“Paul? Are you there?” His voice lowered a little, as if he thought he was now talking to himself. “Damn, I think I lost the connection.”
“No, I’m here, Hal. That’s great news.”
“Yes,” he agreed, and I was again struck by how old he sounded. How papery, somehow. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking.”
No, you don’t, Warden, I thought. Never in a million years could you know what I’m thinking.
“You’re thinking that our young friend will still be around for the Coffey execution. That’s probably true
– Coffey will go well before Thanksgiving, I imagine – but you can put him back in the switch room. No one will object. Including him, I should think.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. “Hal, how’s Melinda?”
There was a long pause so long I might have thought I’d lost him, except for the sound of his breathing.
When he spoke this time, it was in a much lower tone of voice. “She’s sinking,” he said.
Sinking. That chilly word the old-timers used not to describe a person who was dying, exactly, but one who had begun to uncouple from living.
“The headaches seem a little better … for now, anyway … but she can’t walk without help, she can’t pick things up, she loses control of her water while she sleeps . . .” There was another pause, and then, in an even lower voice, Hal said something that sounded like “She wears.”
“Wears what, Hal?” I asked, frowning. My wife had come into the parlor doorway. She stood there wiping her hands on a dishtowel and looking at me.
“No,” he said in a voice that seemed to waver between anger and tears. “She swears.”
“Oh.” I still didn’t know what he meant, but had no intention of pursuing it. I didn’t have to; he did it for me.
“She’ll be all right, perfectly normal, talking about her flower-garden or a dress she saw in the catalogue, or maybe about how she heard Roosevelt on the radio and how wonderful he sounds, and then, all at once, she’ll start to say the most awful things, the most awful … words. She doesn’t raise her voice. It would almost be better if she did, I think, because then … you see, then . . .”
“She wouldn’t sound so much like herself.”
“That’s it,” he said gratefully. “But to hear her saying those awful gutter-language things in her sweet voice … pardon me, Paul.” His voice trailed away and I heard him noisily clearing his throat. Then he came back, sounding a little stronger but just as distressed. “She wants to have Pastor Donaldson over, and I know he’s a comfort to her, but how can I ask him? Suppose that he’s sitting there, reading Scripture with her, and she calls him a foul name? She could; she called me one last night. She said,
‘Hand me that Liberty magazine, you cocksucker, would you?’ Paul, where could she have ever heard such language? How could she know those words?”
“I don’t know. Hal, are you going to be home this evening?”
When he was well and in charge of himself, not distracted by worry or grief, Hal Moores had a cutting and sarcastic facet to his personality; his subordinates feared that side of him even more than his anger or his contempt, I think. His sarcasm, usually impatient and often harsh, could sting like acid. A little of that now splashed on me. It was unexpected, but on the whole I was glad to hear it. All the fight hadn’t gone out of him after all, it seemed.
“No,” he said, “I’m taking Melinda out squaredancing. We’re going to do-si-do, allemand left, and then
tell the fiddler he’s a rooster-dick motherfucker.”
I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. Mercifully, it was an urge that passed in a hurry.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. It’s made me grouchy. Of course we’re going to be home. Why do you ask?”
“It doesn’t matter, I guess,” I said.
“You weren’t thinking of coming by, were you?
Because if you were on last night, you’ll be on tonight. Unless you’ve switched with somebody?”