3-Love

Love

 

A1 K9 Training Facility, Idaho Falls, Idaho

She was fading in and out. The cancer was eating her brain now and the smell rolling off her skin smelled like pure corruption. He blotted her forehead with a wash cloth and gently kissed it. She was exactly where she wanted to be; in her bed with Sally, her favorite and longest owned German shepherd. The social workers had come again yesterday, encouraging him to get her into the hospital but there was going to be none of that. The fact was that for people like her, people that had loved ones, in the last stages hospitals tended to speed things along. It was unstated and unwritten. Maybe they gave them less water or more morphine, he wasn’t sure but hospitals had become a place where people went to die instead of to get well. He would die with her before he let the bastards from the state take her.

A few years ago people talked of death panels but there didn’t seem to be anything official like that. There were no busy body bureaucrats selecting who lived and died, at least that people could see or knew about, there was just little money for medicine and less and less doctors staffing the hospitals. The results were the same as the paranoid suspicions.

When she was last awake she had made him promise that she would get to stay home and that was the way it was going to be. He kept her clean and her bed changed. It was done gently; she had been his childhood love and this is what you did according to the way he had been raised. She was still beautiful to him, and as dust motes danced through the still air of her sick room he remembered the time he had first had an orgasm; it had been with her, in his father’s car. More than that; she had loved him through it all; the bankruptcy, the failed businesses and the political upheavals. The farm had seemed like such madness to her, but here they were, together on it after it all. All that had mattered to her was that he was kind to her, and so he had developed more and more kindness, to where pleasing her had become his reason for existing.

The social worker had been far more insistent the day before, when he had stood on his creaking porch with his clipboard. The suggestion was that he was being negligent. He didn’t come right out and say it but he seemed to imply that they were going to remove her if he didn’t allow her to be moved to the hospital. He had looked at the social worker with pure murder in his mind and determined that she was going to die there, like she had asked, no matter what. More so, she had asked to be buried in the garden, which was totally illegal and against environmental regulations, but it was the way it was going to be, if he had any say. The thought of murdering the social worker had filled him with no small amount of excitement, and yet he felt guilty about his desire as he knew that she would not approve.

She was taking long rests between breaths now and he could feel that it was getting close. Her chest would lift and then she would sink deeply into the bed and be totally still for as long as thirty seconds and just when his heart would being to race and he was sure she had passed she would take another gasping breath.

He blotted her head again and when he looked to her face again this time her eyes were open and surprisingly clear, gazing at him. He was startled and embarrassed by his dark thoughts and his arousal at the memories of those times in the family car.

“Hello Charles, “she whispered. Her eyes were moist but not sad. His eyes became quickly wet too and some spilled out. “Good afternoon Michelle. I am so happy you are awake. “

She stared long at his eyes. One thin hand moved to Sally who was paying rapt attention. “Good dog. Good dog. Mommy loves you. “

“Can I get you anything dear? Are you comfortable? “

She just looked at him and after about a half a minute she shook her head; no. This struck him. In the months leading up to her being stuck in bed the headaches had become debilitating. There was no pain management. Her eyes began to cloud over again. There was nothing he could do, aside from the solution under the rock near the garden that he could do.

“Michelle? “

She moved her hand from Sally’s fur to his hand and her eyes revered their fade and came back into focus on him. He didn’t notice that her chest was not rising.

“Charles…I …love you. “ This was her last breath and the words exhaled as her eyes dimmed. Her smell changed almost instantly from the sickness to that of dried straw in a hay bale. There was a quiet gurgling sounds as her last fluids were expelled.

He sat there for fifteen minutes weeping quietly. “I will see you again dear. Soon. “

 Sally looked from him, to her, and back. She whined and laid her snout on Michelle’s hand. Time seemed to freeze and as light slanted in through the window he knew he had to act quickly if he was going to honor her request. The social workers would be back again soon.

He finally got up and went outside to the shed to grab a shovel. Sally didn’t move; she just stayed there on the bed with her with her snout on her hand. He first took the shovel to a medium sized flat stone in the back corner of the yard and pried it up. Inside a plastic bag wrapped in an oily rag was an outlawed revolver. He was reasonably sure it would fire but didn’t dare check. When the time came one shot would do.

In the garden he carefully pulled up two rows of lettuce and placed them aside. A tarp was laid to confine the dirt and the shovel cut quickly through the top soil. His heart was beating madly and his left hand throbbed. Distantly he thought about what it would be like if he keeled over from cardiac arrest and failed in his mission to bury her where she had requested and he slowed and concentrated on easing his heart rate. After a few minutes of breathing deeply the pain in his hand stopped and three feet down the blade hit stony resistance. He knew that was as far as it was going to go. He had worked this soil for many years with Michelle. It was stony and hard.

Her grave was as ready as it would be and it was time to put her in it.

Making his way back upstairs he tried to avoid looking at the photographs she had hung of them. There had been no children besides the dogs and maybe because of that they had showered them with love and attention.

He entered the room and looked at her. Something had changed. She was no longer there. This was something that had once held her, but she was gone. Sally looked at him and he gestured with his head to the side and she climbed down from the bed roughly. Her hips where beginning to become stiff with dysplasia, but she understood him as always.

He pulled away the heavy top blanket and gently folded the sheet around her. He had imagined that he would be able to lift her but at sixty seven his back was bad and he was exhausted from the digging. He got her up and to the floor. The fall was more violent and loud than he was prepared for in this empty house. He clasped his hands over his heart and prayed one of the only prayers of his adult lifetime; not to God, but to her. “ I am sorry Michelle, Please…forgive me. I cannot carry you. “

He had to pull her along the floor by the sheet. It seemed liked something that should have been uncomfortable or made him feel bad but it didn’t.

She was no longer in the room. This vessel was drained and empty.

The rest of the work was done in a fugue state and he later couldn’t recall much about it. He wasn’t prone to religion but she had always been and she had marked a place in the Bible and asked him to read it when the time came. They had discussed death in a matter of fact way when the cancer began to consume her because it was just a process that they would be going through and they had dealt with it as stoically as small town people had always done. Life was a crop that grew, bloomed and then eventually went barren. This love was not fallow. Just sleeping.

He stood at the head of her grave, the soil now tapped flat and the lettuce replanted. It looked just like before and except for the excess soil on the tarp and the shovel nearby there was virtually no sign of what had happened. The busy boy from the state would never know.

He opened the Bible to the place she had marked and cleared his throat. His mouth opened to begin and then he remembered Sally; Michelle’s dog.

He went back to the house and let her out. He looked to the garden and then decided to let all the dogs out. He suspected they shuffled out expecting another workout and as they gathered around her grave with expectant eyes he opened her book.

“This is Psalm 6,” he said to the dogs. Some cocked their heads to the side, as dogs do.

Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
    or discipline me in your wrath.
 Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint;
    heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony.
 My soul is in deep anguish.
    How long, Lord, how long?

 Turn, Lord, and deliver me;
    save me because of your unfailing love.
 Among the dead no one proclaims your name.
    Who praises you from the grave?

 I am worn out from my groaning.

All night long I flood my bed with weeping
    and drench my couch with tears.
 My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
    they fail because of all my foes.

 Away from me, all you who do evil,
    for the Lord has heard my weeping.
 The Lord has heard my cry for mercy;
    the Lord accepts my prayer.
All my enemies will be overwhelmed with shame and anguish;
    they will turn back and suddenly be put to shame. “

He finished and stood there a moment longer. He had planned on using the pistol on himself after the burial was complete but after looking at it for a long desperate moment he put it back down to side, still clenching it with white knuckles that shook. Life went on, even though sometimes one didn’t want it to. He rubbed the fur around Sally’s collar. She had walked close to him on the trips from the house to the shed, and as he had buried his wife, a best friend.

Then, he finally was able to release it. He clenched his fists and pushed them into his eyes, trying to stop the tears. The hand that held the barrel was oblivious to his and the sight gouged his face before he threw it to the ground.

He fell to his knees and hugged Sally and wept as he never had before. The moon began to rise and after he was drained he went to the kitchen and found a bottle of whiskey from under sink and proceeded to get massively drunk with the pistol clenched in one hand.

The gun lied there, an intoxicating idea. He picked it up and put the barrel into his mouth but could not pull the trigger. Maybe it was because he was in the hallway, with her picture.

He eventually went to the living room and sat on his recliner. Occasionally he looked into the barrel and it seemed to stare back with a single black eternal eye. Finally, it dropped to the floor and eventually he snored and cried into the empty room.