Annie DeWitt - White Nights in Split Town City

“What story?” Wilson said.

“The one about getting chased,” Otto said, draping his arm over my shoulder. His body was fit for a man of his age. It had that taut tension that comes from the small inhalation of a parent thrilling over an act of their child’s bravery.

“I went to visit the redhead in her cabin today,” Wilson said.

“And who caught you, son?” Otto said, egging him on.

“The counselor,” Wilson said. “He chased me out with a broom.”

“And what did you tell him when he chased you?”

“I told him my Daddy said I like the pretty girls.”

“That a way, son,” Otto said. “You old bastard, you. You’re just like your old man.”

I looked up at Otto’s eyes. A pride was rising in them, a glory he’d once thought fondly of and now recalled.

“That was a good one,” Wilson said.

“It sure was,” Otto said. “I’m proud of you. You might be ugly as shit but at least you’re still chasing tail.”

The two were laughing then. There was something in the way Otto laughed, his body doubled over, leaning forward toward his son standing in the thin light down the aisle, that made me realize that this was a feeling Otto’d been deprived of for a long while, the ability to connect with his son as a man. Otto glimpsed that for a moment. It felt damn good. They both felt damn good.

“The counselor said he thought he wanted to rape her,” Otto said between breaths. He was laughing so hard he was almost sobbing. “I got a call this morning. Can you imagine? That dim wit actually thought my son had enough man in him to rape that girl.”

Wilson understood his father’s laugh as a sign of encouragement.

“Rake a girl,” he said. “My Daddy says I’m gonna rake a girl.”

Wilson took the rake in his arms and started spinning with it. He looked as if someone had dropped a harness around his belly, lifting him up toward the rafters, lending him grace and spin.

“Maybe I’ll rake you, Jeanie,” he said. “You’re a pretty girl too.”

Otto was chuckling all the way to the house. His arm was heavy on my shoulder as we walked. After all that, he seemed to have given up on something of the evening. I looked at the stars over top of us and thought of Wilson dancing and the sight of the power lines over Bluecreek. I thought about asking Otto what Wilson had meant by all that in the barn.

“Back to work now, son,” he’d eventually said to Wilson when he got the air back in his chest. “That’s enough of that.”

“Will you be alright then?” I said to Otto.

“Right as rain,” Otto said. “Why don’t you come in for a minute and see if you can make that old piano play again.”

The piano was a small upright Otto kept in the back room near the porch. The top of it resembled a bench from an earlier time, a resting place where all the old faces still sat around and kept watch on the day. It was lined with frames and trinkets, relics of the days when His Helene had still been working her hand and saying her say over her two boys. The collection had the feel of an album — all the best moments splayed together despite the shit faces and gap teeth.

I started in on a sonata, quietly and without much breath at first. But then with more confidence as I went. There was a seriousness about Otto which I respected. His was not a soul easily turned.

I looked over my shoulder at one point while I played. Otto was sitting in the recliner. A peacefulness had invaded his face.

I hadn’t seen His Helene in the other room watching. She was sitting in her wheelchair with her feet in a bedpan. Here you are, she seemed to say, a bit of my letting go.

There I was, all these trinkets of hers, and her husband’s eyes boring into me. By the time I got to the final movement I felt I knew something of her inner life. I tried to tell it just as I heard it. Strong faithful chords. Easy on the flutes and the runs. I wanted to splay the notes in good conscience.

“You’ve been lonely then too,” His Helene said from the other room, when I had finished.

I went to her, kneeling down at her feet and putting my arms on her legs. I tried to be rough with her when I could to remind her that she was still a woman.

“Do you want to go for a stroll, Helene?” I said.

“Sure do, darlin’,” she said. “It’s frightful small in here tonight.”

We bundled her in the old fur from the front closet and all of Otto’s gear, her throat every bit covered. On her head we put the coon hat Otto wore riding in the winter. Wilson donated his glasses to shield her eyes. “We can’t let the wind take those now can we,” Otto said affixing them to her face. “There’s no natural tears left.”

It was true. I’d put the drops in. What water His Helene had left in her had congregated in her feet. They were bulbous and bloated. The doctor said next it would move to her heart. That’s what would take her. That one big rush of her own stream.

She took her grapes. I put them in a small blue bowl, which I wedged on her lap. In a panic, she liked to feel a frozen grape on her tongue. The nurse had shown me where to place it.

Otto took the flashlight. Together we rolled His Helene into the night. Otto’d built a ramp off the back porch that she’d used to wheel herself out to the barn when she’d still had some strength in her arms.

“Take her around front,” Otto said. “I want to show her off one last time even if there’s no one to see her.”

It took too much emotion out of him to push. He just wanted to run alongside and watch the fear being lifted from her face. I broke into a steady jog after we cleared the driveway. The shadows of the branches overhead splayed out on her lap. I watched them move over her as we ran.

“Go, go, go,” she said.

After a few laps, Otto sat on the porch and held the light for us. We made a few more runs in front of the house. I wondered if Father was watching as we passed. I wondered if someday I wouldn’t be doing this with him too.

When I feared the cold would take her, I took her in. As I undressed her, His Helene started to panic. She could feel the gravity shifting. The water in her feet had begun its migration.

Otto went for her box of shots in the freezer. Some high-altitude sedative. That kind of devil had to be kept fresh. Once the needle was under the skin, His Helene looked peaceful. We laid her out on the pullout in the front room. She slept on the ground floor of the house. Otto feared she’d fall down the stairs. The other night, he’d said, she had managed to push herself out of bed and had taken a few steps before crashing into the bookcase. He’d found her on the floor struggling to lift her face out of the carpet. She’d fought him off kicking and wailing.

“You’ll suffocate yourself,” he’d said.

“Who says I’ll let you kill me like this,” she’d replied.

Otto wouldn’t get a night nurse. He said people wait for everyone to leave a room before they die. “Sometimes,” he said, “I pace the house just to give her room to slip away.”

Once His Helene was quiet we went out onto the front porch to get some air. Outside there was a weightiness between us. I stood next to Otto on the mat that lined the door looking out at the road.

“What do you do,” he said, “when there’s almost no one left?”

The way he took me in his arms, pulling the small of my waist into his belt, I felt the sudden surging up of all the ways I’d wanted to be needed. I saw Mother in Father’s arms that morning as they’d danced next to the drain board in the kitchen. I saw Callie push Father into her bed. And too, I saw everything of His Helene. I tilted my head back. He was careful with my lips.

Afterward, Otto took my face in his hands and turned it sideways examining my profile under the gloomy spin of the porch light. There was a softness to my chin which the dentist had once suggested doing away with. “A little insert,” he’d said, turning my face in his hand just as Otto did now, showing Father my weakness in the mirror of the examination room. “Best to correct for any overbite before she grinds her teeth and lockjaw sets in.”