That car’s automatic door locks and across-the-shoulder seat belts impressed me the most. Safety first. When I was twelve, I developed a plan for protection against further abandonment, a method by which Daddy would remain with me. I created rituals, recited self-made mantras, embraced superstitions to ward against harm. They included making sure not to step on cracks while walking to and from school every day, and saying, “He’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay” over and over upon approaching the house. I created my own form of fortune-telling, using a regular deck to substitute for Kimmie’s tarot cards. (“If the nine of clubs shows up before a face card, it means Daddy will feel good today.”) And my fingers were perpetually crossed for good luck.
But then Aunt Essie told me a story that shattered my confidence in these rituals. “You can never ask your mama about this, but I heard that what happened that day was Cyril got pulled over by the cops somewhere in Georgia,” she said to me one evening as we snapped green beans on the back porch. “Got pulled over really for driving that fancy foreign car. You know, po-lice always suspicious of a Negro driving a fine automobile on the highway. Anyway, if Vy hadn’t been in the car with them, they might not of gotten stopped, ’cause from a distance you can’t really tell what that Cyril is—and Kimmie having his color and all. But ain’t no mistaking Vy’s race. Anyway, they got pulled over and po-lice drew his gun and everything. Patted them all down, checked out the car, called in the plates—just plain ol’ meanness like they do down South.” She paused, snapped more beans, rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “Then, when they finally let ’em go, Cyril decided Kimmie should drive for a while. You know, ’cause maybe a young girl would have an easier time of it with the highway patrol, right? Well, poor thing, she was so nervous—JD says she wasn’t a good driver, as he recalls—anyway, she pulled out into traffic and ran right into another car going at least seventy miles an hour down the highway. Didn’t have a chance, ’cause she got hit on the driver’s side. That’s why the others survived. They didn’t get the full impact.”
Even though too young when it happened to have been told the gory details, I didn’t accept that version of the accident. Certain that Mama never would have discussed it with anyone, I decided Aunt Essie’s tale couldn’t possibly be from a reliable source. “Where’d you hear that?” I challenged her.
“Folks talk, Darlin’. News travels.”
“If what you say is true, how come Kimmie’s face looked so good at the funeral?”
Aunt Essie snapped away, working her wrists as though the string beans were knitting needles. “Morticians are like magicians. The good ones, anyway.”
I shook my head. “Kimmie was in the passenger seat and she wasn’t wearing a seat belt and the door wasn’t locked, and she got thrown out the car when it happened.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody had to tell me. I just know.”
Aunt Essie sighed. “If you say so, Darlin’. We don’t rightfully know for absolute sure what happened because we wasn’t there. So maybe you right.”
Truth is, once she told me that story, I secretly vowed that my new talisman against tragedy would be pure perfection as a driver, one who was self-assured behind the wheel, ready to react and able to merge evenly into traffic, drive the speed limit, avoid all collisions—never being in one and never causing one. But I broke my vow of safety when I drove Daddy that day to the VA hospital after our aborted cross-country trip, doing eighty miles an hour on the freeway, passing cars on the right, not bothering to use my blinkers. And still I didn’t get him there fast enough.
Shifting Through
Freeways are our safest roads. Traffic flows in the same direction. There are no stops or intersections…. The greatest danger is fatigue. You can become hypnotized by the constant hum of the wind, tires, and engine. Keep shifting your eyes from one area of the road to another. Keep checking your mirrors. Look at objects near and far, left and right. If you feel tired, stop and rest.
WHAT EVERY DRIVER MUST KNOW
Wendy, the morning-shift nurse, had braided Daddy’s hair into the tiniest, neatest cornrows I’d ever seen. He gripped my arm and pulled my face to his. “Listen to me,” he said, his eyes wild. “I’ve had two strokes since I been in here!”
“Shhhh, you need to rest,” I said, afraid of his agitation and unable to know what to do about his claims. I was in fear of the head nurse—a heavy-footed white woman of middle age and bad temper with blue veins running through her cheeks. “He’s very, very sick,” she said when I asked her about Daddy’s condition. “Didn’t you ever think about encouraging him to lose weight?” she admonished. I shrugged hopelessly, not understanding how a man could walk into a hospital and not walk out of it. Hospitals were supposed to make you better than you were when you entered them. I felt bad for bringing him there in the first place and especially resented Dr. Corey for insisting that I do so.
It was Dr. Corey who told Daddy, way back in 1967, that his high blood pressure had gotten so severe it was like a loose cannon, could take him out at any time. Daddy recounted the story for me one night when we were packing for our cross-country trip. “I had left Vy to be with Selena, finally got up my nerve to leave for good, when Vernon tells me, ‘JD, Go home and get your business in order. Things don’t look so good.’ Before I could figure out what to do, your mama calls me, got a pleading sound in her voice I never heard before. Says, ‘Come home, JD. We need you.’ More I thought about it, more I figured I should go on home, where I had a wife and a daughter and my name on the house. What could I as a dying man offer Selena?” He looked up at me. “Besides, you deserved to get to know your daddy in the little time I had left. So I came on home to die. But do hear me say, it was the hardest damn decision I ever had to make, walking out on the love of my life like that.” He said, “Hmph,” and added: “Whole thing woulda made more sense, woulda been more noble, if I’d a gone ahead and died like I was supposed to.”
When doctors told us Daddy had taken a turn for the worse, Aunt Essie asked if they could move him out of intensive care to a quiet, private room where we could spend that time with him. The doctors nodded their heads in compliance and then filed one-by-one out of the little family consultation room, leaving behind Styrofoam cups of coffee for someone else to toss away. When they were gone, I asked Aunt Essie what she meant by spending that time with him? “JD just done got tired, Darlin’,” she said. “He put up a good fight, willed himself to see you grow up. Now he just done got tired.”
Only then did I realize he was going to die. After seventeen years of witnessing his illness unfold, I finally understood the gravity of it all—that a chronic, incurable disease is progressive, that it can be staunched but never stopped. Just because a man has lived with it for so many years doesn’t mean he can keep living with it. Now I understood that a relentless illness such as his moves steadily forward to a crescendo, a climax with many variations but one ending.
Every night for seven days I stayed at the hospital with Daddy. Slept in the chair beside him, holding his hand, waking up at eerie hours of the night, watching the thin sheet softly rise and fall over his mountainous belly, now insanely comforted by that sight. When awake, he didn’t talk, just lay there with his eyes open, staring out but not seeing. Occasionally, he’d look at me intensely and try to talk. But his speech was slurred, and I couldn’t understand him. These moments were the worst. I’d lean my ear in close to his lips, try to decipher the impeded words. It was torture because I felt he was telling me something profound, something to hold on to. Finally, he managed to make a coherent sentence. “Be a good girl,” he said in a low, breathy voice. I kissed him all over his face, and when I placed my head on his chest, he lifted his hand and patted my hair.
During the day visitors came: Mr. Alfred, men Daddy played cards with, an old man from down the block who knew him way back when, a silver-haired neighbor he turned his numbers in to. I didn’t want them there. They tried to talk to Daddy in loud
voices, hovering over him and saying, “You gon’ be just fine, JD” when their eyes shone with pity. They chatted awkwardly with me. Finally, after some uncomfortable minutes of holding their hats in their hands and shifting their weight from foot to foot, they’d leave. Nurses came regularly to check his heartbeat. Aunt Essie came every afternoon to pray over Daddy. She touched his temples with olive oil and left her Bible open beside his bed, pages turned to the Twenty-third Psalm. He wasn’t an atheist per se—I’d found him watching Oral Roberts on TV on Sunday mornings more than once—but he’d shooed away the hospital minister in one of his lucid moments. This didn’t deter Aunt Essie, who had many sayings about nonbelievers, such as: “God is thinking about you when you not thinking about Him. He answers prayer and forgives the cold shoulder.”
Each day after Aunt Essie visited Daddy for a few hours, she took the bus home. It was a long way to go by bus—from Ann Arbor to Detroit, but she insisted it didn’t bother her. “Gives me time to clear my head, think about this here ol’ life of mine,” she said. I understood what she meant. It made me love my job at the Proving Ground even more so, with its monotonous stretch of road and time.
Somewhere in those final days, I realized I was pregnant. Again. This time it hadn’t been caused by lack of effort. I now had a diaphragm, which the counselor had suggested after the abortion. Kevin and I used it several times. But our lovemaking was often so spontaneous, so furtive, that stopping to insert contraceptive jelly into a little rubber dome, and then insert that into my vagina, were improbable actions and wholly unappealing. Then again, I hadn’t counted on being so fertile.
I decided not to tell Kevin. I was afraid that he might ask me to keep the baby, and I was not prepared for that possibility. I saw no neat symmetry in losing my father, gaining a child. It was one more complication in my life, and the only way I could process it was to handle it swiftly and efficiently. Telling no one, I made an appointment with the Women’s Health Clinic for several days away, a Tuesday, a day that seemed as good as any for ending a life.
At home, neither of us talked about Daddy dying. Not directly. But Aunt Essie dealt with her anxiety the way she knew best: she cleaned the house. She even had the windows washed by professionals and ordered new carpet for the entire downstairs. The beige carpet Mama had chosen umpteen years before was so bare that threads hung from it, the wood on the steps flagrant as it peeked through. I came home from the hospital one day to gather a change of clothes and found red shag carpet snaking through the house like a brush fire. “Everything needs replacing at some point,” explained Aunt Essie, usually so frugal with her money. I imagined her someday transforming the entire house into a showcase of cool antiques against warm color.
One evening after I’d driven Aunt Essie home from the hospital, just as I was about to return, I found her still dressed in her too-light support hose and iron-shine brown dress, sitting at the dining room table with a cup of sugarless Lipton tea. I made myself a cup of herbal and joined her.
“Did your mother live a long time?” I asked, suddenly wanting to know more about Daddy’s history, things I had failed to ask him when I had the chance.
Aunt Essie sipped her tea. “Well, let’s see. She was fifty-eight when she died. That was a long life back then for someone with my ma’s condition. She had what they call the drinking disease.” She rubbed her knees. “Shoot, we were lucky. Wasn’t but one colored doctor making house calls. I know folks, lost their parents before they were out of short pants. Ma hung in there. And she went through a lot, you know. Losing her babies and all, the way she did. I tell you, us Dodsons are survivors.” She paused. “But even the strong get tired.”
“Tell me about the little brothers,” I said.
She shook her head. “I can’t rightly speak on it much. Still pains me.” She pressed her lips together. “One was seven, other one ten. I told them not to go down by that rock quarry, but they were boys. Hardheaded.” She looked into her teacup, was quiet for a minute. “I still owe them a spanking,” she whispered.
On that final morning, Daddy’s breathing was suddenly labored and loud. Rattling. And he was unconscious. The head nurse came by and examined him. “What is it?” I asked, terrified by that horrible, racking sound.
“It’s phlegm. We need to drain his esophagus, so he won’t drown in it.”
“How do you do that?”
“Tube down his throat, suctions it all out.”
“Is that painful?”
“It’s a little uncomfortable, but he’ll feel better afterward,” she promised.
I had my doubts. “Maybe we should just let him be.”
“It’s better to clear it away,” she insisted, blue veins slashing across her cheek.
While she left to get the necessary equipment, I rubbed Daddy’s forehead, letting my hand glide across back and forth as I’d always done. His skin glistened. Daddy used to tell me I had “healing hands.” When he returned to me that day after the city’s riots, he’d left behind a woman who had cared for him once the headaches got severe, rubbing his forehead every night. It made him feel good, he said, to see me instinctively pick up where she’d left off.
When the head nurse returned, she told me to step outside. “This is not something family members feel comfortable watching,” she explained. I called Aunt Essie. “He’s been making this loud, hawking sound all morning, and they’re about to drain his throat,” I reported.
“Oh Lord, a rattling sound? I’m on my way. But it’ll take me a good hour and a half.” I was about to hang up when Aunt Essie called my name through the phone.
“Yeah?” I answered.
“You be right there with him. Don’t leave the room.” She rushed out the next words. “And if the time comes, let him go, Darlin’. He’ll try to hold on for you, so you got to let him go. He’s suffering.”
I hung up on Aunt Essie, not meaning to.
The head nurse came and got me out of the waiting room. “You can go back in now,” she said. “I’m done.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’ll rest better.” Then she added, her face full of efficiency, “You have any other family members you want to be here?” I didn’t answer, rather rushed back to Daddy. As I stepped into the room, the silence was much more disturbing to me than the rattling sound had been. His eyes were shut, and he was working his mouth—opening it and closing it over and over—gasping for air. I knew he was suffocating. Thanks to that bitch of a head nurse.
I couldn’t bear to watch him this way. I grabbed his hand, leaned in, and whispered, “It’s okay, Daddy. It’s okay. You can go.”
He grasped my hand, stunning me with his strength. He gripped tightly, squeezing and squeezing as though riding the wave of a bad pain. Suddenly, the grip loosened and his mouth fell slack. I eased my fingers out of his hand and put my ear to his chest. Nothing. Put my hand before his mouth. Nothing.
Nothing.
Slowly, methodically, I washed Daddy’s body: arms, legs, belly, feet. Next I removed those tiny cornrows, one by one. Afterward, his hair standing on end, I worked Vaseline into it. I started to comb it back, but I stopped, unable to go on, suddenly wasted. When Aunt Essie found me, I was sitting beside Daddy, holding his skinny fine-toothed comb in my hand, looking into space.
After doctors had recorded Daddy’s exact time of death to be 7:20 p.m., and we rode back home from the hospital in silence, I left Aunt Essie alone to go venture into the basement. I dug through the cedar closet, unearthing a box of Daddy’s old albums, then sat cross-legged on the cold cement, flipping through them. I was dazzled by their worn jacket covers, by the initials JD scrawled in black Magic Marker on each. Now that they had become documents, singular pieces of proof of one man’s existence, it stunned me—the reality that a near destructible object—a circle of vinyl—can long outlive you. When I found the Stevie Wonder Greatest Hits album, my assumption was that Mama had left this one behind. Yet there were the initials written across the cover in black M
agic Marker: J.D. You never fully know anyone.
I chose carefully from the pile and taped one tune off each album onto a blank cassette. The music jumped in time and style from the Ink Spots to Jackie Wilson to Al Green. A taste of B. B. King and a splash of Sam Cooke. Ray Charles, of course. Thinking suddenly of Kimmie as she waved from the sunroof of Cyril’s Volvo, I was sorry I never got “Summer Breeze” on a 45. Everyone, it seemed, was covering that song these days.
Selena answered on the first ring.
“This is Joe Dodson’s daughter Rae,” I said. “He wanted you to know if anything happened to him.” I paused. “It did.”
Selena sucked in air, moaned softly. For a few seconds, neither of us said anything. “How are you doing, Rae?” she finally asked.
“Okay. I was with him when he passed.”
“Was it…?”
“A stroke.”
“Yes, well.” She paused. “You were everything to him. His little girl.”
“Apparently not the only one,” I said, wanting to be cruel because Daddy was dead and other people weren’t.
Selena absorbed my blow. “I’m really sorry about your father,” she said. “Deeply.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled before hanging up. Whatever I’d wanted from her in that moment, whatever it was, it made me feel suicidal not to get it. I went into Daddy’s bedroom, grabbed one of his big white shirts from a chair, and lay across his bed, burying my nose into the cotton. Aunt Essie’s competent voice drifted back to me from another room as she made her calls. “Hello, is this Alfred? This is JD’s sister, Essie, calling. We…yes, well not too good, not too good at all. We lost JD today.”
Soon, the house would swell with people bringing food and flowers and the brisk determination to “do something.” The funeral director would show up—a tailor-suited black man with a mustache and a practiced, somber look, there to spend the insurance money on “putting Mr. Dodson away as he would have wanted.” A different undertaker from the one used for Kimmie’s interment, but the same kind. The kind who lived in an apartment above his funeral parlor and sat in the dark every night in an overstuffed chair and drank until he was full of his liquor, stumbling past embalmed bodies to an empty bed.
Shifting Through Neutral Page 25
