My mother called yesterday, to say goodbye. The Big One. The Big Goodbye. Or that was how it seemed. That seemed to be the air between her sentences. Oddly, she was laughing. But then the vast majority of the time, when on the phone, my 88-year-old mother is laughing. She is happy, or appears to be, when on the phone with me. It’s not me, because she can’t hear half of what I say. Sometimes I suspect that she is happy from a decision that happy mothers aren’t as bothersome, that when their lives have steadily collapsed into the recliner in the living room, when there are only so many questions that can be asked to keep the person on the other end of the telephone line, that happy sounds will extend the contact, if only just a little. Only just a little is worth it.
Either that, or it is the combination of pain medications, antidepressants, sleeping pills, and the remainder of the complex chemical soup that is her bloodstream now. The bloodstream that keeps pumping through her oh-so-temporary form, the one that gave rise to mine.
My mother called to say that if she blew away (ha ha), she just wanted me to know she loved me, that she had been thinking about me the whole day before. It turned out that was the day she was watching the news about Joplin, or what used to be Joplin, Missouri before the tornadoes twisted it into rubble. It seems that Greeneville, Tennessee, a little town at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, which doesn’t get tornadoes, has been getting tornadoes recently and one was predicted for yesterday.
The one before showed up despite the astonishment of these quiet people, unaccustomed to excitement of any kind, and roared its way through a small settlement in the county. It touched down in one of those places named after its creek to which we, growing up in town, felt slightly superior, for no discernible reason. I suppose the fact that “we had” the county courthouse was reason enough. They all came to us, the rest of them out there. We in town had the official answers, the main banks, CPA’s like my Dad, and now. . .the WalMart.
It showed up and roared through, despite the fact that tornadoes don’t happen in this part of the world. Buildings were flattened anyway, trailers destroyed. Yesterday, they were predicted again, the day after Joplin, Missouri disappeared. The same week that the neighbor across the street died when she wasn’t supposed to.
Mrs. Lowery wasn’t supposed to die because people who are fixtures in your life aren’t supposed to just up and disappear. I am not sure that I ever had a real conversation with her. And in the 52 years that my mother has lived across the street from Mrs. Lowery, they only had the one. That was when Mrs. Lowery showed up on the front porch, and asked my mother to make a phone call for her. This was kind of like answering the door and finding Jesus there, somebody you kept meaning to go see, to have a closer relationship with, but kept falling into simple comfort, knowing that they are there, and having that be enough.
Maybe if we hadn’t heard the gunshot, all those years ago, when Sonny, the middle of the five children, (Phyllis, Patsy, Sonny, Gary, Kathy) hadn’t had absolutely enough of the abuse. He’d finally had enough at the same time he’d finally gotten hold of the gun. And right over there, in that front yard, right out our kitchen windows, he’d shot and killed his father. Maybe if we hadn’t heard it, maybe if it hadn’t happened, coffee could have been shared in one kitchen or another.
But in which kitchen could it happen? Our kitchen, where my father came home from his board meetings at the bank, or his Presbytery meetings at the church, where the six of us ate dinner in silence so Dad could watch Walter Cronkite? Or their kitchen, familiar to Phyllis and Patsy, around whom I somehow felt wary. Somehow I smelled it on them: they knew things, I wasn’t ever sure what things, but it seemed not quite right.. Kathy was my sister’s age, seven years my junior. And she said out loud, one summer when the two of them were seven, Tough titty, said the kitty, but the milk’s still good.
She said “titty”, out loud. It was the first time I’d heard anybody say that word, out loud. I was fourteen. She was seven. She came across the street, from her yard to ours, and said titty out loud, big as you please.
Their Dad worked at Pet Milk, and wore a soft cotton uniform, and brought home the discarded cardboard cartons of ice cream mix, a rich mixture to which the milk was later added, and sometimes we would get to help clean them out with our spoons. Why would you shoot a man who would bring home giant cartons of ice cream and stay outside with you, in the yard, with his own spoon?
We didn’t talk about it, of course. We would no more talk about it, as a family, then we would say “titty”, or “pregnant”. (Jesus’s mother was “with child.”)
The mother of all those Lowery’s was a gardener and was frequently in that front yard, quietly tending her irises on the bank. In fact, I watched her, during one of my recent visits to my mother, I watched her work her way slowly, from one flowering plant to another, leaning on a cane. That same front yard, where the shot still echoes. That same yard, always with too many cats, the cats that are never fixed, the ones that come over and wait under my mother’s birdfeeders.
My mother called me last week about Mrs. Lowery and her astonishing demise. I didn’t know her very well. I should have invited her over more often, at least once. I don’t know my neighbors, any of them really.
My Mom’s caretaker, Saint Sonya, was downstairs doing laundry while Mom was on the phone with me. There was a doctor visit scheduled for later, about the time the tornado was predicted. Thank goodness the neighbor’s funeral was last week. That family, with all their mysteries, is now in the next phase of their collective lives. Just in case we are next, my Mom called, to say goodbye.
