So Much Broken

by John Thompson 

A small house stands in the middle of town though it used to be in the country. Much like the couple that has lived there for over sixty years, the house has not changed all that much.
 
The city has crept in little by little over the years, taking up land and cutting down trees to make way for strip malls and discount stores, high-priced apartment complexes and housing subdivisions, but that one house, simple in its construction, well-worn and full of memories, still sits on top of the hill as it always has, only now overlooking a more modern world.
    
An elderly man was bedridden in the back bedroom of the house, lying in the bed with the sheets and a heavy quilt pulled up to his chin. What was left of the old man, who had once been tall and strong but not the least bit imposing, amounted to little more than a bundle of sticks cinched up in a sack. He was constantly cold, even in late August, and his wife suffered the heater in their bedroom because she wanted her husband to be comfortable. He had done so much for her over the years that she felt that this little bit, this simple act of sacrifice on her part, was the least she could do.
 
She had spent most of the last month lying on top of the sheets, as close to her husband as he was comfortable. She wore light housedresses because of the heat in the room, but she stayed with her husband because she was terribly aware that the moments she had left with him were few. His health had been in sharp decline since the Fourth of July and he had been bedridden since the end of that month.
    
He had been quiet for the last several days, asking only for water occasionally. He stared at the bedroom door as if he expected someone to walk through it, and, every now and then, he shifted his gaze to his wife. Sometimes he would smile, other times he looked confused. The looks of confusion tore at his wife’s heart because, underneath the confusion, was a look of fear. Her husband had never been afraid of anything until his mind stopped working.
    
One time, however, he turned his head and smiled at his wife and it was the same confident smile that she had known since she was seventeen years old. It was a smile that told her he had everything under control. She had not seen that smile in so long.
    
“Do you remember how we met?” He asked.
    
She was so surprised that he spoke that she almost didn’t respond.
    
“Yes,” she said. “Do you?”
    
“Of course I do,” he said. He spoke slowly. “I remember quite a lot about our early years.”
    
That was the truth. The early years were easy for him to remember. Those memories were clear and colorful. It was the recent past that was black and white and hazy on a good day. The recent past, the last fifteen or twenty years, were mostly short strips of film that were muddy and garbled and probably playing in the wrong sequence to begin with.
    
“Of course I remember how we met,” he said again. He never broke that smile.
    
“Would you tell me?” His wife asked.
    
“We met in front of the post office,” he said. “I was carrying an armload of letters and mail-order packages for Mr. Ogle. That stack of boxes was so high and wide that I couldn’t see around or over them. I didn’t know that you were coming out of the building until I ran into you.”
    
So far he was remembering pretty well.
    
“All of our letters and boxes went flying,” he said, “and I helped you gather yours up, and you helped me with mine.”
    
“That’s right. Do you remember the letter of mine that you kept?”
    
“Yes, I promise I didn’t realize that I had it until I was resorting Mr. Ogle’s mail in the post office. When I found it, I decided I’d take it to the address on the envelope. I prayed it was your house.”
    
“It had a return address on it,” his wife said. “If I wasn’t at one address, I would have been at the other.”
    
“True, but I only had enough nerve to go to one house.”
    
“I remember seeing you walking up to my house with that letter sticking out of your shirt pocket,” she said. “I made my mother answer the door.”
    
“I got to tell you, I was terrified that your daddy was going to be the one to answer the door.”
    
“It would have been luckier for you if he had been home.” She laughed a little; she was enjoying this.
    
“Your mamma didn’t take to kindly to me just showing up, did she?”
    
“Not at all.”
    
“She snatched that letter out of my pocket and slammed the door in my face. I had planned out everything I was going to say, but she never gave me a chance to say it.”
    
The old man began laughing and it quickly turned into a coughing fit. His wife helped him sit up and slapped him on the back until he hocked and spat into the trashcan. She gave him a drink of water and helped him lie back down.
    
“Slammed that door right in my face,” he said again.
    
“Mamma wanted to know where he had found a piece of our mail, so I told her. The first thing Mamma asked was, ‘Why couldn’t that boy have just dropped this in the mail? He was at the post office!’”
    
“I have no answer to that. It took her a while to warm up to me,” he said. “I don’t think she ever approved of me.”
    
“You proved yourself to be a good provider over and over,” she said. “Mamma respected you.”
    
“That was pretty high praise coming from her.”
    
“Indeed it was.”
    
“Then there was that year that I was out of a job after Mr. Ogle died. You remember that?”
    
“I do.”
    
“Left the store to his son, and he turned around and sold it and turned me loose. He did give me ten dollars severance.”
    
“We were fortunate to have that,” his wife said.
    
“Yes, we were.”
    
“That was a tough year.”
    
“Yep, it was. I resorted to poaching for the only time in my life. Had to fish illegally, too. I guess we were lucky that it was just the two of us. Would have been harder with kids. That ten dollars bought a lot of flour and meal.”
    
His wife didn’t respond. Even though he didn’t realize he was doing it, bringing up their lack of children still hurt her. He never said a word about it until he began to lose control of himself. It now came up occasionally, but it was never meant to be hurtful.
    
“Did you ever hate me for not being able to have children?” She asked.
    
“Of course I didn’t. Wasn’t anything you could control. Just the way the Lord made you. Wasn’t meant to be.”
    
“You would have made a good father.”
    
“You would have made a good mother.”
    
“We could have had grandchildren.”
    
“But it wasn’t meant to be.”
    
She held back tears for a moment. It was part of their history that she tried not to dwell on, but it was so difficult. It was something that had cost her many nights’ sleep over the years. He would have made a good father; he had always been kind and patient. He had always prided himself on being pragmatic. Those were just the things that a child needed in a father.
    
She remembered the heartless way that her doctor told her she would never produce children: “You’re all dried up inside,” he’d said. Then he turned and left the room like that was that, nothing more to say. She remembered the look of disappointment on her husband’s face when she told him what the doctor had said. She remembered how he tried to hide it for her sake, but it showed, if only for a moment.
    
“I married you for you,” he said. “I didn’t marry you for babies.”
    
“I know. It still hurts not having been able to give that to you.”
    
“Don’t let it.”
    
“I try.”
    
“I know.”
 
    
Night had fallen and she could tell that her husband was beginning to tire.
    
“You need to rest,” she said.
    
“You’re probably right. Why don’t you go eat something? You’ve been here with me and haven’t eaten all day. You must be starving”
    
“Alright.”
    
She was hesitant to leave because she knew that it was very likely that the conversation would end and not resume. His moments of lucidity were fewer and farther between, and she wasn’t ready to give that up. But he was insistent in his own way. Urging her to go with his eyes, promising to still be there when she came back.
    
She went to the kitchen and toasted some bread and smeared it with butter and jelly. She ate off of a paper towel over the sink and sipped from a glass of water. She took her time eating; she enjoyed being out of the heat of the bedroom, but it kept her husband comfortable and his comfort was her only concern.
    
After she ate, she shook the toast crumbs into the trashcan and smoothed and folded the paper towel on the counter. She washed her water glass and left it on the drain board to dry, and returned to bed.
    
Her husband was looking at the ceiling again. She was saddened by the look of confusion and fear that had returned to her husband’s face. She stretched out on the bed, on top of the blankets and put her hand on her husband’s chest.
    
“So much broken in this world,” he muttered. “You don’t find what we had very often anymore.”
    
“No, you don’t.”
    
The rise and fall of her husband’s chest slowed under her hand as he drifted off to sleep, and sleep soon overtook her as well.
    
Sometime just before the false dawn, her husband’s chest stopped rising and falling. The ceasing of movement woke her, but it took her a few moments to realize what was happening. She shook him, but he didn’t move. She called his name and caressed his face, but he did not respond. She cradled his head to her chest and rocked back and forth on the bed, weeping but relieved. He was better now; she knew that. She believed it.
    
She sat with him until the sun shone through the window blinds. Then she got up and turned the heater off. The light was on in the neighbor’s kitchen window, so she slipped on her gardening shoes and a housecoat and walked across her yard into her neighbor’s.
    
Her neighbor’s house was new, only a couple of years old, and on the backside of the subdivision that abutted her property. The developers had offered to pay a premium for their land because they could have fit three or four more houses into the subdivision, but her husband had flatly refused all of their offers. Now, walking from her yard into the lush, professionally sodded yard of her neighbor, it seemed as if she was crossing from one world to another. One of memories to another of convenience.
    
She walked onto the patio of the neighbor’s house, past a gas grill and an expensive set of outdoor furniture, and she tapped on her neighbor’s back door.
    
Her neighbor had been aware of the situation across from his yard, and probably suspected the reason for such an early visit when he answered the door and saw her standing there.
    
“May I use your telephone?” she asked.