by Beth Hersant
Louella couldn’t help herself, she burst out laughing. “What?”
“You played with your dolls all the time. Loving them, caring for them. But if I skinned a knee or got upset, you’d put them aside and look after me instead. You were such a little mother. I think that’s what you were meant to be. My mom was always so sick and remote — she barely acknowledged anything going on in my life. And yet here was this little girl doing what she couldn’t. Can you imagine what a revelation it was to feel cared for … and loved? And you’ve been doing it ever since. I’m failing geography and you study with me. I get sick and you nurse me back to health. I can’t think of what to write and you’re my sounding board.”
Louella shrugged. “It’s always been a two-way street.”
But he wasn’t listening. “I have no control over any of this. But I can look after you and the only way to do it is to keep you on the other side of those bars.”
“Fletch…”
“I’m infected.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Well if I’m wrong, you can razz me about it later. But right now — you are to stay the hell out of this cage.”
Fletch kept the broth down and so for lunch Louella offered him chicken soup and a sandwich. He didn’t eat as much as she would’ve liked, but he ate some. As she carried plates back to the kitchen, she absentmindedly threw the scraps to the dog. The Labrador shied away from them. This stopped Louella in her tracks; Bailey never refused food. And it wasn’t just his odd reaction that disturbed her. She came from a long line of Pennsylvania Dutch — the devoutly religious and downright superstitious descendants of early German settlers. Once, when she was a child, her grandmother told her how to predict the outcome of an illness. You take a piece of bread, rub it against the patient’s teeth and then offer it to a dog. If the animal eats it, you can expect a full recovery. If not, you’ve got trouble. As Louella picked up the untouched scraps, she told herself that it was all just an old wives’ tale. It meant nothing. But later that afternoon Fletcher’s temperature spiked. It could be, she knew, from a regular infection. That was the big risk when you had to cauterize a wound — the burns could so easily become infected. And his throat might be sore from all the screaming and the nausea could be attributed to the pain. It was not New Rabies. Louella told herself that again and again even though Niamh and Wyn looked pale and drawn as the day progressed and Fletch’s mind began to falter.
He’d been so quiet that she fell back on an old trick that always got him talking. She asked about his next book. He was endlessly fascinated by plot, character, symbolism and impelling incident. And her questions did rouse him. He started to tell her about a Neolithic tribe that gains immortality only to find it a curse. He would call it Good Neighbours and it would be packed full of history and folklore. He would get into the very skins of his characters and render their world with such clarity. He had an experimental structure in mind too, because he really wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before. And Louella listened and nodded and asked all the relevant questions as tears streaked her face. Good Neighbours was his debut novel — his big break — and HBO had turned it into a miniseries decades ago.
Next he turned to her and asked, “So when is James having another poker night?”
Lou, who’d been hanging onto her composure by a thread, looked again at her watch. He could finally have another Tramadol and she hurriedly passed him the tablets. She knew that she shouldn’t be so quick to drug him up; she should spend every moment she could talking to him. But this was unbearable. Every word out of his mouth spoke of his delirium. He might as well have said, “I am doomed” over and over again because that is what the conversation conveyed.
Mercifully, the meds knocked him out and Louella no longer had to listen as Fletch made plans to hang out with her dead husband. She dried her eyes and went to see to the animals. It was time to settle the chickens down for the night and usually by this time, they’d be congregated by the door to their coop. Her barn was an old Pennsylvania Dutch structure with three doors on the front: one led to the henhouse, another to a storage room, while the middle one opened onto the main area with its cow stalls and quarantine pen. And the chickens would go nowhere near it. They were clustered over by the house at the far end of the yard. Lou extracted the little Tupperware container full of seeds from her pocket and gave it a shake. Surely the familiar rattle would entice them. Still they hung back. Growing impatient with this performance, she tried to shoo them toward the barn; but when she nudged Boo toward the coop, the hen completely freaked out. She started clucking frantically and beat her wings. They gave her a little lift, but not enough to clear the wall. She hit the bricks hard and tumbled to the ground. Boo’s foot bled heavily and Wyn had to bandage it so the poor thing wouldn’t end up with bumblefoot. Louella gave up and left the hens to bed down in the yard for the night. The cows, too, refused to approach the barn. Essentially, none of her animals would go anywhere near Fletch.
All was quiet as the sun set. If you didn’t know the situation, you might have mistaken the hush for an abiding peace. But there were now armed guards posted outside the barn and the children were forbidden to leave the house. All anyone could do was wait and try to get some sleep.
The following morning they awoke, not to the usual robust crow of the rooster, but to a high-pitched shriek. They ran to the barn in their nightgowns and pajamas — all armed — and there they found Louella standing just out of reach of Fletcher’s grasping hands. He screamed and spat and strained against the bars in his efforts to get at her, but she just stood there and said in a quiet voice, “Wyn, Niamh. If you please.”
They went immediately to her side.
“I don’t know what else we can do for him, do you?” She looked at them for the first time and her eyes were red and puffy.
Niamh shook her head and Wyn uttered a barely audible “no.”
“This is the New Rabies?”
“I’m so sorry, Lou,” Wyn said.
A tremor went through her, but she pushed ahead with her questions. “And are we in agreement that we’re out of options?”
“Yes.”
“Right,” she nodded and seemed to focus on a blank bit of wall over Niamh’s shoulder. “I want everybody out, but guards still posted outside. The kids are restricted to the farmhouse. When it’s done, I want a cleanup crew in full hazmat gear to bleach every inch of that pen — that includes the walls, the floor and the bars. Everything he touched needs to be disinfected or burnt. We’ll build the pyre this afternoon and hold the service to cremate the body after sundown. I want guards at their regular posts and business as usual when it comes to inspecting the fences.”
She rattled the instructions off so quickly that Niamh glanced over her shoulder expecting to see a list hanging there. The commands were clear, there was plenty to do and yet everyone seemed frozen to the spot. They just stood there staring at Louella.
“Move!” she yelled and it was a high, cracked sound that startled them into action.
Owen approached her. “Chief, let someone else…”
She said nothing, but the look on her face cut him off mid-sentence. Her pain and despair bordered on a kind of savagery. There was no talking to that face. He nodded and left with the others.
They stood together in the kitchen, listening to Fletcher scream and when the shot rang out, many of them jumped. Niamh was in tears and the children were crying and before her mind even registered the fact, Peg was running toward the barn and her mother.
Fletcher lay on the floor with a large hole punched through his forehead from the .357 slug. Louella stood there staring at the body, the magnum on the floor at her feet.
“Mom…”
And Lou did turn toward her; then the old woman rushed past, shouldering Peg out of the way and reaching the sink just as she started to retch. Peg stood with her hand on her m
other’s back and wondered briefly why her mom would be throwing up coffee grounds. Then it hit her— that was blood, old blood, churning-in-your-stomach-for-hours-as-your-ulcer-hemorrhages sort of blood and as she cried out for Wyn and Niamh, she thought her own head might explode from the stress.
And that is why it was so odd to hear Niamh calmly ask from the doorway, “Lou, just how many painkillers have you been taking?”
It took a moment before the chief could answer. “Quite a few.”
“For how long?”
When Louella didn’t answer, Peg gripped her arm, “How long?”
“Since Midwood fell.”
“You’ve been cramming NSAIDs for five months?” Niamh asked incredulously. “No wonder you’re bleeding. Right. Peg, help her get cleaned up and then I want her in bed.”
“I have work to do.”
“Screw your work,” Niamh snapped. Louella gaped in surprise at this quiet, slip of a girl who was suddenly bossing her around. “I know that you’re the chief and all, but I’m a medic and when it comes to health matters, what I say goes.” She was rocking nervously on her feet but plowed on anyway. “Now move your ass, woman!”
Wyn kept an eye on the proceedings, but did not interfere. Despite all the stress and horror of that morning, he felt a moment’s pride at how far Niamh had come along. First she double checked her books and reread the material on peptic ulcers. Then she rummaged through the meds they’d scavenged from the pharmacy at Sage Foods. The prescribed treatment for an ulcer included:
1.H2 Blockers that inhibit acid production. From their stash she selected Pepcid.
2.Proton Pump Inhibitors that block the cells that produce acid. For this she grabbed a box of Nexium.
3.Over-the-counter antacids to neutralize the stomach acid already present. Tums and Rolaids would do.
4.Cryptoprotective agents to protect the lining of the stomach and small intestine. This came in the form of a big pink bottle of Pepto Bismol.
“You are to take all of these as directed,” Niamh said, handing her patient a glass of milk. “There can be no more aspirin, ibuprofen or naproxen sodium. No soda, no fried foods. You are going to rest here …”
“…But Fletch’s service…”
“…is not until later tonight and I will come and get you when it’s time. Meanwhile, I want you to take these.” The girl handed her two 5 mg tablets of diazepam. “You’re exhausted, Lou, and you need to get some sleep.”
When Niamh finally left them alone, Peg sat on the edge of her mother’s bed and held her hand.
“God you scared me,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Compared to what just happened to Fletch, this is hardly a big deal.”
“Stop it!”
Louella looked at her in surprise. “Stop what?”
“Pretending that you’re ok. You’re suffering from chronic headaches that have caused you to shred your stomach lining just to keep going. You’ve just shot your best friend, you’re hacking up blood, you …” Her voice broke and she burst into tears. Louella reached up and touched her cheek.
Louella knew that she should be crying too — hell, screaming into a pillow right now would not go amiss. But she was so tired. She’d had moments like this before, when things were so bad that it felt as if something in her head had … blown. It reminded her of the way that an overloading surge of electricity can blow a fuse. And then everything goes quiet and dark. In those moments she did not have the strength to cry as she should. She did not even have the capacity to register the full horror of the situation. The last time she’d felt like that was just after James died.
“Did I ever tell you what Fletch did after your father died?”
“No.”
“It’s hard to say what was worse, really. Losing Eben or losing James. To lose a child, it felt like someone had hollowed out my chest, like a giant hand had reached in there and ripped out everything vital and just left me with this ragged, gaping hole. I knew I’d never be the same again. But your dad kept me going. It was always that way. No matter what sort of day I’d had, no matter what the problem, I knew that if I could just sit and talk to him about it — it might not be fixed, but it would be better. I’d feel calmer at least. Kept me sane. I guess that sounds lame, like I should have been able to sort myself out on my own.”
“No, mom.”
“But then I lost your father too. And Sam was — what? — fourteen years old and you’d just had Mae and I felt sure that I couldn’t … I just couldn’t do it. All the things that everyone needed me to do. I couldn’t. That was when I sent Sam to stay with you and Alec over Thanksgiving break, remember?”
Peg nodded.
“I was here on my own and it was three o’clock in the afternoon and I was still in my PJs and then Fletcher shows up with a video tape. He swore it would help…”
Fletcher had sat on his couch trying to puzzle his way through it. He’d always thought of Louella as being so strong, but now she was buckling. James was gone and she seemed utterly lost without him. How long had they been married? He did the math and realized it had been thirty-nine years. Then one day, quite suddenly, he died and Lou did something she’d never done before. She gave up. She sat down and did not get up again. And Fletch tried everything he could to prod her back toward life. It was all there waiting for her — Peg and Sam and Mae and the farm and her animals and her friends. But they were all so temporary, she’d said. What could any of it really mean? A life’s worth of struggle and then you die. How many millions of people just like her had lived and fought their way through and now weren’t even so much as a memory? It all — always — got lost.
Hearing her talk like this made Fletch realize: she’d lost her faith. For all her logic, the thing that sustained her was belief; and after James passed, she believed in precisely nothing. He could sympathize. For him, life had negated the possibility of the existence of God. But he didn’t need that faith. She did. And so the atheist tuned into TBN (the Trinity Broadcasting Network on WGTW — TV48). A cheerful voice announced, “Coming up on The Potter’s Touch… ” In truth he almost switched it off. T.D. Jakes and his congregation got so “into it” that he could not imagine Louella responding to the sermon. It was such a far cry from the ordered, and decidedly reserved, services that Lou’s father had once presided over. No, they leaned a little too much toward the “happy clapper” end of the spectrum. His thumb was on the remote’s off button, when a single phrase leapt out at him: “Don’t take the presence of the storm to indicate the absence of God.” Fletcher realized that that was the crux of Louella’s problem. She felt utterly abandoned by God in the storm. He quickly popped a new tape into the VCR and hit record.
As he listened he thought, Now that is good. Not only was the sermon emotionally charged, but the argument was brilliantly constructed. It would engage Lou intellectually and, as she seemed to have gone completely numb, that might be the only way to reach her.
Later on as she watched the tape, the sermon did speak to her. It was all about Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27 when suddenly the very thing he was counting on started to break up in the storm. It was not a huge mental leap for her to equate James with the boat. She needed him so desperately and whenever times were hard, he had kept her head above water. Then he was gone, like Paul’s ship, and what was she supposed to do? And Jakes, as if he had some strange insight into her thoughts, answered that not all blessings are meant to last for your entire journey. Sometimes we only have them for a season.
In the Bible story, the crew took hold of the shattered parts of the vessel in order to paddle their way to shore. And Jakes pointed out that if they had believed that the only way to survive was in a whole boat, then they would have drowned. But instead they grabbed a piece of the ship and it sustained them. Stop weeping, he said, over all you have lost and
start living on what you’ve got left. The program ended and Louella looked thoughtfully at the bald black man that was frozen on the screen. Then she rose, showered and brushed her teeth for the first time in days, got dressed and headed over to Peg’s. She had a lot left to cling to and it was time to get on with it.
“Looking back,” the diazepam was kicking in now and Louella’s voice was thick and drowsy, “I think there was a reason why I lost your dad. I had to be tough if I was going to be able to deal with all this. I couldn’t have done it in my twenties; probably couldn’t have done it before Eben and James died. No, it’s only now… And I am handling it — not perfectly, this fucking ulcer — but I’m handling it. Just like I’ll handle Fletcher’s service tonight and the fact that we have to go back for the rasp bar and then there’s the harvest and on and on it goes. So don’t cry,” she wiped a tear off of Peg’s cheek with her thumb. “I know you’re worried, but understand: I’m not drowning.”
Steven Wannemaker sang Rock of Ages as they lit the pyre. As Louella watched it burn, she thought back to her first day of kindergarten. She was afraid to be left there with all those people she didn’t know and she had clung to her mother’s leg and wept. But Fletcher came over and showed her the little plastic chicken from his Fisher Price Farm set. He said that, if she stayed, he’d let her keep it. She’d let go of her mother then and spent the day with her new friend. There were summer days when she’d ride on Fletch’s handlebars out to Fishing Creek where they’d perform “death-defying dives” from the old railway bridge. He had taught her how to play poker and given her her first beer. And he had introduced her to James. She watched the fire and smiled even though there were tears in her eyes; and she thanked God for bringing him into her life, even if it was only for a season.
Chapter Fifteen
Queen Takes Bishop
“Life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with.”
