When the TV shifted to an advertisement I felt great relief. Edna Mae had been staring at the screen, and at the gravestone, with a quivering intensity.
I knew she was thinking of our daughter’s gravestone in the little cemetery behind our church, that was not much more than an open field, with few graves there at this time, as the St. Paul Missionary Church of Muskegee Falls had only been founded in 1983. And our congregation, as Reverend Dennis likes to boast, is a young and vigorous congregation brimming with health.
“What do you think of those men, who have ‘taken the moral law into their own hands’ and shot the abortion doctors?”—for suddenly it seemed crucial to me, I must ask Edna Mae this question.
The word abortion sounded strange on my lips. I had not ever uttered this ugly word aloud, and certainly would not have uttered such an ugly word to my dear wife, except under these circumstances.
For I understood that my time was rapidly running out.
For I recalled now a remark made by my grandfather on his eighty-eighth birthday that was not self-pitying, but kindly, and smiling—Well. Guess the old man’s time is running out, eh?
Edna Mae turned her eyes to me, blinking slowly. I saw that her eyes were damp and slightly bloodshot and at the corners of her mouth was a chalky substance. She had not changed from her soiled flannel bathrobe that day. The older children and I had prepared our evening meal, which Edna Mae had barely eaten.
I had to think, after I was gone Edna Mae would shake herself awake, and stop taking those pills that were eating away at her soul. For I could not plead with her any more than I had done, and I could not force her to stop. But if I departed, and was not always here in the house to oversee the children, and to buy groceries, Edna Mae would revert to her former self, I believed. For Jesus would guide her.
No doubt, it was surprising to my dear wife that I would ask such a question of her since it was not like me to ask such questions of anyone. In a slow voice she said:
“I think—I think of how terrible it is—for their wives and mothers and their children if they have children . . . I think that there are many lives that are ended when a man is a soldier for Christ—not just the abortion-doctors’ lives.”
It was surprising to me too, that my wife should speak in this way, seriously, as if she had given the question some thought.
Adding then, “It is not for us to judge. We are to anoint the feet of the martyr, that is all.”
LAY YOUR LIFE ON THE LINE for Jesus.
Through the long night lying with eyes open to the faint light from a window in darkness and heart beating quickly in dread of what I must do. My fingertips caressed the rough scar on my side, between my ribs where Felice Sipper had sunk her little jackknife blade, as often I caressed that scar, and another on my thigh, to give a kind of comfort in the night. Many times swallowing, or trying to swallow—my mouth was very dry.
So shivering and restless through the night, though I was badly sweating also, I had to creep from the room to use the bathroom several times. For there was something pinching my bladder causing me to urinate in hot, frothing spurts and the smell of my urine sharp and metallic.
I feared that my bowels would turn to water, scalding. No shame like the shame of losing control of his bowels, when a soldier has embarked upon a sacred mission.
Finally at 5:20 A.M. rising from bed as quietly as I could.
“This will be the final time. My final night in this bed.”
A kind of wonder came upon me, at this realization. And yet I did not touch my lips to my dear wife’s forehead for fear of waking her and disturbing her.
It was a strange remark that Edna Mae had made the other evening. There was this side to my wife, that surprised me. As when I would learn that she had sometimes visited the grave of our little girl, without telling me and without having asked me to come with her.
But Edna Mae had no suspicion of my plans. If she’d had, she would certainly have tried to stop me.
Slow then like a man in a dream closing the door to that room.
Slow then in the hall. Saying good-bye to the children: in the boys’ room Luke and Noah asleep in their bed, in the girls’ room Dawn and Anita. And there was one other—so it seemed to me, for a moment.
Thank you God, for these children. I have been blessed.
Such love I felt for them! Such regret, I would not ever be their Dad-dee again but instead a man who had chosen another life and would become a stranger to them, in the service of the Lord.
Descending silently two flights of stairs into the basement to prepare.
NO MORE DREADED HOUR than the hour to come.