Hob Broun - Odditorium

“I am bigger than you. Stronger.” He lurched, spat a thick wad that crackled on the newspapers. “Jo. Where is Jo? … She give me good thumps of the chest when I need.”

Lucien rolled to one side, groaning, trying to lift himself, estranged from the mechanics of his own body. Tildy put out her hand; he squeezed it a moment, then pushed it away. Going rigid, covering his eyes, Lucien began to recite a psalm, running words together in a roupy, waning voice.

“Lord all my longing is known to Thee and my sighing is not hidden my wounds are repulsive to me and festering because of my folly I am bent am bowed down all the day I go mourning … heart beats fast strength fails me even the lights of eyes I must do without … loved ones and friends stand aloof from illness even … my kinsmen at a distance … and they who seek after my soul … lay snares … who seek my hurt talk mischief and think … up treacheries all day.”

Lucien quivered and went limp. Startled, Tildy pushed herself forward, approaching both the bed and the possibility that she had heard last words. Her relief at the thin purl of his breathing, at the vapor left on her ear as she held it to his lips, was boundless. She was here with him now, seeing him, touching him, regaining him, and yet the love she felt for the old man was no less opaque, no less disconnected than it had been an hour ago, a week ago, ten years ago.

Be brave, be brave.

“How’d it go?” Joby Daigle looked up from the teetery metal table where she was pouring herself coffee from a thermos.

“He passed out after a bite or two.” Tildy cupped her hands under the running faucet and splashed her face.

“Poor soul. Not much strength left in him. Coffee for you? Brewed it with my own chicory, stuff comes up like a weed.”

“Not right now. Mind if I smoke?”

“Suit yourself…. Scared you some to see him that way, did it?”

“Something like that.”

“Can’t be but tore up over it, seein’ a man jes about drained empty. Oh but Lucy was quite a man when I first knowed him. Had fire, you know?”

“Fire,” Tildy said, turning her back. Her hand was growing numb under the cold water.

“Yep. Used to be all through him so’s he kinda glowed. I sure do bless the day I met that man. I was jes driftin’, kinda lost. Like to wither right off when Mr. Daigle passed. Got started sendin’ out my cards. I’d go through all the papers for the announcements and then I’d send out the get-well cards and the sympathy cards and the happy-graduation cards and the new-baby cards. Did over nine hunnert of ’em and wasn’t but twelve people thought to write back and thank me. So right then I says to myself, Joby, you want to help folks, you got to go out and do it. Joined up with this volunteer program for seniors over to the hospital. Met Lucy on the first day. He asked me to read aloud to him from the columnists. Almost three years ago and I hardly missed a day with him since.”

“I know. You’ve done more for him than I have.”

Mrs. Daigle fingered the dregs in her empty cup. “Hadn’t been for those checks you sent every month, who knows? Don’t go throwin’ mud on yourself.” Her shoulders dropped along with her voice. “I wish sometimes — forgive me, Lord — but I wish sometimes I’d met Lucy a lot sooner. Mr. Daigle, he was good to me but he didn’t have no fire. Say there’s wheels within wheels, girl. One of ’em had turned a little different, we could be sittin’ right here mother and daughter.”

“Why not,” Tildy said, regretting it. Like swinging at a pitch right up under the chin.

Joby Daigle rose from the table with effort and advanced on Tildy, plucking shyly at the end of her braid. “You and me, we come to an understandin’ right off. I like that. We got to be like a team, hear? Lucy’s women. Slide on over here and I’ll show you my secret jes the two of us be knowin’.”

With that she opened the broom closet and dragged out a battered footlocker. Closing her eyes, she mumbled a string of private words before raising the lid. A confusion of sharp smells attacked Tildy’s nose. Paper packets, foil-wrapped bundles, bottles and jars of various shapes and sizes were crammed inside the box and as Mrs. Daigle removed each one, she called out its contents: rose hips, sassafras twigs, hoof powder, allspice berries, burdock root, dried liver flakes, pine pitch, beetle legs, cow moss, milkweed, eucalyptus bark.

“This here’s the power of life. Right from nature. Right there for the gatherin’.” Mrs. Daigle sat lightly down beside her arrayed pharmacopoeia, flushed with pride and excitement. “It’s what brung you and your daddy together.”

“Beetle legs?”

“What I’m sayin’ to you, child, is this. If Lucy had stayed with the doctors over there, he’d be gone. But I been dosin’ him with my secret medicines and he’s still here. I got the knowledge.” Her knobby fingers encircled Tildy’s wrist, an emphatic grip. “I know what he needs, understand? Nothin’ funny about it cause it’s all from nature. Mother Nature, she can be real generous if you know how to friendly up to her. There’s all kinds of life essence out there.” Mrs. Daigle pointed out the window.

Tildy followed her finger out to the withered fruit trees and swirling dust. She thought: Lady, you’re as crazy as he is.

Mrs. Daigle extracted a few round, yellowish seeds from a vial and popped them in her mouth. “I take these myself,” she said. “For gas.”

“You got anything for a tired brain?”

“Not exactly, but I know just what you mean.” She held up a cork-stoppered pop bottle containing a viscous brown liquid. “My pacifyin’ tonic. Chamomile, horehound syrup, licorice root, buckthorn, peach and comfrey leaves. When Lucy gets to wailin’ with the hurt and twistin’ all over the bed like the devil’s tryin’ to get a-holt on him, I give him a spoon of this in some weak tea and he curls on up just as sweet as a lamb.”

“Could I try some?”

It took time for Tildy to convince Mrs. Daigle that she could handle things on her own.

“Sure, you want some time alone with him,” Mrs. Daigle said grudgingly. “But lemme write down my number case you need to reach me. I’ll come ’round tomorrow to give him his bath.”

Still the woman lingered; puttering aimlessly under the hood of her Nash Rambler, rubbing splattered insects off the windshield with her fingers and casting every few moments an unhappy, squinting look in the direction of Lucien’s bedroom. At last, having seen Tildy peering at her from the window, she backed out to the road and rattled slowly away.

“We could be sitting down right here mother and daughter,” Tildy repeated, not altogether repelled by the idea at that moment. The only things she could remember about Harlene were that she liked to suck ice and could sleep standing up.

She passed the afternoon at her father’s bedside, reading every second or third sentence of the mystery novel she’d brought with her. Lucien floated up into full awareness only twice, each time wheezing out, in his peculiar franglais, a request for white robes and clean straw. Tildy laid a cool washcloth over his eyes. His sleep was tranquil, save for the rattling in his lungs, and when Tildy held his hand it felt as corky and inert as a heel of old bread. She skipped to the closing chapter to find out who the killer was (Carla, the sweet younger sister, with the revolver, in the office above her lover’s restaurant) and stole away to pace the sprawling shadows of the house.

Those gloomy, narrow rooms were unchanged, full of the same cheap furniture, the same dust, without the slightest decoration. At the end of a long and contentious life there ought to be trophies and mementoes to pass along. But there were none. No photographs or letters bound with ribbon, no album of pressed flowers, not even the Last Supper rendered on a slab of varnished pine. How dismal it must be to leave the world as bereft as the day you’d arrived.