Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  “How about the Second Siege of Shiloh?” Will asked. “More soldiers died at Shiloh, if my memory serves, than in all the U.S. battles before it combined.” He rubbed his hands across his face, looking tired and his age.

  Mother shook her head. “Carolinians like to concentrate on Carolinians. Make it the Second Battle of Fort Sumter.”

  “I might do that,” Will said, and then he was on his way.

  We watched him trot out to the county road, while the pups raced around the circular drive under the oak, the smell of night animals in the air.

  “That’s good fortune for you both,” Mother said. She was holding the back of the rocker, making an effort in the dusk to move her offending muscle.

  “I didn’t mean to take you by surprise,” I said. “If he and I had been younger we might have waited a more decent length of time.”

  “You mentioned his name at lunch,” Mother said, as if that was all the announcement she’d needed.

  “So I did.”

  When the red sunset was just a faint line edging the horizon and the sky was dark, we went in. “What would you like to eat?” I asked her.

  “Cereal? Fruit?”

  Inside, while I set out various brans, oats, wheat, strawberries, bananas, blueberries—wishing my peaches were ripe—Mother worked her hip with her hands. “I used to want,” she confessed, “to have a baby by every man I was interested in. I used to get so disgusted with myself. Way past the age of possibility or good sense, I’d think about it, having his baby, as if that were an option. Later, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t really a signal the body rigged up to increase the species, but that what one always wanted was collaboration with a man. What easier way to collaborate than by reproducing part of the world? In my day, it was rare for women and men to work side by side. Now a lot of women do marry the men they work with. Or work with the men they marry.” She bent and stretched, holding on to a kitchen chair. “You don’t think about that? With Will?”

  I considered, surprised at the question, and at the topic. “He never had children,” I said. “I do, I suppose, think of that.” I’d never asked my mother about men. I’d lost my only father; I imagined as a child I’d assumed my mother had lost her only husband. Children see their parents as their creators and not much more. I’d do well to recall that where Fannin and George were concerned.

  “Why did you never remarry?” I asked Mother now.

  “At first, the good ones were like your Will, too tied to their jobs to travel. By the time anyone promising had come along, I’d got used to being in charge of myself.”

  While we fixed ourselves bowls of cereal and fruit, I admitted that I liked living alone already, and told her a story. “The weekend before I went to Harriet’s, I was spraying the front flower beds, to keep the chiggers off, and other bugs, with that mess I mix—ammonia, water, flea and tick powder—and I heard this car pull into the drive and looked around to see this stringy-haired man with wild eyes, skin bleached pale as bone, bad teeth. Serial killer, was my first thought. He got out and started over to Nolan’s old car—both his cars, as you saw, the old back-roads car and his new one, were still sitting in the drive. He said, ‘I want to see the gentleman of the house,’ and pointed to the old car. ‘I’m the gentleman of the house,’ I told him. ‘I got this GM,’ he said, ‘like that one. I want to take out the compressor and see how does it work.’ ‘You can lift the hood,’ I said, ‘but don’t take it out.’ And went right on spraying. After he left, I thought: What difference would it have made if I’d had a husband down at the bank? Whatever comes along on a daily basis that I don’t handle myself?”

  “That’s easier to see when you live alone,” Mother said. “You aren’t second-guessing what a man will do.” She’d finished eating and was busily rubbing her feet with Vaseline. Then, when they were thoroughly coated, she put on a pair of white socks. “Keeps them from drying out,” she explained, “or getting calluses. Sometimes when I’m at home, I’ll sleep with my hands greased up in a pair of socks, too.” She asked me for a cup of boiling water, then dropped in a tea bag, bent down and breathed the steam. “The tannic acid keeps my sinuses clear,” she said.

  “What else can I get you?” I asked, thinking that Mother was truly a clean machine, someone who treated her body with the same care another woman might have spent rubbing and waxing an antique.

  “Some hot cocoa? Sometimes I have a cup at bedtime when I’m at home. It’s something you can never get travelling.”

  I set out two cups for us. “You always said warm milk tells the system someone is taking care of you.”

  “It tells you you’re taking care of yourself.”

  THE PHONE RANG while I was in the kitchen slicing strawberries and Will was measuring sugar and cream for homemade ice cream. Our shoes were at the back door—it had been muddy out—and the dogs were still running around outside, chasing the tail end of the day. It was our first night to try out my single bed upstairs.

  I reached for the phone out of habit, and then heard myself speak in the still-strange taped sound: “This is Sarah. I’m glad you called. Please leave a message and I’ll return it as soon as I can.” How odd, to stand and eavesdrop on myself.

  There was a silence, then Harriet’s hoarse voice came on: “You? With an answering machine? I don’t believe it. I don’t know which is worse, having to go through the girl at your shop or talk to some wires in a box.” Another pause. Then, “The doctor says they won’t have to operate. Isn’t that great news? He’s going to shrink it instead. I think about it like a fat plum they’re going to turn into a prune in my chest, if I’m lucky. What do you think? Sarah? Where are you?”

  I stood frozen, looking at the machine, while Will reached over and punched the SAVE button.

  “Will—” I looked at him. Did this mean what I thought?

  “Go take a shower,” he said. “Then you can call her. Wash off your walk. Clear your head.”

  “Not good, then?”

  He stroked my arm gently. “Whupped, I’d say. Just off the top of my head.”

  “Oh, please—”

  “Go take a shower. I’ll fix us some ice cream.”

  I stood under the water as hot as I could stand, feeling it hit my scalp, the part in my loosened hair, my upturned face. Just the way it had with Nolan, it felt as if a large black shadow, the wings of some vast condor, had fallen over my world. You walked along, getting on with it, and then something moved across the sky and you were beneath its spread, seized with panic. How much worse it must be for them, the one who feels the claws sink into his side beneath the ribs, the one who feels them sink into her back below the shoulder blades.

  I’d not cried when the gnawing pain in Nolan’s body was labelled and his chances whittled down to nil. I wasn’t crying now. Rather, I felt as if the breath were being squeezed from me, stones piled on my chest. This time, having seen so recently that death is careless, arbitrary, rapid, an X-rated film in which you cannot hide your eyes, I no longer managed even surprise. Only entreaty.

  Not again. Not Harriet with her lovely legs and jewelled good cheer. Not her. We’d meant to be great-grannies together, tatting and knitting and rocking and chatting, putting the youngsters in their place, bawdy, familiar. Octogenarians playing Remember When. Clinging together, grieving for Doll and Edith when their times came, putting the old country place with its hogs and hickory nuts on the market, conveying the intricate web of Edith Huntt Cooper’s work to the designated library. Listening to the tape, made by the young oral historian, of Nat Sloane telling one last time the final score: Notre Dame 27, Stanford 10.

  I turned and bowed my head, letting the water beat down on my back, pressing my palms against my breasts, then moving them down my ribs to my flanks. Flesh and bones, so fragile. So frangible, so frail. I knelt under the pelting water with my face in my hands. Not Harriet, I pleaded until the water turned cold.

  When I slid back the glass, soaked, chilled, Will was waiti
ng with a bath towel. “Here,” he said, “I’m going to dry you off.” He wrapped me in the towel and in his arms and led me, still damp, to the high narrow bed. “You need to be reminded that nothing’s wrong here at home.” He had on his trousers and shirt, unbuttoned and flapping, and while he got me under the bedcovers, he undressed himself.

  “We may be too much for this cot on stilts,” he said, “but we might as well find out now.” He dried my body with the soft much-washed blue towel; then, more slowly, he dried the moist hollow of my throat and under my arms, and the back of my neck under my wet hair, which he wrapped in the towel as he kissed my wet face. Still standing by the bed, he kissed my skin, above my navel, on my temples, where the pulse beat in my neck and at my wrists, as if marking all the vital spots.

  Had I ever told him of my old schoolgirl fantasy of being led from the shower to the bed? Or did he know that because he understood women, or because he understood me to my bones? No matter. In long years past I’d longed for such erotic handling, for years after the time it had been refused me in this house, and I reached for Will, made room for him beside me. I shut my eyes, letting the room go dark, and took him inside me with a desire, a greed, that stunned me. Then held on to him afterwards with my hands, my mouth, my locked legs.

  “How did you know?” I asked him, letting my hair spread wet on the pillow, my face still flushed.

  “When I’ve been up all night,” he said, lying on his side against me, “when I’ve lost one or come up to that stone wall where there’s nothing more to be done, I could hump a sheep. I get this empathy for those cases you read about: some poor pig farmer’s lost his crops, his home, plus half his kin and he wants the nearest thing that’s warm and moving.”

  “And do the dying feel that way?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  I thought of Nolan then, and our final unsatisfactory couplings. Him angry in his denial, taking me as if in revenge for something, slamming my door on his way out. Or, later, unable, unsatisfied, telling me to get out of his room and close the door. “I think not,” I said.

  Will pulled on his pants and buckled his brown belt. “Make your call, Coop. I’ll clean up the pooches and bring us up some ice cream.”

  “Yes.” I sat and let him hand me my blue cotton robe.

  “You got paper and pen?”

  I nodded, indicating the drawer of the night table.

  “Take notes. We’ll go over them in the light of day.”

  My fingers, shaky, dialled a wrong number twice before I heard Harriet’s voice say, “Is that you?”

  Listening, I wrote: Tumor a small-cell carcinoma in the left mainstem bronchus. No metastasis. Some paresis of the left vocal cord, some invasion of the nerve. Adjacent to the heart, in the mediastinum. Harriet, clearly, was reading from notes as well.

  She said it had been dreadful afterwards: she couldn’t swallow or cough, couldn’t eat or drink. But she was fine now. The best thing, Oh, Sarah, she said, the very best thing was that there was no need for an operation. She wasn’t going to have a nasty scar, like a crime victim or something. She’d been terrified of that. She knew that cutting through the breastbone, whatever they had to do, hurt like old billy hell, but mostly it was the scar she’d been terrified about.

  David McCord, her young man, she said, had been a dear. He’d called her lots—and they were definitely planning a trip, after she’d had her thing shrunk up like a sun-dried tomato. After it was just a flake in her chest. She’d set the trip as her goal: not one single cigarette after she got on that plane. They were thinking about Aspen—she had had that great time with Knox there, one of the best times. Wouldn’t it be grand to go back and pick up where she left off? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to start over there with someone else? David, she reported, was almost finished with his recordings of old-timers. He said he could go anywhere she wanted. That was the advantage of her having grown children and his having none; they could just pick up and go, wherever.

  I listened, drawing a small chest on the writing pad, a tiny little dried tomato inside. I was having trouble breathing, and finally opened my mouth and gulped air.

  “How do you feel now?” I asked. I drew a little plum in the chest, and then wrinkled it like a prune. I drew a heart, putting a bow on a sprouting valve.

  “Relieved, honestly. Thrilled—I can’t tell you how scared I was—that this isn’t going to mean being laid up in the hospital, being sawed in half like some magician’s lady friend.” Her voice sounded strained, like someone recovering from laryngitis. “I was the most scared—I mean, having just met David and everything, and him such a hunk—of having this scar right here by my bosoms, you know, something he couldn’t help but see or, worse, have to touch. If we—when we—when he gets this chastity business out of his system, I don’t want to be a mess. My spirits really took a nose dive down there while I waited on that lab in Houston to locate my records and the doctor to see me. You know how long it takes at those big places.”

  “Did you have anyone to keep you company?” I didn’t want to bring up the sore subject of Harriet’s children. Or ask whether she’d let her parents know. Would Doll have sat in a waiting room at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center? It was hard to guess. I drew little tendrils from the prune to the heart. I’d covered half a dozen pads while Nolan was ill, filling pages with tiny pancreases shaped like elongated bunches of grapes, each with a worm inside. Toward the last, the cluster of grapes shrank, drying to raisins.

  “Birthday Club has been great, really. Honestly, they’ve all had one thing after another, and this is just one more to add to it. I think secretly they were glad to find out that I wasn’t the only one with no problems, since most of them, you know, are in lots worse shape. So shrinking this thing, like a fibroid or goiter or something, doesn’t seem so bad. You know those pictures in our biology books at Pritchard’s? Of the old men with goiters on their necks from not eating Morton’s salt? I imagine it like that—the thing going to go down the way a sprained ankle does or a toothache—awful and then the swelling disappearing until you can’t even remember how the hell it hurt so bad or why it put you on the blink for so long.”

  I stared at my pen. “When do you start the—treatment?” I couldn’t think of what else to call it, the radiation. Harriet hadn’t used that word. Perhaps it was too frightening. What should I have said? The procedure?

  Harriet said, sounding uneasy, “He said to get back on my feet. I guess he means feeling better and able to eat something. Next week, I guess I’ll tell the kids, and get that over with. ‘Hey, kids—’ ”

  I thought of our planned October reunion; October, tonight, seemed light-miles away. “Why don’t you come see me this summer?” I asked. “Why do we have to stick to the old routine? Who’s to care? Who’s to be inconvenienced? We’re footloose. Come for the Fourth of July. You know how you hate East Texas in the middle of summer with the air too thick to breathe. It’s pleasant here. We can have picnics in the Blue Ridge.” I knew Bess would coax Fannin and the boys back to William of Orange over the Fourth; foxhound pups and fox cubs would be big enough to handle, and there were splendid fireworks.

  “I think,” Harriet said, nervous, “I’ll still be—going in, you know, for treatment. I have to be through for Birthday Club’s Midsummer Night’s Party for husbands. I have to show the Turtlenecks just how good a widow can look.”

  “The next-to-last week in August, then,” I suggested. “Come for the Mineral Springs Summer Fair. You’ve never seen our little town pretend it looks the way it did in its old and famous days. We get crafts from Georgia and all over the Carolinas. And every church tries to outdo the others with home-cooked food. Even our small St. Andrew’s has a booth. Do come. My peaches will be ripe by then and we’ll have peach cobblers and peach turnovers and peach pancakes.…” I could hear the pleading in my voice. Was I that worried that time would run out? Was I right to be?

  “How about chocolate cake?” Harriet asked, laughing a raw laugh.
/>
  “The best.”

  “I don’t know why not. You’re right. Why do we have to stick to the old schedule? We don’t have children to get to school or husbands to stash at the bank. Besides, in August I can wear my short shorts, can’t I?”

  “Everywhere you go,” I told her.

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  After a pause, she said, “If we can visit back and forth anytime we feel like it, you can even come hold my hand this fall if the shrinking doesn’t work, I mean, if I have to take that bad stuff that makes you sick as two big hogs.”

  “I will,” I said. “Meanwhile, call me anytime you want to talk about it. Let me know when they set up the—schedule. And when you and your David decide on your trip.” I didn’t know what to say; I felt far away and of no help. “We had that slumber party,” I said, “and now I’m five states away.”

  “You’re taking the southern route.” Harriet’s laugh turned into a cough and she covered the phone. “If you go through Arkansas and Tennessee, you’re only three states away.”

  Off the phone, I went to the dresser and slowly began to brush my hair. I looked around the room with its peach-painted walls, its rug with cabbage roses, the Vermeer prints over the high beds. Harriet and I had been rearranging our marriages when I did this bedroom over. Now we were rearranging our very lives.

  When I was steady, I tucked my notes in the bedside drawer, tightened the belt on my robe, put color on my lips, and piled extra pillows against the fruitwood headboard. At the top of the stairs, I called down, “Where’s my ice cream?”

  “I fed it to the dogs,” Will called back.

  In a bit, he came up the stairs and through the doorway, an outsized bowl of strawberries and homemade ice cream in each hand, a paperback under his arm. Ben and Missoula padded along behind him.

  “Move over,” he said, shifting himself up onto the narrow bed beside me. “They’re making mincemeat of my private eye.”

  FOUR