Page 28 - Vol. V #6

(Delmas continued from preceding page)
Deborah sits on his bed and looks down at him. She talks on and on about his recovery. She helps the nurse and the therapists; she massages and exercises his arms and legs. He sees the emaci- ated arms and legs move up and down, bend and stretch in her hands. Purple veins under pale, almost translucent skin. Cadaver limbs. Dead already. “It’s okay, daddy,” she says to him, “we’re going to beat this.” But he overhears one of his sons say, “It can take years,” and Deborah’s re- sponse, “And he’s just stubborn enough to hang on that long.” So when she says to him, “We’ll beat this,” of course she doesn’t mean him, but them, all of them will beat it, whatever comes, and this is how they’re doing it until he’s gone.
inside room, where he can no longer see the ladies whose singing voices recede behind him. Through the dark house, out the back door, he sees a bright sunny yard—sagging porch steps, their oak-wood grain gone black beneath peel- ing gray paint. In the grassy drive from the house down to the river is Delmas’s dad and mom, and his sister and brother. All here. But wait: there
He is not locked in, as that doctor with the eye- brows explained down at his face, as his family keeps discussing. He is in the doorway—or a foyer, a vestibule—able to simultaneously look back from where he has come and glimpse for- ward to where he is going. And these people, his family who stand around, sit around, play board games on his hospital table...more and more he
is losing them. They are drifting away, back and back, blending with the strangers in white coats, strangers in purple smocks and pink smocks, one in a smock with teddy bears all over it. He turns from these people, he thinks, for the last time. He closes his eyes against their affection for this dead thing of flesh that warred so against his spirit.
“Give me my banjo,” he says. And look here, Hob- ert picks up a banjo from beside him on the wooden bench. He holds it out to Delmas, and Lillian presses her hands together—how she loved to hear him play, that banjo with goat skin stretched across the head, mottled like white clouds in a blue-black sky. As if the banjo head were a small round window onto the sky above in yet another heavenly realm. The music becomes the white noise of a splashing river, and he smells the crisp air: leaves and grass scrubbed clean by water tumbling over rocks.
The singing voices fade, but the music remains strong. It is coming from a different direction, from in front of him. It is the hillbilly music of his childhood, a time before Rock & Roll, before Elvis Presley: mandolin, guitar, Hawaiian guitar. Banjo. And Lillian not only isn’t withered and consumed by cancer, but she is healthy, even a little plump. She is standing in the grass of the side yard in a blue-and-green-flowered shift and bare feet.
Delmas feels a jolt—the black woman with the prison tattoo is leaning over his bed, seeming to smother him like a pillow. The room is darkened, but there on the other side of his bed is his Debo- rah. She is reading from a thin computer screen— her head glows in low blue light. Her black boy- friend is over there with her, reading from his own glowing screen. Deborah coughs into her hand, and readjusts herself in the chair. She pulls her legs up, and the plastic cushion creaks. The room is quiet. Someone is talking in Spanish in the hallway.
Then she is at the doorway of an old house much like his childhood home, so far away in Vinton, Virginia—“carry me back to old Virginny,” his dad used to sing as he strummed his 1942, sunburst Gibson. On that porch right there, Lil beckons to him from the doorway, and now he is in the dark
The lights out there have been dimmed. It must be nighttime.
is his old pal Hobert who died in Korea so many years ago. Good old Hobert, holding the Hawaiian guitar Delmas has been hearing. It is black and red and yellow, the chrome wheel glistens and flashes sunlight.
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Sizemore’s ction and non ction is published or forthcoming in Story Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, Connecticut Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, [PANK] Magazine, Silk Road Review, Reed Magazine, and elsewhere. His ction has won the New Millennium Writings Award and has been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and two Pushcart Prizes.