Bodark Creek - 58. Chapter 58

Everyone knew my eightieth birthday was coming up, though it didn’t seem like anything special to me. Ruth was already eighty-seven, and Leona was eighty-four. We had parties for them, and all their children came to celebrate. But Joann felt my party should be bigger.

“For one thing, we all live here, Mama. That makes it easier to get everyone together.”

“But you see me all the time,” I protested. “That means you don’t have to make a fuss.”

“Maybe we like to.”

“Yes. You do,” I joked.

Actually, it had been a long time since any one of my remaining children had caused me any kind of worry, and I was getting to the age where I didn’t see how I could live without them, especially Joann. I could still drive all right, though I did less of that than before. And when I did drive, it was mainly to go the short distance into town or to Ruth and Leona’s. I had other friends, but I didn’t see them as often.

Ruth even confessed, “The truth is there aren’t a lot of people I want to see,” and I reluctantly agreed. She went on, “If I didn’t go out of the house, except to go to church and to have dinner with all of you on Sundays, I’d be perfectly happy.”

“But people come to you,” I pointed out. “And you like that.”

“I like it when they have something to say,” she insisted. “But when they only want to complain, well, I won’t put up with that.”

She’d rather embroider. Ruth would cross-stitch anything, and everyone in the family had some of her tablecloths and napkins and place mats and handkerchiefs.

“I like doing the tablecloths the best,” she said. “They take the longest.”

Still, she managed to finish the most complicated designs in under a month. And when there was no one left to give them to, she donated them to the church.

“If Ruth even hears that someone’s sponsoring a charity,” Leona kidded, “she goes to work. And I’m no better. I’m right there alongside helping.”

“Are we both going crazy?” Ruth asked.

“No more than anyone else,” I assured them.

Joann always used the place mats Ruth gave us, though the tablecloths were more of a problem. We didn’t really have a dining room, so we didn’t have many people over for dinner. But we did a lot of cooking, and Joann rarely went to the market without me. Though when it came to clothes, I let her do the shopping. I could wear the same kind of dress, or the same kind of skirt and blouse, year after year without needing to change. I even liked the same color.

“That’s Mama-blue,” Joann would tease. “You like anything that shade.”

“I don’t even know what it’s called,” I admitted. It was lighter than navy but darker than a clear sky. And there was a little purple in it.

“I’ll look it up,” Joann suggested, but then we got all kinds of answers. The clothes stores called it one thing. And the clothes catalogues said it was something else. And the paint stores couldn’t agree on either – or on any of their own names.

“It’s just blue-purple,” I decided.

“Blue-violet sounds better,” Joann said.

“Well, don’t you all go getting me clothes this color for my birthday,” I warned. “I have enough already.”

“We’ll do exactly what we want,” Joann said, laughing. “And you’ll have to enjoy it.”

And I might have, too, if Charley hadn’t died. His daughter Emma called us first.

“I don’t want to upset you,” she started slowly. “But Mama just phoned me from the hospital and said Daddy had another heart attack – another small one. It wasn’t bad, and he’s not in any pain, but this time his doctor doesn’t think he’ll pull though.” She stopped a little after that, and I could tell she was crying. Then she finished, “I’m really sorry, Aunt Addy.”

“Oh, no,” was all I could say, and I handed the phone to Joann. She knew what to say, and how to talk to Emma. And she made all the arrangements for us to fly to Tucson.

I thought about Charley all the time on the plane. I thought about when he was born, and when he went into the Navy, and when he got married the first time, and when he got married the second. And I remembered worrying about him during both his wars, but never during either of his marriages. Since Charley had his strokes, we’d been talking almost every week on the phone. That was easier for him than writing. Sometimes, we didn’t talk long. But other times, we’d go on for more than an hour.

“This is costing too much,” I’d tell him. “You can’t afford it.”

“Now don’t you start worrying about money,” he’d say. “There’s no way I’d rather spend it.”

Charley and I mostly talked about our families. He knew all about my children, and he was very proud of his daughter, who was running her own business near San Francisco, and his son, who had a job in Hollywood.

“He’s on one of those stories you women watch all the time,” Charley said. “ You know, the ones I always make fun of.”

I didn’t watch much television, but I knew what Charley meant. Dan worked on of the morning soap operas. But he wasn’t an actor. He did something behind the scenes. Still, what interested me most about him was he was the third Daniel in our family. Though he was the only one who carried my daddy’s full name, Daniel Charles Bronner.

Charley’s three other children, his daughters from his first marriage, had all been named by his first wife. And though they were all grown and had their own families, he rarely spoke about them.

“We hear from them at Christmas,” Faye told me. “And I always send cards. But you know how busy children make your life.”

Sadly, by the time we got to the hospital, Charley had died. “He went peacefully,” Faye said. “And I was with him most of the time. Not that he ever really woke up once we got to the emergency room.”

“Like Pat,” I wanted to say. But I spared Faye that memory.

Joann and I stayed at her house afterward, instead of going to a motel. And we stayed for over a week. Joann kept changing our plane tickets.

Faye didn’t plan to bury Charley with the rest of our family. “He talked about it with me and said he hoped he didn’t make anyone angry. But when my father died – and this was back in the 1950s – Charley saw where my family was buried and said he always hoped he could join them.”

“Where is it?” I had to ask. If I’d once knows, I couldn’t remember.

“In western Pennsylvania,” Faye said. “Two hours east of Pittsburgh. It’s a tiny town, and it’s very pretty.”

I didn’t know how I felt about that. I knew that all twelve of us children were never going to be together. Six of us were already in Hattiesburg, in a cemetery most of the others had never seen. But I thought that at least Charley, Rosalind, and I would be buried with the three of our brothers we knew best. But I wouldn’t interfere with Faye.

“We should go there,” I told Joann.

“Where?” she asked, and I explained.

“Shouldn’t we go to Hattiesburg first?” she wondered. “It’s closer.”

I wasn’t sure about that, but we certainly had the time. Faye was going to have Charley cremated – which was something else that had never happened in our family – then she, Emma, and Dan planned to fly to Pittsburgh with his ashes. “We always drive from there,” she said. Then she stopped before going on. “And there wouldn’t be any service,” she confessed. “Charley wasn’t really religious.”

I knew that. He wasn’t religious at all, and it was something Charley and I used to make fun of. He wrote me, “I used to say that if I got through the war alive, I’d try and make friends with Jesus. But then I survived, and it just never happened. Even after I went back for Korea.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I told Joann. “I’ll pray for Charley, and he knew I would. And we can have a service for him when we get home.”

So that’s what we did, without ever bothering Faye about it. Charley died a little before Thanksgiving, and we had a service between then and Christmas. It was mostly for our family and a couple of our friends.

“Should we put a memorial stone in the cemetery?” Del asked.

“I’ll have to ask Faye about that,” I told him. “But when it feels comfortable.” Still, it never felt like a good idea.

Joann and I did go to Hattiesburg. “That’s what I want for my birthday,” I told her. Though finding out where we were going was something of a chore. I had no idea where my brothers and sisters were. I thought we still had the papers or that the information was written in Daddy’s old Bible. But we never found it. We finally located the cemetery through William’s children, because his mama and daddy were buried there.

Our part of the cemetery was pretty overgrown. And some of the stones were so dark you could hardly read them. We tried to clean up, and we tried to have everything fixed. But there was really no one in charge.

“They’ll just have to know we’re still thinking about them,” I finally told Joann.

“I’m sure they do,” she assured me.

And we stood there, and I read their names aloud once more before we left. Frances, Lorena, Noland, Billie, Mary, and Curtis.