The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover

by Robert Morgan

  “We have brought her all the way down here,” Velmer said.

  “The tumor has grown too far,” the doctor said. “I wish I could be more hopeful, but that is the truth.”

  We all stood there like we couldn’t think of nothing else to say. I guess we was all wore out from the long day of travel and worry. I’d never felt so helpless in my life. The light in the hospital was gray, like dishwater, and it seemed the smell of tobacco had seeped into the air. It was a sickening smell. It was so hot the back of my dress was wet. There was cigarette smoke coming from one of the rooms. I felt I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was going to sink right down on the floor. Papa and Velmer both acted like they was stunned. And then a shock of anger surged through me.

  “So you’re not going to help us?” I said to the doctor. “After we brought her all this way.”

  “Mrs. Powell, I wish there was something I could do,” the doctor said. He was so calm it made me madder. He wasn’t even going to try to do nothing for Mama. I’d heard that doctors try to stay away from a patient that’s dying. It looks bad if they are treating a person that dies. Something about the way he looked at the clipboard and spoke in such a low voice made me madder still.

  “The least you could do is try to help her,” I said.

  “If I knew anything that would help her, I would do it,” the doctor said. He looked at his watch.

  A nurse come up and said he had a call at the front desk. “You’ll have to excuse me,” the doctor said.

  “You just want to wash your hands of her,” I said, and looked him in the eye.

  He started to walk away, and then he turned back to me. “The only place they can operate at this stage is in Charlotte,” he said. “There is a brain surgeon there named Rogers. That’s the only thing I can recommend.”

  “How do we make an appointment?” I said.

  “I’ll have my office call ahead and make an appointment,” the doctor said. “Dr. Rogers will be waiting for you.” Then he hurried away.

  “He’s just trying to get rid of us,” Velmer said.

  “Can we go all the way to Charlotte tonight?” Alvin said.

  “How far is it to Charlotte?” Effie said.

  Suddenly I knowed we had to get Mama out of that hospital and out of that town stinking of tobacco. I wouldn’t let her die in that place where they would not even try to help her. I would never forgive myself I we didn’t take her to Charlotte.

  “Charlotte is our only choice,” I said. “We have to take her.”

  The ambulance we’d come in had gone back to Henderson County. We had the woman at the front desk call another ambulance to make the trip to Charlotte.

  THE RIDE TO Charlotte in the dark I don’t hardly remember at all. Mama never woke up as we passed through towns and strange lighted places. It was just getting daylight when we finally reached the hospital in Charlotte. Dr. Rogers was there waiting for us and he seemed completely different from the doctor in Winston-Salem. He shook hands with each of us and had us set down on a settee in the lounge.

  “Any surgery at this time is a very long shot,” he said. “But I’ll do what I can to save Mrs. Richards.” He looked me in the eye when he said that.

  “What are her chances?” I said.

  “Not good; she’s already in a coma.” He said the first thing to do was relieve the pressure on Mama’s brain, if there was pressure. He’d do that by cutting a hole in her skull and letting the built-up fluid out. Then he’d open up the skull to see if the tumor had spread. Dr. Rogers talked to us like he’d knowed us all his life and like he really cared what happened to Mama.

  “I can make no promises,” he said.

  “I understand,” I said.

  A nurse give Papa a form to sign saying he granted permission to operate. I seen them roll Mama into the operating room at the end of the hall, but we couldn’t go down there. We had to stay in the waiting room where there was a few couches and magazines on a coffee table. The blinds was down but you could tell it was getting daylight outside.

  Velmer and Alvin said they was going to get some coffee and maybe something to eat. Effie and Papa and me stayed there in the waiting room. Papa had said almost nothing since we left home. It was so unlike him to have nothing to say. I’d been too worried to pay much attention to him. In all my life I’d never seen him so quiet. It was like he was in shock and didn’t know what to say. He’d always depended on Mama to look after things. Without her I don’t reckon he knowed what to do or think.

  There was a clock on the wall that said seven o’clock in the morning. But I tried not to look at it. There was no telling how long the operation might take. I felt sticky in my clothes and remembered I hadn’t took off my clothes since yesterday morning. I went to the restroom and washed my face and hands. When I come back Papa was still setting where he was but Effie had gone out to look for Alvin and Velmer. Only a few minutes had passed.

  I was thinking what a strange place this was for Mama to be in, so far from home, when I heard somebody holler way down the hall, “Out of the way! Out of the way! We’re coming through.”I jumped up to see what was happening and seen this nurse hurrying down the hall waving everybody out of the way and two men pushing a gurney behind her.

  “Out of the way!” she hollered at me, and I stepped back. As they went by I seen a body on the gurney with the head all bloody and mashed in on one side. A man in overalls and a woman in a print dress that buttoned all the way down the front tried to keep up with the gurney. Another nurse told them to stay there in the waiting room. They watched the men push the gurney all the way down the hall and disappear into the operating room.

  The woman turned away from me and sobbed. The man, who looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, just stood there looking at the floor. I noticed his shoes was laced with binders twine. The woman got a handkerchief out of her pocketbook and wiped her eyes, and blowed her nose but kept crying. I tried to think what I could do to help her. I stood up and spoke to the man in a low voice. “Is that your son?”

  “Grandson,” the man said.

  “I sure am sorry,” I said.

  The man said his grandson had drove his car over a bank and hit a tree. He’d been throwed out and his head had hit another tree. Because the car had gone down the bank, nobody had seen him there till daylight.

  “It’s all my fault,” the man said. Tobacco juice seeped out of the corners of his mouth.

  “How is it your fault?” I said.

  “Cause I let him take the car. He ain’t but fifteen and don’t even have a license.”

  “No, it’s my fault,” the woman said without turning around. “I give him a dollar to buy gas so he could drive to Gastonia.”

  I tried to think of something comforting. “This is the best place for brain surgery,” I said. “Everybody says so.”

  “It’s all my fault,” the man said again. He put his hand in the pocket of his overalls where something heavy weighted the cloth down. “These doctors don’t pull him through, they’ll answer to me,” he said.

  Just then a doctor and a nurse come down the hall from the operating room. It wasn’t Dr. Rogers but another doctor. They come straight to the man in the overalls and the doctor said in a low voice, “Mr. Lindsey, I’m afraid your grandson was already dead when he arrived here. He must have died in the ambulance.”

  The man in the overalls looked around like he didn’t know what to do. And then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver-colored pistol. “You will fix him up,” he said to the doctor.

  “He was dead when he arrived,” the doctor said. “There was nothing we could do.” I was surprised how calm the doctor was. He didn’t seem at all afraid of the man with the pistol.

  “Give me that thing,” the woman said, and reached out for the gun. The man backed away.

  “Cletus, do you always have to act the fool?” the woman said. “Give me that gun this minute.” He handed over the pistol and put his hands over his eyes and turn
ed away.

  “I’m awful sorry,” the doctor said to the woman. The woman led the man in overalls down the hall toward the elevator.

  I’d been so busy watching them that I was surprised to see Dr. Rogers standing beside me. He still had on his white cap, and his mask was pulled down under his chin. He nodded to Papa and asked us to come with him. He took us to a room adjoining the operating room. Mama laid on a gurney with her head all wrapped up in bandages.

  “The tumor has grown since the x-rays were made,” Dr. Rogers said. “She must have been in some pain. I wonder that she has lived this long.”

  “Did you take out the tumor?” I said.

  “I did not,” he said. “It has spread too far.”

  “Then there is no hope?”

  “She will die within hours.” He said Mama’s brain was so damaged it could not send out messages to keep her body alive, or something like that. I wasn’t really listening no more. I went over and looked at Mama. She’d never waked up since we left the house the day before. I wondered if we should take her home. But even if we did she wouldn’t know the difference.

  They rolled Mama into a room farther away from the operating room. Papa come in to look at her, and then Velmer and Effie and Alvin come in. They all went back to the waiting room and I stayed with Mama. I looked at Mama’s hands all calloused and rough from hard work. I felt guilty for bringing her all the way to Winston-Salem and then Charlotte where they couldn’t help her at all. She ought to have been left at home where she belonged. Mama had spent her life working on Mount Olivet, on Gap Creek and on Green River. She’d done a man’s work of chopping wood, plowing fields, killing hogs, as well as a woman’s work of washing and cooking and cleaning, sewing and raising kids. She looked so tiny there under the covers on the gurney it was hard to believe the tons she’d lifted and carried, the back-breaking work she’d done every day of her life.

  I was mad at myself because I hadn’t done enough to help her. If I’d took her to the doctor earlier they might have found the tumor and cured her. If I’d paid more attention I might have helped her. She’d worried herself to death after Troy was killed. She’d not let out her grief. And that grief had poisoned her. I should’ve done something to relieve her mind and I hadn’t.

  Mama laid there and I couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. And then she moved her head a little sideways. There was a kind of twitch and a shudder or tremble run through her body. Her foot moved and then she was still. I stood there waiting for her to move or breathe again, but she didn’t. I waited some more and looked to see if her chest rose, but it didn’t.

  Instead of going out to tell anybody I just stood there to be with Mama. It was my last chance to be with her. I kept thinking of all the things I’d done wrong, and all the ways I should’ve helped her and hadn’t. And then a nurse come in and took her pulse and said Mama was dead. There was no use to stay with her after that. I went out to the waiting room and told Papa and Velmer and Effie and Alvin. Papa just shook his head and looked down at his feet. I knowed he was confused, because for more than forty-five years he’d depended on Mama to keep things going. Even when he’d fussed at her he’d relied on her to tell him what things meant.

  THE DAY AFTER we got home people brought all kinds of things to eat to the house. It was the custom of the community. They brought platters of fried chicken and casseroles of all kinds. They brought apple pies and peach cobblers. Chocolate cakes and coconut cakes. They brought lemonade and jugs of iced tea. Some brought boxes of doughnuts. When Sharon come down she brought a cherry pie. It was hot hazy weather, the kind we usually had in August. I knowed a lot of food would go to waste cause only a little would fit in the icebox. I invited everybody that come by to eat something, and I tried to give away as much as I could.

  Now the surprise to me was that I never did cry when Mama died. I didn’t cry at the hospital when I seen her die or on the ride back home to the mountains. Effie cried and Papa cried, and I expected to cry, but I never did. I’d worked so hard taking care of Mama, and worrying about Mama, I was too tired to cry. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. And somehow I seen what had happened was too sad for tears. Tears was for ordinary grief and hurt feelings and surprise. To know that Mama had grieved herself to death over Troy’s death, and that she was gone forever, left me too numb for words. There wasn’t nothing to be done or said. It’s the reality of death that touches you too deep for weeping. There was nothing that could be said.

  Sharon would run to me and cry and get my shoulder wet, and I’d pat her back. I know that she was awful sorry that Mama had gone because Mama had always been good to her. But then Mama was good to everybody. She’d go without new clothes for herself so her children could have decent clothes. She would get up in the middle of the night to fix grits for somebody that had been sick and was suddenly hungry.

  Even Muir cried, for he was devoted to Mama. When I got home from Charlotte and told him Mama was dead he bawled like a baby, and there wasn’t nothing I could say that would comfort him.

  I guess people thought it was strange that I never cried. And I thought it was odd myself. I didn’t want people to think I didn’t care. But at the same time I knowed I was too close to Mama and her passing. Her death was too big for me to see yet. It would be a while before I understood what had happened.

  Though Ginny had died only five years before, it had been a long time since there’d been a funeral in the Richards family. I think the last had been the funeral of Ma Richards who died when I was just a little girl. I was afraid of her and stayed away from her. If Ma Richards seen me in the room she’d ask me to bring a coal from the fireplace to light her pipe. If she caught hold of me she’d turn me over her knee to see if my underwear was clean. I wasn’t sad at all when she died.

  I went with Papa and Effie to the funeral home to pick out a casket. You could buy a casket at the store down at the highway, but Papa decided to use some of the insurance money from Troy’s death to have an undertaker funeral. I agreed that it was the right thing to do. There was a whole big room of caskets at the funeral parlor and we picked a blue metal one that cost $299.95. Blue was Mama’s favorite color.

  We asked Lorrie and her sisters to sing at the funeral. They’d sung at lots of funerals and they harmonized perfectly together. I asked Muir if he wanted to preach at the funeral, but he said no, it was Preacher Rice’s job since he was pastor of the church and Mama was a member. He didn’t want to take the pastor’s place. I reckon he was still remembering all the trouble with Preacher Liner about Moody’s funeral too.

  I know it’s said that people enjoy funerals. They enjoy getting together with family and neighbors and remembering the one who has gone on. They enjoy the dignity and sadness, the respect and solemnness of the occasion. Most of all a funeral takes you out of the boredom and confusion of ordinary life and makes you think of everlasting things. But I never did like funerals. I had a horror of the way preachers talked at funerals, referring to mansions in heaven and them that might be left behind at the Second Coming. When Moody died Muir had preached the best funeral I ever seen, but he didn’t think it was his place to preach at Mama’s.

  Before we got in the undertaker’s limousine to drive to the funeral I took two aspirins to cool me off. Sharon rode in the car with Papa and Muir and me. Effie and Velmer followed in Alvin’s car. Hot as it was I shivered. And I shivered again when we got in the church and they played the sad organ music. The smell of flowers around the casket at the front of the church made the heat seem stickier. Maybe it was dust in the air that made me want to sneeze.

  Lorrie and her sisters sung and they sung real pretty. They sung “How Beautiful Heaven Must Be,” one of Mama’s favorite songs. But I couldn’t hardly listen. I kept thinking about the way Mama couldn’t enjoy nothing after Troy was killed. Sharon sobbed on the bench beside me, and Effie cried. But I felt like I wasn’t hardly there.

  Preacher Rice prayed and said amen. And then he started to read from the
Bible. It was the passage that was always read at funerals. “In my house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you . . .”

  Just then we heard a car blow its horn. It must have been going up the river road, for we heard the horn again and again as it faded away. It seemed strange that anybody would honk their horn while a funeral was going on. They could see all the cars and trucks parked at the church, not to mention the hearse and limousine. Did someone just want to be mean and irreverent? Was it someone like Edward that was mad at Papa or the family?

  Preacher Rice kept speaking and then there was the sound of another horn. Somebody was banging their horn again and again as they got closer, and then they stopped. I reckon they seen all the cars and the hearse parked at the church. It seemed crazy that two cars would pass on the road honking their horns.

  Preacher Rice kept talking about what a fine Christian woman Mama was and how she now had her reward in heaven. He talked about how she’d served the Lord all her life, how she set an example for us all, how she had true compassion and love for her fellow man. It was all true, but it was like I couldn’t listen. I was somewhere else in my mind. I was streaming sweat and yet I was cold. My feet was icy. I wasn’t sure where I was.

  Then as Preacher Rice was closing with a prayer we heard this terrible boom, like a big gun had gone off. And then boom boom boom boom, and the booms echoed off the mountains. The preacher finished praying, but I could tell he was shook by the blasts. It sounded like war had broke out and that we was being attacked. His voice trembled as he spoke. And then Lorrie and her sisters sung again.

  It was the thought that a war had broke out that made me realize what all the horns, what all the noise, was about. War had not broke out: the war had ended. Japan must have surrendered. It was August 15, 1945, and the war must be over. There was no other explanation for the shots and blaring horns. The world would always remember this day because it was the end of the war. I would always remember it because it was the day of Mama’s funeral.