What You Have Left Read online

  After Josie’s death, my grandfather let the house fall into dis-repair, but during the fall of my sophomore year, when he first began having trouble with his memory, he sold off several parcels of land and started using the money to fix the place up. Though I didn’t know it at the time, he did this for me, for when I inherited the farm.

  At seventy-two, he was no longer able to do the work himself, so he hired Lyle on the recommendation of an old army buddy. In those days, Lyle was more handyman than general contractor, but he worked cheap, and my grandfather liked his manners, the fact that his family was well off, the fact that he’d been smart enough for grad school but then turned his back on all that academic baloney. Inside a month, Cal was inviting him to join us for happy hour. By then I already had my eye on Lyle—a shirtless guy tuck-pointing a chimney apparently being one of my weaknesses—but he seemed more interested in Cal’s company than mine, so I played it close to the chest.

  That all changed on the afternoon my grandfather told me he was sick. He’d just finished filling me in on his visit to the VA when Lyle and the two guys who worked for him came crawling out from under the house, brushing soil from their jeans. That week they were trying to fix the sloping floor in the living room. The joists beneath the oak floorboards were supported by heavy girders cut from the heartwood of long-leaf pines, and their plan was to reinforce these girders with steel beams, jack them up, and then build concrete pillars to stabilize the floor. After his crew knocked off for the day, Lyle joined us and began to report on their progress, and soon talk turned to the next project, a new roof. My grandfather didn’t mention his health again, but I could think of nothing else, and as he and Lyle droned on about shingles and soffits, I stared out at the fields that once fed Cal’s registered Guernseys and quietly plowed my way through two more drinks.

  When the sun started to dip behind the bluff, Cal left for his monthly poker game at the country club; as he drove down the lane, he flashed us the peace sign, something he’d picked up from Lyle. Once he was gone, I lit a smoke and emptied the last of the pitcher into my glass. “You ought to make sure he pays you before he blows his brains out,” I said. Lyle smiled, then quit smiling when he saw I was serious, then smiled again because he didn’t know what else to do.

  “Come again?”

  I sent him inside to mix another pitcher, and when he returned, I continued to get embarrassingly drunk and told him everything, all the while vaguely aware that I was trying to seduce him, never mind that he was twenty-four and I was only nineteen. When I got around to the part about Cal planning to “take matters into his own hands,” Lyle was doubtful. “Isn’t that just something people say? To give themselves a sense of control?”

  “You don’t know my grandfather,” I said. I hoped Lyle was right, though. It had always terrified me to think Cal would end up like the Colonel, but even that would have been better than no Cal at all. Still, the few times he’d alluded to killing himself—usually in the fading twilight of a vodka-soaked cocktail hour, and usually in the context of what his father ought to have done—I’d simply nodded along, trying to maintain the sort of grown-up composure he admired. I understood, even as a child, that I was always being compared to my mother, contrary, contentious, confounding Maddy. “You,” he’d say, tousling my hair, “you I don’t have to worry about.”

  But of course he worried anyway, and as I sat there with Lyle, listening to the crickets and watching the Spanish moss flutter in the breeze, I began to understand why Cal kept inviting him to join us: He was worried about what would happen to me after he was gone. He was worried about me being alone. By now I’d started to get weepy, and Lyle put an arm around me, telling me things would work out. The fireflies were just starting to appear as I took his hand and led him into the house, through the French doors of the parlor, past the pocked paneling of the workshop, and upstairs to the bedroom with faded Day-Glo walls and the curio cabinet lined with my mother’s arrowheads.

  A few days before semester’s end, Cal was scheduled for a neurological exam at the VA, but he missed the appointment. Dr. Miller assumed he’d forgotten—a symptomatic memory lapse—but I chalked it up to my grandfather’s dislike of hospitals, and who could blame him, given the way things had turned out with Josie and my mother? It was decided that I’d take him to his next appointment. On a Tuesday morning in early May, I hurried through a biology exam and then drove out to the farm. When I arrived, I found Cal in his workshop, a stifling, narrow room crowded with fishing poles, hand tools, gardening tools, faded seed packets, scraps of sandpaper, bits of wood, rusted Folgers cans filled with nails, screws, washers, nuts, and bolts. He invited me in. On his workbench was a brown prescription bottle; he’d been grinding up pills with the porcelain mortar and pestle he’d once used to mix medicine for livestock. As he poured the powder back into the bottle, he said that if it turned out he was sick—and nobody was saying for sure he was, don’t go burying him yet—but if he was, this was how he’d do it. Sleeping pills. Twenty of them dissolved in a stiff drink were guaranteed to do the trick. I picked up one of the bottles and examined the label, feeling suddenly hot and dizzy, as if I’d just downed a handful of pills myself.

  “Why not just use a shotgun?”

  “And mess up this pretty face?” Cal tapped his watch and turned to go: We didn’t want to miss another appointment.

  • • •

  In spite of the tough-girl act I put on for Cal, I never could stomach what passed for mercy on a farm. Over the years, I saw him put down more animals than I care to remember: sick cows, sick goats, and sick chickens; rabbits maimed by cats, cats mauled by dogs, dogs hit by cars. “You don’t let a suffering thing suffer,” he’d say. One hazy morning when I was ten, I went to the mailbox and found our coon dog, Leopold, lying in a ditch beside the highway, bleeding from the mouth. His ribs quivered as if he were torn between the need for air and the pain of breathing. My grandfather brought his shotgun, took one look at Leo, and did what needed to be done. When I heard the gunshot, what I felt was relief, but also a kind of hatred.

  Lyle stood in the middle of my grandfather’s workshop admiring the pecky cypress while I rifled the shelves above the workbench. “You know what this stuff is worth?” he said, tracing a finger along the pale wood.

  “He got it for free,” I said. “Ask him. He loves to tell the story.” When I didn’t find what I was looking for on the shelves, I checked the window to make sure Cal was still practicing his golf swing, then moved on to his tackle box. As I scanned the trays of iridescent flies, Lyle told me about a friend of his whose father once owned a lumber mill up in Spartanburg. He said that when they cut open a cypress and discovered it was pecky, they used to shut down the whole operation, drive that one tree to market, and split the profits. “Then they’d take the rest of the day off,” he said. “All thanks to some worms.”

  The pill bottle was hidden among spools of fishing line in the bottom of the tackle box. I handed it to Lyle. He unscrewed the cap and looked inside, frowning. For a minute or two we just stood there, listening to the sounds of his crew tearing off the old roof, the hollow pop of Cal giving flight to another ball. Finally Lyle said, “So what are you going to do?” I’d been hoping he’d insist we talk to Cal, take away his pills, put him in a nursing home if that’s what it took, but Lyle just stood there squinting in the hard light that slanted through the window, looking like he wished he were someplace else.

  “You don’t think I should do anything, do you?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Lyle said. “But it is his life, right?”

  I put the pill bottle back in the tackle box and pushed past him on my way out. He caught up with me in the kitchen pouring a shot of whiskey. When he started to apologize, I cut him off. “And the worms in pecky cypress?” I said. “Any idiot knows it’s a fungus.”

  The neurological exam raised red flags, so the next week, I took Cal in for a dizzying alphabet of tests—EEG, CT, MRI, PET, SPECT. Then it was back
to the psychiatrist, this time for neuropsychological screening, a series of interviews and written tests that left Cal exhausted and irritable. Dr. Miller kept telling us it was a process of elimination; they had to rule out a thyroid problem, stroke, depression.

  By the time it came, the diagnosis was no surprise. “Dementia,” Dr. Miller said, “of the Alzheimer type.” We were sitting in his office at the VA. Cal didn’t even blink. “Of the type, huh? You sure you got the right type?” Dr. Miller understood that he was being mocked, but he kept his cool, explaining yet again that an educated guess was the best he could do.

  I’d learned all about Alzheimer’s in middle school, when I studied up on it in the school library. I read about the change that occurs in the brain, the formation of a mysterious, gummy plaque whose presence can be verified only by autopsy. It had made me think of our pecky cypress walls, and sometimes I imagined my grandfather dead on a conveyor belt, a buzz saw slicing into his head as curious lumberjacks leaned in for a look. Of course, whereas a pecky cypress shows no external signs of its illness, an Alzheimer’s patient shows plenty, so I’d compiled a list of warning signs in my notebook—memory loss, difficulty performing familiar tasks, problems with language, changes in mood or behavior, etc. For years I watched my grandfather and waited, ready for doom every time he so much as misplaced his keys or confused the names of my friends.

  And now that the dark clouds on the horizon had finally rolled in, I found myself facing an even worse wait. The doctors told Cal he might last three years or he might last twenty, but Cal knew that in our family, the disease tended to hit hard and fast, and he seemed determined not to put things off. It made sense that he’d want to take care of business now, while he still had the presence of mind to do so. The day after he was diagnosed, he met with his lawyer about putting his affairs in order, and that weekend he made clear to me that he wanted to finish work on the house as soon as possible. “How soon?” I asked him. It was after the end of spring semester, a Saturday morning, and we were unloading boxes into the swaybacked barn that once sheltered his farming equipment—tractor, sickle mower, silage chopper, disc harrow, bottom plow. The cannibalized remains of an old combine still filled one corner, but the other machines were gone, sold at auction in 1977, the year Cal buried the Colonel and herded his cows between the milking parlor’s stanchions for the last time.

  “End of summer,” he said. “Labor Day at the latest.”

  “That’s not much time.”

  “Lyle’ll manage,” Cal said, lifting another box from the pickup and piling it onto a wooden pallet alongside the combine. We’d been clearing out the attic so Lyle’s crew could add new insulation, and we were down to the last load, mostly boxes containing my mother’s belongings. After my father skipped town, Cal had gone to the little lake house where we lived, packed her stuff, and stowed everything in the attic. As a child, I wasn’t supposed to go up there—Cal told me there were bats—but that never stopped me. I’d spent hours going through her clothes, poring over her photo albums and scrapbooks. Now, rearranging the boxes on the pallet, my arms felt dead, like elastic bands that had lost their snap. Cal was tireless, though. His sun-leathered hands looked as if they could still wrestle a breech calf from a panicked heifer. While he went back to the truck, I took a breather, digging through a box until I found my mother’s wedding dress in its plastic dry cleaner’s bag. It was more sundress than wedding gown, a bit too Summer of Love for my taste, but as I held it against me and swished from side to side, I could see its appeal. When I glanced up, Cal was standing in the doorway of the barn, a wistful smile on his face. “You know, I never did think I’d see you in a wedding dress.”

  “And maybe you never will,” I said. I was hoping to hurt him a little, to remind him what he had to live for, but Cal just seemed confused. He started to say something and then stopped, staring at me as if I were a familiar face he couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t until he turned back to the truck, clearly shaken, that I understood it wasn’t me he’d been talking to.

  I moved back to the farm the following weekend. Cal tried to talk me out of it, suggesting I stay put in the sorority house, but I said I wanted to spend more time with him, and he couldn’t argue with that. For the first few weeks, life wasn’t so different than it had been the previous summer. The doctors had fine-tuned Cal’s medication, and it was possible, watching him peruse the newspaper or tie a fishing lure, to imagine his diagnosis had simply been wrong. Then June melted away into July, and the blast-furnace heat of midsummer seemed to slow everything down, including Cal. Simple conversation began to confound him, his thoughts like knotted rope, and twice he got lost driving in town, unable to solve the once-familiar streets. Determined not to embarrass himself, he gave up his poker game, turned down fishing trips, stopped answering the phone.

  We continued our Friday cocktails against doctor’s orders, but even with Lyle there, those evenings were strained. I’d never realized how much you talk about the future until the topic was off limits. With nowhere to be, Cal invariably ended up drunk. Lyle encouraged me to water down his drinks, but instead I poured him doubles, so he’d sleep sooner. By then I was spending two or three nights a week at Lyle’s apartment, hurrying home each morning so I could have grits and toast waiting on the table for Cal. After breakfast, he’d spend a few hours doing whatever he could to help Lyle, but the afternoons were ours. When we finished lunch, usually leftover fried chicken or barbecue sandwiches bought for the workers, we’d head out to his makeshift driving range, a onetime soybean field he’d seeded with Kentucky bluegrass after he gave up farming. For years he’d been wanting to teach me golf; now I took him up on his offer. We’d start by walking the range together, gathering balls in an old milk pail, and then he’d coach me until the afternoon sun drove us inside, all the while fielding questions about my mother and Josie as I worked to keep his memory sharp. I wasn’t really expecting to hear anything new, but after fifteen years of mostly dodging the subject, Cal surprised me by talking more frankly about his problems with my mother. In between pointed critiques of my grip and stance, he confessed to having been overly protective and overly strict, not letting my mother live her own life, as she used to say to him.

  The trouble between Cal and my mother started when she came down with rheumatic fever. She was seven years old, and the doctor said she’d be crippled for life if her heart wasn’t given sufficient time to heal. He ordered six weeks bed rest. She was not to get up at all—Cal and Josie would feed her, bathe her, change her clothes, even take her to the bathroom.

  That was 1954, the summer Cal tore down the old barn and built a new one. One of the farmhands, Willie Jones, used to ferry my mother around on his shoulders while she was sick. Sometimes he’d set her on a blanket under the chinaberry tree so she could watch the barn rising in the field. The chief carpenter, Old Man Carey, carried a bar of Octagon soap in his pocket, and with the help of Cal’s binoculars, she’d study the way he soaped each nail before driving it into the boards of hard, green oak.

  One afternoon, my mother got restless. She couldn’t lie in bed examining her arrowheads one minute longer. Sneaking downstairs, she bumped into Josie coming inside with a basket of laundry. Normally, Josie was in charge of discipline, but this was such a serious offense that she summoned Cal from the fields. He carried my mother back upstairs, held her in the air by her wrists, and beat her with his belt, determined that his daughter would not end up a cripple. My mother was so upset she stopped speaking to him, even though that meant wetting the bed while she waited for Josie to return from market. At the time, Cal tried not to trouble himself much about the whole episode. He was sure she’d forgive him when she was older, when she could see he’d done it for her own good.

  Labor Day came and went, and still Lyle worked on the house. His final project was to paint the exterior, a huge job that involved scraping off the old paint, repairing broken clapboards, sanding the wood, treating it with a mixture of linseed oil and t
urpentine, and then finally priming and painting. He hired a third man, but even with the extra help, the job took longer than expected. They worked every day, six days a week, starting at dawn. Sometimes they attached floodlights to the scaffolding and worked into the evening. I begged him to slow down, but Cal was pushing him to finish. “What am I supposed to do?” Lyle said. “He wants it done yesterday.”

  I’d taken the semester off to stay home full-time with Cal. His spells had worsened, and he was growing more anxious by the day. I reminded him that treatment had gotten a lot better since the Colonel’s time, that some doctors even believed a cure was near, but it was clear he just wanted to get it over with. After my golf lesson, he often had me drive him to the cemetery, where he stood at the graves of my mother and Josie, telling them, I imagined, that he’d be with them soon.

  It was late September when Lyle finally sealed the last bucket of paint and dismantled the scaffolding. That afternoon, my grandfather was to meet with his attorney to finalize his will. As the two of us stood in the yard admiring the house, I told him he should leave the farm to his sister, who lived out West. “The house, the land, whatever,” I said. “I don’t want it.” He fixed me with a fierce look: There I was, the one person who mattered to him, making things even harder. But I didn’t care. He was hurting me, and I wanted him to know it. He told me he and Josie had worked all their lives to make sure my mother would be taken care of once they were gone. “You’re her daughter,” he said, “so like it or not, it’s all coming to you.”

  When the lawyer arrived, I slipped into Cal’s workshop, pocketed the pill bottle from his tackle box, and told him I needed to run some errands. My plan was to see Dr. Miller and tell him what Cal intended to do, but after an hour in the parking lot at the VA, staring at the pill bottle on my dashboard, I lost my nerve imagining the look on Cal’s face if he found out I betrayed him to a doctor. I spent the rest of the day driving around with a pint of vodka between my knees, eventually making my way out to Lexington, across the dam to Irmo, and then up Highway 5 toward White Rock. I wanted to see the little lake house where I’d lived with my parents before my mother’s accident. I hadn’t been there in years, and at first I thought I’d made a wrong turn in the shadowy dusk. But it turned out the house was gone, as were the other cottages that had once dotted the shore, and in their place stood a row of condominiums overlooking the lake. Also gone was our rickety dock. Now five new docks pointed like fingers into the cove, each one ringed by expensive-looking sailboats.