I turned her, washed her, cleaned and dried her when she soiled the bed. Held her head while she vomited up breakfast into a plastic kidney-shaped pan.

  She fought hard and so did I and we beat the rap again. By February she was on her feet moving with the aid of the walker.

  But something was different this time.

  She didn’t come back the way she had before. February turned to March and March into April and she still only rarely bothered to cook or do any cleaning or laundry and left the Electrolux to me—which initially, at least, came as a relief. I didn’t have to worry about her falling.

  But she seemed suddenly obsessed with money.

  Money we didn’t have.

  Jack Pace was still selling steadily, sure. He had his audience. But it was clear that barring a miracle the guy was never going to make us rich. I tried writing a partial-and-outline of a serious novel and my agent couldn’t sell that damn thing at all. It remains in my drawer to this day, testament to two months’ wasted energy. In the meantime Rita kept talking about money. She’d got it into her head that the reason she couldn’t lay the cancer for once and for all was that we couldn’t afford the best doctors, the best-equipped hospitals, the most state-of-the-art treatments.

  As gently as possible our own doctors assured us otherwise.

  You didn’t beat bone cancer at this stage, it beat you.

  It was only a matter of time.

  “I don’t believe them,” she said. “They’re just watching their asses.”

  “You believed them before. Why not now?”

  “I just don’t, that’s all. Do you?”

  “Yes. Look, Rita, we’ve both read up on the subject. We know what there is to know. Come on.”

  “Books! Books and magazines! You’re not the one who’s dying.”

  She apologized to me right off. She wasn’t trying to make me feel guilty.

  She just was.

  Guilty and sad and frustrated and fearful. Her own fear passed to me as simply as you’d hand someone a flower.

  Over the months I watched her sink into listlessness and a kind of quiet that I knew was simply despair. There was no other word for it. She was quitting the world and she knew it. The world was leaving her behind.

  It got so we barely talked. Our walks were usually short and mostly silent.

  Like we were both just waiting for another axe to fall.

  And I remember lying awake beside her late one night thinking about what she’d said on that other evening so long ago over Almaden white wine and pot, that what drove you was fear. That limitless time would have the power to take away that fear. That you wouldn’t have to grasp for things like money and protection if time was on your side.

  That time would empty hospitals.

  I cried myself to sleep that night. Because what we didn’t have was time. Not time nor money nor protection of any kind.

  Nothing to take away the fear. Her own fear and mine. That it was going to happen again. And worse this time. Much worse. It had to—that was the nature of the disease. And maybe if we were lucky or unlucky a fourth time or a fifth until the bedsores were deep as potholes, until the bones powdered to chalk, until she mercifully gasped and died.

  She was groping for protection from all that, from that long slow slide. That was what all the talk about money was about. It was all about protection, wasn’t it? Something I couldn’t provide.

  But I think that strangely, mysteriously, somehow deep in the night we tend to work out solutions—or that our dreams work out solutions for us—to problems we can’t solve in the light of day or tossing sleepless in our beds at night. You wake up in the morning and sometimes you’ve got an answer.

  That morning I had mine.

  It frightened me, saddened me and God help me, it relieved me too.

  Against all my expectations I thought that maybe Jack Pace might be able to save us both after all.

  I forged the documents carefully.

  It wasn’t very hard. All I needed was a xerox machine and my word-processor. I took from my files an innocuous letter from my agent announcing the enclosure of royalty statements to Wild Side, my third Jack Pace novel and another letter from ABC announcing the same book’s rejection as a made-for-TV-movie, pasted plain white paper over the texts of both leaving only the letterheads and signatures and then brought them into Plymouth and copied them onto two slightly different grades of Mail Boxes, Etc.’s best paper stock. I took them home and went to work.

  About an hour later I had a letter from my agent confirming that per her phone call we did indeed have a deal for a TV series based on the novels at such and such an exhorbitant price and enclosing the letter from the ABC exec which outlined the deal. I tucked them in my drawer under some other papers to await the time.

  It didn’t take long. It was a morning right after the Fourth of July weekend. Like most people I guess we get the usual number of phone solicitations unless we leave the answering machine on to screen them. And for a week or so I got purposely absent-minded about using it.

  I don’t know what the woman on the other end was trying to sell me but I must have confused her plenty because as soon as she got started in on her free trial offer and money-back guarantee I started yelling you’re kidding! I can’t believe it! how much? into the handset because the timing was just perfect, there was Rita sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of her watching me acting up a storm, and when I put down the receiver I shook my head like I was dumbstruck and by then she was across the room to me wondering what in hell was going on.

  “Larry, what is it?”

  More acting.

  Like I was about to tell her. But then thought better of it.

  “No. I want to wait,” I said. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. Let’s just say it’s good news. It could be really good news.”

  “Larry!”

  “Sorry. Call me superstitious. You tell somebody, you might screw the deal. Alice is sending me a memo. It’ll only take a couple of days, maybe a week or so.”

  “A week? That’s not fair,” she said. “No way that’s fair!”

  But she was smiling.

  I let a week go by and then a few days more for good measure and they were happy days for us though I was sleeping very little and badly. She didn’t press me any more about the deal. I knew she wanted to but that was Rita—she’d trust me to let her know when the time came. There was no more talk about money and treatments, either. I worked on the novel as best I could and we’d shop in town and go out for our walks and watch T
V and read at night as though we hadn’t a care in the world nor any limit to our time at all.

  “Let’s go up to Kaltsas’ pool,” I said. “I’ve got something I want to show you.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a kind of a trek.”

  “Come on. You know you like it there.”

  We’d just that morning had a series of rainshowers but now at nearly noon the sky was bright as crystal. You could still smell the rain in the grass.