Nightcrawlers

30

Now it was the eyes.

Dear God, what next?

Elena was still in her rocking chair by the window and it didn’t seem she would ever leave it now. This was her last sitting. She had been feeling poorly when she sat down there, wanting to be in her old favorite rocker by the window feeling the sun streaming onto her old skin, warm and golden. It had never truly occurred to her that she would never get up again, that this was the last time she would lower her frail old bones into her beloved chair.

She had sat in it through so many years since George had made it for her just after World War II. She had rocked babies in it and tended to midnight feedings in it and watched through the window as she did now for George to come back out of the fields as evening set in. Yes, yes, yes, many years, all of them fluttering in her head now like the pages of a book, granting her a peek at their words, their memories, but not much more than that and she had to think that it was for the best, strictly for the best.

She had been sitting there for many hours and her tired old body refused to budge an inch. Whenever she tried, her body ached and her muscles failed her, that pain digging deeper in her chest and her breath barely coming.

Oh, the years, she thought, all the wonderful years and bad years and empty years.

Her mind drifted in and out and she knew she should have called Betty while she had the chance. It would have been a comfort to speak to her one last time, to hear her voice. But it was not to be. It just was not to be.

She focused her eyes.

She needed her sight because she wanted to see what there was to see right at the end. She wanted to see who carted her away because she knew that one would, one she had not seen in many, many years and one she had never gotten to know.

1916 was the year she was born and it made her smile when she thought of the gulf of time between then and now and all she had seen. The pages of her book flipped in her mind, one page after the other. Flip. It was 1947 and George and the neighboring farmers were raising the big barn out near the crick. It took many days and weeks and still more days to finish it and paint it. George had been very proud of his barn. Then in 1963, it was struck by lightning and burned to the ground along with most of their livestock. That had been a hard year. Flip. It was winter, 1939, and Auntie Keena had gone through the ice of the well-named Lake Hardship. They had a funeral for her and stood around an empty plank coffin. Her body would not be discovered until spring. Flip. It was 1924. Elena was eight years old and that summer was the summer when the man with the doll came to town. He was a drifter. He began luring girls off into the woods because he claimed that he had a doll that could smile. Elena and Bissy King had been walking down the road out near Five Mile Creek with jars of freshly picked blueberries and the man had come up to them. His clothes were ragged and his teeth were yellow like rat’s teeth. He bowed to them and said, “Ladies, you will not believe what it is my pleasure to possess.” He gave them the spiel about a doll that not only smiled, but laughed. Bissy went for it, but not Elena. Elena ran and Bissy called after her, “Where you going, ‘lena?” And Elena did not know, but she needed to get out of there fast because something about the drifter made her belly feel like it was filled with black ice. The drifter did something to Bissy in the woods and she was never the same after that. She became sullen and quiet, then mean in high school. She died just shy of her 21st birthday in Chicago with a needle hanging out of her arm. Flip. It was April of 1968 and there was a knock at the door. George was out in the fields. Elena answered it and a found a marine standing there. Franny had been killed in action. Flip. It was 1922. Elena was five years old going on six and her mother was set to deliver a younger brother or sister. Elena herself was excited, singing and skipping about. She was the only one. The other kids were worried and would not say why. The adults were grim as gravestones. The women from the surrounding farms had gathered as they always gathered when there a birthing. And late that afternoon, the midwife, Mrs. Stern, had come. Elena never liked her. She dressed in somber gray, her hair pulled back into a severe bun, her lips wrinkled and her eyes like chips of the blackest coal. She did not think it was her imagination that everyone—even the men—were uneasy around her. Towards suppertime, her mother began to cry out, screaming bloody murder, and it was within the hour that the child was born. No one was allowed to go upstairs and see it. Only a few of the farm women and the midwife herself. Elena heard it crying out more than once and she asked the other kids if babies always sounded like mewling cats. Flip. It was 1996 and they laid George to rest. And although Elena was sad, she did not cry like the others at the funeral. For some reason, she thought the very idea of crying for her husband after he’d lived a good long life of good deeds and productive years was near to blasphemy. So she did not cry. She knew he would be proud of her and the pride they felt in each other through years both lean and fat meant a great deal to them. Flip. It was 1922 again. That baby was really mewling by eight that night and Elena found her father crying and asked him why, but he would not tell her. And when she asked if she could see the new baby, he just shook his head. “There are reasons you can’t see it. Very good reasons.” And it was near on to sunset that night, that Mrs. Stern finally left, carrying a small bundle close to her breast. Later, it was said she had taken it out to Ezren’s Field. Elena and the other children were told that the new baby died of crib death and wasn’t that just so sad? It was a boy and he had been named Edwin. They had a small, dignified funeral out at the county cemetery and everyone wept as a tiny, empty box was lowered into the ground.

“Gah,” Elena said, coming to herself.

Where had she been? Out visiting the years, traveling the long-lost roads of her life, all the darkening streets and narrowing county forks and long-forgotten footpaths that made up a life and its travels. Oh yes, oh yes. She was not long for this world and she knew it. The idea gave her pain but it also gave her a certain sense of freedom for the way had not always been easy and the trail was often stony. If the preachers were right, she would see George again and, oh God yes, Franny. He would be waiting there for her as she remembered him before the U.S. Marines had wasted him and made his death into something dirty and ugly.

Her eyesight was dimming.

Her heart was slow and weary in its cadence.

Her lungs fought for each breath.

She was exhausted beyond the limits of her frail old body and soon the darkness would come and sink her into timeless depths. And as she realized this, she thought, I was young once. I was clear of eye and my hair was like harvested wheat. The sun caught it and made it shimmer. The girls envied it and the boys desired it. I had many, many friends and we danced and sang and laughed and now I’m at my end just as once I was at my beginning and my mother held me tight in her arms against the world.