by Ninie Hammon
But he didn’t love it anymore. There’d been a time when he could get all dewy-eyed just looking at the cows grazing in the field he and his daddy’d cleared with a team of mules. Or watching the chickens peck at nothing on the dirt mound over the storm cellar in the back corner of the yard. He and Daddy’d dug it with pick axes and shovels, broke through into a cave that had been cut through the limestone bedrock by an underground river, the bottom and walls polished as smooth as glass by the rushing water. Mama wouldn’t let him play in the cave, said he’d get lost in it like Tom Sawyer and nobody’d ever find him. But he’d sneaked down there often and explored the dark caverns with a coal-oil lantern.
He leaned over a little farther and stared at the double wooden doors on the cellar and the rusty padlock that fastened them together. He shook his head and straightened up. He didn’t feel anything at all when he looked out the window now.
It was like his whole body, his whole self, was the thumb he’d hit that day with a hammer. When he did it, it hurt so bad tears’d stung his eyes and he’d shaken his hand and hopped around, sick to his stomach. Then it’d just throbbed, ached with every heartbeat. After awhile, though, it’d gone completely numb. The nail eventually turned black and fell off. Never did grow back.
His whole life was numb like that now. Something down deep had been damaged beyond repair. It never would grow back, neither.
“Didn’t that fellow play the piano well!” Maggie gushed from the other room.
Jonas froze.
“Why, I didn’t want to leave, it was so pretty. Just wanted to sit there and listen to him play. I could have sat there …”
“’Til it started rainin’ frogs—” Jonas whispered raggedly.
“Until it started raining frogs and—”
“And the trumpets started blowin’ for the Second Coming,” he finished for her.
He set the coffee pot down with trembling hands. That’s what she’d said, exactly what she’d said, the first time they all realized something was very, very wrong with Maggie.
They’re attending the graduation ceremony at the high school. Maggie’s all dressed up in her favorite red dress, her white hair piled on top of her head like she’s an opera star. She’s wearing high-heeled shoes and the pearls Jonas gave her for their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Since she retired from teaching she seldom wears high heels, says they make the bunion on her foot ache for days afterwards.
Jonas is wearing the only suit he owns, the black one he’s had since … well, he doesn’t remember how long. A good suit should last at least twenty years and his black one has likely been looking at a quarter of a century in the rear-view mirror for quite some time. While he’s shaving, she comes into the bathroom and stands there, watching.
“You’re a good-looking man, Jonas Cunningham,” she says, “even if you don’t have any butt whatsoever.”
She probably would have pinched him where he didn’t have a butt if he hadn’t been shaving.
Truth is, Jonas isn’t good looking. He is average. His thick shock of sandy brown hair has gone the color of a ten-penny nail, not pure white like Maggie’s. His long, weathered face has sprouted jowls, his big ears have sprouted a forest of bristly hairs, and his bushy black eyebrows have just become bushy gray ones.
The bags under his droopy, hound-dog eyes are so big Maggie teases that he needs a porter to carry them, but he still has all his own teeth and can hear just fine and read just fine. In good light. With cheaters.
In the old-age department he has made out fairly well.
But Maggie. Why, she just gets prettier every year. Pale blond hair has turned the purest white. Her thin face, with its delicate features, is hardly wrinkled at all, just looks like fine porcelain with tiny, hairline cracks. Men still turn to look at her when she enters a room. And even after all these years, Jonas is still hesitant to touch her with his big, rough farmer’s hands, still afraid he’ll break her.
They meet their daughter and son-in-law, Melanie and Mac McIntosh, and their granddaughter, Joy, at the school. Joy will be going into junior high in the fall and she’s looking around at the big auditorium the high school building shares with the junior high. Has her long red hair pulled back in a ponytail instead of braids. Jonas loves Joy’s braids, told her stories when she was a little girl about how the fairies used them as rope ladders to climb up to her shoulder so they could whisper secrets in her ears when she was sleeping.
But she’s growing up now. He figures her days of braids and his days of telling her stories about them are drawing to a close—if indeed, the door hasn’t already eased shut without his even noticing.
The son of one of Mac’s elders is the valedictorian of the graduating class. Maggie’d had him in her freshman literature class. She leans over to Jonas during the boy’s address and whispers, “I wonder who wrote his speech for him.”
And she squeezes his hand and winks at him. Oh, how that woman could get his motor running, just with a wink and a squeeze.
They all come back to the house after the ceremony. Maggie’d left a big pot of chili simmering on the stove and they have just sat down to supper when she says it.
“Didn’t that fellow play the piano well?”
Joy looks at her quizzically. “What fella, Grandma?”
“Why the pianist at the graduation ceremony, honey,” Maggie says. She cocks her head to one side and looks at Joy. “Did you sleep through the whole thing?”
“No, I didn’t sleep through it! But it was so borrring.” The little girl rolls her eyes, “I thought my hair would be as white as yours before it was over!” Joy always had a flare for the dramatic. “I was awake, though, and there wasn’t anybody there playing the piano.”
“Well, I’m sorry your missed it, sugar.” Maggie laughs. She turns to Jonas. “Pass me the crackers, the pack that’s already open. I don’t mind if they’re crumbled, I’m just going to crush them in the bowl, anyway. What did you think of the piano player?”
The room falls silent. Jonas hands her the crackers and shoots a glance at Melanie, who looks a question right back at him. Mac just shrugs his shoulders. Maggie misses the silent exchange, intent on crumbling her crackers into her chili bowl.
“Grandma, there wasn’t a—“ Joy begins, then her father elbows her. “What—?” She catches his look and doesn’t finish.
Maggie looks up then, sees everyone is staring at her.
“What’s everybody looking at? Did I spill something on my …” She glances down at the front of her dress. “No, I didn’t …” She looks up and the good humor drains out of her face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Jonas paints a smile on his face, though his heart is thumping so loud it’s a wonder she doesn’t hear it, even sitting all the way at the other end of the table.
“We want to know what you thought about it is all,” he says, and manages to keep his voice light and even. “You liked him so much, you tell us about the piano player.”
Maggie buys it.
“Well, he was just about the best I ever heard in my life, that’s what!” she says, and Jonas swallows hard, trying not to be sick.
This isn’t the first time something wasn’t right. They’d all noticed it, though nobody’d said anything about it out loud.
The time Mac came by to get some fresh tomatoes out of the garden and when he was ready to leave, he couldn’t locate his car keys. They tore that whole house up looking for them. Nothing. Mac finally borrowed some wire-cutters and went out to the car to hotwire the ignition. Jonas figured to make him a cold drink while he worked, opened up the freezer and there were Mac’s car keys—frozen in an ice tray. Maggie just laughed, blamed it on Jonas, said he did it as a joke.
And the time she called him from the grocery store to come downtown and pick her up. He told her she had the car, but she swore she didn’t. He caught a ride with a neighbor; the car was parked right there in the grocery store lot.
All the times she forgot to tell him so
mebody’d called for him, the times she got people’s names wrong, the day she was all ready to leave the house for church, but she still just had her slip on, had forgot to put on her skirt.
All those times he’d just let it slide, didn’t say anything, wouldn’t let himself worry about it. People got forgetful as they aged. It happened. But this …
“…the Moonlight Sonata. That was the best thing he played. Why, I didn’t want to leave, it was so pretty. I could have sat there until it started raining frogs and the trumpets started blowing for the Second Coming.”
Maggie finally tunes in to the looks on everybody’s faces. And what she sees makes her angry. That’s even scarier than the imaginary piano player.
“What in the world are you all gawking at?” she says and slams her spoon down on the table with a loud whap!
The motion upsets her ice tea glass. It starts over and Joy reaches out to keep it from toppling. But she’s too late, merely succeeds in tipping the glass so it dumps its contents into Maggie’s chili bowl.
“Look what you did!” Maggie screeches. “So clumsy, you’re always knocking things over and spilling things and making a mess!”
All the color drains out of Joy’s face. Her grandmother has never said an unkind word to her in her life.
“Just a little slob. ”
“Mama!” Melanie bleats.
“Somebody’s always having to clean up after you, you’re such a—”
“Maggie, that’s enough!” Jonas didn’t mean for it to come out harsh, but he supposes it did. Can’t do nothing ’bout that.
Joy leaps up from the table and races out of the room, crying. Melanie jumps up and follows her.
It is quiet in the dining room. Mac and Jonas sit staring at Maggie; her face is completely blank.
Then she suddenly relaxes and smiles.
“Anybody want some more ice tea?” she asks. “I sure do like ice tea on a hot evening, don’t you?”
Then she picks up her spoon and starts eating her chili, all full of tea and chunks of ice, while the rest of the tea that’d been in her glass drips off the table into her lap.
That was four years ago. Jonas had taken her to Dr. Clements in town, who sent her to a bunch of specialists in Oklahoma City. The doctors had poked and prodded her, run all sorts of tests. At the end of it, they didn’t seem to know a whole lot more than they did going in.
Couple of the them seemed to think she’d had a stroke, though at the time she could still get around fine, could read and feed herself. Senile dementia was what most of the doctors called it. But one of them, a skinny neurologist with one of those square little mustaches that made him look like Adolph Hitler, believed Maggie had something he called Alzheimer’s Disease. Jonas thought he was saying old-timer’s disease until he spelled it.
But as time went by, it mattered less and less what name the doctors chose to give her condition. The reality was simple and stark. Maggie was losing her mind.
She quickly got where she wouldn’t walk across the grass anymore, said them pointed little blades was sharp and would stick up through her shoes into her feet. She’d get lost in the house; he found her once in the closet, fighting the clothes, struggling like they were attacking her.
The first time she didn’t recognize him, snatched the sheet up to her chest and asked him indignantly, “Who are you and what are you doing in my bedroom?” he’d gone out and sat in the swing on the front porch and cried like a baby.
In the beginning, there were times when she seemed to know what was happening to her.
“I can’t find me anymore,” she told him once, whispering in the dark like they used to do when they were young and they’d just made love.
He’d reached over and patted her hand. “You’re not lost, sweetie pie. Long as I know where you are, I’ll keep you safe.”
But he didn’t know where she was anymore. The woman he loved had gone somewhere he couldn’t find her.
For most of his life, he’d prayed, “Lord, please let me live one day longer than Maggie, so I can take care of her.”
Now, he prayed—when he talked to God at all and that wasn’t very often—“Lord, give me the strength to do what I have to do, while I still can.”
Chapter 4
He tugged the shoelaces on his tennis shoes tight and tied the strings in a bow knot so they wouldn’t come undone and trip him. Even after only a few stretching exercises, the sleeveless gray t-shirt Mac wore over his sweatpants had sprouted a wet spot in the center of the back by the time he made it to the end of the driveway. When he got home, it would be soaked with sweat, like he’d stood under a shower.
The Oklahoma plains really only had two seasons—summertime and everything else. The temperature didn’t gently crank down from triple digits as trees dressed up in autumn finery or slowly warm up again when crocus noses began to peek out of the soil in the spring. September and October were hot, but a blue norther could blow through around Thanksgiving and dump six inches of snow on the ground. What few trees could be found didn’t do much turning, either. Oh, the cottonwoods painted golden splotches on the blue sky, but the mesquites pretty much stayed green until one day all the leaves dropped off and they were naked, and the cedar stayed green year round. And spring roared in with a wild yell in April, trailing thunderstorms, hail, and twisters behind it like the twitching tail on a lizard.
Mac could see clouds beginning to build in the west when he turned out of the driveway into the street.
Even at forty-three, he made running look easy. Tall and slender, he had broad shoulders that tapered down to a slim waist and long legs that propelled him fluidly forward, almost like his feet never made solid contact with the ground at all. He no longer had the spring in his step he once had, or the speed, but Mac was all about stamina, endurance. And in that department, he was stronger than he’d ever been. Looked it, too, unless you got up close, saw the streaks of white in his flaming red hair and the despair in eyes the color of faded jeans.
He was a good-looking man in a rugged, lumberjack kind of way; had a high, wide forehead, straight nose, and square, Kirk Douglas chin. Even had a dimple in it that was a pain to shave around. And if he’d had one more freckle, he’d have had to put it in his pocket. There was a time when he’d also had a quick smile and a rumbling, infectious laugh, but that was a long time ago.
Every now and then Mac wondered just how many miles he’d run over the years. The total of them. If you started counting when he joined the track team in high school—what five, six miles a day and ten sometimes on the weekend?—and then on a scholarship for the Razorbacks in college. Take off two years for seminary in Louisville—he hardly ran at all then—and the only running he did when he was in the military was chasing the Japanese in the South Pacific and the Commies in Korea. But since then, as a minister, up and down the streets of Graham, day in and day out, how many miles?
He got to the stop sign at the end of the block and turned left on Thurlock Street, committing to a five-mile run instead of three. The three-mile route was a right turn. It wound around the county high school, down past one of the two elementary schools, and back to the house. The five-miler took him through the heart of Graham, down Main Street, past the courthouse, up toward the park and the baseball fields, and back down Buena Vista to the back side of his neighborhood on the northeast side of town.
His tennis shoes slap, slap, slapped a sidewalk that was “plum broke out with cracks.” That’s what his father-in-law, Jonas Cunningham, had said after Joy hit one on her bike when she was seven, fell off, and broke her arm. Like everything else in town, the sidewalks were well worn and scruffy. They’d needed repair when he’d run on them as a kid, and when he ran on them again after he came back from the army, it had somehow been comforting to see the same old cracks in the same old places. The world and everything he understood and believed had changed, exploded in a rumbling roar of dirt and shrapnel, blood and body parts and wailing screeches of agony, but the sidewal
ks in Graham, Oklahoma, were exactly as he had left them.
Most everything else in Graham was just as he’d left it, too. When he was a boy, he’d become obsessed with figuring out why Graham had been built on that particular spot. One piece of dirt was as good as another on featureless plains devoid of hills, valleys or rivers, where you could see the towering white grain elevator in Taylorsville eleven miles west—through an undulating shimmer of heat waves that set it dancing in the fierce sun. So why here? His minister father didn’t often indulge in tall tales, but he finally tired of Mac’s endless questions and told him that one of the prairie schooners in a wagon train bound for California had broken a wheel and the family’d had no choice but to settle down right there and build a town. He explained that all the small towns in Oklahoma had sprouted among the yucca plants and prairie dog holes the same way, said that was why there were broken wagon wheels in fence lines all across the state. Mac had believed that story for years.
Reality wasn’t as entertaining. The town that by 1963 was home to about 5,000 people had grown up around a railhead where ranchers loaded their livestock into cattle cars for transport to the huge stockyards facilities in Oklahoma City and Amarillo. The incorporated township of Graham was tethered to the rest of the world by US 270. The highway divided the town down the middle from east to west as it reached out from Arkansas to grab Kansas. Main Street was therefore laid out north/south, splitting the town neatly into equal quarters. Seen from the air, Graham’s unimaginative grid of straight streets looked like the business end of a giant wire fly-swatter lying on the empty prairie.
Lining those streets beneath a prickly forest of television antennas were simple ranch houses with big yards of grass that’d likely be brown by the end of August and more car-ports than garages. There was a sprinkling of fancy brick homes, too, of course. Doctors, dentists, and lawyers mostly; oil money didn’t settle in a place like Graham. Big, leafy dogwoods, sugar maples, and pin oaks that had been planted on purpose and watered faithfully dangled tire swings beneath limbs extended upward toward the sun like cold fingers stretching out to a fire.
