All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  Then I saw my fried chicken. Practically untouched. “I guess nobody liked the chicken,” I said. I’d only had a little so that there would be plenty for everyone. I knew it was good.

  “There was just so much food,” Marie said quickly.

  “Well, I’ll find a home for it,” I said, just as quick, putting the foil top right back over the big pan. Allison and I started a relay team to my car, and the men began helping because anything that was going to get them home quicker was fine with them. Soon my back seat was full, and we drove off.

  “Hold on,” I said to Allison. I stopped by the post office and reached over to the glove compartment. I’d started keeping thank-you notes in there with stamps and a blue pen after getting those donations at Christmas. I’d even sent one to that awful woman at Hallmark.

  “A Southern lady knows the power of a thank-you note,” I said to Allison. “Whoever Marie gets in the mail first gets invited back.” If you did it right, you also had a detail that would make them think of you every time they saw it. “From the minute I stepped on your beautiful lawn, I was just stunned by the home you keep,” I said aloud, writing against the steering wheel. Marie needed to be better than all her neighbors, so that would be good.

  I went to lick the stamp and Allison stopped me. “No, me,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “But put it on the envelope. It’s not a sticker for you, okay?”

  “Ta dah,” she said, proud of her work.

  “Good job,” I said. “Now run it to the mailbox so we can go bring this food to people.”

  We spent an hour driving around, stopping in on my guys who were living at the tourist courts and also at the homes of old Miss Ann and Melba. Lonely people tend to be night owls, so I knew they’d be up. We were like reverse trick-or-treaters, ringing the bell to give them something good. “You don’t even have to heat up the chicken,” I told everyone. “Those meatballs need all the help they can get, but that cake will forgive any sin.”

  I’d watched all these men just waste away, and I thought that if I could keep weight on them, they’d have a head start and maybe stay ahead of it. I was tired of waiting for them to die. I was actually trying to help them live instead.

  I started cooking for them, and on a day off I would make enough meals for the next week. It wasn’t easy on my budget, but I could cook anything, and I was inventive. My next-door neighbor had a huge backyard garden, as much as his front yard with the house on it. In the summertime, he was always looking for takers for his extra vegetables. I would cook them on their own or use them to stretch meatloaf as far as your eye could see. In winter, he had plenty of collard greens and turnips to spare. I wasn’t fond of turnips myself, but a lot of the guys I looked after were from the country, so that was a taste of home. I also didn’t mind stopping if I saw a tree that was heavy with peaches and grabbing a bunch to make a peach cobbler for everybody. I can’t even guess how many blackberries I picked, or apples, which were everywhere from August until the edge of winter.

  Or I’d go up the country to Collier Springs, because the old-timers swore by the nutrition in the watercress that grew wild in shallow streams. You needed to find it growing within a few feet of a fresh spring, so you’d know it wasn’t contaminated, and you had to watch out for snakes. They loved to make a home curled up in the watercress, so the trick was to bring a rake and lift the plants out of the water first. Give the snake a chance to move out and find a new home before you stuck your hand right in.

  My cousin out on Amity Road had cattle, and he’d call me when he sold a cow. “Come out, girl,” he’d say. “I got something for you.” After breaking it down for his customer, he’d have all kinds of hamburger left over, and the cuts of meat nobody else wanted. I could also do that at McClard’s—the most famous barbecue restaurant in Hot Springs—asking politely if they had any ham bones or scrap meat to make a big pot of greens or, even better, beans. White beans cooked with a big old ham bone from McClard’s just needed a bay leaf thrown in to be magic for my guys. Sometimes they gave me enough scrap meat that I could make people pork sandwiches, delivering them the same barbecue that people paid the big bucks to eat. “Here it is,” I’d say. “You don’t even have to wait in line for a table. It’s delivered right to you with a pot of beans.”

  In the fall and winter of deer season, people were excited to show off their kill, and I’d be there with a hand out. “Could I just have a little bit of what you’re not going to use?” I would take the neck bones of anything, because there was always a lot of meat there. But the gold was the marrow that I could draw out to make the bone broth for the ones that were too sick to eat. I’d take a hammer to break up the bones, add one capful of vinegar to really draw out the good stuff, then put it on simmer and let it go all day and night. They could just have that in a mug, and when they weren’t strong enough to hold up a mug, I’d hold it for them. And when even that became too hard, I’d feed them by spoon.

  But there were still groceries and things I needed to buy for them. Bonnie and I were at Kroger getting groceries, and she asked me what army I was feeding.

  “I’m bringing food ’round to my guys,” I said. “It’s really making a difference. I can just tell.”

  “Well, let me help,” she said.

  “Bonnie, you are many things, but you are not a cook.”

  “I mean my food stamps,” she said. A woman looked over when she heard that and primly nodded, like Bonnie deserved food stamps on account of how she looked.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Eating’s an aberration for me anyway,” she said; we blended her food for the feeding tube. Bonnie started giving me half her food stamps, and we’d get groceries together.

  But they still kept dying. I learned that if hospital patients needed something, I could advocate best during the graveyard shift and weekends. The night shift didn’t care if you hung around or what you did, just don’t get them in trouble: “Burn the place down but have it back together by shift change in the morning.”

  Unless it was an emergency, I’d drive my guys to Little Rock. AMI was our backup in Hot Springs. “If AMI burns to the ground, go to Little Rock if I’m not here,” I’d tell them. “Do not go to St. Joe’s.” I had more fights at St. Joe’s than at any other hospital. These doctors, men who I respected from town, would shove a finger in my chest and tell me that I was going to die. That was bad enough, but they told me I was bringing in people who put everyone’s life at risk. Dr. Porter, a cancer doctor who was furious to be stuck with AIDS patients on his oncology floor, thought I was disgusting because I went in the room while he stood at the door. He became enraged with me once because I took a chart into a patient’s isolation room. He was screaming at me so much he was spitting.

  “Doctor, there are sick people here,” I said, trying to calm him down.

  “Don’t tell me there’s sick people here!” he yelled. I think he truly believed the chart was infected. I know Dr. Porter is why the nurses thought it was okay to leave the trays outside patients’ doors again. It was so upsetting, because now I knew these dying men. I’d fed them, from chicken sandwiches to broth in a mug. And now they were trapped in these places that did the very least for them. I thought I could shame Dr. Porter into doing more.

  “Have you heard about the pizza and pancake diet for AIDS patients?” I asked him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Pizza and pancakes—you just slide ’em under the door,” I said. “It’s more than your staff is doing.”

  “Well, I don’t want ’em in the hospital.”

  “They don’t want to be here.”

  “Well, if I get an infection from one of them—”

  “Wear a condom when you go in.”

  He stalked off. I had these small moments of release, because otherwise the anger was too painful. There were people in the hospital I could do
that with, but mostly I tried to act as professional as possible. I called it my doctor costume. “If I have to get the doctor involved . . .” I’d say to nurses.

  “Oh, no, you don’t need to get the doctor involved.” Anything but a doctor on their ass. Even an imaginary doctor. And I felt like I was becoming that doctor. I read everything I could, and I was so proud that I was getting the glossary: the cytomegalovirus retinitis that would make some of them blind if they lived long enough; the pneumocystis pneumonia that would fill their lungs and always get them. I kept notes on everything in my planner, noting that the only people I ever saw with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions had been on the coasts. Those were the purple and red blotches that the national news showed people having, in the rare times they talked about AIDS.

  I wrote all this down, thinking knowing the names would help them, or at least I would have information when the cavalry or the federal government showed up to take over. It was a way to tame the chaos. To at least feel the power that comes with naming something. But saying “this is pneumocystis” did not help when a guy was shaking so hard because it was impossible to keep him warm, no matter how many blankets you grabbed from other rooms. The only thing you could do sometimes was wrap yourself inside with him just to give him some heat.

  Saying “this is cytomegalovirus retinitis” didn’t help the men whose vision had started to go, first in a light fog they could deny and then in a closing curtain that left them blind. To block out the beeps and the chatter of the nurses, I closed the door and read to them. At first, it was the Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts books that gave me comfort and distraction. On my own, I would read three at a time and flip between them like TV channels. But they seemed too superficial, and it seemed cruel to read a cliffhanger to people next to a cliff. I understood why people read the Bible to people who are dying. There’s a sureness to it, a sense that this journey had been done before. But I never wanted to bring the Bible in, because these guys had been hit in the head with it enough.

  I started carrying an old tour book for the Florida Keys in my bag with me at all times. I’d had it since I was a kid, and after my daddy died, I read it to escape back to memories of him taking me there. As I read it to my guys, we’d leave whatever hospital we were in, and go somewhere beautiful, away from trouble and worry. They’d all come home to Arkansas, a place that had birthed them but wouldn’t claim them. So we left.

  The first stop was always Key Largo. I would read the description and tell them about the times when I was a kid visiting with my dad. Then I’d take them on down to Islamorada, where we swam with dolphins and dived down into the water, which changed from a clear turquoise to cooler blue as we swam through angelfish, darting around us in streaks of electric yellow, purple, and blue, seeming to be lit from within. We’d put our hands on the coral reefs that had grown over shipwrecks, riots of green and purple covering the skeletons of abandoned cargo ships and freighters. We’d dry ourselves on the beaches, which are made from coquina, disintegrated shells that turn to stone after eons and eons.

  At the end of the guidebook, we’d made it to Key West. I would skip sections to get there sometimes, if we needed to, pressing the gas on the Seven Mile Bridge on the Overseas Highway to make better time. For us, Key West was a gay mecca we lined with as many gorgeous men as there were lavender and pink flowers. By the time we got there, we had an understanding that there was no judgment. We’d smile or just sigh, and they might point out a guy in short shorts riding by on a bike or a swimmer who looked just like the first guy they ever kissed.

  We went someplace else, where they were safe and warm. Where there was nothing to be hidden and nothing wrong with admiring the way the sun shone down on the beauty of men. As if it existed for that very reason—to be admired and loved.

  Chapter Six

  It was a Friday morning in April 1987, and one minute I very much cared that Allison asked for two Eggos and then didn’t even eat half of one—and then I didn’t.

  I caught the first words from a morning news show on in the living room. Princess Diana had visited a newly opened AIDS ward in London the day before. I stood in front of the television, then kneeled to get closer. “The Princess of Wales showed not the slightest apprehension about her visit to Middlesex Hospital and its new AIDS ward,” said the British correspondent, the same one they always had on to talk about how Diana and Prince Charles were in a royal soap opera. “All the speculation had centered on whether she would wear gloves when shaking hands with the staff and nine patients of the new ward.”

  “She didn’t wear gloves,” I whispered, watching her walk, so tall and beautiful in a knee-length blue dress with long sleeves. She shook hands with all nine patients in the ward. A whole ward devoted to AIDS, I thought. She stayed more than an hour but was not filmed with any of the patients. “They were worried about public exposure,” said the correspondent. They were worried, not her. Someone they interviewed from the hospital said the princess sat on the beds of patients when they couldn’t stand.

  They flashed to a picture of her, seated and smiling, facing someone we could see only from behind. “Only this patient agreed to a still photograph with the princess, and then only with his back to the camera.” The slender neck, the dark, thinning hair. He looked like one of my guys. I wondered how long he had. Diana’s smile was broad, just on the edge of looking forced, so I could tell she knew he didn’t have long. She could feel his frailty in her hand.

  Then the news moved on, but I stood there. Maybe things were changing. Allison yelled from the kitchen. “I’m not hungry.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, walking, taking sure strides like Diana’s. “Let’s get ready.”

  I picked out a blue dress for work and double-checked Allison’s backpack. Her daddy would be getting her at school, and I always sent her best clothes along. I crammed them into her little school bag so she didn’t look like a little ragamuffin every Friday.

  Work was busy, but lately everyone had been showing around more sightseers than buyers. I got only one couple, in their fifties and sweating, even though it was just seventy-eight degrees. During the tour I could tell they each wanted to say yes, but neither wanted to be responsible if it was a mistake. I needed this sale, and I thought I had them on the way back to the sales office to sign the papers. But when I motioned for them to sit, she started to and he didn’t.

  “I need time to pray about it,” he said. I saw her face fall, and she leaned on the chair like she never had any intention of sitting. This girl Roxanne who I couldn’t stand was next to me. I didn’t have to look to know she was smirking.

  “I would think so,” I said, matter-of-fact, like it was a necessary formality. “Are you Christian?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Well, so am I,” I said. “Would you pray with me now?”

  “Right here?” she asked.

  I took their hands and I knelt, right there in the sales office in front of all the other time-share staffers. The couple had no choice but to join me.

  “Well, Lord, here it is. You brought these fine people here, and we ask that you guide Harry as he makes this important decision. In Jesus’s name we pray.”

  “Amen,” they said, moving slightly, as if to get up. I remained silent and rooted to the ground, so they did too.

  After a long beat, I whispered, “Did you hear that?”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “That’s God’s voice.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s God telling you, ‘You better take a break and take a vacation.’ Because the only other way He tells you is when you have a heart attack.”

  They laughed and bought. Hallelujah, they bought. How could they argue with the Word of God? Roxanne shot me daggers until Sandy came over.

  “Roxanne,” she said, all smiles. “That dress you’re wearing, it’s so—comfortable. And Ruth
ie, your dress.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Roxanne huffed off to judge someone else.

  “Let’s take it out,” she said. “Don’t waste such a nice look on work.”

  “I can maybe meet you out later,” I said. “I need to run some errands. Where will you be?”

  “The Arlington, but hopefully not for long,” she said. She looked down at my contract. “But if you do catch me out there, drinks are on you.”

  “Praise the Lord,” I said.

  My errands were actually just one, and it was stopping by a house out on Highway 70 West.

  Bonnerdale was about twenty miles west of Hot Springs, and when I drove up to the address I had, I was surprised to find it was a fairly nice house. It was probably one of the nicer ones spared back in 1935 when they tore down neighborhoods to build the highway.

  A tall, sinewy man was leaning on a weathered pickup out front with the hood up, his jean shorts cut as close as Daisy Duke’s. He was wearing black work boots, and a cigarette dangled from his lip. He took a long drag on it as he turned to watch me get out.

  “Tim?”

  “Who’s asking?” He had light hair and dark eyes. His sandy blond hair was sheared off, and he had a tiny little mustache. He was wearing a cologne that was so loud, I could smell it as I was coming up the driveway.

  “I’m Ruth,” I said, going to shake his hand. “We spoke on the phone.”

  “Oh,” he said, relaxing and taking another drag off his cigarette. “Yeah, I’m Tim Gentry. You’re prettier than I thought you’d be.”

  “I could say the same for you,” I said, pointing to his shorts. He let out a laugh, did the smallest dip, almost a curtsy. A hillbilly dandy.

  “Nice truck,” I said.

  “Not mine,” he said. “We were just working on it. The drive belt is loose. Well, he is fixing it.” He turned to the house. “Jimmy,” he yelled to the house. “We got company.”