by Tim Poland
As the public facts came out, they fed directly into the more fluid and variable versions of events narrated and amplified by the voices of the Joyce Maldens of the Ripshin River Valley. Most of these versions made it to Sandy’s ears in one form or another. She paid them little mind, but they were out there, nonetheless, vibrating in the air around her. There must have been an ill-advised affair with a married doctor or something like that because, really, why else would a nurse leave a good-paying job at the big medical center near Dalton’s Ferry to work in a nursing home in a little backwater like this? She’d moved into old Calvin Linkous’s house out on Willard Road, rented to her by his greedy little daughter not even a month yet after poor Calvin had dropped dead next to that big pile of old tires out behind the place. The daughter had even let this outsider take in Calvin’s dog, Stink, without even a how-do-you-do about how much Calvin loved that damn mutt. Some things just weren’t decent. Of course, who else would want that old mutt, smelling like he did of all the skunks he’d killed over the years?
When her husband killed that man, do you know, she was sitting right there at the bar, right in the middle of all that mess. Saw the whole thing happen right in front of her eyes and never said a thing. Never shed tear one. And the husband killed that man, someone said, because she must have been having an affair with him, and he was coming for her to do the same to her, and would have, except that other folks in the bar wrestled him to the ground until the police got there. Horrible as all that is, could you really blame him, bless his heart, her sitting right there, the hussy, with some other fellow for all the world to see? And just why is it she don’t have the same last name as her ex-husband? Someone knew someone who knew the deceased ex-convict ex-husband’s mother, and that woman was not at all shy to let it out what a lousy whore her ex-daughter-in-law had always been. Now, don’t you know, they say she’s taken up with that strange old widower, what’s his name, Keefe, lives in that little shack up on the fire road above the lake. Nurse up at the hospital emergency room in Sherwood said she brought him in with some sort of injury once. You have to wonder what she might have done to him. Now there’s a marriage made in heaven. Hard to tell which one’s more strange of the two. She acts more like a man than a woman, standing right out in the middle of the river, fishing all the time. Not normal for a woman, carrying on like that. And just what do you suppose was going on when her ex-husband came for her, her and that other woman, just the two of them, out there in the river, doing what? Fishing? Call it what you want, but looks more like those two gals are likely, well, you know, that way. Bless their hearts.
Sandy left these imagined facts and the known facts of her life to whirl and shift as they would. Walking down the long hallway, away from Joyce, in search of Edith, she held the private facts of her life close, to be shared partially with only a select few, to be shared fully with no one. She had no point to prove. She was who she was, at home in her skin with no more apologies to make.
She was Sandy Holston, that woman from over the ridge for whom not one but two men had died. And yet they hadn’t died for her, neither Vernon nor the drunken red-haired man Vernon killed at the bar, the red-haired man she’d never met before and whose name she still couldn’t recall. Both had died for a version of her—the beloved wife, the good-looking woman ripe for the picking on the adjacent barstool—versions of Sandy they had each fabricated themselves and attempted to drape over her. Neither version had ever fit her. She wondered if any of these other women ever understood that, the women she would still catch looking furtively at her from time to time, their quick glances revealing a mixture of envy, awe, and fear of the woman for whom men had actually died.
She was Sandy Holston, “a cold fish, that one,” some had said. And perhaps she was. She had finned her way into the world as a late “surprise” to her middle-aged, childless parents, both of whom had by that time long since settled comfortably into a life crafted for only two. Other than the shrine of old photographs on her mother’s bedside table, she had no memory of the father who died in a foundry explosion while she was still a toddler, leaving her with a mother entrenched in the life of a grieving widow and who seemed startled by the presence of a daughter who might intrude upon that grief. When her mother died, she closed up her mother’s house and married Vernon Adams because he had professed what he called love and his proposal had seemed reasonable and she could think of no reason not to accept. She stepped out of the shadow of the life her parents had shaped for themselves and into the one planned out by Vernon and felt no recognizable sense of loss. Nothing had yet presented itself that might sink a barb into the heart pumping blood through her flesh.
She was Sandy Holston, and yes, she had agreed to participate in her imprisoned husband’s ill-fated escape attempt. She could think of no simple way to refuse, and she doubted he would ever actually enact his plan—to wait for the right moment, then flee the prison work detail, escape into the national forest land nearby, run over the ridge and down to the clearing by Dismal Creek, where Sandy would be waiting with the car. And she did wait, as agreed, one day a week for months, while Vernon waited for his opportunity on the other side of the ridge. And while she waited, she learned to fish. Other nurses at work had told her how awful it must be to be married to an imprisoned killer. More sympathetic ones had told her they knew just how much she must miss him, gone for all those years. Sandy dug through her husband’s things, searching for some touch, some scent, some sensation that would indicate she did miss her husband’s presence. She found nothing to ignite longing in her except an old abandoned fly rod, one thing never used by her husband. So while she waited, in the clearing by Dismal Creek, a respectable trout stream, she fished. And in her long waiting, she became a fly fisher, wading gracefully through the current of the stream, taking the stocked rainbow trout easily, learning to stalk with increased precision and skill for the cagey, more elusive native brook trout. Over the months she came gradually to the realization that it was as if she had not been born, not felt lashed to the world around her in any way, until that first day she stepped into a trout stream. A first barb had at last managed to lodge itself in her heart. She loved something.
When Vernon finally did make his escape attempt, Sandy now had something to protect and preserve. The man who burst into the clearing where she was stalking a particularly large brook trout was no longer anyone she could recognize as a husband—he was now a dangerous man coming in between her and a good fish. She fled the stream to her car and escaped the approach of the desperate convict just as the pursuing guards emerged from the creek into the clearing and locked him in their gun sights.
She was Sandy Holston, who moved over the ridge to the Ripshin River Valley, at the far edge of the Rogers Ridge watershed, to wait out the impending release of her ex-husband from prison. She’d waited out half of that first summer along the Ripshin until old Calvin Linkous’s heartbroken, skunk-killing dog, Stink, finally accepted her presence in his home and hobbled up to her, nestled his snout in her lap, and allowed her to pick off the army of ticks attached to his mottled hide. By the end of that summer, she was more glad than she could ever let on that her only friend, irascible, salty-tongued Margie Callander, refused to allow Sandy to flee from her as she had most everything else in her old life. And yes, as they said, she had taken up with that eccentric widower, James Keefe, a man far older than she. She had been drawn to him because of the rhythm of the river in his voice, because of his little bungalow on the banks of the upper Ripshin, and because neither of them could ever care for the other as much as each cared for the river that ran through their lives and the fish in it. Never effusive in their affection, they had grown comfortable with one another, though it hadn’t come easily, and they shared a sense of obligation, in their own odd ways, to the river as they knew and loved it.
And as the public facts had stated, after his release from prison, the ex-husband had come for one Sandy Holston, bent on killing her for reasons unspecified. He
had pursued her into the river, where he was subsequently overwhelmed and drowned by the discharge of water from the upstream hydroelectric dam. What the public facts did not contain, what was contained in the private facts Sandy held so close, was that as Vernon had pursued her, she had retreated downstream with intent and purpose, with precise design, leading him into position at the head of the deepest hole on that stretch of the river just as the wall of discharged water arrived downstream. She’d lured her ex-husband into position just as she would have played a fish. She was a killer, too.
She was Sandy Holston, a woman with a questionable past and a smelly old dog, whose life played out along a tight line between herself and a fish on the other end. She was, admittedly, a “cold fish,” living largely on her own terms, but in this place, this watershed, this river valley, she was also a woman who might, in her own way, love.
AFTERNOON sunlight poured through the glass doors at the end of the hallway. It was the first fully warm day of spring, and Edith had asked to spend as much of it as possible outside, in the courtyard. Sandy was on her way to retrieve Edith, but before she could reach the exit, she was stopped by the exasperated voice of one of the nurses’ aides issuing from the room to her left.
“Now be a good boy for mama,” the nurses’ aide said. Sandy walked to the open door of the room and saw the aide was bent forward, wagging her finger in an old man’s sunken face while her other hand tugged at the fingers of one of the man’s hands, which were clutched tightly to the hem of the blanket covering him. “We have to get you cleaned up and changed. We don’t want to lie there all icky with poo-poo diapers, now do we? Come on, now, let’s be a good boy.”
“Stop that.” Sandy set her purse on a straight-backed chair by the door and stepped to the aide’s side.
“What?” The nurses’ aide turned, startled only slightly, the look of exasperation clear on her face.
“I said stop that.” The aide straightened up, took a step back, and her face went flat as Sandy removed her hand from the old man’s. Sandy recognized the look shifting across the aide’s face. It was, in part, a response to Sandy’s nominal authority over her, but more so it was the face of one of those women, the ones who still regarded Sandy with awe and a bit of fear as the woman for whom men had died.
“But I was just—” Sandy held up her hand, stopping the aide in midsentence.
Sandy drew the curtain around his bed, then took two latex gloves from the aide’s cart, drew them on, and leaned toward the old man in the bed. His head tilted to the side and his mouth hung halfway open, his tongue protruding slightly as it worked hopelessly with the twitch of his lips to form words. His left hand still clung desperately to his blanket, the right lay limp at his side, the fingers curled and immobile. Sandy finished snapping on the gloves and turned to the man, her voice firm and even.
“We’re going to change you now, Mr. Rankin.” His eyes flitted back and forth while the left hand struggled to clutch the blanket tighter. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but it has to be done. Just look at Edie, and she’ll hold your hand. We’ll be done in just a moment.”
Sandy glanced at Edie and nodded toward Mr. Rankin’s hand. “Just hold it,” she said softly. The aide did as instructed, and the man turned his frantic eyes to her. While he was momentarily distracted, Sandy flipped the lower portion of his blanket aside, slid off the soiled incontinence pants, disposed of them, wiped his crotch clean, and slid on a fresh pair of pants. The old man was barely able to turn his eyes back to Sandy by the time she had finished.
“There now,” Sandy said as she pulled off the used gloves and dropped them in the waste container hanging from the aide’s cart. “You’ll rest better now, Mr. Rankin.” She held her hand briefly over his limp one, then slid the curtain aside, scooped her purse from the chair, and motioned for Edie to follow her out into the hallway.
The nurses’ aide rolled her cart out of the room to where Sandy waited.
“Don’t ever do that again.” Sandy slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder.
“Why? You saw what a mess he was. I was just—” Sandy cut her off again.
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Edie’s brows pinched together in confusion. “Don’t ever talk down to a resident that way again. He lacks mobility and speech, but you can see he has some awareness of what’s going on. He’s frightened and embarrassed. He’s a grown man. Don’t talk to him like he’s a child.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And pull the curtain for privacy. He’s a person, and something like this can be humiliating.”
“I’m sorry,” Edie said, the look on her face a mixture of mild regret and genuine fear.
Sandy nodded and walked to the glass doors leading to the courtyard.
Early in her time at the nursing home, Sandy would have given little if any consideration to the emotional frailty at play in custodial care such as that just performed for Mr. Rankin. It was a necessary task to be completed, nothing more. Sandy knew her professional approach was different now, and more than anyone or anything else, Sandy knew this change had come about because of Edith Moser.
EDITH was alone in the courtyard in her wheelchair, her eyes closed, her face turned up to the afternoon sun. The courtyard was an alcove of sorts, a concrete patio enclosed on three sides by the exterior of the building. An arbor extending from the nursing-home roof covered half the courtyard and an assortment of patio furniture. Spaced intermittently around the patio were a few large flowerpots, newly planted with petunias and pansies that had yet to take hold. Two other flowerpots were without flowers, containing instead sand with a variety of cigarette butts speared into it. The open side of the courtyard faced west to the lawn behind the structure, which rolled out to an adjacent pasture where a few spotted cattle could be seen grazing behind their wire fence. The far side of the pasture swept up a slope and into a thick stand of hardwoods and pine. Edith’s chair sat at the far open edge of the patio, the wheels locked in place, exactly as Sandy had positioned her a few hours ago. Sandy stepped quietly to her side and squatted by the wheelchair.
Edith’s face caught and held the afternoon light as if it were emanating from her to the sun. Her lips turned up in just the hint of a smile, more like a grin, as if she knew something no one else would ever have the insight to perceive. The skin of her face was loose, hanging slightly, but still soft and largely unwrinkled. Her legs, stick-thin and virtually useless, were propped on the foot supports of the chair, covered by the robe and blanket Sandy had wrapped her in before bringing her outside. Edith’s hands lay folded in her lap, webbed in thick blue veins under waxy skin as soft as that of her face. Her arms were only slightly more useful than her legs.
Sandy looked at her face, then reached out to gently touch one of Edith’s hands in hopes of not waking her too suddenly. Her hand still hovered just above the old woman’s when Edith spoke.
“I know you’re there, you. Come to take me away from this glorious spring day and drag me back inside my little cave, haven’t you?” Edith’s eyes remained closed, her face still held out to the sunlight. She lifted one hand, found Sandy’s, took it in her own, then lifted the other hand and began softly to pet the hand of the younger woman beside her.
“You have to go in at some point, Edith.” Sandy relaxed under the touch of the old woman. “Thought I’d get you settled before I leave.”
“Just until the sun reaches the ridge, please, dear? Won’t be but a few minutes longer. Please.”
“Of course, Edith.”
“Thank you, dear. You’ve made an old pagan so happy.” A grin etched itself onto the old woman’s face.
Edith Moser was a marvel to Sandy. When she became a resident of the nursing home, shortly after Sandy started working there, she was very old then, close to ninety. Now she was physically capable of little more than drawing air into lungs, pumping blood through veins, and holding her face up to the sun. As Edith’s body grew more frail, her mind and voice, in direct pro
portion, seemed to Sandy to increase in sharpness and clarity. Edith had spent her childhood in her family’s home by the lower Ripshin on the old river road. When Edith was a child the river had, in fact, been just the Ripshin River, there being no hydroelectric dam yet in place, no Willard Lake to divide the upper from the lower. The house was a rickety old two-story thing propped up on a foundation of river stones. It was a “rough and mean” place, she told Sandy. As soon as she was old enough, Edith left that house on the river. She hired on at the furniture plant in Sherwood and worked her way up to line supervisor at a time when women were rarely in charge of anything. Never married, she eventually built a little four-room cottage on the riverside land that was transferred to her after a chimney fire consumed the old house with both her parents in it. She lived along the river and worked in the furniture plant until she was forced to retire on a union pension, which she could still count on in those days. She’d known all along the risks of loneliness that a solitary life could leave her with, especially now, in her old age. But, as she told Sandy, the risks that came with being “stuffed into a life” of someone else’s choosing were far worse. “A steep price,” she told Sandy, but worth it. When she realized she’d grown too old and “tattered” to physically care for herself much longer, she gave away her modest possessions, sold the little house on the river, sold her car, and made preparations to move into the nursing home. She’d made all the arrangements. She drove herself to the nursing home near Damascus, where she met the boy who bought her old Ford, gave him the keys and title to the car, and, leaning on her cane, walked into her last home.
It had been a bit slow at first, but soon enough Edith had broken through Sandy’s rigid clinical shell, demanded that she recognize that Edith, like the other residents, was more than a regimen of clinical tasks to be tended to, was still a person inside this “raggedy sack of bones” and that “you’d better get that through your head right now if you and I are ever gonna be friends.” Sandy had felt a layer of herself peeled away and found Edith, another woman who refused to live inside the lines someone else had drawn around her.
