In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Smell of Ashes
  • Jean Ross Justice (bio)

Twice today my life was spared. The first close call was at the river bridge, when I was making a left turn. I’d misjudged the speed of the oncoming car and was barely out of the way in time; he blasted me with the horn. The sound spread out on the air, flat and metallic. I had a brief palpitation, a feeling like a small bicyclist deep in my chest, pedaling too fast, whirling away. If there’d been a crash, I’d have said to the police: my fault, all my fault!

I’m an old woman driving a long burgundy car, one of those powerful gas-guzzlers, the last car my husband Norris picked out. That deep rich hum he liked is worn out; the engine has come to have an unhealthy excitable sound.

But this morning I was spared again. They’re gone, the others, Gwen and Kip and Norris; they’re all dead. No, it was not some mass tragedy: they got old, they died. I got old but I’m still here. Kip died quite suddenly, at his wife Gwen’s care center; he’d gone there to have lunch with her. I didn’t see him often in his old age, but I remember his relatives with their reddish cheeks, clumping along on stiff legs, their voices loud from deafness; and so I can picture him pushing her wheelchair into the dining room, making his way slowly, or perhaps an aide is pushing her. The aide leaves; they’re, in a sense, alone together in the big room of small tables with white tablecloths. They talk a little, as quietly as deafness allows. They eat; everyone eats; there’s a clatter of dishes. He rises at the end, after the cottage pudding, and falls—blam. An aide runs over; another is running to the hall, calling. He’s gone. Gwen sits in the wheelchair, watching. That’s how it ended; and I hold onto that picture of them, an old couple lunching together and at least imitating, there in their last years, a peaceful life together.

After her diagnosis I went there to help. People said, “How wonderful of you to go help out,” and I’d say, “Wouldn’t you do the same for somebody that close to you?” We were double first cousins: in our parents’ generation two sisters had married [End Page 394] brothers. We’d grown up down the road from each other, always together.

First let me explain how it was there in the country. Kip’s family lived down on the river. In my childhood “down on the river” sounded tony and romantic. Perhaps my father, saying the words, sounded envious. That was where the good land was, and it was true that the families who lived down there were old families and reasonably prosperous, even during the shank of the Depression. We saw their cars pass at a time when ours sat in the garage for lack of money to buy a tag. And Gwen and I lived in books and imagination: we read Agatha Christie and dreamed of the Calais coach and the Orient Express; of New York, where the women in magazine stories lived, owed their furriers, remembered boarding school at St. Cloud, and received telegrams and flowers. We weren’t like my high-school friend Mary Alice, who’d married a hardworking, loud-mouthed dairy farmer, but even with the work and early rising she finished a book or two a week; she read them fast and didn’t dream over them. She’d grasped something important: that her life had nothing to do with anything in books, a distinction Gwen and I had been careless of. Kip’s home down on the river, genuinely old, with genuine old columns two stories high, seemed to us a romantic place where something in a book might happen. And he was good-looking and sure of himself. She married him and lived down on the river, and found it was as dull as anywhere else. Then she got sick, and I lived there a while too.

“Nothing...

pdf

Share