When Did We Lose Harriet?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “Oh, Clara!” Glenna said over and over, clinging like she’d never let go.

  I nearly melted in a puddle of tears right then and there. Since Mama and Daddy died, nobody but Jake and Glenna calls me “Clah-ra”—which was all Jake could make of “MacLaren” when he was a baby.

  “How is he?” I asked. I couldn’t catch a breath while I waited for her answer. So much could have happened in those hours I’d been on the plane.

  She averted her head. “Not good, honey.” Her voice trembled. “The doctor says he needs bypass surgery, but Jake won’t agree. I hope you can persuade him.”

  I gave my nose a hearty blow. “Durn tootin’.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. I saw I was not only going to have to make Jake get his surgery, I was going to have to prop up Glenna at the same time.

  “Can I see him tonight?” I asked.

  She checked her watch. “It’s way past the last visitation, but I told them you were coming and they said they’ll let you in for a minute—if you aren’t too tired.”

  “I’m a walking zombie, but I won’t sleep until I’ve seen him. Let’s stop by to say hello, then go on home.”

  As we left the fresh cool air of the airport, I knew I was in Alabama. The night was so hot and thick I could have shaped it in my hands like cotton candy.

  Glenna pulled into the hospital parking lot and turned deftly into a waiting space. One of her many grace gifts is that she always gets a convenient parking place when she needs one. In emergencies, I have even gotten a couple myself by chanting, “I am Glenna Crane, I am Glenna Crane.”

  In the cardiac intensive care unit Jake was pale, with tubes everywhere and more monitors than NASA. I saw at once why Glenna looked the way she did. The spunk had gone out of old Jake. What little hair he had left was lifeless and dry, his skin was a peculiar ashy gray, and even his voice was a wisp of its usual boom. “Well, Clara, how’s this for a way to get you to visit?”

  I had to clear my throat before I could answer. I even almost said something polite before I caught myself. If I talked nice, Jake would think he was dying. “Effective, Bubba, but not one I’d recommend. How do you feel?”

  “Like an old tire retread. How do you feel?”

  “Like somebody who’s been on planes all day because her baby brother’s being ornery.” I sat down beside him and took his hand. “Glenna says you need a bypass.”

  He chuckled weakly. “Not wasting any time, are you?”

  “Nope. Why are you?”

  “Fundamental chickenism. Besides, I’m not sure that’s what I ought to do. I’ve lived a good life…” He had to stop to cough. His monitors jumped around like crazy.

  I wasn’t about to stay and upset him right then. “We’ll talk some more tomorrow. I’m too tired to argue right now.”

  “How long you gonna be here?”

  “Until you get your bypass and get back home.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’d better,” I warned, in the tone I used when he was four and I was allowed to switch him if he disobeyed. “Now get yourself a good night’s sleep. I’ll get you straightened out tomorrow.”

  Glenna, who had waited by the door, tiptoed in and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll be back after I get Clara settled.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t need to come back, honey. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not coming just for you, Jake. I’m coming for me. I’ll rest better knowing I’m here.” She straightened his covers and touched his shoulder in farewell, then motioned me to follow her out.

  One of the very few things Jake and Glenna don’t agree on is automobiles. To Glenna, a car is transportation. Once she gets one she likes, she hangs onto it for years and gives it just enough maintenance to keep it running. Her current blue Ford was rump sprung and dented, and my suitcases shared the trunk with two bags of clothes she was taking to a homeless shelter and three bags of sanitized cow manure she’d bought for her flowers.

  Jake, on the other hand, has always been car proud. He likes new, pretty ones, and treats them more like girlfriends than steel and plastic. This year’s red Buick Park Avenue gleamed in their unpaved drive, an Auburn sticker in its back window. It was almost easier to see him in the hospital than it was to see his car in the driveway and know he might never come home to drive it.

  Glenna seemed to feel the same, for although she is naturally quiet, she chattered like a squirrel as she lifted the heavier bag from the car. “We haven’t had a bit of rain for weeks. I don’t know what the yard will do if we don’t get some soon. But look! The old magnolia saved three blossoms for you. The rest bloomed earlier, but those waited for you to get here.” I peered up the fat old tree. Sure enough, three creamy blossoms glowed in the darkness.

  Higher up, from towering pines, came the whir of thousands of tiny motors humming in the night. “The cicadas are certainly having a fling!” I exclaimed. Cicadas are noisy little locusts that hibernate for years, then creep out of the ground, sing their hearts out, lay their eggs, and die. On their jubilee, the whole South gets a bumper crop, but where I live, every year a few rebels come up out of season. This was either a jubilee, or Montgomery’s cicadas have the same spirit that made that city the first capital of the Confederacy.

  As I waited on the front walk for Glenna to unlock the door, I took a deep breath of thick air scented with honeysuckle, pine, and boxwood, and thought how remarkable she and Jake were. When they’d been married about three years and had just learned Glenna could never have a baby, they bought a comfortable six-room house in Montgomery’s South Hull District, a neighborhood of modest brick homes. Their house has a big yard and ceilings high enough so you don’t smother, but it also has two small bathrooms and a kitchen Glenna keeps talking about remodeling but never has. Over the years, when a lot of their friends and neighbors moved east to newer neighborhoods with roomy, modern kitchens, enormous bathrooms, and several extra rooms, Jake used to ask, “You want to move, honey?”

  Glenna always replied, “Wouldn’t you rather put our money in something that really matters, Jake?” Only their family, their church treasurer, and the postman who brings appeals and carries away checks know what matters to Jake and Glenna Crane. I never let them hear me say it, but as far as I know there are no finer people on God’s green earth.

  Thinking of losing Jake was like a knife in my heart. When Glenna stepped inside and called, “Coming, dear?” I could hardly see to hurry up the steps.

  I saw Glenna off for her all-night vigil, kicked off my shoes, and unpacked. After a long cool shower I was padding barefoot across the kitchen’s old black and white linoleum tiles for a glass of milk when the phone rang. “MacLaren Yarbrough,” I answered automatically, then corrected myself. “Crane residence.”

  There was a silence on the other end, then an explosion. “Woman, what are you doing there? You are supposed to be in Albuquerque!”

  “Joe Riddley!”

  I knew I was wasting my charm. He barely paused for breath. “When Glenna called here this morning looking for you, I was stupid enough to give her your number, but five minutes later I wished I hadn’t. I just knew you’d do some fool thing like hare off to Montgomery. I never imagined you’d do it so fast, though. What’d you do—sprout wings and fly solo?”

  “I got the first plane out, just like any caring sister would.”

  “Caring, my hind foot. You’ll badger that poor man to death.”

  “I’m not badgering him!” I took a deep breath to fortify myself. Talking to Joe Riddley can be like walking into the Atlantic during a hurricane. You don’t make much headway, and you often wind up flattened. Oddly enough, though, he is the mildest man in Hopemore when he’s on the magistrate’s bench. Did I forget to tell you? Joe Riddley is a magistrate as well as a nursery man. Judge Yarbrough, respected throughout Hope County. Some prisoners—especially those brought in in the middle of the night—ask for him by name, because Joe Riddley never gives them a hard t
ime about being hauled out of bed.

  He seldom gives anybody a hard time, except me and our younger son, Walker. He and Walker butt heads because they are so much alike, and he got used to bossing me when I was four and he was six. Joe Riddley’s daddy owned the local hardware store (the same one we converted into the Feed, Seed & Nursery when Home Depot came into town a few years back) and one day my daddy took me there. Joe Riddley looked down, hitched up his corduroy pants, and asked, “Wanna go count nails?” To somebody just learning to count, it was sublime! They kept the nails in bright red bins, and we counted long ones, short ones, fat ones, and skinny ones. I could only go to a hundred, but Joe Riddley could count forever. After that, I begged to go to the hardware store, because I thought Joe Riddley was wonderful. Still do—although I don’t let him get away with bossing me the way he did back then.

  One day when Daddy called me to go, Joe Riddley looked down at me and said gruffly, “You can’t count worth a flip, but you are the cutest little bit of a thing I ever did see.” Then he turned beet red.

  He’s called me Little Bit ever since—as in “Little Bit, don’t you go butting into things over there. You hear me?” He often complains that I butt in on people’s lives and his cases. I always reply that anybody who’s raised two boys and put up with him all these years knows there are times to butt in and times to butt out.

  Tonight I said, with the dignity befitting one elected to a national church meeting, “I’m not going to butt in on a single thing, Joe Riddley. All I’m going to do is help Glenna make Jake get the surgery he needs.”

  His voice softened. “Well, from what Glenna said, he needs somebody to pound sense into his head, and you’re the best pounder I know. Tell him I said to go on and get that danged operation so he can get rid of you—then you come on home, you hear me? Don’t even think about trying to go back to Albuquerque for that last day or two.”

  “I won’t,” I promised, “and don’t you worry about things here. I’ll keep you posted.” I had no idea, at the time, what a whopper that would turn out to be.

  After he hung up, I got a glass and was just about to finally get my milk when the phone rang again. “Crane residence,” I remembered to answer that time. “This is Jake’s sister MacLaren. May I help you?”

  I leaned toward the fridge, but the cord didn’t reach. Jake and Glenna are so old-fashioned they didn’t even own a cordless phone. I vowed to send them one for Christmas.

  The woman on the other end was courteous, but had whining down to a fine art. “I’m sorry to be calling so late, but I’ve been trying to reach Jake all day.”

  While I explained why Jake had been unavailable, I nearly pulled the cord out of the wall so I could finally open the refrigerator. The milk squatted at the back, out of reach.

  When she heard about Jake, the woman got real sympathetic, but even that was a sympathetic whine. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry to have to bother you at a time like this. Does the church know? I’ll find time to call tomorrow and get him on the prayer chain, then we’ll organize some meals, but in the meantime, I just have to know about tomorrow, because—”

  Living with Joe Riddley, I’ve had lots of practice wading into conversations midstream. “Meals won’t be necessary for a while,” I said loudly and firmly. “Glenna and I will be at the hospital most of the time. But I know they’d appreciate being on the prayer chain. Whom shall I tell them called?”

  She said her name so fast I missed it, then went on, “Glenna and I are also in the Garden Club together, and the…” When a Southern woman starts describing who she is and what clubs she belongs to, there’s plenty of time to leave a receiver on the counter, pour a glass of milk, and get back before the other person knows you’re gone. I’d drunk half my milk, murmuring “umm’s” at what I hoped were appropriate places, before the woman paused for an audible breath. I didn’t really start paying attention until she asked, “Do you know who Glenna got?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said contritely. “I’ve just come in off a plane, and I’m still getting my bearings. What is it you want to know?”

  Her sugar turned a bit sour. “What arrangements Glenna’s made about the teen center tomorrow.”

  “Teen center?” I was totally in the dark, and so sleepy I was having to swallow yawns before they swallowed me.

  If I’d had phone-a-vision, I swear I’d have seen her drumming perfect nails. “The teen center! You know, just off Rosa L. Parks Avenue? Run by the Youth Council? Directed by that nice Mr. Henly?”

  I opened my mouth to explain I had never heard of the Youth Council or that nice Mr. Henly, but she rippled on. “Jake goes over the first and third Tuesdays, from ten ‘til noon. I always call to remind him.”

  “Well, this time he can’t possibly come.”

  Any decent woman would have hung up right then, but this particular specimen was as persistent as summer’s first fly. “We-e-ll…” She drew it out into at least three syllables, followed by a meaningful pause—the meaning being, “This is also your problem now, sugar, so you’d better get on the stick and think of something.”

  I did not say a thing.

  After a long pause, she sighed. “I just don’t know who I could get this late. Being summer, you know. So many people are out of town…” Another long pause.

  I knew what was expected of me. Natives of Montgomery fall all over each other being nice and helpful. I, however, long ago learned to live with the guilt of not always doing the right thing. I drank the rest of my milk and still didn’t say a word. Finally the woman was forced to come right out and ask.

  “How about you? Just this once? Mr. Henly counts on us for Tuesdays.”

  I simply cannot remember what happened after that. I remember repeating that I was a stranger to Montgomery who had just flown in to be with my brother. I’m pretty sure I told her at least twice I couldn’t possibly go to the center. I was so tired I may have given out my mother’s maiden name and our bank security code. I would have said anything to get off that phone.

  Apparently, I did.

  By the time I climbed into bed ten minutes later, I’d agreed that the next morning I’d keep the desk (whatever that meant) at a teen center off Rosa L. Parks Avenue (wherever that was), so nice Mr. Henly (whoever he was) wouldn’t be disappointed.

  “Oh, well,” I consoled myself, yawning, “it’s only two hours. It won’t kill me.”

  I would live to reconsider those words.

  Four

  An inheritance quickly gained

  at the beginning will not be

  blessed at the end. Proverbs 20:21

  I woke early Tuesday morning worrying about Jake. The backyard looked so lovely at that hour that I carried my Bible and a glass of iced tea out to a shady bench, hoping to find a breeze and comfort from the Psalms.

  There was no breeze, just a hot waiting morning slowly baking Jake’s vegetables and Glenna’s flowers, and sunlight streaming between the hackberry trees. I always associate those tall, gracefully leaning elms with Montgomery and Jake’s backyard.

  When I opened my Bible to the Psalms, the first verse I read was no comfort at all: My soul is full of trouble and my life draws near the grave. I couldn’t read any farther. Everywhere I looked the yard was full of Jake. Jake building the bench I sat on. Jake crowing over an enormous tomato. Jake bending to carefully place a stone cherub, rabbit, and a miniature St. Francis so they peeped out from the foliage. Jake, calling us all the way in Georgia to brag when bluebirds nested in the little rustic house he built them.

  Tears rolled uncontrolled down my cheeks. “Please, God, please, God, please!”

  Finally I stopped talking and started to listen. As usually happens, the answer was peace. A shaft of sunlight found its hazy way through the tree canopy and pooled just beyond my feet. A mockingbird pierced the morning with its sweetness. A breeze touched my cheek and brought a honeysuckle scent of amazing sweetness. About the time I was beginning to really relax, mosquitoes began buzzing aro
und my ear.

  That’s life—mockingbirds followed by mosquitoes.

  Naturally, I hadn’t packed anything appropriate to wear to an inner-city teen center. The closest I could get was a mist green linen pantsuit with a Laura Ashley print blouse—not very close at all. “I’ll look nice for Jake later,” I assured myself, combing my hair and putting on bright pink lipstick. I often talk to myself. As I tell my family, a person needs intelligent conversation sometimes.

  I was pouring out cold cereal when Glenna got home, dead on her feet. Quickly I fetched another bowl. “Let’s eat out on the sunporch,” she suggested. “It’s so pretty this time of year.”

  The sunporch is a back porch Jake glassed in years ago so they could enjoy the backyard. In Montgomery, between mosquitoes and the heat, a glass room makes a lot more sense than an open porch. Glenna keeps a couple of rockers out there and a small table with two chairs.

  She gave a huge yawn as she came to the table. “They said we shouldn’t go back to the hospital this morning, because Jake’s having tests and we can’t see him until after lunch. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stretch out a little while.”

  I didn’t bother to mention last night’s call. As tired as she was, Glenna would still drag herself down to that center. Jake always claims that if their house was burning up, Glenna would bring the firemen a nice glass of tea. Actually, it was just as well Glenna was so sleepy. When I said, “I need to run some errands, so why don’t I use the Buick and meet you at the hospital later?” she gave me Jake’s keys as pretty as you please. She must have forgotten Jake never, ever lets me drive his cars.

  No matter what Glenna said, I wasn’t going anywhere that morning without at least one glimpse of my brother, but it was so painful for him to talk and for me to see him trying, I only stayed a second. “See you later, Bubba,” I promised, gently squeezing his hand.