Short Stories from Wing's Authors.

Time To Go

by

Farrell Till

When she went out on the front porch, a cloud of dust rising beyond the ridge where the dirt road joined the paved highway told Mattie Thurman that Sheriff Grigsby was already on the way.  The rapid movement of the cloud meant that the car was flying down the road.  She supposed that the haste indicated by the cloud was a typical reaction when someone called and said that she had just shot and killed her son.

The only thing she could do now was wait, so she sat down in the rocking chair on the porch and propped the 20 gauge shotgun between her knees.  The smell of gun smoke wafted up from the barrel and made a nauseous heaving rise in her throat as images of Billy lying bloodied on the sofa refused to go away.  Blood was on her hands and splattered over the front of her dress.  She should have washed up and changed clothes before she came out to be here when the sheriff arrived. The distance between her and the dust cloud told her that she would have had time.

A hot July sun was streaming down on the cotton field that she had plowed just yesterday, and heat waves rising from the ground made the Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church on the distant ridge shimmer as if she were seeing it in a mirage.  That church had been a vital part of her life.  She had attended Sunday school there as a child, and it was where she and Bill had been married with all of the youthful expectations of living happily ever after.

It didn’t work out that way.  She had lived long enough to see that living happily ever after happened only in movies and fairy tales. The dreams they had had while standing at the church altar had begun to fall apart just a year after their wedding.  That was when William, Jr., had been born.  When the time came, Bill had taken her to the hospital at Greenwood.  Lots of women had their babies at home back then, but Bill wouldn’t even think of it.  Nothing but the best for his Mattie and the baby she was bringing into the world.  He was taking no chances of anything going wrong. 

It was about a month after they had taken little Billy home that they began to realize that despite advantages of the hospital where he had been born, something really serious had gone wrong with him.  He would just lie in his crib with a hollow, vacant expression in his eyes, and as time went by, he didn’t goo and gurgle like normal babies do.  They soon had to face the reality that their precious little Billy was severely handicapped. It was the first serious blow their youthful naivety had suffered. They could take the poverty and hard living of farm life, but that had been more than they should have to bear.

They had had three more children—Callie two years after Billy, and then Orville a year later and finally Raymond four years after that.  Callie had learned to walk before Billy could, but with much coaxing and patience, Billy had finally taken his first steps about the same time Orville began to walk.  As the younger kids grew older, they were wonderful with Billy.  They led him about the farm and always included him in their playing.  Billy would laugh with them and even laugh when they didn’t.  He seemed to think that everything his brothers and sister did was funny. That had been the best period in their life.

Billy never went to school, of course, but all the kids around them and even in town knew about him, and as kids will do, they made fun of him and teased his brothers and sisters for having a brother who was a dummy. They even did it when the family was at church. Orville and Raymond had bloodied many noses over that kind of cruelty, and eventually their playmates had learned that they had better not make fun of their big brother.  The other kids came to understand that and eventually included Billy in their games when they came to the house to play.  Those childhood games had kept Billy occupied and freed her and Bill for the hundreds of duties they had to keep a farm operating efficiently. 

Then the accident had brought even more disillusionment into Mattie’s life.

It happened when Bill was coming back from the gin where he had gone to buy more seed, which he had run out of while planting the last few acres of cotton.  He had taken Billy with him in the pickup truck, as he almost always did when he went into town on business.  He had thought that it was the right thing to do, not just to make Billy feel important but to let everyone he ran into know that he wasn’t ashamed of having a handicapped son. 

On the way back, the truck had run off the highway and hit a tree down by Flat Rock Creek.  They never figured out what had happened, whether Bill had been distracted in some way, possibly Billy doing something that had required his attention, but Bill had been thrown from the truck and killed. The pickup was a model made before they started putting seatbelts into cars, so he had had nothing to protect him in the crash. Billy didn’t either, but he had come through it without even a scratch.  The sheriff said that when they arrived at the scene, Billy was sitting behind the steering wheel, making motor noises with vibrating lips and pretending he was driving.

At the funeral everyone had paid their condolences, which she had deeply appreciated except for comments about God’s will and being in a better place—and she had heard plenty of those.  The one that angered her the most was when Martha Sinclair had taken her hand in the reception line and said, “Thank God Billy wasn’t hurt.”

As she looked back on it now, she realized that was the day when her whole outlook on life had begun to change. She had patiently borne the grief of having her firstborn child turn out like Billy, but she thought it was way too much to expect her to thank God that her husband and not Billy had been killed in the accident.  It just seemed to her that if one of them had had to die, a just God would have spared Bill and taken Billy. Yes, that was the day when she first realized that something was seriously wrong with the view of life that had been painted in her mind during all the years she had spent going to the Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church.

That had seemed to set the pattern for her life as tragedy followed tragedy.  The kids had grown up, and Callie had married.  Nothing can ever stop the passage of time.  Callie had had a daughter whom she named Maggie, and then Callie had become seriously ill and died.  The doctors said it was leukemia, which back then had been a sure death sentence. Callie’s husband had tried to raise Maggie, but that was hard to do when he had had a job to go to each day.  So the duty of raising Maggie had fallen mainly to her.  Her father Brodie had helped out at first by coming out to take Maggie home at night, but soon—much too soon, Mattie thought—he had gotten himself involved with another woman, who didn’t cotton to the responsibility of having a daughter to raise, so when they married, Maggie had come to live permanently on the farm with her and the three boys.  She had heard of grandmothers who had had to raise their grandchildren, but she had never expected it to happen to her. That was just something else about life that seemed all out of kilter.

She had done a good job with Maggie, who was married now and living in town with her two children.  The last one had been a boy, and tears brimmed in her eyes when she remembered the day she had gone to the hospital and Maggie had told her they were going to name him William and call him Bill.  It was just like Maggie to show that kind of appreciation for everything that had been done for her.  She couldn’t love Maggie any more if she had been her actual daughter, and for as long as she could remember, she had thought of her as a daughter rather than a grandchild.

Before that, she had lost Raymond too. When he finished high school, he had joined the Mississippi National Guard, thinking that it would bring in at least a little money to help with the family struggles, and at first it did.  Years passed and he rose in the ranks to sergeant, but as life has a way of throwing the unexpected at you, that war in Iraq had come up, and Raymond’s unit was sent over.  She had worried herself sick every day he was there, because the unfairness of life had been such that she feared Raymond would never return alive—and he didn’t. The way it happened had seemed as if God or something up there was just mocking her.  Raymond had had only another week to serve before his unit was coming home, and then one day she received word that he had been killed by a roadside bomb.  There were six in the armored car, and he was the only one killed.

At the funeral, she had bit her tongue to keep from jumping up and screaming for him to shut up when Reverend Lybarger had rambled on and on about God’s grace and quoted scriptures that said God cared about our sorrows and wouldn’t allow us to experience more grief than we could bear.  She had wanted to scream, “If this isn’t more than I can bear, just what would be too much!”

But she didn’t.  She had been conditioned by a lifetime of church attendance to just tolerate whatever was said from the pulpit no matter how much it insulted her intelligence.

Looking across the cotton fields now at the dust cloud moving steadily closer, her eyes fell on the tombstones glimmering in the summer heat at the Mt. Pisgah Cemetery.  That was where Bill and the children were buried, and the sight of it seemed almost obscene to her—lives that were gone much too soon.  She was especially vexed at the thought of Raymond lying there—dead long before he should have been—and she was outraged at what had caused his death. That president who got us involved over there in Iraq—someday he would leave office and go home with both arms and legs and his wife and children still alive—but thousands of young men and women he had sent over there were coming back permanently crippled, and Raymond was dead, buried over at the Mt. Pisgah Cemetery beside Bill. That wasn’t right.  So many things in life just weren’t right, and she couldn’t understand why it had to be that way.

As she watched the tombstones quivering in the summer heat, a dust devil swirled through the cemetery and continued on into the cotton fields, pulling dust and leaves high into the air. The cloud from the sheriff's car kept steadily advancing.  He would soon be here.  She opened her hand to look at a note she had folded inside.  Before coming out on the porch, she had written it so that Maggie would know what to do.  It simply said, Maggie, don’t have our funerals at the Mt. Pisgah Church or bury us in the cemetery there.  She was sure Maggie would be confused by the note, but the Mt. Pisgah Church had come to symbolize to Mattie what she felt was basically wrong with the world—and she didn’t want her final scene in the farce of life to be just another bit part in what had been preached there a thousand times.  It would be her way of saying to all of the self-righteous souls there that she had chosen not to condone it anymore.

Even Orville had been lost to the cruelties of life too.  He had been mowing weeds on the slope of a ditch that drained the basin in the back forty, and the tractor had slipped and overturned.  He had mowed it a hundred times before, but on that day, something had gone wrong—as it had always seemed to do in Mattie’s life—and the tractor had overturned and crushed him.  Another funeral.  More sermonizing about the grace of God.  More platitudes about being with Jesus in a better place.  She was glad she wouldn’t have to listen to any more of that at Billy’s funeral.  She had heard enough of that to last her an eternity—if there should be any such thing as eternity.

Orville’s death had left all of the farm duties up to her, which she could have done with no trouble at all had it not been for Billy.  She could operate a tractor as well as any man, but Billy had to be looked after constantly.  Maggie had offered to come out and help by watching Billy, but she had two young’uns of her own to look after.  Mattie just couldn’t burden her with additional duties.

She had partly solved the problem by plowing at night when Billy was asleep, and that had worked well until one night she found Billy out in the field, walking in the cotton rows behind her.  He seemed to like that, so she had taught him to walk up and down the rows while she was planting or plowing.  It took her longer to put in the crops and maintain them, but it had proven to be a satisfactory way to baby-sit and do the farm work too.  Now and then, someone from the Mt. Pisgah Church would come by to offer help but not nearly as often as the sermons preached there should have left them feeling obligated to do. She had just considered this another incongruity in what was taught and what was practiced, but she was glad for what little help she did get.

The sheriff’s car came around the last bend, close enough for her to see the lights flashing on top, and the dust devil was twirling across the field as if it were in a race with the car.  Leaning forward, Mattie slipped the end of the shotgun barrel into her mouth.  The metallic taste was acrid on her tongue, and it reminded her of... oral sex.  The thought almost made her chuckle as she sat up straight in the rocker.  Maggie would be horrified if she knew that her grandmother had had a thought like that.  Each generation seemed to think that they had discovered the techniques that make sex exciting and just couldn’t imagine their elders knowing much at all about it but what was necessary for reproduction, but Willard Boatwright knew that she was no stranger to oral sex and other novelties that made it such a driving force in life.

Willard had come along the year after Orville died.  Down and out on his luck, he had been riding the rails, looking for something better in life, and in town one day, he had heard that Mattie Thurman might need someone to help out on her farm.  He had come by one afternoon while she was planting cotton with Billy following along behind the tractor.  He told her he would work for just food.

“I need a job bad,” he had said, looking askance at Billy, “and it looks like you could use some help.”

“I can’t pay much,” Mattie had said.

“Like I said, I’ll work for food and a place to sleep.”

“I guess we could fix up a place in the barn,” she had said.

And that was how Willard Boatwright had come into her life.  He was obviously no stranger to farm work.  He plowed the beans and cotton when they had come up, and he did repairs to the barn and house that were sorely needed after years of neglect. He even gave the house its first coat of fresh paint in over twenty years.  Each night he would eat in the kitchen with her and Billy, and then he would go out to his place in the barn.  One night, after he had left the kitchen, she took a piece of rhubarb pie out to him and waited for him to eat it so that she could take the dish back.  She couldn’t remember now how it had happened, but somehow they were both together on the straw mattress doing things that members of the Mt. Pisgah Church would have considered shameful.  She, however, had cared little about what they would think.  It was easy for women who had husbands and normal children to think that after decades of living without a man in her life, she should have been content to go on living that way, but by then she had seen enough unfairness in life to care little about what sanctimonious church members might think about what she and Willard had done in the barn that night.

That was how Willard Boatwright had learned that she knew all about oral sex. Gradually, Willard had gone from the barn to the house.  At first, he would stay and watch television until bedtime, and then they would go to bed when Billy was asleep and do things that the Mt. Pisgah bunch would have considered scandalous.  Then he would go back to the barn.  Eventually, however, Willard had taken to just staying all night in her bed.

Their relationship had inspired a few sermons at Mt. Pisgah on adultery and the need to resist temptation, but she had just smiled inwardly and ignored them. Finally, she had just stopped going.  She refused to listen to it anymore.

Once again, she had someone besides children to share her life with, and for the first time in years, probably even decades, she was as happy as she could reasonably expect to be under the circumstances.  Then one day she woke up and Willard was gone. She checked and found that what little he had brought with him was gone too.  By then, the crops were laid by, and she was just waiting for harvest time—so she had sat out on the front porch in her rocker and waited till dark each day, hoping, but not really expecting, to see Willard coming back up the road.  But he never did, and she thought she knew why.  Their relationship had gotten to be very serious, so she was sure that the expectation of assuming the responsibility of a woman with a handicapped son was just more than he had wanted to take on.  Apparently, he hadn’t even considered the security of a farm to be worth that responsibility.

So he had just up and left.  She blamed him and she didn’t blame him, but she wanted dearly for him to come back.  She had sat on the porch for days, watching and hoping she would see him—until finally hope had worn out.

As if this disappointment had not been enough to satisfy whatever malevolent providence had worked so diligently to fill her life with one hardship after another, the final straw had come last week when she had gone to Greenwood to hear the results of tests she had taken to try to find out what was causing upper abdominal pains.  The news had been devastating—pancreatic cancer.  The doctor had been open with her.  It had advanced to a terminal stage, so she couldn’t have much hope of surviving it.  She had asked the doctor to give his honest judgment, and that opinion had been that she probably wouldn’t live longer than six months.

Six months!  She and Bill had started a life that had produced a family of six, and now in six months, there would be only one left—Billy.  Somehow Billy seemed to be immortal, and she cynically wondered if he was going to live forever.  When his problem had been diagnosed back when he was just a baby, they had been told that he probably wouldn’t live to adulthood—and now here he was forty-eight years old and robustly healthy in body if not in mind. 

What was going to happen to Billy when she was gone? Maggie being Maggie, of course, would take him into her home and see after him.  The farm would even go to Maggie, so Billy would live in the same place he had known all of his life.  But she didn’t want to burden Maggie with that kind of responsibility when she had enough to worry about with the two kids she already had and others she would probably have later on.

So Mattie had done the only thing she thought she could do.  When Billy had fallen asleep on the sofa, she had put the shotgun over his heart and shot him. Now she was here on the porch waiting for Sheriff Grigsby, whose car was just up the road, the lights flashing and siren blaring away. 

Mattie leaned forward and put the shotgun barrel back into her mouth and raised her big toe to the trigger. The Bible said there was a time to live and a time to die.  She disliked the word die; she preferred to think of what she was doing as going.  She had lived sixty-seven years, and now it was time to go to whatever might be beyond this life.  She no longer had any desire to live.

The car wheeled into the yard in an immense cloud of dust, and Sheriff Grigsby leaped out, shouting. “Don’t do it, Mattie!”

Her toe pushed down on the trigger, and she heard a blast as if it had come from afar like a distant clap of thunder.  She had heard that a person’s life will flash before her at the moment of death, and she did see Bill and her at the Mt. Pisgah Church altar, then she saw Bill and her looking through the maternity ward window at Billy in his bassinet, then she saw Callie and Orville and Raymond playing with Billy as children—and then she saw only inky blackness.

Out behind the sheriff’s car, the dust devil whirled across the road and over the porch, picking up the note from her lap and blowing it out into a cotton field behind the house.

On Saturday, there were two more funerals at the Mt. Pisgah Church.  Reverend Lybarger told the congregation that Mattie and Billy were in a better place with Jesus.