Pew(7)

A silence.
When you’re old, Mrs. Gladstone repeated. When you’re old like me!
She laughed a long time, or what felt like a long time. Anyway—I was telling you about Charles. I keep getting sidetracked because I’m so old and useless—I forget everything. Everything.
Charlie was beloved by the community—by everyone, every single one. And we were happy. He never even had to lay a hand on me, not even once, and there weren’t many women in those days who could say that without blushing. Charlie and I had many good years together. No children of our own, though we did try. It’s just that I was so old, and he’d already had two from his first wife, and they were a handful already. They were unhappy children, really just such a bother. I think he just didn’t want all the trouble of having any more if they’d be like the first two. We traveled a good deal, up the East Coast, now and then to Virginia, and once to California. Once to Canada. He liked to drive and that suited me fine.
But then came the diagnosis and this was … well … almost twenty years ago now? Could it have been that long ago? We didn’t have many options about what to do. Now it seems they have all sorts of treatments—but then, well, there just weren’t so many. The doctors said he didn’t have long, that we should get everything in order, to make arrangements and such. He talked to his lawyer about his last testament, I remember, and pretty soon word got around that he was dying, so the house filled with flowers and people—white people and black people and even that one Indian, or maybe they were a Mexican family, the one out on that county road that Charles had helped years ago with something—lots of people called on us, to him and me, bringing pies and such, and just so many flowers. So very many flowers. Then one night I was sitting up just looking at all those flowers in the front parlor, when the nurse came in and said to me—she said, I’m afraid this is it. He’s going to God.
Mrs. Gladstone stopped here, her mouth hanging open, holding on to each word, blinking at them.
I can still see that nurse’s face, and how she wasn’t afraid of death, it being her profession and all, but of course I was afraid, just terrified. This whole life I had with him—just those ten short years after waiting for so long to have a husband, and now it was about to end and I really did believe it was God’s will, but even so, that didn’t seem to make it easy to accept. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. I knew I had to be strong and accept that God was taking him back now, but I have always had such a wicked heart—I just didn’t want to be alone. I want to have my own way, always have been so selfish and wicked. I’ve deserved every bad thing that’s ever happened to me, and I was so selfish that I hated God for it all—and I wanted to keep having a life with him. I loved him so much. I really did. He was such a good man.
She stopped again. Something in her face reminded me of a loose horse I’d found in some woods once, peace and terror tangled together.
I sat by his side, and his breathing went real slow and deep. The nurse left to give us privacy in those last moments, and just after she left the room Charles looked up at me and said, Darlin’, he said this all so slow and I remember his every word, he said, Darlin’. Here I am. Just a man on my deathbed and now I must tell you that when I was a boy, such a long time ago, I was dared to hold a little black boy underwater in a creek down near the county line and I did it. Everyone said it was an accident, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. I’ve thought about it every day of my life since then. He spoke so very slow. He said, I begged forgiveness from the Lord. I wasn’t a very bright child—they even thought there was something really wrong with me—and it took me many years before I could think for myself, so when they dared me, I just went along with it. I went along with lots of things. We all go along with so much—you understand, don’t you? And then he said, I repent, my Lord, and I thought those were his last words—my Lord. I thought he was for certain going to die now. And I was so frightened by his confession, but I was also frightened to see him die, and I cried and prayed, but he didn’t die, and all night he didn’t die and we made it to the morning and he was still alive, just barely alive. The very next night the nurse told me that actually now he was dying this time, she was sure of it. And she did the same thing, left me in the room with him, gave us some privacy, and after some quiet hours Charles leaned toward me and said, Paulina, dear, what I told you last night … and I thought he was going to tell me it was somehow a lie, some kind of death dream, a hallucination of some sort, because how else could a person ever do such a thing? He was not a violent man, not at all, and I felt so sure it couldn’t have been true. But then Charles said—
Mrs. Gladstone stopped again. She was not crying. I don’t know why I thought she would be.
He said to me, What I told you last night wasn’t all of it. I was part of a group that hung those four men—do you remember? We thought one of them had raped someone’s sister or someone’s girl—I don’t recall the details now—and we weren’t sure which one. We hung all four. They were guilty of something, even though we didn’t know what. We were angry, you have to understand. It wasn’t easy, but we did it, about twenty or thirty of us. We had to. Even the sheriff was there. And I did remember. It was four men from the other side of town, black men. There was a lot of disagreement between our side and their side. It was a painful time. A lot of folks moved away over it.
That second night, he didn’t say he repented or that he knew it was wrong … But again, he didn’t die. He somehow lived to the next night, and he confessed to other things he did or secrets he kept for other men, worse things and things that didn’t seem that bad, and I won’t ever know if any of it was true, and there’s a chance, maybe even a good chance, that all of it was some kind of brain problem that happens to people toward the end, you know. He watched a lot of movies, and he liked the violent ones—I don’t know why.