as yet untitled book- chapter 1

Amos Stevenson is 87 years old, his back is bowed, his knuckles crooked. It takes serious concentration and effort for him to open and close his arthritic fingers, and the cane that is supposed to save his knees and hips causes him a torment in his wrist that he has lived with for so many days he has ceased to think of them in terms of time, and rather than segment it into individual numbers has just jumbled it together and called it a really long time. What is left of his hair is all white, and his face is a mass of liver spots, lines and crags. He walks slowly and painfully, taking great care to watch where he puts his feet allowing his old heart and lungs to keep up with him. On his face, he usually wears a grimace, weather pain or impatience or something else, even he doesn’t bother analyzing it. His stature is stooped from osteoporosis so looking down is not difficult, it is looking up that he doesn’t usually manage to do. His hands and arms are lined with faint scars that hide in the wrinkles, a testament to his hard work in the factory jobs he always worked to support his small family. He is thin, as he always was, which is a blessing because supporting what weight he does carry is hard enough.
He is not the gentle, jolly old man that makes mothers smile and children want to climb into his lap to play and cuddle with. He is not the kind of old man that young people offer to help, nor is he the type that cashiers gently smile at and ask him how he is feeling. He does not engage in lawn bowling or bridge with other seniors, and probably wouldn’t if he was invited. Amos is not the kind of man that looks inviting, or even nice. In his old age, Amos has turned as close to invisible as it is possible to be before death. He slides through his town as if he is a ghost.
Every morning, except the bad ones, Amos takes several hours to wake up and ready himself allowing his joints time to loosen after a long night of sleep. He has no schedule to keep, and no appointments to make. He dresses in old clothes that have hung in his closet for years, the pants threadbare and the once white tshirts yellowed with age. He walks the short block to the neighborhood grocery store, passing the same neighbors every day. Some of them wave at him and he wonders if they even know his name, because he surely doesn’t know theirs. He picks up whatever necessities are needed for him to feed himself for the day. Ham, cheese and sometimes bread and a can of soup. His daughter will buy the rest for him when she comes to see him. He sees the same cashiers in lineups, they say the same hellos and goodbyes without really seeing the person they are being professionally polite to. Then he takes his one bag home with him where he spends the rest of the day alone.
Each night he slowly undresses before bed and then climbs in on the left always leaving the right side untouched as if he is waiting for someone to take their place beside him. There is no one anymore, but there is a picture of her on his nightstand which he looks at every night as he falls asleep with one hand stretched out on her side of the bed, as though he is waiting to take her hand. Whenever he thinks of her, he almost always remembers her looking like she does in this photograph.
She is looking behind her, laughing into the camera with the sun in front of her throwing out rays and her sun browned skin, making her look dipped in golden dust. Her hair is flying in the wind, and the ocean waves stretch out in front of her beyond the pier she’s running down. Her daughters little hand is clasped in her own, and the two of them wear identical looks of quiet delight on their summer warmed faces. Their daughter is dressed in a pink gingham dress with a white button down front, and a pair of patent leather shoes that she loves. His wife is wearing a yellow summer dress, with the hem falling just below the knees. Both of their lips are lightly stained from candy apples and cotton candy from the annual fair.
To the rest of the world, Amos is just an old man the same as every other old man, alone and bitter. As is often the case, the community he lives in sees only what is right in front of them. It doesn’t occur to them to wonder why Amos might look angry and bitter, and it doesn’t occur to them that the reason his clothes are faded is simply because his wife had bought them for him years ago and he can’t bring himself to get rid of them, and that they are yellowed is simply because his eyesight is as old as he is and like him, not as good as it used to be. The people around him don’t feel his knees and hips hurt with every step he takes, or the pain in his back that follows him wherever he goes as though all of the burdens he has carried through his life had finally caught up with him and settled into his bones like dust in the corners of an attic. They don’t see him alone in his house, holding hands in his sleep with his dead wife. Nobody sees the eyes that seem so angry light up every Wednesday with the knowledge that his daughter is coming from the city on her day off to talk with him, play cards with him and baby him. They don’t see the pride in his eyes or hear the joy in his voice while he listens and laughs at the stories she tells him of his two grandchildren. They didn’t see him playing trains with his grandson, nor did they see him dressing dolls in clothes for his granddaughter while unabashedly wearing a tiara or firemans hat when they were young children. They don’t see him sit down to tea at three sharp, pour out one cup of tea and set it at the table and then sit in the chair beside it. Nobody, not even his wife knew how much he detested tea even though he drank a cup with her every day while she lived, and had poured her one every day since her death. It never occurred to him to tell her, and if it had he probably wouldn’t have. It was worth drinking tea with her just to sit down beside her for the half hour it took to choke it down.
On the last day of Amos life, he awoke the same way he always did. Painfully and slowly. He didn’t know it was his last day, but if he did he would have been happy that it happened on a Wednesday. On Wednesdays Amos gets to see his daughter Ella. He will trace her face, so like her mothers in the unobtrusive way that only a father that loves his daughter more than life can do. Seeing her now in mid sixties, he is struck anew at how like her mother she looks. She has her high cheekbones and dark hair. The faint lines around her eyes and mouth only remind him of his wife more, they even aged in the same way; beautifully . He can remember clearly how she looked asleep in her bed with her thumb in her mouth, or the impish grin she gave him with jam on her face when he caught her eating it straight from the jar.
He will complain minimally, and will accept all of the help she has to offer because it means she is there with him. They will go through the same routines they always do. He will help her put away the groceries she brings him. She will wash and he will dry, they will fold and hang the laundry together. They will ask each other short questions with short answers, the comfortable silences between them saying more than what they can with words. They are comfortable with the silences that always come, and in the routines they share. She has been coming every Wednesday since she was in college when her mother died.
He will also sit down at three, and drink tea with his daughter who like her mother loves the taste and also like her mother is completely unaware that he doesn‘t, and like he always did with his Ellen he will sit there happy in the company around him and he will drink in and soak up every story and all the love she has to offer. She will do her best to put a smile on his face and so she plays cards with him or, when he is too tired for cards she will read to him. He has never told her which books to read, and she knows it doesn’t matter. He is listening to her voice, not her words.
He will fall asleep after his tea and she cleans his house, tidying the things he doesn’t think to bother with and he will sleep with the ease he did years ago when he was comforted with the knowledge that all of his family was at home and safe. When he wakes up, there is always the blanket his wife made pulled up to his chin. He never bothers to cover himself and is always pleased to find himself that way. Sometimes she will take him out for coffee, and sometimes it is doctors appointments or pharmacies that he has to visit. Either way, he is pleased to have her company and more than pleased to have a ride.
When she leaves he will stand at the front door and wave as she drives away. He will never see the tears of guilt that slide down her cheeks as she drives away from her father, and it will not occur to him that they are there. He never suspects that her leaving is as painful for his forlorn old heart to bear as it is for her to leave that old heart behind. He cannot see that the smile he forces makes him look that much more lonely.
After a supper that Ella always brings with her, Amos pads to the bathroom and showers. He turns the water as hot as he can stand it and waits for the aching to dull. He will go to the medicine cabinet and take his medication for his heart, his blood pressure, his angina and the godforsaken vitamins that his daughter brings for him. He is sure she counts them and he can’t bear to disappoint her, and so he swallows them along with all the rest figuring that at least they can’t hurt him. He will brush his teeth and smooth his hair down, combing it has been an act in futility for years. Then he will walk into his bedroom, the same bedroom he took his young wife to for the first time more than sixty years ago. The same bedroom she gave him his daughter in, the same bedroom he fell asleep in beside her for all of the happiest days of his life. He will walk in there with a pang of loneliness that he scarcely recognizes anymore, it is now as familiar to him as his wife. He pulls back the covers and settles himself, with his hand stretched out as he always does, waiting for a hand that doesn’t exist to hold. He does these things as he has done them every night without ever thinking that he will continue to do them for however many nights he has left. It is as natural as breathing now. It just happens that this is his last night, and that however many times he has woken up with the same habits as he does when he goes to bed, tomorrow will be very different. Tomorrow he will not wake up slowly and painfully. Unlike every other day, tomorrow he will not wake up. Unlike every other day, he will not be in pain, he will not be lonely. He will also be smiling.
As Amos falls asleep, he doesn’t notice that his heart is beating just a little slower than it did the night before, he only vaguely notices that he feels more relaxed than usual. Amos feels no pain as his heart begins to stop. He is one of the lucky ones that escape disease and heart attacks. Amos is dying in his sleep. From somewhere deep inside him, Amos can feel the gap in time between heartbeats and he can feel that the spaces are getting longer. His conscious and subconscious mind together slide into the spaces between heartbeats like sand between stones on the banks of a river. He doesn’t realize it, but his sense of time slows and he is able to relive his most influential memories and experiences between one ta-thump and the next. By the time he reaches the last dim memory, his heart will stop as though it was fated to do so. Amos mind will have traveled backwards through time, retracing the footprints of his life. If he could say thank you to someone he would, for giving him back his happiest moments and giving him the ability to see and feel his loved ones one last time.
This is Amos last experience, these are his memories. This is his story.