Nightcrawlers

26

It was funny how as age advanced you could know things you couldn’t know before and funnier still how you could see the truth of things that you had long been blind to.

Elena could remember when her husband, old George, was dying, how he lay on the couch that final week, refusing both doctors and hospitals, saying in his breathless voice how he would either shake off what plagued him or it would be the end and if it was, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing because he was accepting of things, accepting of nature’s way. George was a farmer and the good earth was everything to him. He had turned it and seeded it year after year and never was there a happier man than he when his hands were soiled with black dirt. Maybe that’s how it was. A woman had her children, but a man had the earth that he tilled and sowed and reaped.

As he lay dying—something she refused to accept and something he was perfectly comfortable with—on the couch, covered in the frayed quilt his mother had made them as a wedding present, she refused to face the fact that he would soon be gone. He was old, he was tired, he was used up by the land and by life. Not only were his hands callused by long years in the field, but his entire body. And his eyes… no longer young and bright, but unfocused and dimming with that peculiar rheumy shine to them like those of an old dog remembering long golden summers many years gone. Yes, she knew what was coming but she did not want to know. He had been the only constant in her life for so many years that the idea he would soon be gone was not something she could let herself consider realistically.

But George had known.

Oh yes, he had surely known just as he knew that no doctors or hospitals could change fate or alter nature’s plans for him. They could delay it and turn him into an invalid, who would shit his pants and have to be spoon fed, but the course was set and he wanted to face it with a certain degree of dignity.

George knew just as she knew now.

This was the final year, the final month, the final week, and—she was certain—the final day. The pain in her chest was tightening by the hour and her old lungs were having trouble drawing in breath. It was close now. The shadow of death was creeping ever closer and she was too weak to stave it off.

George had been dead for years now, seventeen to be exact, and his namesake, her oldest boy, Georgy, had been gone for three. She missed them both, but mostly she missed Franny. He was her youngest. A kind boy, sweet, sensitive, and wonderful in nearly every way. He had joined the marines in 1967 and been sent to Vietnam in April of ’68. He never came home. And this was the greatest pain she had ever known and one that had never left her. Though he had been gone forty-five years now, his death was only yesterday to his mother and she still saw his smile and heard his voice and the pain of it all, dear God, it still cut deep.

A smart boy. She could tell Georgy and his sister, Betty, all that business about the Ezrens and the ruins were just spook stories twice told, but Franny did not believe it.

“There’s monsters over there, isn’t there?” he would ask. “Things that live under the ground.” To which she would always reply that that was plain foolishness. Monsters. Nothing but stories told by weak minds and there was no more to say about it than that. There were no such things as monsters and he was certainly old enough to know that, now wasn’t he?

But Franny could never be put off quite so easily.

Maybe such pat little rationalizations would work on his older brother and sister, but never him. He was far too smart for that. He tended to question things. Which always got his father’s ire up because he thought Franny simply thought too much, questioned too much. Such things were unthinkable to George, who was a creature of instinct and impulse.

“But, Mom,” Franny would say, “if there are no monsters, why do you leave things for them? Why do you put out scraps as offerings every night? Why do you feed them if they don’t exist?”

Of course, Elena had no answer for that. Not really. She would just tell him that she put the scraps out for the forest animals because they needed to eat, too, and if worse ever came to worst, and times were tough, the family would be eating those animals so she wanted them fat and healthy.

It was thin as hell and Franny knew it. But he would consider it and then later, always later when she thought he had forgotten about it, he would ask, “Why is it easier to tell lies than to admit the truth?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she’d say.

To that, Franny would only smile as if she had just confirmed things for him.

Sitting in her rocking chair by the window, remembering and remembering, Elena missed that boy terribly. It still broke her heart to think of him wasted on some dirty battlefield in another senseless war.

Breathing was getting difficult now. She knew she should call Betty but Betty would nag her to death about going to the hospital and Elena did not want that. The end was close and she wanted to face it as George had faced it: peacefully, with no drugs to blur her perception of the next world.