“If you’re smart as I think you are, then I think you know how I’m not touched in the head. And I’m not that old, either. At least not as old as a man should be to be put in a nursing home.” He started hacking like an ex–chicken plucker. “On my honor,” he forced out.
“I’m just doing what I’m told,” I said, which was true. What else could I say? “I’m doing what I’m told, and they ain’t paying me under the table like they said they would.”
Mr. Self kicked his legs in the air like a tar-stuck yellow jacket. “Snot-nose,” he said. “I’m telling you, boy. I’m telling you. They’re paying another fellow twice as much to push me around nights you’re not here. I’ll ask him for the exact amount tomorrow and get back to you on all this.”
I could only look at my watch, see that it was past five o’clock, and say, “Yessir.” I put Mr. Self’s front wheels down and started rolling him back toward home. I said, “People might get paid more than I do, but they have taxes taken out. I get flat-paid money Mr. Alexander says I make.”
Mr. Self opened his eyes wide. “That right? Well I’ll take note of that. Do you know what I did before my kids slapped me in here, boy? I’ll tell you. I was an accountant. I was an accountant, and I was an IRS agent. A T-man they call it. I worked with the mafia. My brother and I cracked the code so we didn’t have to stay in the war as long as people thought we’d be—the war the mafia got that country to start up with us.”
I pushed, knowing better. These were the kinds of stories I had hoped to hear from these folks all along. I dodged gravel. I knew what Mr. Self really had done for a living and wondered how his mind contorted fabric- and yarn-making into the world of bookkeeping and espionage. I said, “Y’all had something to do with the atomic bomb?”
“World War I!” he yelled. If his back hadn’t been fused together like beef jerky, he would’ve turned in his wheel-chair and walloped me across the face. “Foxholes and nerve gas, little boy.”
We approached the nursing home’s back patio. The ambulatory patients walked toward the cinder track. A black coworker named Mr. Perlotte was hovering behind them like a good herding dog. I called out to him, “Is the cafeteria open?”
He nodded. “Ain’t no food left for Mr. Self in the kitchen, though. Sorry.”
He had said the same thing every other time I worked. Mr. Self stuck out the wrong finger—his ring finger—and said, “Up yours, Honeypot.”
Mr. Perlotte laughed. He clucked his tongue toward his charge, as one might to a horse. “We ain’t in your cotton mill no more, is we, Leonard Self? Un-uh.”
Mr. Self said to me, “And then when I figured out how to get us all out of the Depression, I took over for my daddy at the mill. Do you appreciate the shirt you’re wearing, son? Well, do you? Sometimes you taint my blood, what with your inconsideration. All of you and your people.”
I pushed him into the cafeteria, went past tables, and left him in front of the ice dispenser. I said, “I’ll be right back. I need to go into your room and rifle through your belongings.” It’s what I always said. It was a way to get Mr. Self to clear out his air passages before meals, which allowed him to swallow easier, which kept any of us from having to stick our fingers down his throat in search of lodged corn bread, biscuits, and so on. At least that’s what my boss told me.
In reality, Mr. Self owned nothing at the facility. His relatives had made sure of that. On the chalkboard in his room I printed out, POUR SALT ON SLUGS, not because Wylie Alexander had said I looked like the crazy brother of the Morton Salt Girl, I don’t think, but because my father told me this every morning when I got up to get the newspaper.
Later on, after I left my part-time job, I would learn that pouring salt meant a number of things.
THE RESIDENTS TOOK to me like grids on a waffle iron, no lie. Whenever I walked in—after I’d parked my bicycle straight up in azalea bushes out front—every wheelchair-confined invalid scooted toward the front door, propelling themselves with their standard-issue house slippers, until it looked like one giant demolition-derby clog. Everybody’s hubs got stuck in someone else’s spokes, and my first job, always, was to back them out one at a time, pushing them to their own quarters, or the TV room, or the cafeteria. I pushed them wherever I thought was best, and told them they’d have dinner soon.
Alzheimer’s hadn’t been invented at this point, of course. I let men and women alike call me “son,” “wife,” “husband,” “daughter,” “doctor,” “waiter,” “car mechanic,” “house-painter,” “teacher,” “ship captain,” “Fuller Brush man,” “Avon lady,” “veterinarian,” or “maid.” One man was so old he thought I was his slave, and he threatened to take me back behind the tobacco barn in his mind and whip me silly for juking with the white girls. I could only think, Man, please let me get to the same point before I’m thirty. I thought, I want to be able to say anything I like, all the time.
But after I rolled the shovees into the cafeteria, I always went straight back to Leonard Self, took him outside no matter the weather, and inched along until I knew that, back inside, the last lima bean had been slurped up and gnashed into nothingness. “Other boys getting paid union wages,” Mr. Self said a month before I quit for good, seeing as I had a B in math. “They getting upwards of three dollars an hour.”
There were no unions in South Carolina, and Mr. Self had fought hard against them for most of his life, according to my dad. My father also kept me apprised daily of the evils of capitalism in general and Republican leaders in particular, and let me know early on that I’d be better off running a truck farm off Highway 25 during drought than upper management at one of the cotton mills.
I said to Mr. Self, “I don’t care. I’m fine getting what I get. And there aren’t any unions, by the way, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“There’s a town called Union, so that’s where you’re wrong. I own a mill in Union. Almost wanted to have the name of the town changed before we built it there.”
“There’s a town,” I said. This was late October. The leaves had turned somewhat, even though it was still eighty degrees outside going toward dusk. I should’ve been thinking about what I’d wear on Halloween, but instead I felt confident enough to argue with a man whose family made entirely too much money off the labors of Forty-Fivers. “I thought you meant labor unions. You got me.”
Understand that I’d about gotten to know everything about Leonard Self—he kind of repeated his stories—outside of the subject of his adult diapers. Mr. Self looked forward as I pushed him uphill on the asphalt walkway between the fifth- and sixth-grade wing and the cinder track. “Let’s you and me go beyond the line this afternoon,” he said. He reached into his pajamas and produced an old-timey tweed riding cap. “Let’s see what’s on the other side of those trees.”
We went slowly. I said, “I don’t know.”
“You afraid that when we don’t get back in time Wylie Alexander will call the sheriff’s department and they’ll get you for kidnapping a tycoon?”
“Yessir. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.” My father had taught me never to trust anyone who’d had more than one person working for him, ever.
Mr. Self reached back in his pajamas and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill. “I can’t imagine bail being more than this. Here. Take this money. Show me where other people live. I won’t even tell on you about how you’re sticking Mexican jumping beans beneath old Blindman Martin’s bed, driving him crazy. I won’t do that.”
I said, “What? I don’t stick anything beneath his bed.”
Mr. Self laughed. His thin white hair stood up like a poor, deranged Mohawk. “I can do or say anything I want around here. Like always. Who do you think owns this place?”
I could not call my father for advice. There were no pay phones on the edge of Forty-Five Longterm Care, and this was a thousand years before cell phones. I’d never seen a fifty-dollar bill, although I’d heard that they existed in exotic faraway places like Atlanta, Charleston, and Nash
ville. My father and Compton’s daddy didn’t know I was standing on the other side of a door once, when Mr. Lane said he drove up to Charlotte to a titty bar and gave a strange woman a fifty-dollar bill to do something I couldn’t quite envision. This little act of eavesdropping occurred not long after my own mother had skipped town, and Mr. Lane evidently tried to talk my father into going on the next excursion. For a half-year after this incident I would check my father’s pockets at night, hoping to find a pack of matches with a naked woman pictured on front. But for the longest time I found nothing worthwhile and quit searching altogether after my dad—who somehow became aware of my nosiness—stuck safety razors in each pocket, then waited for me to come wake him up as my sliced index finger bled between the yellow, curled kitchen linoleum where he’d left his dirty clothes and the brown, curled linoleum where he slept, always, on Mom’s old side of the bed. He didn’t take me to the hospital—which looked similar to Forty-Five Longterm Care. My father took me into the bathroom, poured plain isopropyl in a metal bucket, forced my hand in, and said, “It looks like Kool-Aid, don’t it?” as my blood mixed in. “I’m going to put a butterfly stitch on this. And then maybe every time you see a monarch flit by you’ll remember not to rifle through my clothes looking for money. Don’t be like your momma, boy.”
I said, “I’m not stealing your money.” I screamed. The bucket turned redder, and my filleted finger throbbed. “I promise. I was looking for naked-women pictures.”
My father released my hand. “Goddamn it to hell, I told you not to be like your mother. Do I need to get your hearing checked?” He reached in the drawer and pulled out a circular tin of white adhesive tape. “Give me your finger.”
I did. Oh, I gave him my finger from then on out.
I pushed Mr. Self faster by accident and saw the property line ahead, the trees beyond it, and the path that led into some woods where the kitchen crew went occasionally to drink beer on breaks. Self held that fifty-dollar bill up and said, “Fitty, fitty, fitty, fitty, fitty. Just take me to the other side, son. I want to see what’s on the other side. I’m betting that it’s changed since when my brother and I used to come down here with girls my daddy would’ve killed us for seeing.”
Even back then I thought of that greener grass cliché. Because my father wasn’t a churchgoer, thus making me the same, I didn’t know how the other side could mean anything else.
LEONARD SELF FEIGNED death thirty minutes past the kitchen help’s secret hobo jungle. I stopped the wheel-chair there for a couple minutes, and we looked at four plastic chairs stolen from the cafeteria, a mound of malt-liquor bottles, an IV stand that the doctor brought over to the home one day in case anyone got dehydrated, and a still-smoking, half-buried campfire of fat lighter, paper plates, old flower ar rangements, and lobby magazines donated by an auxiliary of women way over in Columbia who felt guilty about being married to rich doctors and lawyers.
There at the heap—and I’m sure he had in mind his fake death by this point—Mr. Self said, “This used to be a place where I hunted arrowheads as a child. I can’t remember for sure, but I believe I got my first kiss here, way before I made my money. Long before I realized there are people who want to be held down.”
Even I, at this age, wondered if I’d heard him right. “No one wants to be held down, according to my dad. The only man wants to be held down either finds his way to prison on purpose, or moves to South Carolina on purpose from elsewhere. According to my father.”
Mr. Self stared straight ahead. His hair waved around slower than a sea anemone stuck in doldrums. “Well. I was born in the nineteenth century. I might be wrong, nowadays, boy. Both my parents were born before the Industrial Revolution.” Mr. Self pointed toward one tendril of smoke. “I always wanted to be a potter, to tell you the truth. Dirt lasts forever, you know.” He stuck out his hand like a referee calling first down.
Let me say here that Mr. Self didn’t display exactly the same dementia that most of our residents did, but he tended toward non sequitur and flat-out mean lies. This particular fifty-dollar ride—and I had not touched the money by this time—showed him to be a contrite, sad, and vulnerable ex–mill president. I said, “Dirt and cockroaches. I’ve heard say that at the end of the world the only things left will be dirt, cockroaches, and duct tape.” I pushed him through the woods and looked at the scar on my finger.
We made it to a clearing and a slight bluff overlooking the Saluda River below Lake Between’s pitiful dam. A handful of men and women held cane poles and fished the water. They stood beside drywall buckets. I thought to ask Mr. Self if he wanted to join these folks, maybe see if they had an extra pole. I thought to say how we could go no further safely.
I said, “Maybe tomorrow we can head out in the other direction. There’s a nice hill overlooking the county landfill. We can watch the seagulls. You can tell me about what you used to find in the dump way back when you were my age.”
I’d gotten outright giddy, and startlingly brave. Maybe I was feeling the preliminary twinges of false power one receives from newfound wealth. It would take thirty years before I would regain such a feeling. I popped old man Self’s crown to get a response. And I got one—when he slumped straight out of his wheelchair onto the red clay that sloped down to the river.
“Hey. Hey, hey!” I said. Whatever jazzy kind of song had been running through my head—saxophones, clarinets, and trumpets—stopped.
Unfortunately one of the river people saw Mr. Self fall out and pointed us out to his fellow anglers. They dropped their poles and trudged up the incline as I tried to shove Mr. Self back into his chair. Just as this was a time before cell phones, it was a time before wheelchairs had good and trustworthy brakes.
The fifty-dollar bill must’ve flown off. I hate to admit it, but the closer the fisherpeople came, the more concerned I was with shoving fifty dollars into my pocket as opposed to getting Leonard Self in an upright position.
“He dead,” one of the men said. It was, luckily, a black friend of my father’s, one of Shirley Ebo’s uncles. “Mr. Self, he dead.”
Although it seemed like the most trivial and obvious pronouncement at the time, later I would have nightmares, from college Intro to Literature onward. I said, “I didn’t do anything. He wanted me to show him the river. He said he wanted to see the other side.”
A woman said, “He finally got to see for hisself what we got to do for food, that sad money he pay at Forty-Five Cotton Mill.”
We got him into the wheelchair. Shirley Ebo’s uncle said, “Wha’chew gone do now, pusher-man?” He said, “You ought to look through his pajamas, see what money he got wrapped around his belly. All them Selfs wrap they money around they belly. People think they fat. But it money.”
It seemed like Wylie Alexander or someone would’ve come looking for us. It had been a good hour since the last shovee had finished her plate of gray and yellow food. I said, “I guess take him back and tell them what happened is all I can do.”
“Let us look under his pajamas first,” the woman said. “Come on. I know you. You Lee Dawes’s boy, right? I know Mr. Lee.”
Mr. Self’s wrinkled clothes were full of clay. His hat brim was bent mercilessly. There was blood on the blade of his nose, and for some reason I could only worry about how he’d soon crap in his pants like dead people always did in the stories Compton and I told each other. I said, “That’s not right.”
My onlookers backed off. One of the men said, “You want all that money for yourself, I bet. You should be ashamed, boy. Just ’cause he’s a white man don’t mean you got claim to everything.”
I began the long Forty-Five Longterm Care push homeward, and listened for followers.
NOW IT DOESN’T matter that I took dead Leonard Self back to the kitchen workers’ hideout, that we waited there until an hour after the sun set, that no one seemed alarmed. I pushed Mr. Self toward the still-smoking fire pit, found stray branches and twigs, and heaped them atop what burnt-edged magazines lay frayed on
the outskirts of the pit. It doesn’t matter that I considered looking for a sewn-in secret pocket down at the bottom of Leonard Self’s pajama bottoms, imagining crisp fifty-dollar bills that I could shove into my own socks. I sat across from him on an upright oak stump, held my head in my hands, and cried in a way I’d not even done when my mother left for good.
I’d not even been to a funeral yet, at this time. I’d never witnessed a dead person. But that’s not what made me un dergo my first of many near–nervous breakdowns. I didn’t think of all the spinners, doffers, loom fixers, or supervisors that Mr. Self had killed off in his own way to amass the millions of dollars his heirs would squander over the next few generations. It wasn’t the poor relatives of my classmate Shirley Ebo having to stick doughballs on hooks so they could make catfish stew to eat over a three-day period.
“I tried to give him CPR,” I told Wylie Alexander. “It didn’t work,” I said when I finally got up the courage to push Leonard Self back to the nursing home. “He held his heart and let out a gasp. Then I got him out of the chair and performed mouth-to-mouth. I must’ve spent an hour beating his chest. He wouldn’t come back.”
Wylie Alexander put his soft hand on my shoulder. “You done the best you could, Mendal. I don’t know what else you could’ve done.” He turned his head toward the nurse’s station and said, “Ain’t that right, Lee?”
My father popped out from behind the counter. I began crying again. “I didn’t mean to be late for supper,” I said. My father had come looking for me, certainly, like any good single parent might.
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