“The Reverend Miriam Young has passed on, I’m afraid.”
We were standing on the porch of the little blue house that used to be the Spiritualist Church of Glen Meadows when we heard these awful words. And all three of us, I’m sure, felt for a moment like just passing on with her.
We’d found the place without any trouble. Drove the main highway in, stopped at a filling station and checked a phone book, and by 10:00 A.M. we were on the Reverend Young’s front porch. Or what used to be hers.
There was no sign outside the home advertising it as a church, but Ob said, getting out of the car, that it wasn’t the kind of religion people necessarily advertised. He said it wasn’t what you’d call Welcome Wagon material. And Cletus made some joke about the church not needing a sign anyway because everybody who was supposed to come most likely heard of it telepathically anyway. But I wasn’t so optimistic. I was always set for failures since May died, and I was set for this one.
“Passed on where?” Cletus asked the man like a fool.
Smiling kindly to the imbecile in our company, the chipmunk of a man (that’s the animal he favored) said, “She died, son. Last June. She’s passed on to the Spirit World.”
We three just stood there dumbfounded. We were trying to outwit Death on this trip, rise above it, penetrate the blockades it put up between us and May. We were coming to Putnam County to put Death in its place, and instead it had put us squarely back in ours.
“So who are you?” I asked brazenly, forgetting my manners. I had nothing left to lose anyway. I was mad at this chipmunk and ready to fight. Ready to squeeze that Bat Lady right out of him.
But his face never altered as he looked into my eyes. He smiled again, again kindly, and he said, “I am Miriam’s nephew, dear. I’m living here until I get her affairs in order.”
“Oh.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Then Cletus said, “Where are the bats?”
The chipmunk chuckled. He said, “Flying free, son. Like the Reverend Young herself.”
All this time Ob had said nothing. He hadn’t even been facing us. As soon as he’d learned Reverend Young was dead, he had turned away and looked off the side of the porch, rubbing his forehead as he always did when he was lost and searching for a way to go.
But after the feeble attempts of Cletus and me to deal with this house empty of its Small Medium at Large, he turned back. Turned back and in a quiet voice said to the man, “I was hoping she could help me contact my wife. I needed to talk to my wife.”
And the nephew of the preacher Ob had needed so desperately to find looked on Ob’s heartbroken face and saw his pain and he reached out and put a hand on Ob’s shoulder.
“I am so sorry, sir, but I haven’t my aunt’s spiritual powers. There is no one else here. But I do know someone, a man in Sissonville, who might be able to …”
But Ob put up his hand and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No. We were led here, and here my looking ends. I can’t go traipsing through the state like some old fool, searching out psychics. I’m not meant to do it and I won’t.”
Cletus looked at me and I looked at him, both of us hoping for the other one to do something.
Then Cletus said, “Well, sir, do you have any materials you might give us? Anything she might have used in church?”
Leave it to Cletus to think of that. Wanting something to take, something to hold between his fingers, to hide away in his vinyl suitcase. Cletus always needing something to collect.
“Well,” said the nephew, “there is the church brochure the Reverend always handed out to newcomers. I could give you one of those.”
Cletus nodded his head.
The nephew looked over at Ob.
“Would you care to come inside while I look? Could I offer you a cup of coffee?”
But Ob shook his head and remained silent. His face was pale and full of strain, and I wanted to take his suffering from him. But all I could do was wait for the chipmunk and Cletus to take care of their business so we might just go on home.
The nephew reappeared at the door with a folded white paper in his hands. He again apologized sorrowfully, wrote his number on the paper in case he could ever be of any help to us, and then the door that had held so much hope was closed and we were back on our own again.
We walked silently to the Valiant, then sat there a few minutes without a word. I was waiting for Ob to decide what he was going to do next. We had already called up our reservations at the one motel in town. Then tomorrow — after the Reverend Young would have connected Ob to May and everything was finally set right — tomorrow we were supposed to drive to the capitol. Spend the whole day there hobnobbing with the legislators. And then we were to go home and maybe live again.
But it was only eleven o’clock in the morning, we had been on this journey only three hours, and already everything was cracked and broken — and some of us with it.
Ob gave a deep sigh and he said, “I guess we better head on home, children.”
He started the car, and slowly we pulled away from all the spirits resting in that little blue house. Cletus and I said nothing. I guess we both knew it was too delicate a situation for fixing.
Unlike the happy silence we’d all enjoyed earlier that morning, we suffered instead a black kind of stillness on our route back home. Ob looked awful. I thought he might just pull the car over to the shoulder and die. Cletus opened up the Spiritualist handout and stared at the page mile after mile. And I watched out my window, swallowing back the lump in my throat and praying for something to save Ob and me. For I truly felt Ob had taken his final punch.
Off of I-64 and back on the turnpike, the signs for Capitol Street started cropping up again. I could feel Cletus lift his eyes and watch them slide past. And before long, there she was. That pretty concrete queen Cletus wanted to marry someday.
We traveled the road up the river alongside her, and no one said a word. My heart was aching for Cletus, for I knew there was little in life he really wanted this bad, this chance to see the West Virginia State Capitol. But I had nothing left to try to get it for him. We headed on south toward the bridge that would take us across the river and as far away from Cletus’s capitol as any soul could be. Back to Deep Water, where life would become again an empty trailer, an old man’s declining will to go on, a crazy fool believing in the mysteries of a beat-up vinyl suitcase, and me. I kept my eyes straight ahead, unwilling to look behind me at that gold shining dome that had accepted all our deepest wishes just a few hours back. Then just as we were nearly out of its sight, just as we were ready to put that last disappointment behind us and go back to the old life, we heard Ob say, “I’m turning this buggy around.”
And he did. He turned that buggy around and he drove it back the way we’d come. Back toward that shining castle. My heart began to lift. And Cletus leaned forward from the backseat.
Sounding almost too scared to ask, he said, “Are we going anyway, Ob? Going in to see it?”
Ob said, “It’s getting on to lunchtime. I figure the governor will be in the coffee shop, watching for somebody interesting to come through the door.”
Ob straightened his shoulders, and his face eased up a little, and he said, “We sure don’t want to disappoint him.”
May always said we were angels before we were ever people. She said when we were finished being people we’d go back to being angels. And we’d never feel pain again.
But what is it that makes a person want to stay here on this earth anyway, and go on suffering the most awful pain just for the sake of getting to stay?
I used to think it was because people fear death. But now I think it is because people can’t bear saying good-bye.
May was lucky. When she had to say her good-bye to Ob, she had to hurt over it only once. And then she was an angel and it didn’t hurt her anymore.
But Ob. Ob hurt and he kept on hurting. Living in a trailer full of May’s empty spaces. Walkin
g through May’s dying garden. Sleeping in a bed that still left room for her.
He hurt so much. But even after his most terrible hours, he decided to stay here on this earth. Right out of the blue, he wanted to live again. And I’d like to think maybe he wanted to live because of me. Because he couldn’t bear the thought of saying good-bye to me.
Something happened to Ob that day we left Putnam County and started back for home. Between the front porch of the late Reverend Young’s and the concrete steps of the West Virginia State Capitol, something happened to Ob to make him long for living again. I don’t know what it was. I couldn’t even take any credit for making it happen when it did. I figured Ob had given up there on that porch in Putnam County and I was preparing myself for the worst. But something happened to Ob. He turned that buggy around.
The three of us found an easy place to park right beside the capitol building and we got out of the car and walked into that place like three people coming home. We didn’t feel small. We didn’t mind that we were new. We felt embraced and even sort of expected.
Cletus seemed to need to touch everything. Even when we walked down the halls, he’d run his fingers lightly against the walls. We stopped at every lighted display window. We read the name on every door. We picked up every brochure. And Cletus smiled at each person we passed as if he knew everyone well.
And all this time Ob was gentle with him and with me, gentle like a mother. He would lean with Cletus over a glass case in the museum, and his arm would lie softly about Cletus’s shoulders as they read the words off an old yellowed newspaper. And while I stood in front of a beautiful window, looking out at the capitol lawn with its pigeons and squirrels and pretty women walking together and laughing, Ob would stand beside me and rest his palm against the back of my head as he used to when I was a little girl.
In the capitol coffee shop we looked for signs of the governor, but I guess he was off somewhere else that day. So we just eavesdropped on the conversations of all the other men and women in their nice suits, people who had come downstairs from their big offices with leather chairs to have a cup of capitol coffee and relax. Cletus watched them with a kind of ache in his eyes, and I knew what he wanted for his life and I prayed for him to someday get it. But I didn’t say any prayers for me. I was too afraid to hope for things.
We went through every bit of space in the capitol building that we could find; then we went next door to the Science and Culture Center and soaked in all of that place, too. There was a gift shop there selling handmade items by West Virginians, and it was Cletus who said that Ob ought to be bringing in his whirligigs to sell. I could see that Ob actually gave it some thought. He looked around the shop like somebody planning out a garden they’re about to plant. He’d stare at one corner, then another, like he was setting up his whirligigs there, in his head, getting the feel of it.
But when we walked out of the shop, Ob said to Cletus, “My ’gigs are needing a place. This ain’t it.”
We stayed among the senators and legislators until five o’clock, and when they started heading out to their cars to go home, we called the Glen Meadows Motel to cancel; then we headed on out to ours. I gave Cletus the front seat.
It was dark when we finally pulled into the yard, the headlights of the car flashing across Ob’s old Chevy sitting in the weeds. We’d been quiet all the way home, but not a hard, lonely quiet. Just tired. Full of thoughts.
We were getting ourselves and our stuff out of the car. Ob was talking to Cletus about how comfy the couch was to sleep on (Ob had asked Cletus to spend the night so we wouldn’t have to answer any awkward questions from Cletus’s parents). And I was thinking of May.
Then something flew over me.
We all let out a little gasp. The wings were so completely silent and we so unprepared. But the moon was bright and the shadow of those wings so real, and before we could find our voices, before I could call out, “Wait!” the owl had flown off into the night.
I remembered her then. I remembered May.
I began to cry. I had not ever really cried for May. I had tried so hard to bear her loss and had swallowed back the tears that had been building up inside me for two seasons. But nothing could keep them back once that owl disappeared from my eyes and I knew as I had never known before that I would never, ever, see May on this earth again.
I cried and cried and could not stop crying. Then Ob lifted me up and carried me through the door Cletus held open and he took me to my room as he had done so many times when I was a little girl. My stomach and my throat burned and ached with the tears as I curled into a ball on my bed and tried to cry the very life out of my body. But for every bit of life I cried away, Ob held me hard against him and he put more life back in me. He did not ever speak. Just held on to me and wiped away the tears with his strong, wide hands until finally my body was emptied of those tears and I was no more burdened.
When finally I felt I could speak, I whispered to him, “It’s been so hard missing May.”
And Ob said, “She’s still here, honey. People don’t ever leave us for good.”
I laid my head on his shoulder, so grateful he was still here with me, grateful even for Cletus, who I knew was somewhere in the trailer, waiting. I closed my eyes and thought of my poor young mama and May’s poor mommy and daddy and my dear May herself. But I didn’t dwell on them with pain or with fear. There was a tranquillity in me that felt all right, and as I remembered them all, my tears dried up and I fell asleep.
* * *
When Ob and me met you, honey, you was such a shy thing. Them big ol’ eyes of yours looking like a puppy begging for love.
I knew right off I wanted you. I took Ob out to the back porch after supper and I said, “Ob, we’ve got to take that child home with us.”
Well, Ob had seen how at the supper table you’d been too scared to death to ask for anything. Run out of milk in your glass and too scared to ask Connie Francine to fill it up again. Ob knew an unhappy child when he saw one.
So he said, “We’re taking her today, May,” and we just packed you up and took you. Those folks never cared. Those Ohio kin — they’re good people mostly, but they’re limited, honey.
I couldn’t hardly keep my hands off you those first few days. Remember how I was always touching your hair, combing it all the time and clipping pretty bows to it? I had me a little girl finally, something I’d wanted all my life. I’d come to figure the good Lord wasn’t ever going to give me one, for reasons of His own. But He was holding me steady all those years, waiting for you to be born, waiting for your poor mama to die, waiting for Ob to see you didn’t know how to ask for a glass of milk.
I worried about us not having the money to give you all you truly deserved. I wanted so much to buy you them big plastic houses with those little round-headed people sitting inside. And those great big baby dolls that wet their diapers. I wanted to dress you up in pink and yellow every day. Take you over to Charleston to that big glass mall and go in that big department store and buy everything pink and yellow for little girls.
But we just didn’t have much, honey. We were both sorry for it. Ob made you those little wooden people to play with. And I picked through everything at the Goodwill to find you some nice clothes. But we knew you should’ve had more. We were so sorry for it.
Remember you and me out late that one night? What is it we were doing…. You thought you heard a cat a-meowing and wanted me to come see with you. Do you remember? And we put on our coats and went out, and the moon was as big around as I’d ever seen it, and we didn’t need no lights, it was that bright. And just as we were heading for the shed to see if there was a lost kitty in there somewhere, out of that dark came a big owl just swooping right across our path. Biggest thing I’d ever seen, and not a sound. And you and me, we couldn’t say a word. Just stood there with our hands over our mouths, frozen up like statues, watching those wings flap off into the dark.
I’d not ever seen an owl in all my days, and when I hadn’t
had you but a few weeks there that one passed through my life. I knew you’d always be doing that for me and for Ob. Bringing us good things like that.
I used to wonder why God gave you to us so late in life. Why we had to be old already before we could have you. I was almost big as a house and full of diabetes. And Ob an old arthritic skeleton of a man. We couldn’t do none of the things we could’ve done for you thirty or forty years back.
But I thought on it and thought on it till I finally figured it out.
And my guess is that the Lord wanted us all to be just full of need. If Ob and me had been young and strong, why, maybe you wouldn’t’ve felt so necessary to us. Maybe you’d’ve thought we could do just fine without you.
So the Lord let us get old so we’d have plenty cause to need you and you’d feel free to need us right back. We wanted a family so bad, all of us. And we just grabbed on to each another and made us one. Simple as that.
I always told Ob he was my moon and sun. And when you came to us, Summer, honey, you were my shining star.
You are the best little girl I ever did know.
When I opened my eyes the next morning, the brightest yellow sunshine was coming through the window. It is nearly spring now. May’s daffodils will be blooming.
I smelled hot coffee brewing in the kitchen, and bacon. Somebody was cooking me breakfast.
I came out of my room to find Cletus setting the table and telling Ob all about some article he’d read on people spontaneously combusting. And Ob cracking eggs into a big plastic bowl and telling Cletus he didn’t believe a word of it.
I said, “Good morning,” and they both grinned at me and said good morning back. Then we all three ate ourselves nearly to oblivion on the best eggs and bacon I ever tasted in my life.
After breakfast Ob said, “I got us all a chore this morning.”