Clara and Vincent… Part III

“How long were you and your husband together?” Vincent asked without looking up from his plate.

“I met him in Middle School.” Clara answered. “We started dating in high school and then got married right after graduation. We were married for 58 years.”

Vincent took off his hat and looked at her for a second before asking, “Any kids?”

“We never had children, no.” Clara turned away from his unwavering gaze, turning her attention to the neatly trimmed flower beds along the back fence for a while. “It was the greatest disappointment of our lives—not having children. But it just wasn’t meant to be.”

Vincent took the last fork full of potato salad then wiped his mouth with the linen napkin beside his plate.

“How in the world is it possible to be married for 58 years?” Vincent smiled and shook his head from side to side in genuine amazement.

Clara smiled back and asked a question of her own. “Are you married Vincent?”

It was his turn to avert his gaze to the freshly tended back yard. It would be best if he just made up a lie. It would have saved him the embarrassment of having to admit to such a colossal failure. Clara would have no frame of reference for what it was like today. She wouldn’t possibly have been able to understand. Her generation stayed together forever. He didn’t want to face the judgement that was sure to come his way if he told the truth, no matter how kind her eyes felt when she looked at him. It would be a repeat of the night that he told his parents that his second marriage was over less than 18 months before it started. They had cut him off, ashamed of his moral failings and tired of being disappointed. 

But when he opened his mouth to answer, the words had surprised him, “Not anymore, Ms. Clara.”

“So you’re divorced?”

Vincent glanced down at his hands folded neatly in his lap. “Twice.”

Her response was direct but flowed freely from her without a hint of judgement or disapproval, “Goodness. How is it possible to have been divorced twice before age 30?”

“If you answer my question, I’ll try to answer yours.”

“I’m sorry, my dear, what was your question?” 

“I asked you how it was possible to be married for 58 years.”

“Oh yes, now I remember.” Clara stopped for a moment to think before offering an answer to such a question. It was not something she had spent a lot of time pondering. She had been too busy with living life which had left little time for deep thoughts about the whys and hows.

“I’m not sure I know the answer to your question Vincent. I suppose the best I can offer is that we worked hard at it. There were wonderful times through our many years together…but we had our share of heartache and disappointments. In the end, we loved each other warts and all.”

Vincent believed her. But her words had wounded him. The truth was that he had never loved anyone more than he loved his own desire, his own way. He had discovered too late that his brand of selfishness wasn’t comparable with marriage. He decided to tell the truth.

“Well, the way you manage to have two divorces before you’re 30 is to get caught cheating on both of your wives. Yeah. So it was my fault. Both of them. Not proud of myself. But that’s the truth.”

Clara looked deeply into his eyes. The clouds of trouble hanging over him had darkened. He took a final drink of his tea. Clara reached across the table and grasped his hand in hers. “How about we have some ice cream?”

Before he could answer she had made her way inside the house leaving Vincent to make sense of what was happening to him. What was he doing here at this old woman’s broken down house confessing his sins to a complete stranger? Why had it felt good to admit to this kind old widow what an absolute bastard he was? He had another job to get to, an actual paying job, he didn’t have time to eat strawberry ice cream with an octogenarian…but here he was listening to another question—“Do you have children?”

“Yes. Two girls. Both with my first wife.”

“Oh my…” Clara, for the first time, looked disappointed. “How often do you get to see them?”

“Just one weekend a month. They live with their mother up in Cambridge, a little over an hour away.”

“I’m sorry, Vincent. I imagine that its quite difficult for you.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me, Ms. Clara.” Vincent answered honestly. “I was a cheater, remember? I brought it all on myself.”

“Yes. You did.” Clara’s face changed expression. Her eyes had taken on a pensive distance, along with the beginnings of tears. “I cheated on Harold once.”

Vincent couldn’t help himself. “What??”

A brief playful smile played across Clara’s face for an instant. “I am an old woman, Vincent. I will excuse you for not thinking me capable of infidelity.”

Then the distance returned and she began to tell her story.

“We had only been married for a couple of years when Harold enlisted in the Army. I begged him not to but my Harold was a patriot through and through. All I was thinking about was the war. But there was no changing his mind so off he went to Fort Dix for basic training. It was the first time in my life that I was alone. Before long he was shipped to Vietnam where he stayed for over two years. He got shot twice but the fool kept re-upping. I was angry and inconsolable for most of those two years.” 

As she was talking it occurred to Clara that she had never before this strange moment shared her story with another human being. As she spoke, the memories that her words released swept over her.

“One night I found myself in a bar that Harold and I used to go to after we were married and who should I run into but Burt Wilks, Harold’s best friend and the best man at our wedding. Burt was a year behind us in school but the two of them had been inseparable growing up. I hadn’t seen him for quite a while at that point so we sat together and caught up…and drank quite a few beers, not that that’s some kind of excuse. Anyway, I just remember feeling dangerous and angry. Before I knew it there we were back in my tiny little apartment waking up the next morning and going at it again. It went on for a week or more until we both had had enough. After that we went our separate ways, and I was never again unfaithful to Harold.”

Vincent had been mesmerized by the tale and by Clara’s willingness to share it but it felt unfinished. “What did Harold do when he found out?”

“He never found out because I never told him.” Clara’s voice was unwavering and unapologetic. “It was a week of weakness and selfishness on my part and nothing more. I didn’t tell him because it would have served no purpose other than breaking his heart.”

“But what about Burt? They were best friends. How did that work out?”

“It didn’t.” The very first tears of the telling appeared. “Burt followed Harold to Vietnam where he was killed five months into his tour. For the longest time I felt a measure of guilt for his death—like maybe he was too reckless a soldier because he had betrayed his best friend…with me.”

They both fell silent gazing at the reinvigorated back yard. Vincent felt a knot rising in his throat. Then he heard his unrecognizable voice—“why did you tell me that story?”

Once again Clara leaned forward to hold Vincent’s hand across the table. “I told you that story because you need to understand that you can’t let your very worst moments define you for the rest of your life. We all have it within us to do better, to be better. We just need a little encouragement, that’s all.”

Vincent looked at her with tenderness and gratitude. He hoped that it was true. He hoped that she was right, that better was possible.

He helped Clara clear off the table. They carried the dishes into the kitchen. He watched her stack them on a rubber mat next to the sink, noticing that she had no dishwasher.

“So, you live in this big old house all by yourself? Who looks after you?”

Clara placed a plug in the drain and began filling the sink with warm water. “Just me. Most of the time I do alright, but every once in a while I find that I must rely on the kindness of strangers.”

Vincent picked up the dish towel that was hanging on the stove handle and began drying the hot plates in the dish drain. “In this city, relying on the kindness of strangers is probably very hit or miss, I would imagine.”

Clara smiled as she scrubbed the ice cream bowls. “Well, just a week ago you were a stranger. So, I guess some days are better than others.”

Clara walked Vincent down the front sidewalk to his truck, thanked him for her beautiful yard then gave him a tender hug. Vincent reached in his pocket and placed a business card in her hand. It had the logo of Bianchi’s Landscaping across the front. On the back Vincent had written out his cell phone number. “Listen Clara, I want you to promise me that if you ever need something you will call me on this number. I don’t live far from you and it wouldn’t be any trouble at all. Ok?”

Vincent drove away, glancing back at her through the rear view mirror, with tears in his eyes.

Clara and Vincent…Part II

Clara stood over her stove stirring the bubbling pot of soup, thinking about the young man with the troubled eyes. He had been so kind to her, so concerned about her shaking hands, but there was a shadow about him, what Harold used to call a cloud of trouble. When they sat at the small table in the bistro he hadn’t had much to say about himself. He had asked her full name and where she lived and she had answered him with no fear that he might show up one day to rob her blind. Harold would have been appalled. But when she had asked him what he did for a living all he said was, “a little of this and a little of that,” changing the subject as fast as he could.

But her encounter with him had stirred something. It had given her a lift to be seen, to have been looked out for by a stranger. It had changed her, boosted her spirits. For the first time since Harold had passed she took her lunch out on the deck, sipping her soup in the warm sunshine. She listened to the birds and thought about the year they had visited Paris. She smiled as she remembered the flakey croissants, strong coffee and the melodic sound of softly spoken French words drifting through the evening breeze.

The next week she ventured out to the drug store to pick up some reading glasses, then took a cab to the library and checked out several books she had read when she was younger. She was older now. Maybe she would receive the words differently. It felt good to have something to look forward to. Revisiting the Yorkshire moors with Heathcliff, reentering the charged atmosphere of an Alabama courtroom with Scout, and lingering over the electric charge that always ran through her at the introduction of Phoebe into the dark and foreboding house of seven gables. The more she read the more her appetite returned.

Clara and Harold lived on an old neighborhood street three blocks from the main thoroughfare that led into the city. It was a street lined with 100 year old craftsman style houses with a broad porch across the front overlooking two square shaped yards divided by a sidewalk coming up from the street. In front of the porch were bedraggled flower beds. Harold had kept up the grounds before he got sick, but now it was a mess. Once or twice every summer one of the neighbors would show up and cut the grass without any explanation, but Clara knew that the reason sprang not from some altruistic impulse, but rather from the fact that her yard had become a neighborhood eyesore, which might bring down property values. Every year she would retrieve a half dozen landscaping advertisements taped to her front door. She had called one of them the year that Harold had passed. They wanted $75 dollars a month for their entry level plan. Clara had been mortified at the audacity of the price. So the grounds of the house she had lived in for over 40 years had fallen into disarray. The yard hadn’t been cut, the flower beds tended in months, and for reasons that were confusing to her, it suddenly mattered. Maybe it was the descriptions of the gardens in her old books. Perhaps it was all the time she was spending taking her meals outside looking out over the chaos of her back yard. Something was stirring in her soul, she knew not what.

Both of Vinny’s two ex-wives had moved away before the ink was even dry on the divorce papers, both to their old home towns, over an hour away, back to the comforts of home where they didn’t have to worry about running into him every time that ventured out. Vinny couldn’t blame them. He had been a horrible husband. The only part of his married life he could cling to as proof that he wasn’t a complete disaster was the fact that he had never once lifted a hand in anger to either of them. As an ex-husband, he had never missed a support payment, even when it meant a diet of Campbell’s soup, peanut butter-jelly sandwiches and the smelly city tap water that had the advantage of being relatively free. They had left because he had broken their hearts. Vinny had sown the wind and now was reaping the whirlwind. His inability to resist the sins of the flesh had cost him everything, including his self-respect. Which was why his encounter with Clara Parker had surprised him so.

In the first moments after he saw her spill her groceries across the parking lot he thought that he had finally found someone more miserable then he was. She had the facial expression and the halting, shaky movements of someone overwhelmed by the world and her tenuous place in it. But instead of fleeing her mess, there he was inserting himself into the middle of it. Maybe it was the tears streaming down her fragile cheeks, or the helplessness of her predicament. Whatever it was had stirred a long atrophied trace of compassion loose in his heart. There he was sitting with her, watching her eating her biscuit, listening to her talk about her dead husband, and watching the color return to her face. He had watched her slowly back her ancient, exhaust-belching Oldsmobile out of its space and drive agonizingly slow through the parking lot and finally disappear around the corner. He felt the odd sensation of warmth as soon as he started his truck. There came an inexplicable realization that he had just done something decent and good, that he had been of service to someone who needed help. In addition to the banishment of the aches and pains which had sent him on this errand in the first place, his encounter with Ms. Clara had brought with it the suggestion that somewhere within him lived a better man.

The very next Saturday morning Clara sat on her rocking chair, this time on the front porch, sipping her coffee and reading the last chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird, when she heard a loud truck rumbling down the street towing a trailer jam packed with lawn mowers, gas cans and weed eaters. When it stopped in front of her house she concluded that the neighbors had finally had enough of the weeds in her yard.

Then she saw Vincent walking towards her on the side walk that split her yard in two. He tilted the brim of his baseball cap up enough to reveal his eyes. “Ms. Clara, I couldn’t help noticing that your yard is a hot mess. Thought maybe I could clean it up a bit, if that’s alright with you.”

Clara was temporarily speechless. The only thing she thought to say was the worst possible thing to say—“How much will it cost?” It came out even worse than it was, like all she cared about was money and not the fact that this bewildering young man was once again offering his assistance with a job that she was ill-equipped to handle by herself. Vinny saved her the embarrassment but answering quickly and with a smile. “Well, maybe you could fix me some lunch when I’m through.”

Clara spent the rest of the morning watching Vincent bringing her old gardens back to life, cutting the grass, trimming all the edges and gathering up all the dead weeds into large black bags. He worked slowly, deliberately, with the practiced skill of an expert. It was like watching the grounds travel back in time, back to when they were regularly cared for, back to a time when she had been cared for. By the time he was through his shirt was plastered front and back with sweat. She offered him a towel and told him that he would have to clean up in the half bath at the end of the hall before she would feed him. For the second time in two weeks Clara found herself at a small table sharing a meal with a virtual stranger.

She brought out freshly made BLT’s along with potato salad and a large coffee mug full of homemade sausage and lentil soup, along with a glass of iced tea. She watched him eat and tried to think of what to say. She was so grateful for him and his kindness but couldn’t summon words equal to the task. So, she ate her soup in silence. 

Vincent had never tasted anything so good as the soup in the white coffee mug. For one thing, he was ravenously hungry. He hadn’t had a plate of food this generous in a very long time and he tried not to embarrass himself by wolfing it down like some kind of homeless vagrant at a soup kitchen. But the spicy warmth of the soup and the crispness of the bacon tasted like some kind of miracle. He looked across the table at Clara, wondered about the vagaries of fate which had brought him to this sun splashed deck on a Saturday morning as the smell of freshly mowed grass hung heavily in the air.

Clara and Vincent

Clara was 80 years old and living alone after the death of her husband. Although he had been sick for a long time, his passing was a surprise leaving her adrift for the first time in her memory. They had never had children and she had outlived her only sister. Most of their friends had either passed or moved to Florida, leaving her alone in a neighborhood she no longer recognized. But Clara kept reminding herself that she was reasonably healthy, warm and dry. She didn’t want to spend her last days wallowing in self-pity. She didn’t want the light to go out of her eyes. But some days were harder than others. Some nights were dark beyond knowing.

The city wasn’t a place for old people. The pace was too fast, the sidewalks cracked and uneven. All of the old stores were gone, replaced with gleaming shops with names she couldn’t pronounce. Everything was so expensive. The aisles were cramped and she bumped into things more than she used to. She didn’t know anyone at her grocery store. Gilbert Owen had run the store for as long as she could remember, but he had sold out to a younger man who she had never met. She wasn’t sure she had ever seen him in the place. He had hired a young Indian man to run the place and had installed self-checkout lanes everywhere. Clara struggled to work the scanner. She had trouble lifting the heavier items and placing them in the flimsy plastic bags. Grocery shopping took up half the morning these days.

Clara felt lucky to still have a car and her driver’s license, but she knew that eventually she would have to give up both. Her eyesight was going. She didn’t think she could pass the eye test the next time she had to renew her license, just two years away. She would just have to take the bus after that, something she wasn’t looking forward to. It was dirty and far too loud. But there was no point borrowing trouble, Clara thought to herself as she drove to the grocery store. She reminded herself to stop fretting over things she couldn’t control…which seemed to be everything now. She needed to concentrate on the task at hand. She hadn’t wanted to go to the grocery store on a Saturday but somehow she had let the pantry empty itself out and there weren’t eggs or milk or bread in the refrigerator. She hadn’t been paying attention and now she would have to fight the manic weekend crowds. The hardest part was remembering everything she needed. She had recently started making a list but her handwriting had gotten so poor she could barely read it anymore. She was planning on making soup. One pot would feed her all week. She hoped she could find tomatoes that were fit to eat. The produce under the new management was terrible. She chided herself for such uncharitable thoughts. 

It was Vincent’s first day off in over a year. His two jobs kept him busy during the week and his Uncle’s landscaping business provided him as many jobs as he wanted on the weekends and he took them all. He needed the money, for one thing, and for another, when he was working he had less time to think about the hash he had made of his life. He was only 28 and on his second divorce, with two children he only saw once a month. The friends he had left called him Vinny and blamed him for both divorces, but no more than he blamed himself. Most of his money went to his exes for the care and feeding of children who no longer felt like his. 

He had taken the day off because he felt like hell. He woke up with a splitting headache and a sharp pain running through the middle of his back. He had strained it the day before lifting a sack of fertilizer from the back of his truck. Now he could hardly get out of bed. He managed to make a pot of coffee in the midst of his agony and then sat at his kitchen table rummaging through the medicine box looking for the Tylenol. It was empty. Of course it was empty, he thought, why wouldn’t it be?

Vinny was rapidly coming to the end of his rope. He felt like he was living someone else’s life, one that had no future and no point. How had it come to this? Yes, he had made a few bad decisions, most of his mistakes were self-inflicted. But the price he was being made to pay seemed too dear, too much to ever pay. His boss at the distribution center where he worked at night had asked him, “where do you see yourself in five years, Vinny?”  Vinny had said—“hopefully better off.” But on his way home that night he pondered the question over and over in his mind and the only answer that felt true was—“dead.” But he knew he was too much of a coward to kill himself. The worst nights of his life were always the times when he thought about running away, making a break for anonymity, leaving all of his mistakes in the rear view mirror. He would take on a new name and craft a new identity, and try his best to stay one step ahead of his past. But each time he imagined this new life all he could see were the faces of his children. He had brought them into the world. What about them?

Clara made it to the self-checkout station and fumbled with the scanner. It had taken her over an hour to find everything. She crept through the store like thick syrup as all the young people sped past her on all sides. They seemed in such a hurry. It was like they couldn’t even see her, as if she were invisible. Everyone moved so fast now. She could hear the noise they made as they passed her in the aisles, like a spring breeze. And now she could feel their growing impatience as they gathered in the line behind her at the checkout station. They had places to be and people to see and when in the world was this old woman ever going to finish? She finally placed the three paper thin plastic bags in her cart and moved away from the checkout station. It had cost $100 to barely fill the three small bags, and as soon as she sat them in the cart, each of them fell open and cans of beans and her tomatoes rolled around every which way. How she hated it when the store had done away with paper bags.

There was a wide walking lane painted with bright yellow lines on the blacktop that led to the parking lot. Even though it was a walking zone Clara always stopped and looked both ways before venturing out. Then she would proceed on her way, slowly and methodically, much to the frustration of the men and women in their SUV’s waiting for her to cross. She had never noticed how slow she was until Harold had gotten sick. Once he no longer was able to go with her, she felt unsure of herself out and about. By the time she made it to her car she was sweating and her hands had begun to tremble ever so slightly. She noticed a truck idling in the lane down from her car with its blinker on. Was he waiting for her? Why had she come shopping on a Saturday? Clara fought back against a rising tide of tears as she gathered up her tomatoes and canned beans, shoved them into the plastic bag and lifted it out of the cart. When the bag ripped open sending it all crashing to the pavement and rolling across the parking lot she burst into tears.

Vinny saw the old woman, saw her groceries spill and for just a moment thought of throwing the truck in reverse. He didn’t need this. He needed some Tylenol. But then he paused and closed his eyes. For the first time in years he thought of his long dead grandmother. He opened his eyes and saw the old woman crying. He placed his truck in park, turned on the emergency flashers, got out of the cab and began gathering cans of beans and boxes of pasta. 

Clara was embarrassed when he approached her and a bit scared. He was a young man, powerfully built and sloppily dressed. The expression on his face looked weary and she couldn’t tell if he was angry or tired. 

“Looks like you’re having trouble,” he said without changing expression. 

“I’m so sorry,” Clara said.

“No need to be sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s these cheap-ass plastic bags!” The young man managed a hint of a smile.

Clara had stopped crying, but her hands were still shaking. She had gotten into the habit of skipping breakfast, drinking only coffee and a small glass of water. Her appetite had never recovered after Harold passed. But going grocery shopping with nothing in her stomach had been a mistake. Now her head began to ache and she suddenly felt as weak as water. The young man had gathered all of her runaway groceries and placed them in her trunk. Now he stood next to her, his dark eyes staring out from under his baseball cap.

“What you need are a couple of those special bags the store sells with sturdy handles on each side. At least they stand up in the cart.”

Clara thought to answer exactly how Harold would have had he been alive, “yeah…but they charge you two dollars each for those bags! First they take away the paper ones, replace them with the worthless plastic ones. Then they offer to sell you bags for two dollars. It’s a scam.”

Vinny smiled down at her. “Well, I’ve got a bunch of them behind the seat in my truck. How about I get you a couple?” 

Clara watched him go back to his truck, park it in an available space and return to her with three wrinkled bags emblazoned with the store name—Uncle Willie’s. He handed them to her and noticed that she had lost her color. He saw her hands trembling and then heard himself say, “Ma'am? You don’t look so good. Are you alright?”

“I’m afraid I’m just old and worn out. I’ll be ok once I get back to the house. I should have had some breakfast this morning. Don’t know what I was thinking,” Clara rambled.

Vinny thought of his children. Out of nowhere their bright faces appeared. They were drifting away. He was losing them. Suddenly, desperately, he wanted to be the kind of man who they would one day be proud of. He was still young. It wasn’t too late. He had time to turn it around. He extended his hand. “My name is Vincent. What’s your’s?”

“I’m Clara.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Clara.”

“I’m pleased to meet you too, Vincent.”

Vinny insisted on walking Clara back inside Uncle Willie’s. There was a small bistro inside that served breakfast biscuits and sandwiches. Vinny bought her a sausage and egg biscuit and a glass of orange juice. They sat at the small round table and talked about themselves for a few minutes. Before long Clara’s color had returned, her hands were once again steady. Vinny then walked her back to her car, helped her in safely, then waved to her as she drove out of the parking lot.

For the first time that he could remember the knot inside his stomach was gone. As he got into the cab of his truck he noticed that his headache was gone and the kink in his back had melted away.

“O Brave New World…”

A couple of weeks ago I finished putting together this puzzle. Fifty of the “Best Classic Books.” It was great fun. I took a certain amount of pride in the fact that I had read 31 of the 50 on this list. One of the 31 is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I originally read it back in college when I thought I knew everything. As I recall, it made no lasting impression on me then, but there it was on my library shelf. So I decided to give it a second read. This time it felt different. What I remembered of the plot landed in a far different way for 66 year old me than it did the 20 year old version. Although written almost a hundred years ago, it remains freshly relevant.

The basic story concerns a world civilization from an unidentified year in the future where all human emotions, activities and pursuits are controlled by the State. This control has been achieved through the complete elimination of traditional childbirth, replacing it with artificial reproduction performed at a series of State operated “Hatchery and Conditioning Centers”, where everything from height and weight to intelligence is predetermined. The results of this new science is the division of humanity into several categories from Alphas to Gammas, and the complete elimination of mothers and fathers. The society that is created by such fine tuned humans is one where free unfettered sex and state encouraged drug use—a magic holiday inducing euphoria drug called Soma, insures peace and tranquility. The world controllers are proud of the world they have created which is undergirded by the three word mantra Community. Identity. Stability. One widely held belief of the society is the value placed on consumption, a citizen’s highest calling. One of the slogans pumped through the pillows of developing children as they sleep in the vast Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Nursery—ending is better than mending…the more stitches the less riches. Its difficult to read this book without a certain level of discomfort!

The timing of having read this book this week has been fascinating. After having read about the strange process of “creating” a human being all the way from a test tube through a birthing decanter, controlling for every variable through scientific manipulation of the process was mind blowing. But then yesterday I sat on a comfortable sofa in a dimly lit examining room watching a television monitor filled with my 21 week old grandson squirming around in vitro, as a highly skilled sonogram technician measured his bones. The jumpy grey images danced around as she moved the probe from side to side. There was his beating heart. Here were the soles of his feet. There is his nose and the undeniable proof of his gender. We hung on every word the technician spoke, and our hearts were calmed with every “completely normal.”

In the Brave New World, society and science has done away with birth defects and by eliminating the traditional family and the possibility of abusive mothers and fathers, insured an easily predictable life for every child. It has also eliminated art, beauty, love, and faithfulness along with the risks of the old ways. Everyone belongs to everyone else. Nobody belongs to anyone.

As I watched the little guy moving around I thought of how all of life is one giant risk. So many things could go wrong. No guarantees exist concerning his future. We hold on to hope that everything goes well. We pray for his safety and flourishing. But, a flourishing life can only come by taking risks. Risk is as much a part of life as life itself. I don’t want a world without risk. I don’t want a life where I have to trade art, beauty, love and faithfulness for personal safety and comfort. There is absolutely nothing brave about such a world.

Blue Hill

She was only seven years old when it happened. It was in the summer, a dreadfully hot day. The breakfast dishes had been cleared off the table and piled high in the sink, flies buzzing around the table as her mother wiped it clean with a dishcloth. Edna Taylor was a large woman with an unruly head of hair which defied all attempts to keep it out of her face. Long strands fell this way and that as she cupped all the crumbs into her hand at the end of the table after a final swoop. Her seven year old daughter looked up at her from the door to the back porch, sensing that something wasn’t right. Edna looked worried and weak. 

“Lizzy, go outside and play. Your mother needs some time alone. Run along!” Elizabeth heard the tone of her mother’s voice and understood it to be an order, not a suggestion. She bounded down the back steps and ran around to the front of the house where it was cooler. She looked down the field that sloped away from the great, white salt box house that went by the name of Blue Hill. The field of brown straw, scorched by the relentless summer sun, stretched all the way to the river. Elizabeth sat herself down on a stump of a tree that had been cut down earlier in the year when it was struck by lightening. Edna had thought it a bad omen, a sign that her sick boy wasn’t long for this world. But that was months ago, and lately Chesty had seemed to be getting better. Elizabeth watched the water drifting by slowly in the distance. She heard the whistle then saw the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad train coming up from Gladstone on the other side of the river. She could smell the smoke from the engine some days, but today the wind, what little there was, was headed in the other  direction. Still, she watched the train until it disappeared, worrying about her mother and her sick brother. 

It was just the three of them this morning. All the men were working and wouldn’t be back until lunch when the kitchen would come alive with noise and fuss as her father, three brothers and older sister came back to the house to eat. It always irked Elizabeth that her father wouldn’t allow her to go with them. “You’ve gotta stay with Momma, Lizzy. What’s gonna happen if she needs help with Chesty,” he would explain. 

Chesterton Taylor had been born in 1925 and had surprised the doctors by surviving his first year, then surprised them every year since. He had been born with what they called a weak heart and wasn’t given much of a chance. The fact that he was now twelve years old had been a testament to either God’s grace or an extra helping of the famous Taylor stubbornness gene. It hadn’t been much of a life though, he having spent much of it bedridden and weak as water. Elizabeth loved him, felt sorry for him, and on some level envied him their mother’s attention, But even a seven year old knew not to admit to such a thing. 

Suddenly Elizabeth thought she heard crying. Had the sound of the train drowned it out? How long had she been crying? Where was she? She ran around the house and saw her sitting on the steps holding her head in her hands, sobbing, great anguished cries of despair and heartache. Elizabeth ran up and wrapped her tiny arms around her inconsolable mother. “What’s the matter, Momma? Is it Chesty?”

Edna buried her face in her apron, wiped away the tears then lifted Elizabeth into her lap. “Chesty passed away, Lizzy. His time for suffering is finally over, he’s gone home.”

“But, this is his home,” Elizabeth cried.

“No Lizzy. This is just our earthly home.”

Thus went the strangest conversation of young Elizabeth’s short life for fifteen minutes or so as she rocked back and forth in her mother’s strong arms, not understanding but taking comfort in her odd words. Then they both saw him.

Blue Hill was a house that rested at the end of a two mile one-lane dirt road that slithered down the middle of the 700 acre farm like a serpent. To the north lay cow pastures, a couple of barns and on the highest point, the family cemetery. To the south, fields of corn and soybeans and more barns. From the back steps of the house you could see a car approaching from half a mile away, a tail of dust billowing behind it with the soft rumble of a distant engine. Neither of them saw or heard him approach. They just looked up and there he was, the morning sun shining off his clean blue clothes. He wore a white boater hat and his brown wingtip shoes looked like they had just been buffed clean. Not a trace of dust. Sitting at his feet was a Jack Russell terrier, his pink tongue bouncing up and down. Neither Elizabeth nor her mother felt any fear at the strange sight of a man in a clean suit who seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. When they looked up at him he tipped his hat and smiled down at them. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Taylor. I can see you’ve been crying. What’s troubling you?”

Elizabeth had never seen a kinder smile or heard a more soothing voice. She felt warm inside as he spoke. She heard her mother’s anguished answer, “It’s my boy. He’s dead.”

The dog walked forward, jumped up in her lap, curled around and laid down. The man took off his hat as if to acknowledge their loss then said, “I know, Mrs. Taylor. I’m so sorry. It’s a terrible thing to lose a child, especially one who has been sick for so long.” He then walked over and sat down beside her on the step, he on one side and Elizabeth on the other, both holding on to her. They rocked back and forth together while the dog slept peacefully in her mother’s lap.

Elizabeth couldn’t remember how long he was there. Time was a difficult concept for a seven year old. It felt like a long time but it might have only been a few minutes. Regardless, his presence had a calming effect on her mother. She had stopped sobbing, was no longer shaking with the force of her grief. The tears had dried up by the time he left. He had stood up slowly. The dog jumped down from her lap and joined him. His parting words were simple, “The men will be back soon.” Then the two of them walked back up the road. Elizabeth watched them get smaller and smaller, noticed the dust that their feet kicked up as they walked along, saw the sun shining off his boater hat. 

       When her father, brothers and sister returned for lunch, they all began crying at the news. They gathered around Chesty’s bed and wept. Rosemary, Elizabeth’s only sister, was particularly distraught, draping herself over his dead body while she wailed. Her brothers mostly stood at a distance, arms crossed stiffly over their chests, eyes rimmed with tears. Her father held his filthy hat in both hands, lower lip trembling for a minute until he got a hold of himself. Then he said, “Ok, that’s enough of that,” as he gathered everyone up, led them out of the bedroom and closed the door. Edna served lunch. Everyone ate slowly, in silence. Elizabeth had never seen her family do anything quietly. They were loud people, always hollering and screaming about one thing or another, not with anger or malice, they were just loud. They spoke to each other loudly, worked loudly, even ate loudly. The clatter and tumult were an incessant part of Elizabeth’s life. Now, the seven of them sat around the long oak kitchen table so quietly you could hear the stirring of fly’s wings.

“Did ya’ll see the man wearing the white hat?” Edna asked, breaking the silence. They all exchanged glances. Her father answered, “What man?”

“You must have passed him on the road,” she insisted. “He just left us thirty minutes before ya’ll drove up. He had a little dog with him.”

“We didn’t see a man or a dog on the road. Who was he?”

Edna insisted that they couldn’t possibly have missed a man with such a sharp suit and fine dog. She told them all about his visit and as she talked they all began exchanging worried glances. Finally, Edna dropped the subject and the silence returned. Later that night when she tucked Elizabeth in bed she whispered in her ear, “Lizzy, that man was an angel sent from God to comfort us. Don’t you ever forget it, ya hear?”

And, she hadn’t. But oddly, had never bothered to share the story with her son until now, the night before he was to undergo open heart surgery to repair a faulty mitral valve. As she sat on the end of his bed regaling him with yet another creepy paranormal family secret, it occurred to Montgomery Duncan that his mother’s family history was chocked full of this sort of thing, Blue Hill being a house shot through with Gothic mystery. He made a mental note that if he survived his pending procedure, he would attempt to get to the bottom of it all. There were so many unanswered questions about the Taylors, so many odd tales. The least interesting part of this particular story was the fact that the beautiful woman sitting at the end of his bed telling it had been dead and in the ground for eleven months, having died in her sleep of heart failure herself. There seemed to be two things that prominently ran in the Taylor family, bad hearts and bedside visits from the dead. Montgomery chalked this one up to the delightful drug cocktail pulsing through his veins from the shiny IV bag beside his bed. But what to make of the half dozen other stories of premonitions, warnings and reassurance that had been provided from various dead Taylor Uncles, Aunts and Cousins through the years?

“What are you saying Ma, are you an angel sent to comfort me?”

“No. I’m just your mother.”

And with that, she was gone. Montgomery drifted off to sleep thinking about his grandmother, her dirty apron, the black wood stove in the dark kitchen, that heavy picnic style table that ran the length of the room. He pictured her turning from her cooking to see him standing at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t sleep well in the huge red bedroom upstairs, always woke up before dawn and always found her busy in the kitchen.

“Come over here, child,” she would smile. “Give your Nanny a hug.”

She would envelope him in her apron which always smelled of sausage. She would tussle his hair then sit him down at the table and give him a hot biscuit. 

“How come you always wake up so early?”

Montgomery never told her the truth. He never told her that Blue Hill scared the hell out of him at night. The big room upstairs was painted blood red and the only light was a single clear light bulb which hung at the end of a long chord from the middle of the ceiling. For reasons that he didn’t understand the light always swayed a little from side to side sending shadows slithering across the walls. For a five year old boy this was the stuff from which nightmares were made. But all it took to break the spell was a visit to Nanny’s kitchen and the rising sun peaking through the screen door. For Montgomery, Blue Hill was part paradise and part haunted house. The haunting always happened at night making the arrival of the morning sun feel like paradise.

A nurse with kind eyes wearing a mask asked him to count backwards from ten. He felt a soft tingle in his arm, then a blast of cold air, then nothing. When next he opened his eyes he was hovering above the bobbing head of his surgeon looking down at the bright red blood surrounded by sky blue napkins in the middle of the table. He heard the buzz and gurgle of the ventilator and picked up parts of a conversation between the nurses about the results of a football game. Then over in a corner behind a tray of instruments he saw his mother staring intently at her son’s open chest. She was swaying from side to side with one arm raised towards heaven. This had always been how it was with Elizabeth Taylor Duncan, always turning up at the oddest times in the oddest places, always knowing something she had no way of knowing, understanding things she couldn’t possibly understand. Montgomery knew at that moment that he would survive the operation going on below. He would make a full and complete recovery. There suddenly wasn’t a doubt in his mind.