The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

I sat there on the dock and I thought about Darlene Fisk, and I thought about what I had been so afraid of, which was that this man was taking something. And the truth was the opposite all the way down. This man had found the one hour of the day that hurt him worst, and instead of drinking it or sleeping it or sitting in his dead wife’s kitchen letting it eat him, he had turned it around and aimed it at the loneliest person he could find, a stranger dying alone in a brick building in a town he was only passing through.

“Walt,” I said. “Can I come with you tomorrow.”

He turned and looked at me, and in the starlight I could see he was not far from crying himself. “Meg,” he said. “I was afraid you’d run. Most would, from a man who spends his vacation in a care home singing to the dying.”

“I spent thirty one years feeding other people’s children,” I said. “I know how to sit with somebody who can’t do for themselves. Earl’s going to get awfully sick of my cooking stories, but I can sing a sight better than you.”

He laughed, and he took my hand, the same way he had taken Earl’s, both his hands around mine, and we sat on the dock a long time and did not talk, and I was not afraid anymore, of anything.

The next evening at seven o’clock we walked into town together.

I will not tell you Earl Tolliver sat up and spoke, because he did not. He was past that. But I pulled a second chair up to the other side of the bed, and I took his other hand, and Walt read from the Psalms, and I sang, and it is true what Walt said, I sing a great deal better than he does, and when I started in on “In the Garden,” which my own mother sang at her own kitchen sink in Ardell every day of my childhood, Earl Tolliver’s eyebrows moved. Just a little. And the nurse in the doorway put her hand over her mouth.

We went every evening for the rest of the week. Pat Oleska at the lodge found out where we went and started sending a thermos of soup along for the night nurse. Even Darlene Fisk, when she learned of it, had the grace to go quiet for about a day, though she was back to warning the new widow in cabin six by Thursday, because some people cannot help what they are.

Earl Tolliver died on our last night there.