The Death Bed
“I don’t know if Lewis really comprehended what was happening,” she’d told Abigail that night over the phone.
“You’ve got to be careful with kids,” Abigail answered. “They might not understand what’s being said, but that doesn’t mean they don’t understand everything that’s going on.”
* * *
Jessica left Thomas for someone else shortly after spring break. She’d insisted that they’d never officially gotten back together, but Thomas still felt a deep sense of betrayal and abandonment.
“We’re just not right for each other,” she told him when he’d insisted on an explanation. He ended up going to a party with Robert and Clint the next night. He hadn’t really enjoyed himself, but he didn’t turn them down the following weekend when they wanted him to go with them to some new club. He let himself get lost in their lifestyle, vowing that he would start his experiment as soon as the next semester began. The “B” that he’d gotten on his philosophy paper did little to motivate him.
“I need to wait until I have at least a year of college under my belt before I start something so ambitions,” he would tell himself as he struggled to get out of bed on Monday mornings.
* * *
About a month after the custody battle, Peter and Hannah found themselves back in the courtroom, this time with the insurance company. The lawyer for the insurance company presented a strong case for arson, based on the fire department’s testimony on how the fire must have gotten started, and Hannah didn’t seem to put up much of a fight.
“I don’t think Peter would do something like that, but we were both under a lot of pressure at the time, so I guess anything could be possible,” she’d said.
In the end she dropped the case and Peter didn’t have enough money left to continue paying the lawyer. He wanted to continue to fight, but in the end he conceded the matter. He remained convinced that Hannah had wanted to lose because she knew that not receiving anything for the house would affect him more than her.
* * *
Julia came back from her trip to Mexico with a renewed resolution to live her life for other people. She wrote another entry in her diary about the importance of living for others, both for the good of society, and for her own sake. She also put on a superb performance in the school play, which only her mother came to watch.
Julia visited her grandfather often, and on one occasion she’d snuck him a knife and several blocks of wood.
“I’ve read enough. I’m done tryin’ ta live through other men’s words,” Abraham had said. “I’m tired of learnin’ how I ought ta have lived an’ I want ta get started doin’ it. Do me this favor. Go down ta that hardware store up the road an’ get me a good knife an’ some wood. Susie won’t care an’ I’ll keep it hidden from the rest a’ ‘em without any trouble. You remember when you were a little girl how I used ta let you eat ice cream, even when you’re dad said you couldn’t have any. You know why I did that? It was ‘cause I knew that a little taste a’ goodness wasn’t goin’ ta hurt you. I’m just askin’ you ta do the same fer me now.”
Julia hadn’t needed any explanation, and went that same day to the hardware store and bought him a small knife and several blocks of wood.
Sara’s parents had convinced Julia to stay with them throughout the summer until she left for college. She’d agreed to live with Thomas when she got there in order to help with rent, and they found a small apartment off campus that they moved into a week before the fall semester began. Neither of them had felt comfortable living together at first, but warmed up to each other once classes started and life found its rhythm. Julia offered to pay for all of the rent based on the rather large sum of money that she’d received from Abraham—a down payment as he’d called it—but Thomas turned her down, insisting that he pay his fair share. Neither of them mentioned the subject afterwards.
* * *
Lewis moved in with Hannah and moped around the house most of the time. Tommy Johnson didn’t come over as much, not because of any falling out between the two of them, but simply because of geography.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to go over to Tommy’s house,” Hannah had tried to explain, “but it’s too far away for me to drive all the way over there, drop you off, and then go back to pick you up.”
Lewis hadn’t said anything then, but the look he’d given her had been enough to persuade her to buy out her lease and find a small house outside the city so that he could go to the same junior high as everyone else from his sixth grade class. It only took Hannah an evening to box up everything she owned and relocate all of her belongings from Abigail’s place to the rental house she’d leased.
She continued to see her doctor regularly to “monitor her progress,” and he turned out to have been right about there being no need to worry about that three percent, so she redirected all of her worrying onto Lewis.
“He’s just having a hard time adjusting to being in junior high,” Andy had assured her. Hannah found herself wanting to believe him, but still couldn’t accept such an unproven theory. Even after the move, Tommy Johnson didn’t come over nearly as much as he had in the past. She asked Lewis if they’d had a fight, but he told her that Tommy now went by Tom and insisted that everything was fine between the two of them, so she stopped pestering him.
After she had watched Lewis spend the entire summer moping around the house, Hannah broke down and bought him a magic kit that included a few decks of cards, coins, a top hat, and a thick book that explained how to perform countless tricks. He hadn’t shown any excitement when she brought it home for him, but he’d spent all of the following day practicing in his bedroom.
Hannah tried in vain to understand a cause for Lewis’s newfound melancholy other than the recent dissolution of her marriage to Peter.
“He should be a happy kid. You don’t think that Peter and I could be the only reason for all of this, do you?” she asked Abigail one evening.
Abigail had assured her that Lewis was only going through a phase and that he would adjust to his new surroundings soon. Despite her constant vigilance and probing inquiries, Hannah had no idea that Lewis had spent the rest of the school year trying to understand what it meant to be Summer Wallburn’s boyfriend, and most of his summer vacation thinking about her and waiting for school to start so he could see her again, in spite of all the uncertainty she produced in him.
* * *
Peter still hadn’t found a job; he still hadn’t moved into a new apartment or replaced the decaying couch that had become a permanent fixture in his living room. He hadn’t found any reason to get up from that couch and do something with his life either. When he’d gotten back from his cold wet night huddled next to that bum in the driving rain, he’d made a brief attempt to turn his life around. He began going to job interviews and making a point to eat more healthy foods. He’d even decided to stop drinking altogether. And for a few weeks it appeared that he’d done a marvelous job of pulling himself back together.
“I’ve never seen you like this; you look genuinely happy,” Luke had said. “I never thought that with everything that’s happened to you over the past few months that you could turn your life back around, but you’ve done it.” Debra agreed. And the new Peter Manchell managed to survive longer than anyone had thought.
But after the results from the blood test came in, the new Peter seemed to disappear overnight. The old demons had been waiting for an opportunity to creep back in, and when they did Peter found his life worse off than it had been before. He drank more, considerably more, and found himself even more dominated by apathy; it seemed almost oppressive at times. He ate nothing but junk food and microwave dinners and put on almost twenty pounds between May and August. In the end he found himself unable to repress even passing whims. He would have hated his life if he’d been capable of taking time to evaluate what it had become, but that would have required more thought and energy than he could muster.
“This is exactly what she wants,” he woul
d mutter sometimes. That’s why she’s done everything. He hated Hannah for the blood test. “But it’s her ‘generosity’ that makes her evil,” he would tell himself. He didn’t tell anyone about that ‘generosity,’ and sloth didn’t allow him to continue with that line of thought. The laziness was like a parasite fighting for its continued existence in his life. It couldn’t exist without a viable host, and without Hannah’s ‘generosity’ Peter was a far cry from viable. Finding a distraction never proved too difficult, and so Peter never fully questioned Hannah’s motives, but the loathing for her continued to build in his subconscious.
* * *
Meanwhile, Abraham continued his existence in Grace Assisted Living Center, neither refusing to die, nor dying. Rather, he lay in his bed either reading, or whittling away on one of his blocks of wood with the knife that Julia had brought him.
Chapter 2
On the day Julia moved in with Thomas, her brother handed her a letter. “It arrived yesterday,” he told her. She recognized the return address and rushed into her room to open it. Several pages had been stuffed into the envelope along with a short note. She removed the note and read:
Dear Julia,
You should know that Susie is helping me write this. She’s helped me to write a lot lately, since you’ve been so busy with getting ready for college. I’m sending you my story. I’ve never told it to anyone, and these handwritten pages, which I’ve enclosed, are the only copy. If you wonder about your grandmother, and find yourself speculating about anything that might have happened between us, know that you’re right, even though I haven’t included any mention of those things. Those details aren’t part of this story.
I know that this story is told a little too simply, but it’s my story, and that’s the only way I know how to tell it. Susie asked me lots of other questions, but I told her that they weren’t part of the story and shouldn’t be included. Susie didn’t want to write that last bit about me never leaving, but I told her that that’s how the story would end, and she agreed, on the condition that either she or you be allowed to change the ending should it turn out to be false.
I also don’t want you to think that my story is completely true in the most literal sense. I wish that I could say that everything enclosed in these pages that I’m sending you had happened just as I have described them. But they are true in a much deeper sense. Everything that I’ve written has happened. It has all happened a million times over. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s only taken me a lifetime to realize it. I am sending you this story so that you might recognize that there is nothing new, though I believe that in many ways you already have.
Sincerely,
Abraham Thomas Manchell
Without moving, or a moment’s hesitation, Julia opened the handwritten manuscript and continued to read.
The Community Garden:
When my wife died I thought that my life was over. My own health had been in a state of steady decline for several years, and I lived all alone in a small house situated on the outskirts of a small suburb of a large city. I spent the first year after her death puttering about in that empty suburban house, waiting for my heart to give out or for a blood clot to find its way to my brain. But months slipped away, and, against all probability and my own desire, my health neither improved nor worsened.
I didn’t visit the cemetery at all during that first year, but on the first anniversary of her death I took two Easter Lilies to the plot of ground where her body had been laid. I set them on fresh grass in front of her marker and knelt down in front of the chiseled stone slab.
“You always liked lilies,” I said to the gravestone. “I know that they’ll wither up in a few days, if the wind doesn’t blow them away before that, but I wanted to bring you lilies all the same.”
I didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t linger long. But on the following day I woke up early and went to a nursery where I bought a few bulbs and a small gardening trowel. I spent that morning planting the flowers on the plot of dirt in front of my wife’s marker. If I’d been content to stop there then I might have gone back to puttering around my house for the remainder of my life. But the next day I went back to the cemetery to water the bulbs, and the day after that I went back to the nursery to pick out another type of flower to plant. I had soon developed the habit of going out to her marker each morning to tend the small flower garden that I’d planted. I was always careful to avoid being noticed by the caretaker, but I couldn’t keep my work a secret when the plants began to sprout. The caretaker, perhaps moved by sympathy, took it upon himself to call my son, and let him know how I had begun spending my mornings. That evening I received a call from my son, who tried to explain why the cemetery couldn’t allow me to continue planting flowers on their premises.
The next day, when I made my daily pilgrimage to my late wife’s gravestone the caretaker met me at the entrance and informed me that I would not be permitted onto the premises if I insisted on continuing with my garden. I returned home, and I drove out of the small suburb and into the large city. I drove up and down the city blocks, until I found something that caught my eye. I stopped the car next to a sizeable plot of land and got out. A “For Sale” sign stood in front of the burned out remains of what had once been a home. Later I would have time to speculate if maybe I hadn’t left that morning with the intent of finding that exact piece of property; later I would have time speculate about a great many things. But that evening I called the number listed at the bottom of the sign and offered to pay the realtor’s asking price in cash on the following Monday. The realtor of course needed more time, but the transaction went through, and I began work on the last great undertaking of my life.
I’d shown up at the closing in overalls, and began working that same day, clearing away everything that I could with my hands. The next day I hired a construction crew to break up and remove the old foundation—it’s amazing how timely a construction crew can be when the price is right—and by Wednesday I could begin in earnest. I’d considered renting a tiller, or some other kind of heavy machinery to clear the land, but I couldn’t warm up to the idea. Instead I arrived at the naked plot of ground with gardening gloves and a spade. It would take me the rest of the week to pull up every weed, and patch of grass by hand, but time had lost its power over me. On Friday I even shed the worn gardening gloves, wanting to feel each thorny prick, and the fresh dirt beneath my fingernails. I noticed that the people who passed by my plot of ground took long glances at my labor, but they continued on their way and didn’t bother me with questions.
On Saturday my son called, saying that he’d noticed a large deduction from the retirement account. I assured him that everything was fine, but declined to answer further questions related to the matter. On Sunday I traveled into the city early. There was something about Sunday that felt so alive and vibrant, and I began planting the seeds that I’d purchased months ago but never had the opportunity to put in the soil. The next day I watered them, and I continued to travel into the city to tend the small flower garden almost every day, staying in only to avoid inclement weather. On days when there was little to be done I would take a book and sit down on the fresh earth and read all afternoon. Soon enough the flowers began to bloom. They grew up in a tangled mess and a montage of colors; nevertheless, they exuded a sense of warmth and well-being against the dreary concrete backdrop.
My son called again, this time to inform me that he’d found out what had been done with the money and gone by to see the vacant plot.
“Did you like it?” I asked.
“It looks like you overpaid for it,” my son answered.
“It’s not about the money,” I explained. “You know what your mother used to say?”
“What?”
“You have to go to the people who need help. You can’t expect them to swallow their pride and come to you.”
“So what are your plans? Are you going to clear out all the growth and build a new house? If you wanted to move to
the city you could have called and I would have helped you get settled into a nice place in a better neighborhood.
I said that I had no intention of building anything or of moving to the city. “All that growth is my garden,” I explained.
“Well don’t go getting senile,” my son answered, and hung up the phone.
One day, some time after the phone call, I was sitting in my garden reading my book, and a youth from the neighborhood paused momentarily as he walked past the plot.
“Hey,” the youth called out from the street.
I looked up from my book.
“What are all these flowers for?” the youth asked.
“They’re for you, and everyone else,” Abraham answered.
“Man, aint nobody in this neighborhood need flowers,” the youth exclaimed. “People here need food. Why cain’t you plant some vegetables or something useful?”
I couldn’t think of an answer, and before I could formulate one the youth had dismissed me and turned to walk away. But the next day I bought new seed and began to work again. I dug out almost all of the flowers, leaving only those that ran around the perimeter of the garden and set to work planting vegetables. On the next rainy day, instead of reading on my couch, I made a simple wooden sign that said in red paint: “Community Garden” and then made another that read: “Feel Free To Take Anything You Want.”
As the first of the tomatoes began to turn color I placed the two signs next to the curb. In time the corn, watermelon, squash, and zucchini came in, but nobody ever came into the garden or took any of its produce. I sat on the little bench that I’d placed in the back corner of the garden and, when the weather was favorable, I would spend entire days reading and waiting for someone to come into my little garden. Mothers would walk by with their children, and I would hope that they would stop to pick some of my fresh vegetables, but they never did. One child pleaded with his mom to let him stop and get something.
“But the sign says that they’re free,” he insisted.
“Be quiet,” his mother answered in a harsh, yet hushed tone. “You don’t know what that man might have done to them. There could be drugs or poison inside for all we know. Her scornful eyes met my own for a moment before she whisked her child away.