by J.A. Bennett
I’m
thirsty.
Seth pondered these words as he paused
in the shade of Beloved’s weeping stone
angel. His muscles strained to trim a clean edge along the marker’s grass line.
I’m
thirsty.
Beneath the St. Augustine, the earth was
a parched mosaic of tiny fissures. Seth couldn’t remember when it had rained
last. Despite Heavenly Meadows’
state-of-the-art sprinkler system, the ground stayed dry.
I’m
thirsty.
There was something in the words Seth couldn’t
quantify, couldn’t explain even to himself, but it had been growing in him – a
kind of darkness that constricted his airways.
“I’m
thirsty.”
Seth’s dad said this every night when he
came home from work. The old man would roll into the house, slow and quiet as
fading daylight, and prop his shoulder against the stainless steel
refrigerator. The words would rumble out of him, a storm he’d been holding inside
all day long, and then he’d pause. Seth’s mom might be stirring a pot of
spaghetti noodles over the stove, or maybe she’d be bent over the kitchen table
reading a Harlequin romance and pulling at a Virginia Slim while Oprah filled
in the blanks with white noise. But never once in as long as Seth could
remember did she respond to his dad’s statement. Instead, his dad would quietly
open the refrigerator door and fondle a cold Samuel Adams before disappearing
into the den to watch the evening news. There, with the exception of the
occasional rise and fall of his drinking arm, the man became motionless; a
ghost with mirror eyes reflecting white lights and smiling faces. The day Seth
realized his dad was becoming invisible, a man quietly wasting in bits and
pieces, was the same day Seth began slamming every door he walked through. It
was also the day Seth began to feel a dryness at the back of his throat.
I’m
thirsty.
The sun was high over Heavenly Meadows when Seth saw Mrs. Nutt
slowly making her away across the lawn. She wore a powder-blue dress suit and a
wide brim straw hat with a cluster of blue rosebuds fastened to the base of the
crown. With one mottled and blue-veined fist, she gripped the handle of a huge
yellow handbag. He couldn’t see her eyes beneath that straw brim, only a few
wisps of curling white hair, but he felt fairly certain when he switched off
the whacker and took a deep swig from his Gatorade bottle that old Mrs. Nutt
hadn’t noticed him noticing her.
The whole affair made Seth feel guilty,
like he was spying on his grandmother and not his former fifth grade teacher,
but his boss, Mr. Meadows, was passionate about the lawn’s aesthetics. When the
grass around Mr. Nutt’s grave began to discolor, Mr. Meadows ordered Seth to
keep an eye on the old widow.
Seth laid the whacker on the ground and eased
his way behind the thick trunk of a maple standing just beyond the stone bench
over which Mrs. Nutt was draping a red and white checkered cloth. She tugged at
the cloth’s corners, moved it a bit to the right and then to the left, and when
she’d deemed the unsightly bird droppings sufficiently covered she took a seat
and pulled off her hat.
“Hello Jim,” she said. “How are you
doing today?” She spoke to a gravestone standing a few feet beyond the bench.
The name James Nutt had been engraved
into the marble on one side. The other side was blank. Waiting.
Seth remembered Mr. Nutt. He had been a
World War II veteran, a ruddy and wiry old man never without his Texas Ranger’s
base-ball cap. When Seth’s fifth grade class had begun studying the attack on
Pearl Harbor, Mrs. Nutt had invited her husband in to talk to the kids about
his war experiences. Mr. Nutt had some pretty interesting stories, but when he
got to the really good stuff, the glorious details about shooting guns and
people dying, his face tightened, his eyes glazed over, and his hands began to
shake. He’d looked wraith-white. Mrs. Nutt interrupted him with some silly and
boring question. But, as she spoke, her arms encircled his shoulders like a
puzzle piece snapping into place around its match, and Mr. Nutt came, from some
faraway place, back to himself.
“I’ve been all right mostly,” she went
on. “Amy-Lynn had me over to their house for dinner last night. Little Hudson,
he turned four last month, remember I told you? Well, that boy stuffed a handful
of Bing cherries into his mouth, every last one… pits, stems, and all. They
were in there so tight, and I was trying to figure out how to pull one out
without pushing any down into his throat. That boy was laughing so loud that
Amy-Lynn thought he was choking and ran behind him. She slapped her palm on his
back so hard he must have thought she was whipping him. Poor little Hudson was
so startled he actually did start to choke. His face turned as red as one of
those cherries.”
Seth watched as Mrs. Nutt picked up the
straw hat by its crown and began to fan herself. Her thin hair wisped around
her head like a smoky halo.
“I shouted for Percy to come quick, and
he gave the boy the Heimlich. Bing cherries spraying all over the dinner table
– ‘bout gave me a heart attack and definitely put me off my appetite, let me
tell you what. But it made me happy to think that all that sacrifice to put our
Percy through medical school was really worth it. He’s grown into a good man,
our Percy.”
Seth leaned his shoulder up against the
tree trunk. He’d forgotten that old Mrs. Nutt had a special kind of quality in
her way of speaking. Her cadence rose and fell like she was always singing a
song. And she did like to sing. In the fifth grade she had made him learn songs
to memorize the names of all the Presidents, all the continents and all fifty
of the United States. Mrs. Nutt might have been old even back then, but she had
a way of teaching that wasn’t half bad.
“Pastor Hayes stopped by for coffee this
morning,” she continued. “He’s still an odd one. Young and full of strange
notions. He told me he read online that seventy percent of wives outlive their
husbands. Can you believe that? What a thing to say.” She paused for a moment
and turned her head to examine something in the distance. “But, I’m glad you
went on before me,” she said and then she fell quiet.
Seth leaned outward from the maple’s
trunk and followed her gaze across the top of Mr. Nutt’s marker to sunny patch
surrounded by tree-shade. In the center, a pair of white butterflies hovered.
They swirled with each other, dancing, then, like some strange miracle,
collided and joined into one fluttering and trembling creature. Seth watched
them for a moment and then closed his eyes and thought of his girlfriend,
Phoebe. She had a butterfly tattoo just at the base of her neck, a pair of tiny
purple wings with the word wicked
drawn in black script just beneath. He’d spent a night at her house the
previous weekend, and they’d had a hell of a time passing the bottle of vodka
her mother kept hidden in the freezer, and touching each other while a Firefly reruns played in the background.
The next morning Seth had woken before dawn and, for a brief and terrifying
moment, was certain he’d come undone, fallen through the world in lonely
fragments and awaken in a nightmare. He’d stood at Phoebe’s bedroom window
staring at his pale reflection and shaking. When he heard her stir he called
her name and said, “I’m thirsty, Phoebe. Aren’t you thirsty?” She had
responded, “Whatever Seth. You know where the kitchen is.” Then she pulled the
sheet over her head and rolled over. At that moment, it dawned on Seth that
he’d never much liked purple. At that moment, it dawned on Seth that maybe
nothing was connected and maybe everything was connected because he was exactly
like his father – broken and entirely alone.
Seth opened his eyes.
“Well now. I think it’s late enough, what do
you think? Shall we have a drink?” Mrs. Nutt reached into her handbag and
pulled out a small bottle of scotch and a clear glass tumbler. She unscrewed
the bottle’s gold metal cap and poured until the glass was half full of amber
light. Then she rose from the bench and took a step forward to the foot of Mr.
Nutt’s grave and lifted up the glass.
“To you, James Franklin Nutt,” she said.
“And to me, the perfect pair. To us and the long winding road we travelled
together.” She lifted the glass to her lips and took a sip. Then, with measured
grace, she extended her arm and poured the glass’s remnants over the grass.
As Seth watched, wide-eyed and still,
something hopeful flickered inside him.
The amber light fell in one smooth
stream, catching in sun-filled droplets along blades of grass. And, beneath, the
earth drank.
